Sept. 17, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:48
Stefan Molyneux on How Censorship Stifles Debate and Free Speech
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I've actually become a friend of and I've always been a fan of Stefan Molyneux.
If you don't know that name, I urge you to please go to Free Domain Radio.
Get on the internet, check him out at YouTube.
He's got a huge following.
And what I love as a professor myself, I love talking to Stefan because...
You know, he is one of the few really committed philosophical voices in America today.
I mean, we think about the entire progressive agenda.
It is run exclusively by emotion.
It's critical thinking, logic are out the window.
And as Stephan rightly points out, it's one of the major reasons we are in the fix.
Western culture is in the fix it is now.
The culture that really gave voice to and rise to logic, reason, the scientific method, empiricism, has pretty much rejected it now in the favor of feelings and subjectivity.
And so looking forward to this.
I want to talk to you, Steph, today about the Constitution of the United States.
And I want to start with something you know very well.
We've experienced a little bit of censorship ourselves over at Freedom Project, but you've experienced a lot, not just here but overseas.
Start off by talking to us a little bit about your thoughts about all of the text giants and the monopoly that technology is under and how it really threatens our Constitution with regards to speech.
Well, I feel like the old-timer, you know, sitting on the porch, whittling away with my spenders up to my chest, talking about the good old days, because I've been on social media since 2005, which is basically prehistoric for most of your listeners.
And back in the day, man, you could say what you wanted.
You could engage in robust debates.
There wasn't always this Nazgul shadow of potential deplatforming or suppression or shadow banning hanging over you.
So I remember the halcyon days of the Wild West when real free speech reigned, On social media platforms.
So really what's happened since the election of Donald Trump has been such an enormous departure.
I almost pity those who didn't know what it was like before.
It's a real shame.
When I was growing up, I debated with my friends all the time and we really got into it.
We debated colonialism, we debated the death penalty, we debated abortion, we debated government, you name it.
And it was pretty ferocious.
Now the idea That somebody would cry and run to the teacher if their feelings got hurt was so incomprehensible to us.
It would be such a confession of an inability to answer an argument.
And what is censorship other than running to the teacher saying, make this person shut up because I cannot answer the argument.
And it is a terrible anti-civilizational aspect of the modern world.
The modern world exists because Thinking people challenged all of the preconceptions of physics, of biology, even aspects of theology.
They questioned and opposed those and had some limited freedom to do so.
So everything that we treasure and benefit in the modern world is the result of challenging existing ideas and now the mad narcissistic vanity, primarily of the modern left, has swollen to the point where they think they're at the end of history.
That they have the answers for everything, and anyone who questions those answers or opposes those suppositions is a far-right, white supremacist, Nazi, national, whatever it is, right?
And that is really a great tragedy.
It takes a very smart person to recognize the value of free speech, and I'm not sure we have smart people in charge at the moment.
I think you're right. I grew up exactly like you did, by the way, fighting with everybody, arguing all the time.
I went to college, first person in my family to go to college, and I went expecting at university, this is the 1980s, I went expecting debates and fights and all of this back in, being able to argue with somebody and still like them.
Boy, was I disavowed of that quickly.
You make enemy with the academic left.
They don't play nice.
And it's gotten worse and worse over the last few years.
And what you said, I think, is also really true, that you can't have civilization without free speech.
It's one of the things that makes Western culture so exceptional is the degree to which, out of all sorts of bad things, over the centuries we had more and more freedom, more and more ability to speak, until it was really enshrined in the First Amendment with this great experiment here in America.
And in a short time, it seems like the progressive left has managed to unravel it a lot.
Where are the watchmen? Who should we be turning to here?
Donald Trump, his election was a big – he's an outsider.
That thrilled a lot of us.
But he doesn't seem to be himself.
He uses free speech on Twitter.
I almost wonder if they were to ban Trump's Twitter account, would he really get into the free speech movement?
Well, I think he is starting to make inroads along those lines, because of course a lot of his supporters are pointing out this massive amount of suppression.
So it's a funny thing about free speech, which is There were so many gatekeepers in the past, right?
I mean, obviously there were gatekeepers like what John Milton was talking about in REO Progetica, where you had the royal censors who would approve or not approve of particular books.
