Aug. 29, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:21
3396 How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech | Kimberley Strassel and Stefan Molyneux
How is the Left silencing free speech in America? Kimberley Strassel joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss how disclosure and campaign finance laws have been hijacked by the Left as weapons against free speech and free association.Kimberley Strassel is a political columnist, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the author of “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.”Order "The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech" now: http://www.fdrurl.com/The-Intimidation-GameFreedomain 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
She is a political columnist, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and author of a truly hair-raising crackerjack book called The Intimidation Game, How the Left is Silencing.
Free speech, Kimberly.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
I'm so happy to be here.
So, the left...
Oh, the ambivalence of my relationship to the left is quite complicated, and it generally revolves around two areas.
I love their criticism of imperialistic foreign policy.
I think that stuff is well needed in public discourse, and I've always kind of enjoyed their commitment to free speech.
Ah, that relationship, as partly as a result of your book and other things that I've read, seems to be going through a bit of a transition.
And I think you also talked about your admiration for the left's commitment to free speech.
It seems to be changing just a little bit these days.
Yeah, you go back and you look especially, for instance, the civil rights era.
Left was magnificent on that.
And some of the best court cases we have about free speech and also about things like the right to anonymity in politics were the result of the left's work.
Groups like the NAACP, who brought this amazing case called NAACP versus Alabama, which was all about an attorney general in the South that was trying to get the names of those on a list We're good to
that has really changed its view on this.
They are now going after people that they don't like trying to suppress their ability to take part in politics and that has been a big shift.
Well, and of course the First Amendment in the United States is the big gotcha when it comes to government expansions of control over free speech.
But I think as you're pointing out, I'm sort of reminded when I was reading your book about some commercial I saw when I was younger about how intrusive the government might be.
You know, one day they might be able to find out which library books you've taken out.
And it was like, ah, you know, it's the most horrifying thing in the world.
Now that seems relatively benign when you've got the Huffington Post putting up maps, clickable, searchable maps of names and addresses and people you've donated to and so on.
I mean, the capacity to make that chilling effect of The privacy of one's own conscience and one's own political activism, to have that go public, to be subject to the kind of paybacks or intimidation or harassment or whatever can happen, I think that's having a big chilling effect.
And it's kind of funny because it's all political speech and it's also heavily regulated.
It seems to be kind of an end run around the First Amendment.
Yeah, I think you see two things going on here, and this is what the book is about.
One very scary change is that you see the left in particular utilizing the powers of government and the tools of government to intimidate and harass their opponents.
So you have it, for instance, in the IRS targeting scandal, which, by the way, was no accident.
You continue to hear from this administration that it was just a bunch of line agents out in Cincinnati that didn't understand the law.
Not true.
Elected Democrats who asked the IRS to go after these groups.
You had a president of the United States who went out every day on this campaign stump trail and said, oh, we have all these problems with shadowy organizations.
Somebody ought to do something about it.
They trained the IRS on their political opponents.
You have it in prosecutors who are going after people.
So that's one side of it, the new utilization of government powers to harass and scare and intimidate people engaged in politics.
The other side is what you just mentioned.
Which is, they're also now using and honing the ability to use tools to find out who those opponents are through disclosure things.
And as you said, you have organizations, one of the scariest stories in this book, you just referenced it, out in California, a bunch of people who had given money in support of the Prop 8 campaign for traditional marriage.
The opponents of that ballot initiative went and put the names of everyone who had donated to it on a searchable, walkable map.
The people who were on that list got their cars keyed, their windows broken, they lost their jobs, harassing messages left on voicemail and email, flash mob protesters outside their small businesses.
So these two things joined together have really created a very scary and toxic environment for political activity.
Let's dip into the IRS scandal for a moment because you've referred to it as one of the worst cases of government abuse in the modern history of America.
And of course, for far less, Richard Nixon, well, ran into some challenges in his presidency, to put it mildly.
And I've seen reports that it did have a significant sway in the actual election results.
So I wonder if you can give people how it came about, because the backstory, you know, these things never appear out of nowhere.
The backstory, I think, is particularly fascinating.
Yeah, and it's a frustration for me.
