July 16, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:22
3349 Free Speech Under Attack | Alex Epstein and Stefan Molyneux
Alex Epstein had a three-word response after learning that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey had included him in her climate change “fraud” investigation: F**k off, fascist. Epstein joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss this shocking attack on those who oppose climate change propaganda and the latest government attack on freedom of speech. First The Government Went After ExxonMobil -- Now They're Going After Me: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2016/06/16/first-the-government-went-after-exxonmobil-now-theyre-going-after-me/#342a0aaf69a1Alex Epstein is the President and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and an expert on energy and industrial policy. Center for Industrial Progress is a for-profit think-tank seeking to bring about a new industrial revolution. For more from Alex and CIP, please check out: industrialprogress.com and alexepstein.comTo purchase The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and get source notes, go to: moralcaseforfossilfuels.com or http://www.fdrurl.com/alex-epsteinFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
You can find his work at industrialprogress.com and alexepstein.com.
We'll put links to his book below, which is fantastic.
We've talked about that before.
But today we are changing topics somewhat I wonder if you can tell us about one of the more surprising emails you may have gotten from Massachusetts, people high up in the Massachusetts legal department, Alex.
Alright, yeah, it was four weeks ago now, it was a Wednesday, and I woke up and I got some annoying, I was planning on doing some writing, and I got this annoying thing for someone, you know, somebody says, call me.
No explanation at all, you know, which is always annoying when you get that.
But it turned out when I called the person, he told me, hey, by the way, there's a subpoena coming out of ExxonMobil, And your name is in it.
Or rather, your organization is in it.
The Center for Industrial Progress.
And I'm thinking, like, what the hell is this?
And I was familiar with the general phenomenon, and I was really opposed to it.
And so this is the phenomenon of different state attorneys, generals, different kinds of justice departments trying to silence companies And think tanks connected to companies, usually funded by companies, by accusing them of fraud, which we can talk about and why I consider that a completely illegitimate use of the term fraud.
But basically the idea is they want to silence the opposition and they want to demonize them, and this is their latest tactic.
I was a little surprised that I was included in it because I don't run a non-profit that gets funding from organizations.
I run a for-profit company, so we sell books and lectures and training and consulting.
We certainly deal with the industry in various capacities, but we're just selling them our opinions.
It's not like I get funded to do a research project or say something.
I thought this was very peculiar.
What it highlighted to me Is that this whole enterprise of going against the companies is not about some sort of illicit, allegedly tobacco-like distortion of things where you're paying these agents.
It's simply, if you have an opinion that's pro-fossil fuels, you are fair game.
So being included in the subpoena means that anyone from my company, communicating with anyone from Exxon, those emails can be extracted.
You know, from them.
And so this is just a complete unwarranted search and seizure.
I don't want anyone invading my emails.
I want to be able to say whatever I want to any company I want as long as I'm not committing fraud, as long as there's no evidence.
There's certainly no evidence at all.
And so I really regarded this and I regard the whole campaign as very barbaric.
I consider it as if I'm expressing an opinion and somebody's coming in my house and demanding my stuff.
I thought about how to respond and my first inclination was, well, my usual response is I'll write some sort of sophisticated op-ed breaking this down, which I later did a couple days later.
But my immediate response was there's something wrong with that and there's something wrong with the fact that all the victims of this are responding in legalese or taking out ads in the newspaper.
But this is savage, barbaric behavior.
This is not a reasonable disagreement.
This is thuggery.
And so what would I do if a thug came in my house?
I would tell them, you know, expletive off.
Oh, you can say it.
It's the least offensive thing about this whole situation is what you wrote to the Attorney General.
I know, but people should know I don't use profanity just flagrantly all the time.
So this was a very deliberate thing.
People can listen to our last interviews with you.
The only bleeping comes from me.
So you are a civil discourse kind of guy, but obviously you were provoked.
If someone came to my house, I'd say, fuck off.
And because I wanted to identify the nature of this, I wrote Attorney General Maura Healey, this is the leader of this particular case against Exxon that included me in it, I just wrote, regarding your demand to seize my email, that was the subject, and then I just wrote, fuck off fascist, period.
And that was it.
And then I publicized that on Twitter and other places.
And it got an enormous reaction, which may or may not be surprising.
But my goal was to communicate to people that we should not tolerate fascism.
We should not tolerate censorship.
