Slow Thinking Democracy: Michael Shellenberger on the Psychology of Censorship
Russell chats to Michael Shellenberger, founder of ‘Public’ on Substack, Twitter files journalist and the author of ‘Apocalypse Never’. Together they talk about the implications of Ireland's new online/hate speech bill, the psychology of censorship, and why democracy thrives on slow thinking. Plus, spirituality and the profound need for human connection in today's world, and 'Are we on the brink of an apocalyptic showdown?' Follow Michael's work on Public: https://public.substack.com/ Support this channel directly here: https://rb.rumble.com/Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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It's plain that you have to support independent media now because the institutions are broken and require either radical re-evaluation or total dismantling.
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We've seized one of them from the morass.
It's so-called journalist Michael Schellenberger, founder of Public on Substack, the Twitterphile inaugure, author of Apocalypse Never, Thank you for joining us, Michael.
Great to see you, Russell.
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Press the red button to support independent journalism and Michael, can you tell us a little bit of what you've been doing recently in Ireland and how that impacts what's happening with legislation globally around online safety and hate speech?
Yeah, well, I mean, you and your listeners may remember that Ireland proposed one of the most draconian crackdowns on free speech.
It was legislation that would literally allow the police to go into people's homes and confiscate their cell phones and laptops and read what was on them.
And then if people refused to do it, they could be carted off to jail.
I mean, it was shocking to think that this was something that was being proposed You know, in a country like Ireland, which has long been a place really committed to free speech, you know, land of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.
And so we, you know, so we were there in, you know, in September, and it was incredible.
I mean, I went and interviewed people on the street.
Most people had no idea this was going on.
But when people learned about it, most people were against it.
We found out really upon arriving that the Justice Minister, who's also a member of Parliament who had sponsored the legislation, that really her career is in trouble because this legislation is so unpopular.
So we're feeling pretty good about this.
The event itself was amazing.
I mean, there was 800 people in this huge lecture hall.
The spirits were very high.
I think that the folks on the ground in Ireland, the free speech advocates, Our feeling like the wind is in our back and that there's a good chance to defeat this thing.
You know, it's very unpopular.
People love their freedoms around the world.
And even though I think people in Britain, I mean, sorry, people in Ireland are very, they're very, you know, concerned obviously about intolerance.
But when I asked people on the street, we recorded videos of me interviewing people on the street.
You know, has there been an increase in hatred and intolerance in Ireland that would necessitate such a thing?
And basically everybody said, no, the Irish are more tolerant than ever.
So I think it helps.
I wrote a piece over the weekend where I talked about, I think it helps to remind people just how much more progressive everybody is, how much more sensitive and tolerant everybody is.
I think it also helped when I would ask people, I'd be like, what, what would James Joyce and Oscar Wilde think about this legislation?
And most people I think said, I don't think they would like it very much.
And also, you know, it's helpful to remind people because it's funny, people don't think that they'll be victims of censorship.
Most people tend to think they go, oh, there's these hateful people that are out there and there's none of that in me.
You know, it's kind of a classic, you know, I'm, you know, a good person.
Everybody thinks they're a good person.
They never think that they would be subject to such censorship.
But when you kind of remind them about how subjective Hate speech supposedly is and how many people will think, some people will think some things are hateful and other people won't.
I think it really did help to turn people's minds around.
So I wrote a piece this weekend that just said, just make people think about it for a minute and I think people will end up siding on the side of free speech.
Yeah, what you wrote in your piece, because obviously I read your journalism on Substack, on Public, which you founded, you said that you offer an alternative framing.
It's pretty easy to see how, if you ask people the question, and wow, censor takers for Time Immemorial have known, If you've said, do you think hate speech is good?
Do you like child pornography?
Generally speaking, people say, no, no.
Would you like to stop child pornography and hate speech?
Yes, yes.
But it's interesting that the framing of the argument is, of course, designed to ease us into censorship.
Like that when you think that the end point is police storming your home and grabbing your laptop the only thing that would legitimize that would be oh well it's there's child pornography on that laptop but of course the law doesn't say exclusively and specifically in cases of child pornography which is already illegal and doesn't require additional legislation so in a sense those points are Redundant and they are sort of in a sense using, I don't know, neuro-linguistic programming, cyber warfare, hypnosis to create conditions where we, like we the turkeys, vote once again enthusiastically for Christmas.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, there's this famous distinction between fast thinking and slow thinking, which comes from the great psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a contributor to something called behavioral economics.
But look, it's a very ancient idea.
I mean, this goes back to the Greeks and this idea that It's easy to manipulate people when you can short-circuit their thinking and make them think quickly and emotionally, whereas this kind of dialogue, it's essential.
It's essential to being free.
It's essential to democracy.
I was teasing my readers, I just said, this one simple trick.