It's one reason I wrote this, because the press will pay attention to these things for a few minutes, but when the real story does come out, by then they've lost interest.
We know what happened, for the most part, at the IRS. We had elected Democrats, the President, encouraging the IRS to take action.
We had an IRS bureaucracy at the top, including, by the way, some elected people.
Or appointed people, rather presidential appointees in the Treasury Department who were very concerned about the number of conservative groups that were flooding into the electoral sphere leading up to the 2010 midterm election.
That bureaucracy and those officials acted to segregate off conservative applications.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
And I think one of the things that's more scary, I mean, then they sent out all of these questionnaires to all of these groups, hundreds of these groups in the end, representing tens of thousands of Americans.
The idea was, in fact, to make them go quiet, to leave them in legal limbo so that they were uncertain and scared that if they continued to do what they were doing, bad things, legal repercussions would follow.
I think one of the worst aspects of this that we found out as well, too, is that there was already complaints about this in early 2012.
The IRS was being questioned about it by Congress.
Senior officials in the Treasury Department knew that something was very, very wrong, and they allowed it to continue to happen.
They kept it quiet so that they could continue to keep these groups quiet during the 2012 presidential election as well, too.
So, yes, you add this all up, this is an administration and an IRS that purposely moved to silence tens of thousands of Americans during a democratic process, and that's why it's one of the worst abuses of government power ever.
And may well have swung an election.
And this is sort of, of course, power corrupts.
I mean, I think we all know that.
But this is particularly hypocritical, given the left's history of, you know, screaming blue murder over the famous McCarthy question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
And them demanding the right for privacy for political activism, even in such questionable groups as the Communist Party.
And now it's like, are you now or have you ever been somebody who likes the Constitution and considers himself or herself a patriot and Now this seems to be in pursuit of that which they decried in the past so much.
Yeah, no, we're seeing it right now.
One of the more recent episodes that's come out since the book was published is what you see with all of these liberal prosecutors going after ExxonMobil, as well as a lot of the outside conservative groups that had worked with Exxon over the years on climate science issues.
And, you know, they're essentially, with their subpoenas and this investigation, they are sending a message to these groups in particular Look, get out of this realm.
If you continue to tout a line that we think is wrong, then you will face subpoenas, harassment, legal costs, everything else.
And that's exactly what you're saying.
They used to defend the right to free speech, but now they are actively attempting to muzzle anyone who disagrees with them.
Well, and the more you have, I guess the stronger your criticisms, the more anonymity might be your preferred route.
Point out the Federalist Papers, Tom Paine's Common Sense, that these were all published anonymously because it seems a bit reverse reality to have to register with the very group that you are aiming to criticize and then, of course, with the Internet now, be open to it being out there forever, what you did.
It's a way of getting the people who have the strongest criticisms to be the most nervous, if that makes sense.
No, it is, and...
Look, our disclosure regime in this country has unfortunately been turned on its head.
Look, disclosure is a nice word.
Transparency is a nice word.
And it has actually many useful purposes.
But again, the original purpose of this was to allow citizens to keep track of their elected government officials.
Okay?
And in terms of the citizens themselves, they were supposed to be protected from that government.
So as you relate, we have this amazing tradition, not just in America, but in other English-speaking countries of political anonymity and speech.
For lots of reasons, good reasons too, by the way, not just because you might be at risk if your name was divulged, but because we like a regime in which people can express ideas and those ideas can stand on their own merit, that they aren't necessarily tarred by the fact that so-and-so wrote them, that they aren't necessarily tarred by the fact that so-and-so wrote them, But what's happened is our disclosure regime, all upside down.
You now have, for instance, Hillary Clinton and her server scandal where you can't see anybody's emails.
FOIA laws aren't working.
It's very difficult to make the government hand anything over.
But at the same time, as you mentioned, campaign finance disclosure requires that anybody who gives any dollar almost to any cause that they believe in, it's instantly recorded online.
And then anyone can come after you.
And we've seen this now happening out in the states with attorneys generals on the left who are trying to expand these disclosure regimes, force people to give names that should be protected or are protected under federal law, give them to them for bogus excuses for why they should get a hold of them.
But they're not trying to get them so that there's more transparency.