And I wanted to make clear, this is not a civil action.
This is different than saying, hey, Alex, I think you're wrong about the consequences of CO2 emissions.
This is somebody saying, you're not allowed to talk, and if you do talk, I will invade your life.
So that's why I did it, and I think most people understood that's why I did it, although I did get some interesting negative reactions from people as well.
Oh, the people who thought that your use of profanity was perhaps the most offensive thing about this entire situation?
That's the exact right way of putting it, because people would write to me, yeah, they'd write to me, you know, you should really learn how to express yourself.
I love this, right?
Oh, I don't know how to express myself.
I've been a writer my entire adult life.
Like, I don't know how to use it.
These are people on my mailing list.
Like, you should learn how to express yourself better.
And so I started writing back to people.
Was this.
I said, I hope, you know, regardless of your view of my choice of language, I hope you've written the Attorney General to tell her what you think of this, because surely her actions, this is often, by the way, industry people criticizing me, surely her actions, which is depriving you of your right to speak in the name of the goal of destroying your industry, surely that's more profane than what I said.
And not one person wrote back to me, and there's only a handful that happened, so I don't want to exaggerate it, but not one person said, yes, I did write the Attorney General, but I'm writing you because I disagree with your approach.
So what this says to me is people really don't care I think that's notable.
It is something that happens a lot.
I mean, in what I do, I could be talking about the most heinous evils in the world, and should I happen to let loose with a few syllables that might be more appropriate to an angry drunken sailor stubbing his toe on a cat, people are like, oh!
As I describe all the evils, people are like, oh, that's terrible, that's terrible, but should I cuss, which is actually good for one's mental health, as has been proven, people, that's the shock factor.
It's not like the war or the debt or the destruction or the unjust imprisonment that I'm describing.
It's words which don't harm anyone.
That's where people's tripwire is.
I always find that kind of surprising.
But anyway, so you said that.
What is the Attorney General, Amora Healy, her name is, what is her contention?
And in your view, how is it false?
Sure.
So the contention is not...
I was included in this particular case, and I was not included in other cases.
And before I explain what the contention is, I just want to specify who is included.
So ExxonMobil has been included, and then usually what happens is different think tanks have been named in the subpoena.
So that means that Exxon is required to divulge any communication it's had from any of these people, which I'll talk about in a second why that's completely unjust.
But they've actually also gone directly after the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
So this is a think tank, right?
This is a nonprofit organization that stands for free markets, that stands for what they consider rationality and science, that has been, in my view, one of the more courageous people challenging climate catastrophism.
And they are being attacked by the government.
Like the judicial, not the judicial, rather the executive branch is going after them, right?
So they're saying, you are a criminal, or we think you might be a criminal.
For what?
For expressing ideas.
So it's important that these investigations are not just happening to companies, but to think tanks, right?
So that's...
Sorry, just to interrupt, but also to point out, because they're a non-profit, It really can't be said that they would be doing so for significant material gain as far as I understand it.
They're not acting on behalf of shareholders who they feel may have received bad information from the company and so on, although shareholders have many legal recourses outside of the government pursuing people.
Is that a fair way to state some of the pushback?
Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to even know what it would mean for a non-profit to commit fraud because they don't have a product.
So let's talk about the base case of what it means to commit fraud and what it doesn't mean to commit fraud.
So it would be to commit fraud if Exxon was selling gasoline as unleaded that had a whole bunch of lead in it.
Why?
Well, because what the government is supposed to do is protect us against coercion, and it's a form of coercion to give something to somebody that they did not ask for, particularly that has certain kinds of damaging consequences.
This is why we have laws against fraud.
But fraud, you have to specifically misrepresent facts, like direct observable facts about your company.
And And it has to be something that you would reasonably know to be false when you would say it.
That you would reasonably know, and also that you would have unique access to.
For instance, if Exxon even said, I guess they could theoretically say, our gasoline doesn't emit CO2, that would be fraudulent, but they don't say that because they're not liars, but it's a known fact.
So it's important that With this issue, there's no such issue of the composition of Exxon's gasoline, any particular evidence they would have unique access to.
The issue here is a known fact about every single form of fossil fuel, aka hydrocarbon fuel, which is that when you burn it, when you oxidize it, the carbon in the hydrocarbon becomes CO2, and that aggregates in the atmosphere.
And then there are all sorts of views about what the consequences of that are.