And the trick, of course, is to get people to think slowly about these things and to have that conversation because Irrationality lives in fast thinking, and reason and liberalism, in the best sense of the term, and democracy depend on slow thinking.
Yes, and dialogue, it might be assumed, would lead to consensus.
And whilst there's offered, whilst the framing we're offered is this is to protect you, it seems that actually what's really being lain are a set of traps that prevent people realizing, wait a minute, we could organize society radically differently.
We don't need to centralize power in the same way that we once did.
There are opportunities for communication, discourse, consensus, autonomy that just simply didn't exist even 20, 30 years ago.
And to prevent that sort of momentum and tendency from naturally unfurling a sort of what you might consider an ordinary evolution of the way that technology and communications has evolved, You have to use atavistic, reductive, and to use your phrase, fast thinking models to prevent people rationally moving in the direction of our shared interests.
Yeah, that's right.
I think the other thing you said that's so important is this idea that we're doing this to protect you.
In fact, these measures would make ordinary people more vulnerable to abuses of state power.
And that also, that was part of the subjectivity I was pointing to, which was that You kind of get people thinking a little bit about it and you kind of go, you know, these are these are, you know, human beings that are going to be making decisions about what's hateful and what's not.
And could you see how people might abuse that or start to manipulate that or that even just innocent mistakes might be made and get people entrapped in them?
And so I think that it helps to get people to slow down on it and it helps to do it in person.
And it was a delightful thing because I think sometimes, you know, even myself, I was sort of imagining that that, That I think you tend to think that one person holds a particular point of view and what you're reminded of is that when you talk to somebody that we hold a whole jumble of opinions and that actually the people will change their mind or they have different views and different circumstances.
So I think for me the watchword right now is just re-humanizing the conversation and it's just so dehumanizing the ways in which the media culture work And the way that I think when people get afraid and they get into this panic and particularly the elites and this desire to control, it leads them to engage in really dehumanizing forms of rhetoric and of manipulations.
And I think that there's just something so powerful to coming back to just the simple Recognition of our shared humanity and of our flawedness.
And this is why one of the it's made me more appreciate the American system more, but the enlightenment and sort of the sense in which we're flawed.
And so we have to create systems that that check that create checks and balances against these abuses of power.
This dehumanisation is perhaps exacerbated and amplified and weaponised by a polarising political space.
I think it was in your article that you pointed out at least that the Democrats that favour increased censorship has itself gone up from 40% to 70%.
In the last five years and I suppose what undergirds that is not an appetite for censorship but the assumption that who's going to be censored are your opponents.
That's what's going to be shut down is things that you generally disagree with and take in that democrat case you might say oh they think it's good to censor pro-life arguments or pro-gun arguments or libertarianism or MAGA extremism and in a way that's a call for Humanitarianism and humanism as you've just mentioned and that perhaps that even if you're not a spiritual or religious person and you know I feel that both you and I are Michael that that's an appeal to a set of values that transcend self-interest that hold on a minute that might not and even if from a self-interested perspective you might
Hold on, this legislation could be used by an opposing ideology that sees me with the enmity that currently I regard the MAGA hat wearers or whatever it might be in this instance.
So do you think that this oppositionism and this polarising culture is Creating an environment where people are more susceptible to authoritarianism because they think that they're going to benefit or their side is going to benefit from it.
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to, you know, it's one of the things that we talked about before with your producers before the show was this declining trust in the government.
I mean, of course, we're watching this horrible dehumanization occur in the Hamas attack on Israel, but then we see a lot of dehumanization.
And people hate it when you say it, but there's people that are engaging in dehumanizing rhetoric on both sides.
You know, is it worse now than it was a hundred years ago?
I don't know.
I mean, it was obviously pretty horrible a hundred years ago.
I mean, you start to look back at periods, I find myself looking back on periods like the 90s and being like we were all, we were in a much better way back then.
There was much less this dehumanizing rhetoric.
I definitely think that social media Has contributed to it.
You know, there's the experience that we have, um, and I'm having it right now with several people where, you know, you're being attacked online and you feel like everybody's watching and it makes you very scared and paranoid and small.
And then you can kind of go in one of two directions.
You can try to, you can be smaller and hide and be quiet and not say, not take any risks.
Or you can reaffirm, I think what we would call more spiritual values, which is The value of embracing all of humanity, of viewing ourselves as children of God, at least that's how I talk about it.
I mean, I struggle with it, because as a Christian, for me, the hardest thing is the most essential part of Christianity, which is to love thy enemy.
And it's not the easiest thing to do when people are attacking you and trying to destroy you to be like, I love you.
You know, having that as the goal and holding that up as a really as the highest value, I think makes us better.
And so for me, that's something to strive for.
Yeah, as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ says, if you just love people that love you, well that's expedient and ordinary.