They're trying to get them so that they have more lists of names of people to go after.
Well, and it's always struck me, correct me where I go astray, but it's always struck me, Kimberly, that the left has a fairly guaranteed source of income, particularly through public sector unions, forced union dues floating up to the Democrats.
And so, you know, all of the, I guess, lefty policies have a big shot in the arm, a big shot of steroids because of all of this money that's going to end up in the Democrats' lap no matter what.
And it seems that their natural enemy is any sort of private sector business that wants to, in general, you could say a generalization that they're going to be a little bit more on the Republican side.
So it seems like the laws are there to protect the flow of income for the Democrats while interrupting any flow of income from corporations which are more likely to go to Republicans.
Is that a fair way to characterize it?
Absolutely a fair way.
And you just explained why, too, the left has decided to make that Citizens United Court case.
They're rallying cry for the last few years and in this election.
Think about how many times it was brought up just recently at the Democratic Convention.
You would think it was a source of all public corruption and evil.
Of course it's not.
Look, money is a proxy for speech.
We all know that.
If you said that you wanted to go out and run for the presidency, and I said, great, but you can only spend $50 to do it.
We would probably agree that you wouldn't have a very good chance of getting your message out there.
Once you accept that, then you realize that when you put restrictions on money, you are in essence putting restrictions on speech.
So that's what Citizens United is about.
It freed up all kinds of groups to again spend money in elections.
A lot of them, for instance, corporations and also nonprofits.
The left did not like this because they had long had a monopoly on the money flowing into politics.
The McCain-Feingold law had helped them even further with that.
When the Supreme Court struck it all down with Citizens United, they were terrified.
Again, not because they're worried about corruption, but because they're worried that their political opponents are going to be able to match them in political spending and in political speech.
So when you hear them out there talking about how this is such a bad, bad, bad law, just bear in mind that what they're in essence saying is, We want to change it so that we can decide who gets to speak in elections.
Well, and it is such a hot-button issue, not just for the American electorate, but for the electorate throughout the West.
Everyone gets the sense that something is rotten in the state of Denmark in that there is a huge amount of power that the government has to, you know, the old definition of political power.
It's a great way to benefit your friends and punish your enemies.
And that's kind of what it's all about.
And given the amount of power that the state has in terms of preferential legislation and tax breaks, tax benefits and all that, tariffs and you name it, of course, the politicians have a lot to sell.
And so people want to go in and try and influence that.
And I've seen some studies that say that one of one of the best and most efficient return on investments that a business can make is buying themselves their very own shiny new congressperson.
And so I think everyone accepts that money and politics have become a bit of an unholy brew.
And I think that's the – isn't that the hook, right?
It's the bait on the hook.
It's, oh, we're going to clean this up.
We're going to make sure that special interests are what used to be called just people who wanted to spend money to influence an election, which is kind of democracy, as you point out.
Everyone wants to separate this lobbying in the state.
And that, I think, is what people keep offering.
Oh, we're going to get this new law.
It's going to clean things up.
And it just seems to add another pile of manure on something that never seems to grow.
I have two thoughts on that.
One person's special interest is another person's, my person's, power of people together speaking.
You just mentioned the public sector unions.
One of the reasons that they're influential, just one union worker on their own wouldn't have much of a voice.
But when you get 100,000 of them together in a union together, they suddenly have a voice out there in the political sphere.
It's the same when you go look at the National Rifle Association.
On the other side, for instance, or corporations.
They represent tens of thousands of shareholders.
They represent their employees.
They have a vested interest in a free market policies, for instance, and so they should have a voice in the election, too.
What I always like to say to people is if you're really, really worried about people buying off Congress, make government smaller.
You know, the reason we have so many laws The reason we have these lobbyists is because we have so many laws.
You almost have to be a fool these days to be a giant corporation and not hire lobbyists because how else are you going to navigate this infinitesimally long area of regulation and government and things?
If you don't want an IRS snooping in your events, get a flat tax so that there's really only one page of regulations.
And it's the same with regulations and other things.
You want to get rid of lobbyists, make government a lot smaller.
That's a far better way of fixing it than trying to limit money, which in fact also limits speech.
