Republicans Face EXTINCTION Unless They Stop Online Censorship, Here 's How They Can Fight Back
Republicans Face EXTINCTION Unless They Stop Online Censorship. Will Chamberlain joins me to discuss the idea of social media access being a civil right. As Facebook censorship escalates many high profile figures associated with the right lose their ability to influence voters. Republicans, Conservatives, Moderates, and even center left Liberals are self censoring out of fear of being banned and losing access to online services. Its not just about social media but about commerce and even banking. We have already seen people banned from credit cards and banks. If people don't demand protected access to the new digital public square people will end up living under a far left regressive technocracy.
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As you probably know by now, Facebook banned a bunch of people associated with the right.
This resulted in Donald Trump tweeting about it.
The left threw up their arms saying, oh no, Donald Trump is the Infowars president.
We saw this activist screed from CNN journalists where they complained about Paul Joseph Watson, the extremist.
It's all a really strange conversation, but one thing I think that's becoming apparent Is that, yes, these platforms are biased.
We've heard from Twitter employees, we've heard from Facebook employees, they even have rules on Twitter that restrict conservative perspective on certain ideologies.
So yes, we know this.
Even Jack Dorsey said on the Joe Rogan podcast, perhaps they were too aggressive in policing the learn to code meme.
It stands to reason, at least from my point of view, Republicans are going to lose moving forward.
I've even made the argument in the past that if they don't solve this problem, they will lose.
Recently in Texas, a state law was proposed, particularly because Republicans in Texas wanted to put an advertisement out that was pro-life, and Facebook said no.
To them, a clear bias.
If these tech giants have monopolized this space, yeah, Republicans are not going to win ever again.
So there's a couple questions.
Can Republicans fight back?
And why haven't the big megadonors who support conservative ideas stepped into the ring?
To address these issues, I am joined by Will Chamberlain, lawyer and publisher of Human Events, who had two really interesting takes on the whole issue.
One, arguing that platform access is a civil right, and another article talking about these big megadonors who haven't stepped up.
So first, let's talk about platform access as a civil right, but let's begin that conversation by me asking you, What do you think's going to happen to conservatives, Republicans, and honestly, like, the reason I'm concerned is this, moderates.
We've seen feminists banned, right?
If you oppose the regressive orthodoxy of, you know, intersectionality, they'll ban you too.
What future do you see if this situation isn't remedied?
Oh, I mean, it will become untenable for conservatives to win national elections and increasingly the conservative movement will become a regional party.
The power of social media is both to hijack the media's hive mind and also to provide a space where conservatives can essentially lead on thought and motivate their voters to get out and vote.
If the social media platforms constrain and constrict conservative speech and ban effective persuaders and influencers on the right, that's a huge boon to the left in terms of elections.
So I don't see a way for Republicans to continue to win elections going forward if they let the left destroy them on social media.
There's actually something really interesting shared with me by, there are a lot of companies that want to make what's called OTT, over-the-top services.
So that's like your Roku player, your Amazon.
And I saw this chart that shows the 50 plus demographic is still watching TV, but young people are just every day watching more and more online content.
So I feel like one of the problems, you have a lot of Republicans who are just, they're
not seeing it because they're not as active online as the younger generation.
But you have, so this conversation is being framed now by young people and the younger,
moderate conservative, and even like old school Democrats from 10 years ago are being called
far right.
They're being smeared.
They're being banned.
Edgy jokes, even like even activists on the left who oppose this specific ideology, like
Megan Murphy, the feminist, are getting banned.
So to me, it seems like we might not see the ramifications of this for about 10 or 15 years,
but if something doesn't happen now, man, conservatives today are not going to exist.
So you wrote this article saying that platform access is a civil right.
So I mean, basically, there's kind of two big components to the article.
The first is the question of whether or not to frame social media platform access as a civil right, as opposed to something else, just about free speech, for example.
And then the second is about what exactly could be done by conservatives to protect that civil right.
And the civil rights framing, I think, is important.
I think it's accurate, first and foremost.
When we think about civil rights, we're thinking about those things that the government says to private companies, this is so important that we're not even going to let private companies violate these rights.
And usually they're in furtherance of some commitment in the Constitution based on constitutional rights.
So the way I see civil rights, for example, the 14th Amendment protects against government racial discrimination.
Right.
That's that's the equal protection of the laws.
The government's not allowed to discriminate against you on the basis of race, sex, etc.
But that was already the rule in the 1950s after Brown versus Board.
And I mean, that was effectively the rule that governments couldn't do that.
But that didn't change the experience for people, Black people who were, say, driving on a highway through the South.
That didn't mean that a private motel had to let you stay in there That's a real example from your article.