So Exxon has no ability.
It's not that they didn't defraud people.
It's impossible to defraud people because the core thing is a matter of known public fact.
So there's no potential now.
So what would they say about that?
Well, they'd say, well, Exxon knew this expression.
Exxon had internal people that discussed the possibility or the speculation of catastrophic climate change.
And so there's a couple things to say about this, but one is that no matter what Exxon is exposed to or not, they can say whatever they want that's in the realm of opinion.
So even if they do so immorally, which I don't think they did at all, I think actually they've done it immorally in the other direction.
They've promoted the catastrophes way too much.
But even if they do, they're allowed to say, even if it's not in good faith, We think CO2 is not...
You know, we believe what some people call the lukewarming theory, right?
That there's just a very small amount of warming.
The point is, every organization has an unlimited right to express any opinion about any kind of public issue.
And this is very, very important that they have this right.
So Exxon did not, in any way, to my knowledge, act unethically in this direction.
But it's important that it's not like this borderline case that Exxon has to prove that its opinion was exactly correct...
And that every person involved was moral.
No.
You are allowed to express opinions on any kind of issue.
You're not allowed to misrepresent specific facts.
The same way, Windows can say, we think we're the best operating system.
Now, I think that's a hard argument to justify.
But nevertheless, they are allowed to say that, right?
And even if, I forget, Balmer's successor, but even if he's not being fully honest with himself, he's allowed to say that.
You know, you're allowed to say all kinds of things.
I wish I had the link to it.
My colleague Eric Dennis had this great article explaining just how if you took this idea that wrong opinions could be used as grounds for fraud, then nobody could say anything.
You could just go after every single company, and basically the government would be on a 24-7 watch for any opinion that it thought was misleading, and then who gets to decide that?
a 24-7 watch for any opinion that it thought was misleading, and then who gets to decide that?
It's just a complete mess.
It's just a complete mess.
People have no clue what fraud actually means.
People have no clue what fraud actually means.
Exxon, there was no possibility of them committing fraud.
Exxon, there was no possibility of them committing fraud.
They had a right to express whatever they believed.
In fact, what they did was much more responsible than what the climate catastrophists did because the climate catastrophists publicized all these predictions in the 80s that by today we would be in some sort of inferno and that we'd have massive numbers of climate-related deaths.
John Holdren, our top science official, projected that we'd have a billion climate-related deaths from famine by 2020, and the opposite has happened.
Exxon was right not to publicize the wrong predictions.
Even if they had been wrong, they have a right to.
But they were right, so you have the people who didn't publicize the wrong ideas and who generally were on the right side, them being persecuted.
And if that sounds crazy, it is, but that's what happens when you don't have free speech.
that the people in the wrong use the tools of government to suppress the people on the right.
If you're the people on the right, you don't need coercive tools to suppress the other side.
So fraud also, of course, if you conceal or fabricate evidence, right?
So if you, I don't know, if you're putting out some pill and the evidence is that it's dangerous and you suppress that evidence and you put it out and pretend it's safe, I assume that would somewhat be in the category of fraud.
But of course, the climate impact of CO2, the evidence has been gathered by public institutions.
The data is largely in the public domain and government agencies, educational institutions funded by the government have put out all of this data.
And the data, of course, is available to everyone, and they have come to particular tentative conclusions about certain aspects of the data and so on, so they can't be accused of concealing or fabricating evidence that everyone has access to.
Yep.
I mean, I have nothing more to say about that.
They don't have even any unique expertise on the issue.
Now, if you want to talk about concealing and fabricating evidence, there is a very, very strong, if not impregnable case to be made against the United States government and various different institutions.
I mean, for example, even just take these claims about hottest year on record and temperature records, the government does not disclose in any prominent way that it is constantly tampering with or manipulating or, they would say, reinterpreting past temperature records.
So people think that the records that are publicized today are this unchanging frame of reference that now we're getting new data with regard to.
But if you look at the data, what happens is it's a very inconvenient fact for the catastrophists that around the 1940s were the worst times, 30s and 40s, were the worst times in terms of climate-related deaths because you had a combination of a lot of heat and much less technology to be able to protect ourselves.
That's why you have things like the Dust Bowl.
That's why you had years where you had millions of climate-related deaths, whereas today we have tens of thousands of climate-related deaths.