Well, okay, so this is something that – there's a sentence in your book that I'd just like to break out a little bit further.
You wrote this.
You wrote, They reduce political accountability.
They kill free speech.
They are inherently unfair.
I thought this was fascinating.
They give vast rights to the press, but deny them to average Americans, particularly that last part.
How does that work?
How does that play out?
Well, look, right now, if you're in the press, you can say anything you want.
You can go out.
I mean, look, I'm in the press.
I could go out tomorrow and write an entire column saying, you absolutely must elect this person.
I don't have to file any forms anywhere.
My message goes out to a million people who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
Any other person who wanted to get that message out, they'd have to pay for it in some way, and they'd have to probably be limited in what they could put toward it, right?
How much is my endorsement of a candidate worth compared to the legal limit of two thousand some hundred dollars that you can donate to a candidate, for instance?
So there's an incredible disparity there, which by the way is getting far more complicated because who all is in the press these days?
Any blogger out there, any person, can you not make the case that you are the press as well?
So there's all these rights that the First Amendment protects explicitly for the First Amendment and it gives the press an advantage over everybody else because of campaign finance laws.
You know, I make a big argument in the book that Again, we all think campaign finance laws are supposed to be against corruption.
Think of who dreamed them up in the first place.
It was the politicians.
And they did so not because they were really very concerned about corruption in government, but because they protect incumbents, right?
If you can limit how much money anyone else can spend on an election, you have a far greater chance of keeping your own job.
And limiting the criticism.
So you go back and you look through the whole history of campaign finance laws, what you will find is that A, they almost always come about because of some self-preservation instinct out of Washington, or one side nakedly attempting to go after the other and shut down their political opponents.
And you also find that they really don't do much in terms of stopping corruption.
All they really do is really stop the flow of democracy and challenges and free-flowing elections.
Well, and I've made the case on this show before many times that it's my belief that the left kind of ran out of arguments as far back as the 60s.
You know, ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in particular, but even before then, when the cult of personality under Stalin was broken out by Khrushchev in the early 60s, it became very hard to believe, and not that all leftists are communists, but it became very hard to believe in the efficacy and virtue of central planning and socialist organization and all that.
What they did was they started the welfare state to get certain votes.
They started importing voters from non-Western countries to get more votes.
They took over the mainstream media and the entertainment and the academics and so on.
They don't have a lot of words.
It's sort of been my experience that when you run out of words, the corruption tendency, if not the aggression tendency, tends to go up considerably.
This doesn't mean that the Republicans have done similar things when they've had the opportunity as well.
But I think in particular, the left is wanting to flee an arena of free speech that they used to be very fiercely protective of.
No, you're absolutely right.
This entire book is about what you just said.
It's about what happens when a side runs out of ideas and believes that they're losing the public argument.
One of the scariest chapters in this book, I thought, was the one about Wisconsin and what happened to these conservative groups up there.
And the whole story there is worth relating just in a nutshell because what happens is Governor Scott Walker passes some big government reforms that hurt unions in effect, especially public sector unions.
They don't like it.
They try to stop it in the legislature.
They fail.
They attempt to recall him and members of the Republican Senate and they fail.
And the next thing you know is then comes the intimidation and the aggression.
They couldn't win that debate with the public.
They couldn't win it at the ballot box.
So suddenly you have liberal prosecutors who are conducting a secret investigation of 30 conservative groups who had supported those reforms.
They conduct pre-dawn raids.
They subpoena information, look through financial records.
They go after these groups every which way, force them all to hire lawyers.
It was two years of hell for the organizations who were involved in this.
When it finally got exposed, It finally ended up going all the way up to the State Supreme Court, which in essence, in its ruling, when it shut down this probe, it said, the prosecutors in this case, and I'm paraphrasing a bit here, are pursuing theories of law that have no basis in reality, and they basically did so against people that are wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.
So that's basically the State Supreme Court saying, the liberal prosecutors here just brought this up because they wanted to harass the people who were part of this probe.
Well, there is an old saying that goes all the way back to Socrates that when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.
And this used to be, I don't know, I don't want to date myself, but when I was growing up, that was the basis of how you would judge.