So it's only in loving your enemy, on bestowing blessings upon your enemy, that you are able to transcend this material state and this material paradigm.
And often when we talk, and like indeed you're one of the journalists that I'd most cite as being a symbol of this, I need to talk to people that I recognise are credible, but I usually mean by that intellectually credible, like yourself or Glenn Greenwald, and I think, oh no, God, I've not gone mad.
I have just remained anti-authoritarian, and the system has shifted around me, and the rules have all changed.
It's gone all mad and dark.
And unless we're able to derive our values from somewhere outside of rationalism, that in a way can always make an argument for ultimately self-interest.
There is no meaning.
We're just like rushing towards nothingness.
Billiard ball universe.
Consciousness is random.
Love is simply reciprocal.
Altruism, just a sort of a rational set.
It's a pretty despairing model that we're offered.
And indeed, when you feel that you are Under attack, when you feel that you're living in a system that doesn't have values, it's pretty easy to yield.
And in a way, I suppose, yeah, a greater demand is made that you find within yourself a depth and a beyond faith, I think, Michael, even trust like that.
Well, I believe in God, so God's got to have a plan.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this one unfolds.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
But our systems, Whether they are media, judicial, like, yeah, they are not organized on that basis.
We can say even values that are advocated for and declared as, you know, just accepted values, innocent until proven guilty, that doesn't seem to hold a great deal of sway.
Where from where Do we derive these values?
I hope you don't feel, gosh, short-changed by me.
I would never have assumed that you were a person who's primarily, because if you are a spiritual person at all, you have to be primarily spiritual.
Otherwise, what is it?
A sort of a safety net, I guess.
It's fascinating to hear someone who's so well-researched, thorough, direct, and astute, relying on religious principles.
It helps me now.
Yeah, I was going to say something.
I mean, I came back to my faith in a dark time when I needed it.
And at first, there was something rational about it, which is that I knew that there's a lot of evidence that having faith is good for you.
But there was also a leap of faith, and this is something that comes out of the existential tradition too, particularly out of Soren Kierkegaard, who was a brilliant Christian existentialist, but it's also in Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a very famous atheist.
And it's a view that I hold very strongly, which is that faith is not something ultimately that you can reason towards.
Faith is something that you must leap towards.
It's an act of faith.
And I think it's disparaged quite a bit, including by many people who I love and agree with on many issues in the secular community that really think that faith is irrational and that we should get rid of it.
For me, it's absolutely essential.
I think that we can get unity and agreement beyond people with different faiths, but there is some leap of faith that says we have a faith in humankind and in humanizing rather than dehumanizing.
I can make a bunch of reasonable arguments about it, but I do think that ultimately it's hard to get your way there through logic, that you're making a leap of faith To believe in God, or to believe that we have a soul, or to believe that humanity is basically good.
And I think even for things like liberal democracy, I just think that those numbers that your colleague sent me showing the declining trust in government, I mean, it's really scary.
Particularly at a time of so much trouble in the world, and I think we have to affirm it.
We can argue for it, but I do think if you are pro-human, you must be pro-civilization.
And if you're pro-human and pro-civilization, you must be in favor of liberal democracy, and of free speech, and of innocence until proven guilty, and of all of the other foundations of civilization, because You can't be pro-human and against civilization because if you don't have civilization or you don't have these rules of liberal democracy, then the outcomes for humankind as a whole are far worse.
Plainly they don't believe in these principles except when it's in their service, I say they, and I'm, you know, in a way I'm just doubling down on the point I made about the increase in Democrat support for censorship.
They obviously don't believe in free speech because it has no value unless you believe in free speech that you don't agree with, in much the same way that you and I are just talking about spirituality, unless you are willing to Love thine enemy then all you're talking about is rationalism and logic.
Now logic and rationalism are by their nature based on measurement and discernment and faith in a sense is an invitation to hurl yourself into the mysterious abyss and pray that it's not made of nothing but of something that there is some telos other than just blind expansionism and I mean that in the cosmological sense rather than the Imperial sense now, what do we do mate when you have
figures whose primary pose appears to be around Morality and ethics say take Justin Trudeau, please
Thank you Like seems to be all about kindness
kindness and sweetness and I see him joshing along with the leader of the opposition, taking
the speaker to the seat. But that speaker, you know, just before condemned the truck
of protests or last year at least as Nazis on the flimsiest of evidence, no evidence
actually to suggest that Nazism is what they're interested in. Meanwhile, they applaud an
actual Nazi and then sort of ask us to sort of forget it and consider it as potential
Russian disinformation as usual. And also that they are similarly introducing new streaming
laws and the ability to regulate podcasts.
How is it that the new aesthetic of authoritarianism is sort of couched in this floppy haired liberalism?
How have we found ourselves here?
Yeah, great question.