So it's very inconvenient that the temperature went up a lot in the 40s and then it went down from the 40s to the 70s, which is why everyone was afraid of global cooling, and then it went up.
Because if people see that, and they see the small magnitude, they might think, hey, guess what?
There's a lot of natural variability in the climate.
Whatever we're adding with CO2 doesn't seem like too big a deal, certainly not justifying making ourselves all poorer, which would, among other things, make us unable to cope with climate and, of course, every other aspect of life.
So what they want to do is they want to show this unbroken hockey stick type thing.
And so they keep reinterpreting the data in, guess what, a way that favors this kind of hockey stick.
Now, this guy, Michael Mann, M-A-N-N, which people sometimes joke, man-made global warming, you know, he had this hockey stick thing, which was completely exposed as a fraud.
And so it's been mostly retracted.
But you see, anyway, there's this tendency to interpret the data in a way that's consistent with catastrophism.
So the government, if it's doing that, needs to publicize what it's doing, including the fact that it always seems to go in a certain direction, and that it should also publicize catastrophes.
That it also contradicts all historical accounts, right?
Because we have in the 70s, there are reasons why people thought we were having global cooling.
And in the 40s, there were reasons why people were really upset about the temperature.
So there's this, there's ClimateGate, there's the hockey stick.
And these are cases where people are really suppressing evidence.
I mean, there is a claim in the ClimateGate emails called Hide the Decline.
Hide!
That's suppressing evidence.
The government has a lot to answer for here.
So this is the thoughts that sort of sprang through my mind on sort of reading up on these issues, Alex, which was that – well, number one, of course, there's a lot of government institutions that get massive amounts of funding, which is kind of contingent on the fact that global warming is man-made, ever-escalating, catastrophic and requires massive amounts of government power to counteract.
So, they of course have a big incentive, you could say, right, to sort of change the data, hide the data, hide the declines or whatever it is.
And of course, they have self-admitted to changing the data to adjust for various variables, although I don't know that they've actually released the specific methodology and process.
So that seems kind of like a conflict of interest.
Plus there's this whole clean power energy segment.
I put those in quotes for this, clean power.
Some estimated it's about the same size as the pharmaceutical industry, running at about $200 billion a year.
Well, of course, one of the ways that they sell clean energy is saying, well, if you're burning that dirty coal, if you're burning all that CO2 stuff, you know, you're choking the spotted owl and you're killing the newt and all that kind of stuff.
And so, given that there's a huge industry that has some material benefit to thermageddon, the sort of climate alarmism and so on, is that not also the case that they might have?
Yeah, well, in a couple of respects, just one way it spills over is to the other companies where there's this fear.
And imagine even just with me, I mean, I didn't, let's say a couple of companies said, hey, we were planning on having you speak for us and holding events, but we don't want to anymore.
How much of that is fear?
How much of that is the F word is just beyond the pale versus how much of that is fear?
I mean, whatever it is in this case, there is, as Michael Crichton called, a climate of fear where companies have to be afraid of any email they send to anyone.
And if you think about the nature of movements, communication is paramount.
So I absolutely want to be able to communicate with any and every company about how to fight against the climate catastrophists and for fossil fuels.
That's very important.
And I certainly don't want people invading that right.
So that's one aspect.
The other aspect you mentioned, though, is...
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, all kinds of companies are incentivized to have interpretations that their benefits of what they do are better than they are, and that the risks are less than what they are.
I mean, that's directionally what their incentive is.
It doesn't mean, I mean, to be honest, you don't want to do that.
But I mean, you know, directionally, I'm incentivized to believe that the moral case for fossil fuels is even better than it is, right?
I mean, I'm not incentivized to think it's worse than it is.
Uh, I try to be honest about it, but this is just a fact.
So if you look at, say, the solar companies, the wind companies, Tesla, Elon Musk, they have an enormous...
I mean, they are industries that rely overwhelmingly on welfare, on subsidies.
They would not exist without...
I mean, the grid operators, if they wanted to run as efficiently as possible, even though that's a whole utility thing, even with the utility thing, they would not want a bunch of unreliable energy on the network paying a bunch of money for it.
There's just...
Why would they possibly want that?
They just put a cheap natural gas plant on the network.
So the whole justification has to be that this is all causing a catastrophe and then what the government should look into and say, "Hey, by this logic, are any of you exaggerating even, let alone fabricating?
