4158 Event Canceled: New Zealand Is Hostile To Free Speech
After completing five events in Australia, Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern went to New Zealand for an August 3rd event in Auckland - but due to circumstances beyond their control, things went terribly awry and the event was canceled. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We are not where we expected to be, we're not where we're supposed to be, but it's where the fates and the left have placed us, which is not in a venue giving spectacular speeches, enjoying engaging Q&As and meeting with like-minded people or just minded people.
But here we are, not there, and the story of it I think is worth telling.
Absolutely. Yeah, it kind of sucks but at the same time I think this does tell an important story and does kind of form an important show of what is happening in New Zealand and the crippling of free speech here.
Like in many places right now across the West.
Basically what occurred is we were expecting to speak tonight at a wonderful venue.
We had a call with them last night and on the phone the venue owner knew who Steph and I were.
They knew it was a controversial event and they said this is a venue and That supports free speech.
This is a venue that wants all opinions to be allowed here.
And I understand you're controversial, but you will be allowed.
Now, we usually wait a little bit before we announce what the actual venue is until right before the event so that protesters can't really gather and it's just more secure overall.
But as soon as 1pm, right, that we released the event?
Yeah. 1pm today, we released the event name.
And by 2pm, we got a call from the...
Venue host and just the guy was in absolute hysteria saying, you cannot be on this property, get off, get out of here, no more show.
Well, and if you're here in 10 minutes, I'm going to have you arrested for trespassing.
So that's a tough place to negotiate from.
And of course, we tried, but he was dead set on.
And the change in demeanor, night before to the day, is really quite extraordinary.
And at some point, I'm sure we'll find out exactly what happened.
But we got fairly spectacularly deplatformed.
And it's funny, you know, I'm not used to...
Not getting what I plan for.
As an entrepreneur, as somebody who's been self-directed, like you for many years, I'm used to, okay, here's what I want to execute.
I mean, you weren't like, gee, I hope I finish Farmlands.
Because you can make things happen when you work for yourself.
When you work in a studio, you can make things happen.
There's very few people I've wanted to talk to that I can't talk to.
There's very few shows. I can't think of any.
Where I've wanted to do it, and I'm just not used to having something between my will and my objective that I can't control.
And that is a very strange feeling.
It's literally completely out of our control.
And I rewrote my whole speech to make it based around New Zealand's Policies.
And now I've got all this kind of semi-useless knowledge about New Zealand's history and policies surrounding multiculturalism.
But yeah, it's not something that we wanted to happen.
I was very excited to meet people here.
But this wasn't even the first venue that cancelled.
Of course, we had the mayor council any of the government venues on us, despite the fact that these were supposed to be places that...
These had been places that had held even radical Islamic talks before.
And so that was cancelled.
And then we figured, well, we'll go to the free market and try to find a venue there.
No problem. Awesome. Found one.
But that was challenged with, I truly believe that there were strong forces involved, whether it be government calling the sky, threats.
The threat of his windows being smashed, maybe the police telling him, your whole place is going to be destroyed if you hold this, because there were hundreds of people that had no respect for our free speech, no respect for the questions that we were coming here to propose and engage in.
The frustrating thing for me, and I'm not used to this kind of frustration, so I'm still kind of working with it, but the frustrating thing for me, Lauren, is...
Nobody actually linked to any arguments, any content, any facts, any data, any syllogisms, anything that we had presented.
Nobody was linking to that.
They were apparently upset because we did some goofy Power Rangers stances under some archway coming in.
They were upset because you made a joke about you didn't want to nuke.
I didn't want to nuke.
I was watching something tonight where they said, you know, Stefan Molyneux said some controversial things about Aborigines, right?
And then they had a video of me on the stage.
I'm like, great, they're going to cut to my speech and people can actually hear what I'm saying.
No. None of that.
They just went straight, like, he said controversial things.
Here's a picture of him. We're not going to play you any sound.
We're just going to move right back to the presenters.
And it's like, it's so weird.
It's like, this isn't us.
This is like hand puppets.
This is like caricatures.
This is not actually things that we've said, arguments that we've made.
It's like, these are goofy photos.
This is a joke you made.
This is me not being able to speak because they won't play any sound of my speech.
Like, it's just so weird.
It's like we're not even here in the country.
There's these weird caricatures.
And the big thing, now that we've been shut down, we don't get to, other than, thank goodness, on this YouTube channel, we don't get to speak for ourselves.
The people don't get to hear what we actually have to say.
They get this perfectly curated image of what the media wants us to be saying.
And the media do want us to say these things.
They want their perfect villain.
They want their people who are saying, we hate different races.
We hate women. They want us to say that.
Because they want a villain.
They have to make us into villains. They wouldn't be so desperately trying to publish articles saying, all right, activist says nuke Melbourne and all of this, right?
They're desperate for villains.
And the thing is, we're just not actually those villains.
We're just here to have conversations that...
Are really, really important for the future of this country.
And I'm not saying I have all the answers.
I'm just willing to ask some of the questions that other people won't, and so are you.
We just want to have a conversation with people.
It's really disheartening, but hopefully this will wake some people up in New Zealand.
Well, so this is the kind of win-lose thing that is a challenge here, right?
Of course we wanted to do the event.
Of course the people who took days off work, who drove, who flew to come and see the event, you know, we're so...
I hate to say we're sorry like we did something wrong because we're all victims here, but we're sorry that the event, we regret that the event did not go on and we're sorry for the time, the expense, and so on.
But the reality is that we are not these caricatures.
And if the speech had gone on...
People would have seen. I was going to make an argument, a very passionate case for free speech, a very new case.
I'm going to do the speech at some point, for sure.
A very new case for free speech to remind people why it's so essential.
And these caricatures, it's almost like the left or these people need these ogres.