We've really plumbed a lot of this.
I mean, obviously, there's two things going on.
There's the censorship industrial complex, which we've seen funded by governments, both in the UK and the United States, the Five Eyes nations as well.
We see the involvement of intelligence and security organizations.
But there's also this cultural desire, and I think that some of that is coming just from a place of privilege.
And just to put a point on it, I think some coddling, where there's this idea that I shouldn't have to hear disconfirmatory information.
You know, I think that hearing people that disagree with you or that are debunking your views or challenging your views is uncomfortable.
And so there's some extent to which I just think there's a lot of privileged people in the society that are saying, I shouldn't have to hear those views.
So it's gotten, in some ways, it's a magnification of the filter bubbles that get created from social media platforms.
The intolerance is coming from privileged elites.
I always point out that the people demanding censorship are not, you know, bagging your groceries or filling up your car with gasoline.
They're not making products to the factory floor.
They're working at universities like Stanford, like Harvard.
You know, that's where it's just in the art in the former prime minister of of New Zealand went to.
And so it's coming from the elites.
It's a kind of demand for privilege.
It's absolutely oppressive, obviously.
No movement for human liberation has ever demanded censorship.
They've always demanded the right to speak.
That's been the first thing that's been part of movements for human liberation.
So I think what you see with Trudeau is somebody that really believes there's a fanaticism in it,
that he is absolutely pure.
There's no, he's never wrong.
He's never malintentioned.
This is not the view that our civilization is based on.
Our civilization is based on this idea that we are all flawed, that we are all wrong at one point or another, that we have very mixed motives, that we all behave in ways that we regret later.
Like all of us.
Literally, there's not a single one of us that doesn't have that.
And that We're better off when we are in an environment where we have people that can challenge us and criticize us.
And I mean, I find myself whenever I have to make these little soliloquies about the importance of free speech, I go, God, I can't believe I have to justify free speech.
But we do.
We have to make the case.
And particularly, I think we have to make it towards younger folks.
I think those of us.
that were not raised on social media and that weren't raised in this culture of fear tend to be more open to free speech.
I think older generations tend to be more favoring free speech.
But setting that aside, I think that we do have to find ways to make this case to folks about the importance of free speech, particularly younger folks, and how wonderful it is to be wrong.
I mean, I wrote two whole books About that explore the ways in which I was wrong and and you know, you can use your narcissism against your narcissism in the sense that you can it's very fascinating the ways that I've been wrong.
Let's talk more about how I've been wrong in the things that I regret because I do think that I think it inspires something from people.
That's not defensive that'll actually allows us to kind of be like, yeah, I was wrong about that too, or I have those regrets too and Let him that's never sinned be the first to throw the stone.
And it's just such a simple, basic lesson.
I mean, that lesson of humility.
I mean, it's in every, you know, wisdom tradition on earth.
It's in the Constitution of the United States government.
It's it should be really fundamental, this sense of humility and the potential to be wrong and the potential to be bad.
And I think, you know, some of that exists, has traditionally existed on the left in terms of the support for free speech.
Some of it's existed on the right.
In the sense of having a darker view of human nature, but it's in all the wisdom traditions and I think we have to elevate it once again as a sense of humility and the chance that we might be wrong and and for that reason, especially that's why we want to have a fair and equal justice system.
And that's why we want to have freedom of speech.
Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, said that we are experiencing in this new culture all of the piety of religion just extracted of important ideas like redemption and salvation and I again feel like there's this kind of, you know, I've written books in which I talk about, you know, doing things wrong but there's this sort of subsequent metastasization into sort of ethical failings, into something far more monstrous And it seems to me that this has a kind of cultural context that's curious.
For example, you know, obviously free speech equates to hate speech is an interesting idea.
Your opponents must be demonized.
You don't need to hear their ideas.
You shouldn't hear their ideas.
What do you feel about this?
The FBI targeting Trump supporters for 2024 and the kind of equation of opposition With terrorism, the use of language, you know, from Hillary Clinton specifically, like, you know, extremists if not terrorists.
What do you feel about that?
Yeah, I mean, so this is a very important investigative piece that ran in Newsweek by a journalist named Bill Arkin, who's a very well-known and respected journalist in the United States.
He quoted many FBI officials anonymously, confirming that indeed this was what was going on, and the FBI has been Focused on exaggerating the threat of domestic extremism and domestic terrorism.
We have also written about this extensively.
We think that there is clearly an effort by a politicized FBI.
To spread disinformation that basically frames Trump supporters as wanting to overthrow the government.
I think there's reasons to suspect that a significant number of federal agents undercover were instigating violence on January 6th.
We now know because In the fake FBI entrapment that led to the kidnapping plot against the governor of Michigan, those defendants have now been acquitted because the government was involved in an entrapment.