You know, I remember 10 years ago, kind of reading the libertarian arguments against civil rights and entertaining them intellectually.
But real life examples like that make you realize that, okay, I guess libertarianism can be appealing and sort of this aesthetic sense of letting liberty in the market solve all these problems.
But It's not okay that black people couldn't go to a restaurant or use a restroom or go to a hotel.
That wasn't okay, and the government was capable of making that problem stop.
And I think that's the power of the civil rights argument is it is it says, look, if something's a civil right, we don't have to wait for some entrepreneur to figure out some novel solution to the problem.
We don't have to hope that some invisible hand mechanism comes along and resolves the problem for us.
We can just use government power and make it stop.
This is the weirdest thing to me because, you know, I posted this big long thread with all these facts on my Facebook while I was arguing with some, like, democratic socialist types, and they just completely ignore it, and they say private companies can do what they want, and I was like, what?
I used to hang out with these people who were straight up like, we need to stop these companies from building this oil pipeline.
They shouldn't be allowed to do it.
I'm like, yeah, we shouldn't let these companies do whatever they want.
I believe in a mixed economy.
There's got to be market competition, but we do have to try and control things that get out of hand.
I'm for the mixed economy, but I had a thought on this.
First of all, my opinion has always been that in the instance of the wedding cake, the gay wedding, I understand that's a complicated story because what people tend to miss in that one, for those that are watching, if you're not familiar, the baker in, I think it was Denver, didn't want to make a custom cake for a gay wedding.
He said, you can have any cake you want, but I won't do custom work.
And it's not as simple as to say that he wouldn't serve them because he was offering them to buy whatever they wanted.
It was that they wanted him to produce a specific message.
Here's what's fascinating.
On Twitter, my understanding is the reason Twitter thinks they have a right to ban whoever they want, it's a First Amendment argument.
That Twitter has free speech, that they publish, you know, that they're essentially platforming these ideas and they shouldn't be obligated to speak an idea they don't like.
But that's a similar argument, in my opinion, to the wedding cake.
Now, I don't know if that's what he did, but Can you force someone to speak something they don't want to speak?
But here's my ultimate thought on the bigger issue and social media.
When it comes to a business operating in, say, my town, we all pay taxes.
We are obligated to pay taxes.
You may think taxes shouldn't be.
That's a different argument.
By all means, you can have it.
We'll talk about that later.
But for the time being, if I have to spend money to fund infrastructure, To fund plumbing, to fund electrical power lines and streets.
You shouldn't be able to occupy space that I'm contributing to and then restrict my access to it for arbitrary means.
Finding the line of what is arbitrary and what isn't is a conversation.
Like if I go into your business and start shrieking at the top of my lungs, by all means kick me out.
But if someone comes into your business and happens to be, you know, I don't know, Muslim, throwing them out is unfair because they did nothing wrong, they're not in violation of any laws, and their taxes contribute to the space you're occupying.
So I look at Twitter, and here's what I see.
Massive multinational corporations with foreign investment, with extreme power in swaying our laws and our governments, they're hiding money overseas, they're using our infrastructure in our country, and then saying, but I can arbitrarily decide who is or isn't allowed to speak.
That's terrifying.
I don't think you should be allowed to use my infrastructure that my taxes contribute to, that I pay for the collective defense to, and you're freeloading on that.
Why can you take away my right to legally speak?
That's my social liberal argument that I'm surprised the former Democrat types aren't saying.
So, I mean, I kind of want to take that in turn because there's like so much interesting, there's like three or four distinct interesting arguments there, right?
So the first one is, I mean, fair enough, but I think I can remember them.
I'm a good debater if I remember right.
The first one is about the bake a cake argument, right?
That liberals who are perfectly happy to demand that some random baker in Colorado bake a cake for a gay wedding are suddenly yelling, my private company, how dare you infringe on Facebook's rights?
Um, interestingly, you know, I'm a conservative, so the pushback that I get on this article is pushback on, well, what are you saying?
Are you saying people should have to bake the cake from the conservatives who, you know, come that angle?
And my answer to that is, no, I think you can draw a principal distinction between one baker out of 200 million people that bake some cupcakes versus a $500 billion social media company and suggest that perhaps we impose more restrictions and more demands on the $500 billion social media company than we do on random bakers.
I think that's a principled position in general.
But even so, I think I think the really bizarre case is the one where you say, yes, we should be able to force people to bake the cake, no, how dare we infringe on Facebook's rights?
It was the Jared Taylor case, where Twitter argued under the First Amendment, they can't be obligated to speak someone else's speech.
So it's clear to me that they're in violation of at least the spirit of the law.
They're picking winners and losers.
They're censoring certain ads for arbitrary reasons.