Like if you start basically throwing your feces at your opponent in a debate, you don't get to win.
And I think we seem to have lost that idea that this kind of aggressive escalation is a sign that you've lost the debate.
And now it seems, of course, that's the point, is to get people to be too scared to engage in the debate and to just say, well, the benefits of me engaging in the political process could be very, very small and maybe I'll influence a little here and there.
But the downside, you know, it's the Pascal's wager, the downside can be so enormous that maybe I'll just, you know, take a step back and let other more, I guess, legally competent people enter the fray.
And that is a very chilling thing to see in the remnants of a republic.
No, it is.
One of the most disappointing aspects of this book, or just heartbreaking ones, is That story we mentioned earlier about those people who had given money out in California for the Prop 8 ballot initiative.
And I don't really care what your views are on gay marriage, one side or the other.
You know, everyone has a right to express their views, especially at the ballot box.
Most of the people who had those terrible things happen to them, their cars keyed, their windows broken.
When they were deposed and asked about this, almost all of them ended their depositions by saying, based on my experiences in this, I would be unlikely to take part again in another ballot initiative like this.
So in that regard, the bullies won.
Now, on the other hand, there were a lot of cases in the book of people who decided to fight back and expose what had happened.
And as a result, sort of triumphed after over it.
But as you mentioned, they often tend to be people who have a lot of legal teams at their handling.
They have a lot of money in which they can do this.
It's the average citizen who is most hurt by this.
You've pointed out in the book, Kimberly, that there's a lot of theory, a lot of history, all of which is fascinating, but you say that the centerpiece in many ways is brave souls who've stood up to this kind of intimidation.
I wonder if you could pick a story that's one of your favorites from the book and just help people understand how personal some of this stuff can become.
My favorite goes back to that Wisconsin story.
After these prosecutors launched that probe, They did so under this very strange Wisconsin unique law called Wisconsin's John Doe Law.
It allowed them to do this entirely in secret.
It allowed them to take a lot of actions that they wouldn't normally ever be able to do because they'd have had to get authorization from a grand jury, but they didn't have to do that in this case.
They went after, in the end, it was hundreds of people and their tactics were terrible.
Like I said, in one case, they raided the house of a guy who was off with his wife on a charitable fundraising trip His teenage son was home alone.
The police came into the house in the morning, put him in a room, would not let him call an attorney, would not let him call his grandparents who lived down the road, ransacked the house, carted stuff out, and then as they left and told this teenage kid that if he told anyone what had happened to him, under this John Doe law, he could go to jail.
So these were the tactics that were being used, and it was all being done in secret until a man named Eric O'Keefe, who worked for Wisconsin's Club for Growth, said, you know...
This is wrong and he went to the Wall Street Journal and told what was happening and it exploded this story in the national press because everyone understood that what was happening here was wrong and only as a result of that did it end up working its way through the court system and went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
If not, no one to this day would have any idea that those tactics have been used in Wisconsin.
That guy was very brave but he risked going to jail for it.
He ended up spending Tens of thousands, if not more, money in legal defense to do all of this, and he's still fighting all of this today.
Wow.
Federal Elections Commission.
So you mentioned Brad Smith, campaign finance expert, and one-time FEC commissioner.
He wrote in a book on free speech, he said FECA was, quote, one of the most radical laws ever passed in the United States.
For the first time in history, Congress had passed a law requiring citizens to register with the government in order to criticize its rights.
What an enormous break, not just with First Amendment, but general free speech principles going all the way back to common law.
How radical was it, and how did it come about?
Well, this goes back to what we were talking about before.
If you look at campaign finance laws, and FICA, the Federal Election Campaign Act, was the kind of mother load, the first big campaign finance law we had in this country.
You go back in history, you either see that they come about because one side wants to get the other.
One of my favorite examples was back during the war, World War II. You know, the Republicans in Congress were very concerned about all the union support that was going to FDR. When there was a strike during the middle of the war, they used that as an excuse to stop unions from donating money in elections anymore.
Okay, so this was just naked partisanship.
It was clearly a law designed To hurt their political opposition.
So they either do it openly like that, or it's a way of sort of covering up or making atonement for a mistake in Washington.
In this case, Fika came out because of Watergate, right?