So this is really scary because what we're talking about here is basically a disinformation campaign by the federal government to frame people expressing their free speech rights to frame them as terrorists.
This is basically secret police, information operations.
This is all illegal.
It's unconstitutional.
It's extremely disturbing.
It has to be rooted out.
You know, I think that, you know, there's another thing here, which is the ways in which the intelligence and security agencies that are involved in this, they're manipulating The confusion that people have in their own minds, and I discovered it when I was interviewing people in Ireland, and I keep finding it, where on the one hand, people kind of are saying we should not allow incitement to violence.
And everybody basically agrees with that.
We have a lot of legal cases where you can't immediately incite violence.
But you can see it's already it's it's a little subjective.
In other words, it's easy to be like, we have to go kill that person because they're part of this religious group.
That's a media incitement to violence.
Well, you start to then get into it's not immediate or how immediate is it?
And so in that.
That sort of subjective gray zone, you start to see the expansion or what psychologists call concept creep, where the idea of harm and what's categorized as harm grows, grows, grows.
And that other thing I was mentioning where people are more intolerant of different views than justifies itself by saying, oh, well, we have to protect people from that harmful speech.
So again, it's one of those things where it's like it takes some time to sort of explain what's going on and to help people to see that.
You know, I mean, there's, this has come up with Twitter, now X, where Elon has allowed, you know, more so-called hate speech on the platform.
I mean, in other words, you know, hate speech is subjective, but certainly, you know, you can find, and it's, you know, I think Elon, there's some questions around whether there's really been an increase, but certainly you can find people saying horrible anti-Semitic things online.
We just saw over the last several days, people saying really terrible dehumanizing things.
The question is, is it better to be able to argue back against that and say, look, that's really gross.
You're justifying this horrible violence against people.
Is it better to be able to have that conversation, or is it better to just have a small committee of experts decide to censor it?
I obviously, and you, and our friend Matt Taibbi, and others, we obviously side with the idea of allow that debate to occur.
Allow people to say terrible things.
They will regret it later, I believe.
Most of them will regret it later.
But allow in that moment to say, hey, that's horrible.
How would you feel if that was your daughter?
How would you feel if that was your child that that happened to?
And I think being able to allow that exchange to occur, you know, online is wonderful.
Now, of course, I'll say I think there are There's always exceptions.
There's limits to that.
But I do think we need to get back to allowing more of that conversation to occur because, you know, I think down the road of we just have to have more censorship decided by unelected people and by special secret committees.
That's a very that's a road to totalitarianism.
It's a road that we appear to be traveling down at pace in a variety of areas.
Yes, with the censorship industrial complex.
Yes, with matters that regarding world health.
Yes, with matters regarding war, increasing ongoing war, without, it seems, due democratic
process, without the ability to debate or discuss it, without a vision for peace in
sight or even really discussed in some instances.
This thing you said about the concept creep and the increase in what constitutes harm,
I suppose by its nature legitimizes authoritarianism.
And it seems that that is the trend.
Because of X, we must increase authoritarianism.
We must have these new regulatory powers.
And these regulatory powers are seldom deployed or even designed to be deployed against other
powerful entities that you might imagine have considerable influence in global outcomes.
It's usually the ability to restrict, impede, control.
The actions of individuals.
That's usually where it ends up.
So I suppose on that basis, it's clear to see why trust in institutions is in decline.
Only 4% of Americans say the political system is working well.
The vast majority say that it isn't.
And when we're talking about this, Michael, I know that at least from the way you present, it seems that you have some faith or hope at least that these institutions can improve. Now for the first time
it seems in this sort of cycle leading to 2024 people are saying we would disband the CIA,
we would disband the FBI.
This institutional mistrust appears to be reaching levels where people are at least
rhetorically I suppose discussing, suggesting the possibility of what might have been regarded as
revolutionary change.
Is that what is required?
Or do you believe that reform can be effective, even in the areas we've discussed, where I know a lot of people think, oh my god, this is seismic.
We are on the edge of something absolutely terrifying, not just because of the loathing and distrust of the media and the government and many of our institutions, but because it appears There is a trajectory towards centralisation in many, many areas of public life and it's beyond national.
It seems to be a global and somewhat coordinated issue.
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
I mean, I think there's a lot of ways in which I and many others, I think, see the current moment as very similar to the 1970s.
The 1970s, though, we had a reaction to Watergate in the form of something called the Church Committee hearing of 1975.
But it was the Democrats that were running that hearing and it had the support of Republicans.
And they really put it, this is where they exposed MKUltra, You know, the drug, the drugging of people without their permission.
I mean, shocking experiments were done by the CIA.
But we also saw abuses of power by FBI, of course.
And there's still things from that era that we that we don't know.
But you saw a sort of reform of institutions.
