March 1, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:49
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I was looking at a picture of myself the other day, from many years ago, standing in a desert with a blood-red sun behind me on the horizon, and I couldn't for the life of me remember Whether it was sunrise or sunset that I was looking at, was it the beginning of a new day and a bright day, or was it the extinguishing of a day into darkness? | |
| And I'm telling you, my friends, when I look across the social landscape at the moment and the intellectual challenge that we truth speakers face, I don't know whether it is sunrise or sunset, whether we can escape the extinguishing of the light or whether we can will it to ascend higher into the heavens. | |
| Jordan Peterson was not too long ago locked out of his Google account, Prager University, suing YouTube and Google at the moment for restricting its content. | |
| Ashton Witte received a strike, which was then removed, and then she got another strike. | |
| Afterwards, Andrew Borski got a strike for an old video and now is not allowed to live stream. | |
| Mike Cernovich received a strike for a video showing Antifa Chanting very violent chants outside his events, which were the event that I was at, which was, do you want a red pill? | |
| How about a lead pill? | |
| Which is brutal, of course. | |
| Infowars received two strikes and was pretty near having their entire channel deleted until at least one of them was removed. | |
| And then just today, Sargon of Akkad was locked out of his Google account, which of course includes all of his YouTube channels. | |
| Steven Crowder has had his issues. | |
| Dave Rubin can't seem to get a video monetized to save his life. | |
| And cash flow, of course, is king. | |
| Now I love YouTube. | |
| I love free speech. | |
| I love debate. I love the robust play of ideas. | |
| I love the step into the arena with your fiercest arguments and your best data and may the most honest exposition win. | |
| But it's getting a little harder to love this every day. | |
| The push for censorship is escalating and By robbing people of video, it's like they're trying to throw people back in time to text and audio only, and that is a significant barrier to participation in the public sphere of the exchange of ideas. | |
| I did a video, I think, over a decade ago. | |
| Saying that the internet was like the printing press, like the invention of the printing press which allowed for books to be copied and therefore shared widely and took the elite intellectual class out of the way of people sharing ideas. | |
| The gatekeepers were removed through the promulgation of new technology and the internet is like that. | |
| We could have this conversation, no gatekeepers and The honesty and the depth and the power in the Overton window that gets shifted, what we can talk about is much wider because we're speaking directly and we're engaging people directly. | |
| And this escalation It's funny because when I was younger, it was the left that was more for free speech, and the right was more into censorship and so on. | |
| That has kind of reversed itself. | |
| And in my view, there are these existing power structures, just as there was at the time of the Reformation, there are these existing power structures that wish to retain their legitimacy. | |
| And I think they're manipulating young people in particular on the left into attacking Free speech. | |
| And that is tragic for everyone involved. | |
| It's tragic for everyone who wishes to approach and gather and keep the truth close to their heart. | |
| Because the truth is a collective endeavor. | |
| The truth is conversation. The truth is not just navel-gazing or staring inwards or downwards. | |
| The truth is not something we can ever achieve in a solitary fashion. | |
| It is a collective endeavor where we need to allow all viewpoints to be exposed. | |
| The good ones flourish. | |
| The bad ones will fall away. | |
| As long as we are all committed to conversing openly and with integrity in the public sphere. | |
| But there is this pushback. | |
| There is this Blowback that is occurring. | |
| Now I, of course, I'm sure you know this, I am not backing down. | |
| I am not going to withdraw my conversational energies from any topics that I deem important and relevant and essential. | |
| I am not backing down. | |
| Philosophy is just too important. | |
| It is, of course, for the good of the world, for the good of all truth seekers, and it is even for the good of the people who want to censor. | |
| Censorship is a form of astonishing intellectual hubris. | |
| It's like central planning in the realm of economics. | |
| It's hard to know what are going to be the best ideas going forward. | |
| And censorship is saying that you somehow know the outcome of every conceivable idea, of every conceivable debate, and you're willing to put your thumb on the scale of social discourse. | |
| No one has that right. | |
| No one has that power of prescience, fundamentally. | |
| Brings me to this. | |
| I am aware that existing platforms are under attack. | |
| I am aware that independent, honest truth seekers who speak bravely and with integrity are being targeted. | |
| So we've bought a new domain. | |
| The existing domain, Free Domain Radio, is going to be phased out over time. | |
| And replaced with just free domain. | |
| The radio part, of course, is becoming a little anachronistic at this point. | |
| So we bought a new domain and we have plans to build an entirely new portal for philosophy, a new platform incorporating audio, of course, more text for searchability. | |
| Existing videos can be re-platformed there as well. | |
| In the possibility, in the eventuality, that the censorship continues to spread. | |
| Because I like YouTube. | |
| I respect the platform. | |
| I appreciate the platform. | |
| It's a powerful way to get ideas out there. | |
| And it's not quite the way that it was. | |
| I hope that the better angels of their natures will prevail in YouTube and that they will open up social discourse to as many truth seekers as humanly possible. | |
| As the old saying goes, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. | |
| And that is one of the reasons why I've invested in this new domain, why we're investing in building a new platform so that the continuity of philosophy can continue no matter what happens in the public sphere and in the public square. | |
| So I do, of course, request and require your help in this endeavor. | |
| And so I do ask you if you can help out what it is that we're doing in these perilous, which means exciting, times as we begin to really approach the core of social debate about reason and evidence and objectivity and philosophy and truth. | |
| These are very, very important times, very powerful times. | |
| This is a once every half millennia moment in history when the truth prevails or it fails. | |
| Whether we are looking at a sunset or a sunrise is not up to nature. | |
| It's not up to the orbit of the world. | |
| It is up to our willpower and our resources and our integrity and our courage and our commitment to the truth, to each other, to philosophy. | |
| So I am going to ask for your help as I do from time to time in this challenging environment of potential and blowback. | |
| freedominradio.com slash donate is where you can help out there are of course crypto currencies that we take you don't need a paypal account although that can certainly be used you can credit cards you can use interact cards and so on bank cards Sign up for a subscription. | |
| One-time donation is very, very important. | |
| It's fairly pricey to build parallel platforms for the sake of continuing philosophy as the world so desperately needs it to. | |
| So I really, really stand here before you in my unelaborate studio to ask for your help in what it is that needs to be done to continue to broadcast and to show the beacons, the searchlights, the flares, the lighthouses. | |
| Our philosophy across a world where the sun sits bisected by the horizon and the future hangs by a thread. | |
| So please, please, if you can help me out, I really, really need your support. | |
| The fight is really on, my friends. | |
| It has come. The fight is on. | |
| The time is now. |
Export Selection