They seriously, I mean, look, there was a period where you, I'm scared to even say the word because I know what'll happen when the Twitter, I'm sorry, when the YouTube algorithm, they do a speech conversion and then take the words and then flag your video.
Wow, okay.
Okay, a certain device which is used for self-defense and protected under the Second Amendment
Google actually banned all instances of that word so that you couldn't even talk about anime because there's an anime
called Gundam wing and Those first three letters were censored. So the search one
That's insane to me, that Google has that power to say you can't even look for this.
And now they're suppressing YouTube channels.
There's a couple channels that have made a living and built a career for 10 years with Second Amendment protected home defense objects.
You see what I have to do to avoid these pitfalls?
It's legal!
It's all legal, it's constitutionally protected, but Google arbitrarily decides what is morally just.
Like, what if you could use government power to say to Google, you don't get to do that anymore.
Sorry.
You do that and you censor somebody's video.
They can walk into court tomorrow, get an injunction, forcing you to undo what you did and you need to pay the user's attorney's fees.
Right.
And that's kind of the attitude I want to say.
That's the second part of the article, which is the reframe away from the sort of standard conservative approaches to solving big tech censorship and focusing on what is the best end goal for the conservative movement.
So, so kind of again, and this connects to the idea of generally people are so focused on this publisher platform distinction that I just talked about, right, the idea that, you know, Facebook really is a publisher, and it pretends to be a platform.
But even if you got that fixed, and you got rid of that liability protection, All that means is that you can sue Facebook for defamation.
Defamation cases are notoriously hard to win.
And that's incredibly indirect because, you know, all that means is somebody else who gets lied about could sue Facebook and punish them financially.
But you, the user who's banned, you don't have any recourse.
Merely making them a publisher doesn't give you the right to sue them and say, hey, give me my account back.
That doesn't change anything.
So my point is, If we think of this as a civil right, the right to platform access, then we write laws that say, since it's a civil right, we're going to create what's called a private right of action, which is a new type of lawsuit that says, if Facebook takes away your platform, bans you wrongfully,
Then you have the right to walk into court, you are entitled to an immediate injunction, you are entitled to attorney's fees, whatever it costs you to get that injunction, and you're entitled to a penalty, statutory damages.
So Facebook would immediately have to restore your account, pay you money, and pay your fees.
You could write that into the statute, no problem, right?
I mean, you could say, here are the list of requirements you need Facebook.
And if you want to lawfully ban an account from your platform, here are the things you must do and the things you must demonstrate in order to not be in violation of this civil rights law, which if you are in violation of, it's not good for you because it's a really bad time where you just have to pay a quarter million dollars to some random user for their fees and for a penalty.
But I do think I'm, you know, so the way I describe it is like we're all standing on this cliffside.
And as the cliff erodes, more and more people fall off.
First it's, you know, first they come for the crazies, then they come for the fringe, then they come for the far-right, then the conservatives, then the moderates, then the liberals.
It just keeps going.
So I'm watching, you know, one by one, people are falling.
It was, this is really funny, actually.
Oliver Darcy, the CNN journalist who called Paul Joseph Watson an extremist, who has been, you know, furious over Infowars and all that, interviewed me two, two and a half years ago, three years ago, when I said, it's disconcerting the alt-right is getting banned for having bad opinions.
So he hits me up.
He's like, that's a really interesting, you know, opinion you had on this issue.
I'd like to elaborate on this.
Writes the story about it.
You know, and now his position is totally inverted.
Ban them.
They shouldn't be allowed on the platform.
And it's so damn confusing.
But for me, the reason I bring this up is that it was years ago I said, hey man, they banned the alt-right today for having nasty opinions.
I get it.
I don't want their opinions either.
How long until they come for conservatives?
How long after that do they come for moderates?
And the swing to the far left keeps happening.
I made a video about this the other day.
I have three or four charts showing how the Democrats are swinging far to the left.
And we've got all these mainstream publications saying it's happening.
You know, so if we follow this track, where do we end up?
Ten years?
Will there be conservatives on social media?
I doubt it, but it's worse than that.
It means, I mean, I already have to walk on eggshells to talk about basic things.
You know, you've got, like, Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is, he does not like Donald Trump.
He's a neuroscientist, and he's actually talked about the idea of race and intelligence.
How long until that's removed outright and banned, right?
So the cliff's eroding.
I'm not saying that to, like, endorse Sam Airstone.
I'm just pointing out that you'll actually have scientists, and we're actually seeing this with some scientific research being pulled down due to protest.
The track seems obvious.
Take away someone's right to speak, the ideas can't exist in public, and the Overton window swings ridiculously to the far left, unless something's done about it now.