And I think this is what America's founding fathers meant when they said we need a revolution every every few decades.
You need to clean out these institutions.
I personally think it would be going too far to completely shut down the FBI, you know, the CIA.
I mean, every government has spies.
It's hard to believe if you got rid of the CIA that you wouldn't have spies operating through State Department or something else.
On the FBI question, do you need a national police force?
I mean, there's ways in which a lot of the positive improvement of policing occurs when there's some standards being put to it.
For example, we've seen a decline in the use of violence by police forces since the 1970s.
So I think that just abolishing these institutions is just too radical.
I think it goes too far.
But you definitely need new heads of these agencies who are psychologically healthy and apolitical.
I think that one of the things that I've been very interested in is the ways in which Totalitarianism is characterized by psychopaths and narcissists taking over important societal institutions.
And that means people that use their charisma to mesmerize and hypnotize people, basically with this line that we've been talking about, oh, I'm here to protect you and protect you from all this hatred and domestic extremism.
And the psychopaths who will basically destroy people's lives.
I mean, the entrapment that the FBI has been engaged in is often entrapment of people that are mentally disabled or mentally ill.
I mean, that's pretty gross.
Like, you have to be a pretty uncaring person to be able to destroy somebody's life in order to achieve a broader political goal.
So you need to be able to take over.
Now, the problem is, and I point this out in this piece I wrote about Jim Jordan, who's the The head of this subcommittee investigating the weaponization, he's a lot like Church, Frank Church, the member of Congress was in the mid-70s.
The difference is, is that the Democrats are against Jim Jordan.
In fact, they demonize Jim Jordan as sort of anti-democratic, even though Jim Jordan has done the most to sort of surface the abuses of power, both by Department of Homeland Security in terms of censorship, also by FBI.
But I will say, you know, the United States, we're still we still have a constitution.
We have a really strong First Amendment that protects free speech and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in considering Missouri versus Biden, which is the lawsuit around censorship.
Recently came back and actually expanded the injunction preventing this Department of Homeland Security agency from talking to social media companies.
And I do think the Supreme Court will decide to hear this case.
I do think the Supreme Court will side with us.
So when I look, you know, it's like a knife by the phone booth.
You know, it's like we're definitely having some setbacks.
all around the world and the demonetization, including people, including you and others,
is really disturbing, really scary.
That's, YouTube is out of control.
I mean, Facebook and YouTube and Google are absolutely out of control.
Happily, we have X.
You know, Elon has made it much freer.
We have Supreme Court in the United States.
We have the pushback in Ireland that appears to be working.
Similarly, our friends in Brazil say that as soon as they said, as soon as they explained to people that what you're proposing is censorship, it did start to change the conversation in Brazil.
So I do think that, I mean, what I, you know, it's cliche, but I will just say really fighting for free speech does matter.
I think the event that we did in London had a big impact.
I think the event that we did in Ireland is important.
It's quite lovely, I will say, just at a human level to be able to have these conversations and have these exchanges.
I've made some really lovely friends around the world.
Almost everybody has been cancelled.
Everybody has been sort of personally hurt.
Including quite badly.
And so to be able to find each other and build a community has been one of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of building this free speech movement.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're right to have done that, man.
I guess one of the... I feel like I've got no choice now.
You know, like I can't have one foot in each camp anymore.
This is real, you know?
Yeah.
I want to add Rumble to that list of people advocating for free speech, obviously, for some reasons that are pretty bloody obvious.
Also, I want to talk about the Our idea of transparency, whilst the population from various nations have less and less ability to live privately, privacy is being equated with criminality, another one of those peculiar conjunctions that we've been discussing throughout this chat.
There is no transparency in government, or perhaps insufficient transparency in government.
A conversation I had recently with Scott Adams, we discussed the possibility of absolute transparency at the level of government.
What would happen there?
If you were able to witness all expenditure, if you were able to plainly witness all funding, if it was open source and accessible, is that possible?
Would they?
Would it ever be possible?
I feel like even with the subject, when we talk about, oh, you know, well, there are many Republicans that are pretty anti-war, but those, generally speaking, they're anti the war between Ukraine and Russia, and they're pro Yeah, intensifying hostilities between the US and China.
What does that mean then?
You can't vote for anybody that doesn't want to have a war against an opposing superpower.
That seems kind of crazy now pending RFK's announcement in Philadelphia, which will have happened by the time we broadcast this.
So subsequent to that, you could vote for Bobby Kennedy there.
But I wonder if when it comes to free speech, this issue of transparency, I wonder, do you think that that's possible?
Do you think that would ever happen?
Is it feasible?
And also, do you think that in the same way, after your point about Brazil, that we could end up with free speech kind of exiles in the same way that you might have once had tax exiles, that there might be principalities and regions where free speech is tolerated outside of the kind of Five Eyes countries, for want of a better phrase?