But are you exaggerating about the nature of the threat?
And this is actually what some Republicans did somewhat cleverly, in my view, which is they said, hey, Democrats, if you're going to go after people for underplaying global warming, we're going to go after anyone who has exaggerated global warming.
Which you could find even by the government's crazy views about global warming, you can always find people who exaggerate and who make all sorts of statements.
So if you look at what the, if you look at what the, quote, clean energy, aka unreliable energy industry has put out, it's infinitely more wrong and misleading and dishonest than what the fossil fuel industry has put out.
The fossil fuel industry is very meek and very honest by comparison.
It seems strange for me, Alex, to live in a world where Hillary Clinton's emails can be deleted at whim with relatively little consequence, but they want your emails about a public policy debate based on uncertain, sometimes contradictory, often changed data in the public domain and its ramifications over time that people are somehow not allowed to participate in that debate should they have any conflict of interest.
But of course, in general...
we are drawn towards a topic where we have some particular stake in the issue.
You know, I'm drawn to issues of free speech.
Why?
Because I say things that are controversial sometimes, and I have on experts who are controversial.
You care about this stuff because you have a sort of fact and evidence-based interest in human life being well served by energy requirements or energy demands.
So it seems like if we're going to say, well, you can't participate in a debate, if you have any kind of conflict of interest or any personal stake, isn't that kind of what sort of defines people's passion to be involved in a particular debate?
Yeah, I mean, there's this idea that self-interest is disqualifying.
That if you have any sort of interest or potential interest in something, then that must be bad.
So if you're the fossil fuel industry, you have no right to speak up on your own behalf.
But how wrong is that?
That's what you should want to do.
I mean, you should want to talk about that for the same reasons we want to talk about what we want to talk about.
And you have every right to, and in the context where your rights are threatened, which all this legislation does threaten their rights, they should absolutely be doing that.
So the only truth to this is that you want to be aware of people's incentives and the potential consequences of those incentives.
But if you want to talk about incentives, for me the worst incentive is any kind of status seeker.
People who want status because what they want from the status is fake self-esteem.
That's what I'm always terrified of.
When people are seeking status, that's a lot scarier than people seeking money.
Money can be sought for status purposes but can also be sought very legitimately as a reward for creating something that you think is very valuable.
So the people in this context whom I'm afraid of are the people in the government who are very wedded to this idea of destroying industry in all of these different ways and who really want the power to shut people up.
I mean, think about this.
They want to shut Exxon up.
They don't want – Exxon is just a bunch of people, right?
I mean, a bunch of people getting together with a set of contracts, right?
They want to shut every person at Exxon up and they want to shut up anyone whom Exxon could potentially help.
And ultimately, they want to shut up everyone who disagrees with them.
And it's really horrible.
Well, of course, this is part of, I think, what people on the internet refer to as virtue signaling.
I care about the environment, therefore we should never use coal and people should die of freezing in the winter or whatever.
And that is a terrifying thing because, of course, the whole point of this exercise, should it prove to be pushed back or thrown out or whatever it is, The point, of course, is what's referred to as the chilling effect.
The point is to say to people, well, this risk now exists, which you never imagined existed before.
Therefore, you're just going to try and avoid this particular issue because it happened once.
Maybe nothing happened, but it was alarming and it was expensive.
So let's just avoid this particular topic.
and it's a way of shutting down opposition to what is a very highly theoretical consequence-based alarmism regarding CO2 escalations.
And that, of course, is the chilling thing.
It almost, in a sense, could be argued, unless there's specific punishments and sanctions against people who unjustly brought this forward, in my opinion, what happens is even if it fails, even if it's thrown out, there is, of course, that chilling effect.
And I think that's the entire point behind it.
Whether it works or not, it works, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, there's often this idea that if something doesn't succeed 100% on its own terms, then it hasn't succeeded.
But the point of this is not to succeed 100% on its own terms.
The point is to terrify people in terms of people who would speak out and to further demonize the fossil fuel industry.
In some ways, it's akin to this divestment movement where people are selling their shares of different fossil fuel stocks.
People could think, oh, the goal of that is that everyone will sell their shares and the shares will go to zero and the companies will crater and no oil will ever be developed again.
Right.
I mean, that is not what is going to happen and they know that's not what's going to happen.