Now that, of course, went to the quasi-free market in that you now have publishers and television stations and newspapers prior to the rise of the internet and social media.
They were the gatekeepers.
And so you could strangle the discourse of an entire country, of an entire culture, By filling just a couple hundred or at most a couple of thousand key positions.
And that, of course, is what the communists and the hard leftists did.
They did the slow walk through the institutions.
They ended up in control of Hollywood.
They ended up in control of the media.
They ended up in control of academia and newspapers and you name it, right?
So it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's fine to have free speech on paper as long as we control the means of production of opinion.
But then, of course, the Internet came along.
And the gatekeepers got sidestepped.
And you and I and millions and millions of other people could speak truth directly to an audience without the need to placate advertisers, without the need to go through an editorial board, just straight conversation.
And now what's happened is, now that free speech through technology has manifested itself, I would argue for the very first time in all of human history, the left in particular is freaking out because they spend all this time and all of this energy and all of this money and all of this dedication To man the Titanic of the existing media and now it's going down.
They're looking for lifeboats and they just want to sink everything because it turns out to have been kind of a wasted effort because shows like yours, shows like mine, have more reach and more impact than many mainstream media stations and they're no likey much at all.
Let me ask you because this is the big crux of it for me.
As non-progressives, we recognize that private property, private ownership is a big deal.
It's maybe second or third behind free speech as a civilization building force.
And so the big tech companies, all directed by radical progressive lefties, they own their own companies, they built them.
And yet they're using those companies to silence those of us who use their platforms.
How do we navigate that, Steph?
What's the answer between, are we all conservative hypocrites now?
Because on the one hand, we want free ownership.
We want that cake baker to be able to bake or not bake a cake.
But we're now pushing back against the tech giants because they're not letting us have our voice.
How would you answer that? No, no, I don't agree with that.
Because looking at private property is overleaping the big elephant in the room, which is contracting.
So when you sign up for social media companies and you read the end user in terms of agreement, nothing in there says, by the way, if you criticize socialism, communism, the Democrats, the left, or blah, blah, blah, blah, you're going to get this, this, and this, and this applied to you.
That's not... Nobody says there, well, you can be a black nationalist or a Jewish nationalist, totally fine, but if you're a white nationalist, that's evil.
It's not explicit.
That's the problem. It's an implicit contract, which is not a valid contract.
So nobody is asking the social media companies to turn their means of production over to one group or another.
All I'm asking them to do is fulfill two things.
Number one, to fulfill the end-user terms of agreement, which says, if you're not abusive, if you're not inciting violence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then you're free to say what you want.
That's what they say, and I expect them to stick by that, because...
It's sort of like if you lease a land for 50 years and then you build a mall, and then a year after you build the mall, the guy says, no, I'm ripping up that 50 year contract and I'm taking your mall.
You'd be like, no, no, no, no, we have a contract.
You can't do that. It's the same thing.
That's number one. Number two, and this is really, really essential in American law, the social media companies have to be platforms, not publishers.
That's the only way that they escape liability for the content of what is posted on their sites.
They have to remain neutral.
And if they're not able to remain neutral, then they go from websites, in a sense, to publishers.
They go from platforms to publishers, which means they are then liable for the content of what is put on their site.
For the coverage of the rape situation and why Facebook could never be sued for that.
So given that they enjoy the protection for the content of their sites only based upon impartiality in the ideological sphere, they must maintain that.
That is the commitment that they have under American law.
The end user commitment is to remain neutral and that's all I think people are asking for is a fulfillment of contract which is pure capitalism.
We've got about 30 seconds left in this segment, but comment quickly at the end of it.
Do you think they've crossed the line to publishers?
That seems to be what they're doing.
They're acting as if publishers and hiding behind the idea that they're not.
There does seem to be evidence.
And of course, James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is getting a lot of whistleblowers coming out from big tech companies.
I would like to see a thorough investigation.
I would like to see third parties, neutral third parties, review the source code to look for bias, and that should be determined through that process.
Yeah, I agree 100%. And the idea that the false dichotomy with the cake baker, you're asking a cake baker to express language that he doesn't agree with.
So I don't see that as a contradiction either.
I think it makes perfect sense based on what we've said.
And there is no way that you could argue one is not the other.