You know, they need these, like they're like rusty knights in search of imaginary dragons.
Because we were sort of joking as like, well, without us, what reason do they have to get out of bed in the morning, so to speak?
And because we aren't what they imagine, they have to invent or create us in order to motivate themselves to create some heroic fight.
Exactly. Everyone wants to be involved in their own civil rights movement.
They've been told that it is the greatest good to partake in these civil rights movements.
And because there isn't one in this day and age, there's no real oppression other than, I mean, the only laws I can think of that are biased against a certain race in the Western world are ones that are anti-hiring men and white people because of affirmative action.
These battles have already been won.
So yeah, they do have to create these villains.
I mean, there are people out there protesting today, holding signs saying, no to white supremacists, no to fascists.
We're not white supremacists or fascists.
I'd say no to fascists too.
I'm with you there. It sucks too, because a lot of these people out there, they've never heard a word of what we've said either.
So they haven't made up their own minds.
They're just repeating what the media have told them verbatim.
And the media... They're not a particularly clever lot, are they?
So that's a real sad way to base your opinion.
You know, here's a pro tip for all you leftists out there.
There have been groups in history who have caricatured entire groups in negative light and there have been significantly negative things that have occurred from that.
You might not be playing for the team you think you're playing for.
And that's an important thing to remember that this Dehumanization of the opposition is terrible.
The other thing that bothers me too, and this bothers me about people who go after people like us, You're a Christian.
I am into the non-aggression principle.
I'm into the verbal arts of defense and advocation and argumentation and so on.
So they know that we're not physically dangerous.
They know that around us isn't some mysterious no-go zone where, you know, you're gonna get into trouble.
Like all the people who pick on Christians and pick on...
I wouldn't say I'm specifically a pacifist because I accept the right of self-defense, but I'm into the non-aggression principle.
You don't see these people taking on radical Muslims.
You don't see these people taking on the more violent elements within their own groups because they know that there may be some element of personal risk.
So it very much is fighting a paper tiger and calling yourself a hero.
It's very cowardly. Absolutely.
I really do wish.
And if we do more speaking events, anything like it, we had a couple people show up for sure at our events in Australia where they said, hey, I disagree with you guys, but I'm here at the Q&A. I loved listening to you and I'm here to challenge you at the Q&A. Some of the best moments in our entire speaking tour.
Here in New Zealand, would have loved to even go out and talk to some of the protesters outside, ask, why are you here?
Tell me what you disagree with me on.
Let's find... If you are right, if your opinions are superior to mine, I will change my mind if you give me the evidence.
I have no problem admitting I'm wrong.
I have no problem changing my mind.
I want to be proven wrong because that means I've been given a better solution to our current state of chaos.
And we are in a state of chaos.
We're in a state where we don't know what our identities are.
We don't know how we're going to go forward with our languages, our laws, our religions.
How are we going to adopt this whole new multicultural project as immigration expands and People who are Western-centric become the minority.
It doesn't matter if you have a left-wing opinion on that.
The fact of the matter is we just need to have a discussion.
Do you know how much easier our lives would be if we were wrong about multiculturalism and diversity?
Like, we would be embraced as the prodigal children returned home to the nest.
I mean, wouldn't it be great? We could go out.
We could have venues. We wouldn't have to spend ungodly amounts and give kidneys out to people to protect us from feral mobs.
We wouldn't need security. We would have this wonderful, gracious life.
It would be like carrying a loft on clouds of silver leftist adoration and so on.
If someone could come up to me and convince me of this, I would be like, I would name my second born after you, kiss the hem of your garment.
It would be beautiful to be wrong about this, but we're not.
And here's an example. This is what I want to point out.
In the West, there was almost no problem with free speech until multiculturalism.
Remember, diversity is a strength, which means that free speech, which was very robust, and I'm not just talking about in America with the First Amendment, but all throughout the West.
England was the founder in many ways.
Speaker's Corner and the Magna Carta, limiting the power of the aristocracy, free speech and so on, was very powerful.
In England, it was unchallenged legally in Canada up until the 80s, I think it was.
We had free speech.
Now we have multiculturalism and free speech is under significant attack and is crumbling in particular in places like New Zealand.
So this is one of the indications of what we're talking about that we say we have this wonderful right of free speech which is the essence of civilization in the West.
Now we have multiculturalism.
Everyone's getting offended and free speech is being destroyed.
How is that our strength? Yeah, this is what I was hoping to talk about with people tonight.
The multicultural project is so inherently volatile, it cannot afford to look itself in the mirror.
It is a powder keg just waiting to go off of questions.
If we are to have multiple cultures involved in every facet of our life, does that mean we now need to have witch doctors at our medical conferences working in our hospitals?
Because we can't just make Western medicine the Is this not just creating segregated societies?
There are all these questions that come out of the multicultural project and if you start asking them it causes doubt in people's minds of what the future will look like and that doubt will turn itself into political action of people wanting to preserve the best parts of their society which I'd like to think most people would concur is Western parts, the free speech, the democracy, the rule of law.
Limited government, property rights, contracts.
Yeah, those can be very important as we found out today.
And just for the record, I'm actually more comfortable with rich doctors in the hospital than postmodernists in the universities.
I just really, because, you know, at least with doctors, there's a placebo effect possibly.
Yes. But with any of this, not so much the case.
As we are winding things up here, I want to thank Lauren for being a great partner, professional partner, wonderful person to work with on this tour.
Let's not forget the big picture, which is that we had five incredibly successful events.
The success of this event in New Zealand It's a little abstract at the moment, but I think will still materialize over time.
But it has been a wonderful experience touring this part of the world.
I absolutely completely and totally hope to come back.
It's been a wonderful experience touring with Lauren, and we will absolutely see you next time we're out and about.