But by having these divestment movements and divestment statements from all kinds of universities and all kinds of municipalities and various funds, what they're doing is they're making, they're cementing the idea that the fossil fuel industry is evil and that there is no legitimacy to supporting it whatsoever.
And this, I'm really scared to see how this chilling effect is going to happen with the industry because I've devoted a lot of effort to getting industry to speak.
speak out more on its own behalf.
I encourage them a lot to fund some of the good non-profits.
How is this going to affect that?
Even will people respond to my emails?
Will they be afraid to?
It's terrifying.
Let's put it this way.
If people were going after the climate catastrophist in this way, I would be defending the climate catastrophist's right to free speech.
Oh absolutely.
They should be doing the same.
Well, this is the key thing and that this, as you've pointed out, that this is done in the name of science makes it particularly reprehensible because science is supposed to be the open marketplace of hypotheses and examination of data and processing of empirical evidence.
I'm no expert on the history of science, but I don't remember scientists with good arguments ever requiring the government to silence dissent.
One of the most admirable things about Einstein was that he laid out in very great detail – Exactly how his theories could be disproven.
And everybody sort of said, oh, that's very helpful.
So now we have a way of knowing the degree to which we can push back on the general or specific theory of relativity, and that was done regularly.
And Newton didn't need the power of the state to silence people who disagreed with his theories, and so mathematicians don't need it.
The only people is bad ideas.
So people who thought, I don't know, that the Earth was the center of the solar system and who may have had religious beliefs that required that, well, they went after people who put the heliocentric sort of solar-centered model of the solar system forward.
And so that is almost an example of exactly how you know someone's argument is bad, is they're not willing to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas.
Yeah, I mean, Galileo is, I think, the most memorable example.
But I was learning recently, I've just started to study this, but I'm interested in these consensus declarations that are used to support ultimately unscientific views.
And I've heard of this one where Einstein was opposed by a large number of prominent scientists of the day who wrote Like one of these open letters, you know, these co-signed letters that we're supposed to bow to, about how Einstein was completely wrong.
So imagine we had, instead of a competitive climate like existed back then, we had this monopoly climate that exists now, and there was just this establishment, and the establishment could say, look, Einstein, you know, you're a heretic.
You're just, you know, you're ruining people's views of physics, you're misleading them, and if you were funded by industry, by the way, huge amounts of science historically have All science historically has been funded by industry.
I mean, throughout the 20th century, the idea that this was a bad thing is like a very recent distortion because the government just takes all of industry's money and then gives it to the positions that it thinks will advance the interests of industry.
The government, but it's just terrifying.
This idea that the truth needs a gun to silence the false is the exact opposite of the truth.
More and more, it feels like we're living in the final eight chapters of Atlas Shrugged, you know?
So, Alex, for people who want to help out on what you're doing and what you're facing, what would you suggest that they could do from a material standpoint?
From a material standpoint, I think the best thing is, I mean, if you go to industrialprogress.com, our website, there's a little sign-up thing for our mailing list.
So every week we have different things and we have different updates.
So there's not one perfect thing right now because it's an ongoing thing.
It's a dynamic thing.
So people just get on our mailing list at industrialprogress.com every Wednesday or Thursday or so.
They'll get something and then...
I'll make a note to repeat some of the stuff.
But I think the key thing is that people are vigilant about the issue and that we seize opportunities as they come up.
So it's possible there will be an opportunity at the Democratic Convention to do something, I'm not sure.
But that's the kind of thing I want to be in touch with people about.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for the update.
I certainly wish you the best in this somewhat surprising struggle.
And we'll put, of course, links to your websites below.
You share the information.
What people need to know is what's going on.
Because, of course, these things tend to operate on people being unaware of the stakes and what is involved.
You know, it is all a series of dominoes.
And they may go if you're sort of pro-alarmist global warming.
You should have freedom to speak about that.
Alex should have freedom to speak.
People at ExxonMobil should have freedom to speak.
And we cannot adjudicate science in the courtroom.
That is, going back to the Scopes monkey trial levels of nonsense.
And we really do have to be aware of the dangers coming down the pipeline when you attempt to regulate free speech in this way, as was, I think, put forward by the American court system in 1927.
The best solution for bad speech, if you consider it bad speech, is more speech, not less.
So thanks so much, Alex.
Hopefully you'll keep us updated on what's going on.
We'll put links to your stuff below.
Really appreciate your time today and look forward to seeing how this turns out.