Yeah, great question.
I mean, I think it's, you know, right before the recent war and attacks in Israel, everybody was focusing on the United States on the border.
And I mean, here we have in the United States and so, but it's also similar in Europe.
I mean, here we have people around the world fleeing To free countries.
People want to come to the United States and Europe because they want to be free.
They want to be able to speak their minds.
They don't want to be victims of censorship and state oppression.
So at the end of the day, I do think that what we have going for us is that most people do want to be free.
I have arguments with some people about this because obviously there are some people that do want totalitarianism and you are people that want censorship.
But I think that's often that fast thinking.
You get into slow thinking, you make people start to make, you require people to slow down and think about it.
I do think they side with free speech.
Similarly with transparency.
Boy, are you right about this.
I just had, I just was reminded.
How frequently the US government is moving money around to hide various projects.
Now, sometimes if you're making a new secret weapon, a defensive weapon, it might be justified.
But even then, you're supposed to have congressional oversight.
There's been far too much secrecy on these issues.
We do need a whole new era of transparency.
You know, on COVID, to give one example, you may remember there's this moment where one of Anthony Fauci's aides said, I'm going to use my private Gmail to avoid future Freedom of Information Act requests.
And we ended up getting those emails anyway.
There is this sense in which the people that are in charge They know, obviously, that what they're doing doesn't look good and is probably bad, and they really don't trust the public.
I think in some sense they really don't like the public.
They don't really think the public has a right to know, and yet that's been so foundational.
It's, I think, one of these other reforms.
I mean, like you, I think you kind of go, man, if there's really a crackdown here, do we have to go somewhere else?
But it's like, where else do you go?
I mean, if the United States can't remain steadfast in its commitment to free speech, Equal justice under the law.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Transparency into how our tax money is being spent.
Then I just think Western civilization is over.
You know, I think you can start to lose some liberal societies in the Western alliance, but you start to lose the United States and I think it's game over.
And so I do think I think we are going to get a victory on Missouri versus Biden.
I will say America has been in some pretty dark moments before.
You know, the most recently was sort of the 70s and the abuses of power that we saw in the in the late 60s, early 70s.
But we really do have an amazing system here.
And I think that culture is still here, but people forget it when they get caught up in the emotions of social media and fast thinking.
And I wonder if that culture is being diluted by this, simply by almost technological advancement, in a sense, the same way that the industrialization of war made, you know, the First and Second World War much worse than their predecessors.
And perhaps that doesn't tell the whole story of the preceding appetites.
I read something about the brutality of the early days of the French Revolution that was sort of an indicator that the sort of Venom was still present.
It's just they didn't have the mechanization that would facilitate murder on the scale of, you know, 50, 60 years later.
Sorry, 200.
Anyway, my point is that what concerns me is now the machinery is in place for dystopia and It appears sometimes that legislatively moves are being made that suggest that the idea of a consensus between those that are governed and the governing is breaking down.
I spoke with Glenn Greenwald a little while ago and he says, you know, anti-protest laws, pro-surveillance, pro-censorship, and automated civil... you know, it seems that now, once
there was a kind of necessity to, like for billionaire philanthropists to toss dollar bills
from the window of a passing limo in a gesture of appeasement, whereas now it's just like,
well we're just going to have robots on the streets of New York that at the flick of a switch
can be utilised to absolutely control you in the militarisation of the police forces. But one of the
components, so obviously you have to be, if not optimistic, you have to be hopeful to live in the
space that we live in, otherwise our plan would have to become, we better get some land off
Nicaragua and get the hell out of here and start thinking about communes that are off grid or
whatever, and I do think about those things.
But you also have to think, no, hold on, there is a battle here, there is a war, and it's significant what's happened in the last five, ten years.
And the capacity that we have now to regulate and control, if that is undergirded by new legislation, like the safety bills that we've talked about in both the UK, Ireland, Canada, then that is a significant step towards the end of America, in a way.
Yeah, and I will say I don't hold those apocalyptic views of AI.
I just testified to Senator Paul inviting me to testify in front of the Senate about AI.
In fact, I worry that that discourse around AI actually You know, suggest that humans aren't making these big decisions when they are.
You know, everyone, there's a big thing you always see people do online where they're like, oh, I asked Chad GPT this question and they answered with this, you know, super politically correct response.
Well, somebody is making that decision for Chad GPT.
I mean, I just think I'm a little, I worry a little bit about that conversation on AI because I also think I see people that sort of say, oh, it's this big threat and that means I have to control it.
Often the people hyping that threat are often people that want the control.
It definitely needs to be regulated.
It definitely needs governance.
But I do think at the end of the day, like, for example, in the case of the censorship, of course, they were using, you know, these tools to be able to do mass censorship, like on Facebook and on Twitter.