And we do know that Nixon did a lot of very bad things.
And in fact, the campaign finance shenanigans were among the smallest of the bad things that he did.
But Washington felt that they needed to somehow self-flagellate Or suggest that no one was going to do it again.
So they came up with this dramatic new law.
And it was one of the biggest curtailments of free speech that this country had ever witnessed.
So dramatic that, in fact, the court, a few years later, did strike down significant portions of it in a case called Buckley v.
Vallejo.
But because the court was still in the mood of the country as well, you know, we like to try to pretend the Supreme Court doesn't play politics.
It does, of course, at times, too.
So it upheld most of it.
I still think you could make the case today that the entirety of FIKA, if not all of it, is contravenes the First Amendment.
But it says something about our culture and the fact that people are willing to accept certain abridgments of their basic rights if they think I also wanted to talk about some of the softer repercussions that people can experience if their political activities become public knowledge.
Because, I mean, back in the day when I was, I guess, swimming my salmon-y way upstream in the, you know, somewhat lefty Canadian academic environment as a big free market guy.
You kind of notice there's a bit of a current.
Nothing explicit.
It's just kind of there.
Your footnotes are scrutinized a little bit more.
You get a lot more pushback and so on.
You point out some professor, someone in academia, or I guess somebody who wants to become a tenured professor.
If his or her political activity becomes known, you might not just get that tenure thing.
You might not get a deanship.
You might want to teach a particular class and find that.
And of course, the jobs that you don't get because of your political leanings, you don't even know about.
You might not ever even be in the running or there might be six million other reasons why you might not get that job.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the softer repercussions?
Businesses, of course, as you point out, boycotts and so on, which is a little bit different from free speech, although, of course, legal.
But some of the softer repercussions, if somebody said to you, oh, well, don't worry, you'll never get any notice from the government for what you do politically, that doesn't necessarily mean that your life is smooth sailing from there.
No, this is why we have to think very carefully about disclosure.
Because, as you said, you can just now go with a touch of the button onto the computer and find out who gave In any election, wherever it is, anything more than $200, okay?
That's an extraordinary thought when you think about it because, yes, there's the case you just gave, but just the average citizen, okay?
You were at your job.
Maybe you didn't get a higher-up promotion because it turns out that, you know, the people running the HR department figured out which way you lean politically and didn't really like it and had it in for you.
Maybe your kid doesn't get to play...
On a certain position on their soccer team because it turns out the coach knows who you are and they don't really like your politics either.
So there's a vast number of reasons why we should all be careful about disclosure.
And one of the things that the book actually does is say that we should rethink this whole regime and do it in a way where we're once again putting the onerous burden of disclosure on government politicians.
And also probably even I would go so far as Probably campaign donations to elected officials, too, because that is obviously the most obvious potential for corruption.
But even there, we need to rethink it.
Is any Washington politician, and I hate to sound super cynical, really going to be bought off for $200 these days?
I'm just saying, it's not going to happen.
I mean, you've got to be talking at least six figures, okay?
So maybe the disclosure limit...
Which you have to say that you gave money needs to be much, much higher.
Maybe it needs to be $5,000.
Maybe it needs to be $10,000.
There's also this question of issue advocacy.
These are ads where you simply run an ad in favor of a policy, for instance.
What aspect for corruption is there there?
Should we have to disclose?
Who was behind those ads when you're simply making a policy argument?
Or the question of ballot initiatives?
What aspect of corruption is there as an individual giving money in support of a law that's being proposed?
I mean, there might be some, but again, do we do it at low levels or should the disclosure be much, much higher?
It's time for us to rethink this precisely because of all of those soft ramifications and intimidations that are happening out there.
And we know they're happening out there.
They're in the book.
Well, and as Ayn Rand said many years ago, the worst form of tyranny is not terrible laws or unjust laws, but laws that aren't even really your laws, like eye of the beholder laws.
And this question of coordination, which you raise in the book very powerfully, Is really, I think, kind of a chilling association problem as well.
Because, of course, as a PAC, you're not supposed to coordinate.
But what does that even mean?
How can you prove that?
What if there's just accidental similarities and you're going to...
