The President Donald Trump hostile mainstream media has finally gotten their wish as Alex Jones and Infowars were banned from YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and a host of other distribution platforms. Under the guise of 'hate speech" one of the most prominent alternative media voices in the world has been removed from public view on major platforms - prompting a fierce debate about the power of social media companies in modern times. 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
The left is doing what it always does, which is to attempt to destroy voices raised up against it in rational opposition, advocating for freedom, free markets, limited government, and a reduction of the general amount of coercion within society.
They cannot argue against this perspective.
It is a civilized, reasonable perspective, and therefore they attempt to erase or destroy Those who voice opposition to them because they're desperate for power and the resources that it brings, to the point where they cannot stand debate against them.
What you cannot win fairly but desperately need, you will win unfairly.
If you cannot buy the drug you are desperately addicted to, you will simply steal it.
And the power that they want, they cannot earn through negotiation, through reason, because what they want is fundamentally anti-rational.
And therefore, they take it by force or they simply erase people who disagree with them effectively.
Now, this purge by the left historically has been physical.
Now, it is digital.
Now, that, of course, is a precursor to the eventual physical purge.
But in this case, we are talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, of course, who have been scrubbed from all forms of social media, unpersoned, deplatformed, erased, 1984 style, all the way from Facebook to YouTube to iTunes to Spotify to LinkedIn, where he hadn't even uploaded all the way from Facebook to YouTube to iTunes to Spotify to He has vanished.
He has gone.
And the millions upon millions of people who enjoyed his views, who enjoyed his challenges and his rants and his insights and his interviews, well, it's all gone from these platforms.
Now, there are of course a lot of people saying, well, it's a private company, they can ban whoever they want.
Actually, they can't. They can't.
Look, I'm no lawyer, but this is my understanding of how it goes.
If you are a newspaper, you exercise editorial control over the content of your newspaper.
So let's say a reporter writes something slanderous, you can sue the newspaper because the newspaper is not just letting anyone publish whatever they want.
The newspaper is exercising editorial control over the content of the paper and therefore liable for what is there.
Now the social media giants have escaped Legal liability for the content of their platform because they say, hey, we're just a platform.
We're neutral. We don't act politically.
We're not particularly focused on one group versus another.
We just have these standards, like hate speech, incitement of violence, whatever it is.
We just have these standards. We get complaints.
We deal with them, and it's impartial, and it's neutral.
Therefore, we're not responsible for the content of what is published.
We're not exercising editorial control of the content on our platforms.
If it turns out and it sure seems to be the case, but if it turns out that they are targeting Conservative voices on their platforms.
In other words, if they are over-applying particular standards against conservatives while not applying them all against other groups that have far more egregious violations of their terms of service, then they are, in my view, exercising editorial control.
Now, that turns out to be the case, and I'm sure this will be adjudicated in a court of law at some point in the not-too-distant future, if it turns out that that is the case.
Then they become legally liable for what is posted on their platforms, which means that their platforms cannot survive.
Like, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder value could conceivably be wiped out.
I don't know why shareholders aren't up in arms and revolting and calling emergency shareholder meetings and holding the boards of these companies to account and saying, what the hell are you doing?
You're threatening my life savings.
You're threatening my wealth, my investment, my children's future.
You're threatening everything! Why?
To deplatform people who are conservatives mere months before The 2018 American midterm elections.
Of course, that's what it's all about.
You understand that. Alex Jones has been doing what he's doing for decades.
Now, right before the midterms, when the Russia collusion narrative is collapsing in on itself, when the Mueller probe looks to be the partisan hack job that I believe that it is, what are they doing?
Well, they can't win the argument, so they merely silence the opposition.
This is a Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan Style takedown.
Can't beat honestly and therefore will beat dishonestly.
And of course we've all seen these examples where they say, oh such and such a conservative promoted this or that or was bad or hate speech or whatever.
But you can see for yourself.
There are On various social media platforms, Antifa message boards where they openly plot and plan political violence, which is the definition of terrorism.
Open terrorist networks.
There are jihadi recruitment sites all over the place, which are not being shut down, which are not being deplatformed, which are not being erased.
The great Candace Owens took a couple tweets From the woman recently hired by the New York Times, which was railing against white people and saying the most unbelievably hateful and racist things about white people, replaced white people with black people and was immediately banned.
So of course they're exercising editorial control, in my humble opinion, because I'm an empiricist and that's what the data very clearly shows.
So no, they don't get to do that and maintain immunity from legal liability for the content of their sites.
Because if they're so sensitive to conservatives saying supposedly hateful or devastating things, but they don't exercise that same deplatforming on groups that openly advocate and plan for violence using their platform, then clearly there is a political purpose at work here, which means they're no longer neutral.
So, no, don't try this free market crap.
This is not rational.
It doesn't work. And it simply says, well, you're afraid to take on these people.
Well, we have to.
Like, I'm sorry, this is just, it's wrong.
It's absolutely wrong to deplatform someone in this manner on what?
Well, he said this, he did that.
Well, you show me, you know, sought by order of egregiousness and you show me how Alex Jones is at the top of anyone's list compared to the jihadis and antifas and other organizations out there openly calling for advocating and planning for and plotting for violence come on come on this man has been anti-war as long as I've known him passionately vociferously anti-war he's for small government limited government constitutionality and so on this is not I mean come on now of course the problem is why is all of this occurring Well,
when you have a very big government, free speech comes under attack.