But on the issues of what they were censoring, it was people making those decisions.
Facebook's, you know, it's Mark Zuckerberg that's going to decide.
And it's Elon Musk who's going to decide.
You know, I think I mean, you know, the thing that really freaks me out is I'm like, what would have happened if Elon hadn't taken over Twitter?
I mean, that's I that is really scary because I don't think we really knew how bad it was.
There was there was some legislation already on the censorship of Facebook.
So hopefully it would have come out.
But I do think, no, I think that we can't, we can't escape the West.
If you, if you move to Nicaragua and start your commune, of course I'll come and visit.
But I, but you're not, I mean, these are peripheral countries.
I mean, you wouldn't be safe if there's some global totalitarian crackdown.
And I just think, yeah, I mean, I just think, look, we, humankind is, you know, we've come up from really, you know, authoritarian rule over time and really violent rule and You know, the long sweep is pretty clear that we've evolved towards greater democracy and less violence.
And there's been some backsliding for sure over the last few decades.
And these recent trends are alarming.
But to some extent, that distrust of government Some of that's healthy, right?
We don't want too much trust in government.
We should not want the government to decide who can be paid for their YouTube videos or who should be censored online.
I think it's a very, very dark moment right now, but I think we should You know, remind ourselves that this too shall pass and that nothing is permanent and that reality swerves, that trends tend to be non-linear, in many cases not linear.
I like that.
Do you, though, as a Christian, ever concern yourself with the idea that there might be some terrible apocalyptic showdown on the horizon that we're all going to be invited to participate in?
I mean, obviously nuclear war is just the most realistic possibility for apocalypse, and I think everybody should be scared about it.
I mean, that's how nuclear weapons sort of work, is by scaring people.
It's deterrence.
You know, I'll say, though, that my understanding of it and I've done some amount of research and writing on this is that the most dangerous moments around nuclear were when we first got them when the Russians and Americans first got them and we were sort of.
Not sure, you know, how to handle them.
So we had the worst scares, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis being the closest that we came.
Since then, we've created much better communications.
You know, I think there was a recent instance, as you may know, between, you know, the Ukrainians asked Elon to expand Starlink support up into, you know, new areas and he declined out of concern for nuclear war.
So, I do think that, you know, we also saw India and Pakistan.
Everybody thought that if India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons that they would have nuclear war, but it actually ended up helping them to de-escalate the situation.
The most dangerous moment is when people first get the nuclear weapons.
So, I think You know, I've been misunderstood this issue before.
We should be scared of nuclear weapons.
At the same time, we have put in place some some means to prevent their being used.
But this is all the reason why we have to negotiate a peace in Ukraine.
I mean, at this point, I think most people want to see something negotiated.
And there are nuclear weapons that protect all NATO countries.
And so there's going to be some negotiation over Whether that protection is going to be extended to Ukraine, whether it's not, or whether partly or whatnot, but ultimately, yeah, it is scary, but I do think there's also risks of becoming too apocalyptic and too hopeless.
I do think we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is for peace and freedom and prosperity and the older values.
Including humility, especially humility, especially the balance of power, because without those things I think you tend towards a totalitarian mentality.
Yeah, that's good.
Like an arcane honouring of principles like humility and an acknowledgement that technology appears to be moving in the direction of allowing less centralisation, more communication, More dialogue.
And it feels to me that what's being cultivated is a mindset that's like, no, no, no, we should use all this to centralise power and create a centralised global entity that can regulate above, whether it's the WHO pandemic treaty or these eerily similar set of legislations across anglophonic countries.
to increase surveillance or whether it's we have to rely on the largesse of Elon Musk to prevent
escalating wars you know between proxy war at least between superpowers. Michael thank you
so much thank you for covering so much territory in such good faith.
That's what I feel is perhaps lacking in the conversation around social, cultural and political issues at the moment is a sort of an open-hearted intention towards resolution rather than a further validation of a polarizing position.
Yeah, I feel that you're doing a lot of good, mate.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Russell.
I appreciate you too.
Back at you.
I appreciate the love and the faith that you're bringing this.
Cheers, mate.
Thank you.
What choice do we have now?
Thanks, man.
It's the right choice.
Thank you, Michael.
You can follow Michael's work by going to public.substack.com and follow him on X by searching at Schellenberger, which is well worth doing because as you just witnessed, his contributions to the conversation are always enlightening.
He has become, I think, an example of what he espouses.
He indeed is the change that we would like to see in the world.
On the show tomorrow, Kim Iverson is joining us.
We'll be talking about RFK's announcement.
Can an independent win in this new America?
Is that the only option we really have?
Who's going to be most hurt by it?
Trump or Biden?
Does it mean that Trump or Biden may not run?
What will it mean?
And of course, we're going to be talking about events in Gaza.
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