How do you know whether such an ephemeral thing as coordination is going on?
Maybe you watched one of their ads and it's stuck in your head.
How can you possibly have a law that is supposed to be psychic in its nature?
Well, also, just, I mean, this very basic question...
How can you argue that the First Amendment does not protect the right for like-minded people to work together?
I mean, just debate that question.
It's an odd one.
And yet, we have this written loosely into campaign finance laws, not just at the federal level, but obviously at the state level.
This was precisely what those Wisconsin prosecutors tried to get those groups over, suggested that they were somehow illegally coordinating, when in fact, they all just happened to support the same issue, which was this Government reform that Scott Walker had pushed through.
What could possibly be illegal about many people all supporting the same reform?
So we have reached this cuckoo's nest version of campaign finance where, again, we need to rethink some of these laws and remind ourselves again that money isn't necessarily the problem.
Corruption I think we're good to go.
And one aspect that I think is, we've started to talk about solutions, and of course, raising the reportable limits for campaign contributions is one possibility.
You've got a very amusing example where the Democrats worked in, so it was just high enough that you didn't need to report the union members, and it's just delightful.
I do so love when people who claim to have these big abstract ideals just find that right mathematical cutoff to protect their own people while harming their enemies.
It's It's a delightful thing to see.
But as far as solutions go, you know, there's that old saying, we're all familiar with it, that when Congress has the power to buy and sell, the first thing to be bought and sold will be Congress people.
When it comes to trying to solve some of these issues, let's start to, you know, cut at the root, as you pointed out, smaller government.
What are some of the government powers that these guys are trying to get a hold of with these contributions, both on the left and the right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think that this is what is most concerning to me is, you know, we have an election coming up and we've got a president here in the United States that not only has, again, openly engaged in this use of government powers to go after political enemies.
But once you have a precedent like that set and that genie has come out of the bottle, I think it's very, very difficult to stuff it back in.
So we need to think very hard, for instance, about IRS powers.
For instance, we should have a situation these days where the IRS is solely, their only job is to look at how money is being spent, and then if they believe that perhaps money is being spent in a political fashion that somehow contravenes the law, then that case should get moved over to the Federal Election Commission, which is a truly bipartisan group.
There are six members on it.
You need at least four of them to take an action against an organization for their political.
But we need to remove the IRS's ability to engage in any sort of political judgment because that is what happened in this last case and we can see where that went.
So there are things like that and the same in other agencies and government too where they are making judgments about the political actions of organizations.
All of those need to be moved over to the Federal Election Commission, and there's no reason, earthly reason, why that should not and could not happen.
So that's one thing we need to do.
We need to rethink campaign finance laws, not just the disclosure thing, but the question about coordination, about the ability of people to speak.
We need people to speak out when they have things like this intimidation happen to them so that the rest of the public knows, because often that's a good way to make people back down.
Right.
And I would also add that the government will dangle this.
Well, you know, we're just one more set of reforms away from a perfectly fair democracy.
And generally, you know, as Bismarck said, I feel like I'm quoting other people all the time, but it's just so relevant.
You know, as Bismarck said, there's two things you don't want to see getting made.
Number one, sausages.
Number two, laws.
Because after it goes through the process, and politicians can promise everything they want, but after it goes through the whole mangled brain political influence process, what's going to come out is very rarely similar to what I think that's something that people really need to be aware of.
Of course, giving the government less power will move the money out of government and back into creating jobs, investing in R&D, expanding markets, hiring people.
A lot of this money is getting sluiced into the sinkhole of politics to buy and carry favors.
Which could otherwise be used to do really productive things in society and the opportunity costs of this kind of manipulation and lobbying is incalculable.
Yeah, and you know, one other thing we've got to do too is we've got to, in every country, in every regard, we need to be voting more for people who actually make express promises that it is their goal and duty when they get to office to uphold the Constitution and to have respect for the Bill of Rights.
I've been very alarmed, for instance, and you referenced this earlier, that increasingly when people are moving over to these intimidation tactics, it feels like everywhere is going that way.
And, you know, I was very dismayed to see a number of Republicans in Congress recently calling for the IRS to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
Okay, you know, they just went through this on their side.