Because you have entire classes of people dependent upon the state.
The rich and the poor in general.
The middle class of the tax livestock cult financially to feed the growing disparity between rich and poor.
But you have a huge dependent class of people who live on lies.
And when somebody starts to come and tell the truth, it's not that they're threatened by the truth.
They're threatened by the fact that the truth might undo Some of the resources that they currently pillage based upon the lies and propaganda of the state, right?
You know, the poor are helpless people who need welfare.
We need this massive military-industrial complex to keep the country safe and so on.
These lies are responsible for the transfer of trillions of dollars from one group of people to other groups of people, from the productive to the parasitic.
And so free speech threatens the transfer of trillions of dollars.
And that's why free speech is so vociferously opposed.
Trump is showing 4 plus percent growth in the most recent quarter.
Unbelievable amounts of jobs created, manufacturing coming back, necessary and healthy, quote, trade wars beginning to reduce tariffs and exploitation of American workers by foreign governments and so on.
They don't want the free market to work.
They don't want capitalism to work.
Of course, right? They don't want to work, so they don't want there to be more jobs.
They don't want the system to work, the left.
The left is invested in the failure and destruction of Western freedoms and therefore they get hysterical not because Trump is failing but because the free market is succeeding.
As those of us who know anything about the free market roundly predicted many years ago, yes, the fact that he cut taxes and is cutting regulations and so on is causing business to roar up.
You know, you pull a big stone out of the river, the water rushes into the hole, and you pull impediments out of the way.
The free market does a sufficient and wonderful job of creating and producing and satisfying customer wants in a fairly voluntary manner.
I say fairly voluntary because the government is still involved in so many transactions, but they don't want it to succeed.
And so they're panicking, not because Trump is doing badly, but because the economy is doing well, which goes against their entire worldview that central planning, coercion, socialism, whatever you name it, is the only way for societies to flourish and survive, and there's an existential panic.
When you end up being nothing but propaganda, truth arrives in your environment like a predator, and you're tied to the tree of ideology.
You simply cannot Fight off the predator called truth that you think is destroying you but is actually liberating you from the lies that confine you, that asphyxiate you, that destroy you.
But they don't want to live in that kind of way and so they're now against the health and freedom of their societies and therefore anybody Who advocates it must be targeted.
Now, of course, they're going to go for the most flamboyant, the most ranty, the guy who tears off his shirt and does whatever he can to keep the audience entertained and engaged while he drops some serious red pill airstrikes on their minds, hearts and souls.
And of course, they're going to go for the most flamboyant and outspoken and...
I guess, least easily defendable by the respectable libertarians.
Of course they are. Of course they're going to, but they're not going to stop with him, you understand that, right?
And so there's lots of people who say, well, you know, I'm not a big fan of Alex Jones, but it's like, but that's the whole point of free speech, is you have to defend people that you're not, quote, big fans of.
That's the whole point of free speech.
You know, it's raining outside.
When it's raining outside, it's not something that anybody's going to get too upset and offended by.
So, of course it's going to be people pushing the envelope.
Of course it's going to be people saying things that other people find shocking.
And the fact that people have elevated their own negative reaction to some sort of abstract ideological principle is terrifying.
It's horrifying. It's like we now have to live in the minds of crazy people.
We now have to suffer the hallucinations of schizophrenics and call them reality because people get offended by something that is said.
And they go from, I hate that speech to that is objectively hate speech to hate speech must be banned.
What's being banned is something that stimulates them negatively, that gives them a negative stimuli of any kind.
And because they're unable to reason with and manage their own emotions, they end up having to control absolutely everyone else.
And it will never end. Because if you don't learn how to manage negative stimuli, if you snowflake yourself, if you isolate yourself from negative stimuli, that's the exact wrong thing to do.
You get weaker, more hysterical, more panicked, and that's why you get triggered by this, and then this, and then this, and then this, and less and less requires...
Less and less stimulus is required to trigger you more and more and you end up in this hysterical escalation where you end up having to control everyone all the time no matter what and that will never be enough and then their mere presence causes you hysteria and then you start to talk about not just deplatforming people digitally but physically that is the tradition and the role and the play out of how this kind of stuff goes and of course the point is To make everybody who's not on the left begin to censor themselves so they don't end up that way,
right? You understand it is, to use an analogy, you don't have to shoot everyone in the village to get compliance.
One or two people and everyone else is going to kind of fall into line because they don't want to end up the same way.
And so, yes, of course, the whole deplatforming of Infowars is going to cause everyone else to say, ooh, well, I better stay away from this topic and I better talk about this, I better talk about that, otherwise it's going to end up in the same way.
But it will never stop. And people say, well, Alex Jones, these wild conspiracy theories, they didn't pan out.
Yeah, for sure. Some of his wild conspiracy theories did not pan out.
But some of them did.
And if free speech requires that you be perfect, then you have no free speech at all.
You're not perfect. I'm not perfect.
We're going to make mistakes. And if you say, somebody who makes a mistake, somebody who's wrong about something no longer has the right of free speech, well, guess what?