We don't want the IRS engaged in political activity, which is obviously...
What the threat of that would be if they were to do, look, I think the Clinton Foundation is a great big phony super PAC for Hillary Clinton.
But, you know, if there's an argument about that, it should be lodged with the Federal Election Commission.
You know, they were calling on the power of government to go after their political enemies.
This is what we descend to.
So we need to be, in fact, instead demanding and then voting for politicians who, in fact, say, I will not ever use government for those purposes.
What happened before was wrong.
I believe in the Constitution or I believe in whatever it is.
It's the guiding document of your country that protects citizens and their rights to participate.
Now, the book's been out for...
It was February.
It came out.
Is that right?
Oh, no.
It came out just in the end of June.
Okay.
Mike, cut this bit and pretend that I knew it was the end of June.
So...
Ixnay, okay.
Let's not make the final cut.
So the book came out in June, and how has the reception been?
I mean, everything that I've read has been stellar, and I think rightly so, but how has the reception been, and has there been any pushback for your thesis?
So I've been really gratified.
It has done very well.
A couple of things that have been really interesting to me.
One, I have not had really anybody write a review that said that anything in the book was wrong.
I, in fact, only had one critical review by some reporter out in Wisconsin, or rather I should say an editorial opinion writer out in Wisconsin, who said the book was fiction, but then just went on to write a long column about how Scott Walker was evil.
So I didn't really feel it got into any of the meat of the book.
The other thing, though, and I think this has been the more disheartening thing, is that even though you read it, it's a serious book, and I'd like to think I'm a serious...
It has not been reviewed by any major publications.
So this is, I'd like to, I don't know why that is, but I think maybe it's because you can't argue with a lot of the things that are in the book.
I'm a reporter.
I spent many years getting all these facts and details together.
And I think those on the left, including some left-leaning newspapers and publications, know that there is no way of getting around the fact that this is happening.
And they can't really argue against it.
Well, I'll propose a couple of theories and we'll see if they stick.
If you've joined the Ann Coulter club of amazingly successful books, bestsellers that don't get reviewed, I mean, because, of course, you are, you know, the president has been a Democrat for close on eight years.
And so given that you're talking about, you know, this Obama regime, which said, oh, we're going to be the most transparent, you've made cases that it might be the least transparent, it's negative for that.
There are ways in which people who would review this book, I think, Kimberly, could say, well, some of Donald Trump's policies, simplifying the tax code, reducing regulations, and so on, might benefit from the arguments in this book, a perspective on those, whereas Hillary Clinton's, I don't know, more regulations, more taxes, more who knows what, right?
So there may be some feeling that the book might lean people a little bit more towards Trump than Hillary.
These are just possibilities, and I'm certainly not putting you in either political camp, but I could certainly see how that case could be made.
Yeah, you know, it was disheartening, too.
The first week that the book came out, according to Nielsen Bookscan, it was number six best-selling hardcover book out there, which was great.
But it did not appear on the New York Times' bestseller list that week.
So go figure.
Yeah.
Well, and for a book which has neither a wizard nor a dragon nor a vampire on the cover, I would say that is extraordinarily good.
So, Kimberly, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks, of course, for the book.
I'm really going to strongly – actually, I'm just going to order everyone.
Order!
I order you to go and read Kimberly's book.
We'll put a link to it down below.
It is essential reading for not just this election cycle but for the future of political freedom as a whole.
I think that once the beast of excessive government power is out, we can try and tamp it down to some degree, but it's kind of like thumbtacks on a heavily winded tent.
You know, sooner or later, it's going to break moorings.
And I think you're pointing out that if we can work to reduce the size and power of the state, this problem will resolve on its own.
But attempting to use the size of the power of the state to control its effects, I think, is like attempting to move a statue by pushing at its shadow.
And I'm sorry, I don't mean to put too many words in your mouth, but I really, really want people to read this book.
It is a fascinating read.
Sorry, go ahead.
You should write the sequel.
You clearly got the idea better.
My sequel would be called No State.
So that's a whole different kettle of fish.
But thanks so much, Kimberly.
Really appreciate your time.
I hope we can talk again soon.
And are you doing a book tour or speeches by chance?