So this will be a good point to segue into.
Why aren't these big mega donors doing anything about it?
If you want to address anything I just said before we get into that, you know, by all means.
Well, I mean, and part of that is why I think the civil rights framing of this issue is so powerful and important.
You know, for so long, the narrative has been, well, is this person really a good person?
Like, should they really be able to spread their hate speech?
And I think that the power of the civil rights reframe is you immediately get to say, why are we picking and choosing who gets civil rights?
I thought that that's not how civil rights work.
We protect civil rights for everyone, even if we don't like what they're using them for.
And so I think that that's a way to just change this whole debate to a high ground.
And suddenly people who are fighting against it, if it sticks, and I think it should,
I really do believe this should be conceptualized as a civil right.
I think that's completely fair framing.
But if you're against it, then you're an anti-civil rights advocate.
You know, suddenly, Oliver Darcy is for stripping people of civil rights.
And, and I think that, and he might say, Oh, that's so unfair.
I'm totally pro civil rights.
I'm totally pro people being able to access common carriers.
Are you?
Really?
Like, it doesn't seem like it seems like all your advocacy is geared towards removing people from the most important communication platforms that they have It's a good idea.
You also bring up that really interesting, what is it, like, Packingham?
And I that's why I think the framing has stuck so aggressively like I mean, I've just seen it everywhere. It's
a good idea You also bring up that really interesting. What is it like
Packingham? Is that the Supreme Court case? Yeah Right. I mean so
I don't want to get too into the nitty-gritty of that specific case.
I bring it up because it basically has a Supreme Court saying, specifically, social media is cheap, effective, and one of the most ubiquitous tools for public participation.
So it's not so the government cannot restrict your access to it.
That's what that case stands for.
And so if it's that important, all that language, that's civil rightsy language, that's like all about your ability to access the public square and be a participant in society, in civil society.
So I think that that case assists the framing, it doesn't necessarily prove what some people want it to prove.
That current law requires Facebook and Twitter to stop banning people.
I don't think that, but it's a useful case in terms of changing the frame to civil rights.
I mean, so there's two dynamics, I think, that are really interesting about what Rahim realized, which is this fact that, hey, all these people are talking about the virtues of risk-taking and entrepreneurship and how competition will solve social media censorship, and yet none of them have funded a competitor to Facebook or Twitter.
So point one is, it turns out that competing with these companies is extraordinarily difficult.
Funny thing, right?
They try and say that there's no monopoly here, and yet the moment you say to them, well, then try to compete with them, they're like, what do you mean?
I couldn't compete with Facebook.
That's impossible.
How could one, you know, deal with all their problems?
Yeah, and it puts the light of these competitive arguments and the sort of complete obliviousness to the idea of natural monopoly and network effects.
So that's one part.
But then the second part is also just the sort of indifference they've shown to helping conservatives speak.
I mean, it really is fundamental indifference.
You'd think that if you're going to go out there and spend money on a think tank and have that think tank talk about how competition will solve this problem, you'd simultaneously be trying to put your money where your mouth is and solve it yourself.
And demonstrate that you're doing it.
Yeah, have some skin in the game, right?
Like, why is it okay that for the Kochs, billionaires, billionaires, to, on the one hand, you know, demand that we not have the government intervene, allow the market to work, and then on the other hand, not spend a dime to do it.
Have some skin in the game, guys.
Like, if you want to compete against Facebook, put up your money.
If you don't, then go away, and we're going to use government to solve the problem.
I mean, it's always the most robust defenses of competition and the virtues of the marketplace are always the people who have completely insulated themselves from competition at non-profit sinecures.
It's really quite obnoxious.
These are people who laud the virtues of risk and avoid all risk in their own personal lives.
And that extends not beyond merely their jobs, but also who they'll talk to.
I mean, you go down the list.
They're constantly trying to distance themselves from the wrong people to maintain their cynicure.
That's actually interesting, though, because that kind of sounds like something Jordan Peterson said about the right drawing a line and the left not drawing a line.
Well, I mean, once you realize that the left's principle is not, let's have anything abstract other than like, we should win and they should lose, then you suddenly realize there's no real internal tension between these arguments at all.
I feel like something I want to bring up, as I've mentioned before, is the censorship kind of has a net benefit effect for the right.
The way I explain it is, imagine you have two kids, and you tell one of them they're not allowed to have ice cream.
You tell them both, neither of you are allowed to have ice cream.
And then you whisper to one, but I'll give you ice cream.
The parents show up and they see one kid drenched in ice cream and the other kid looks clean, and they think one kid's messy and one kid's clean, when in reality, you're restricting what the one kid can't do.
So the point I'm trying to make is, if you ban the worst of the worst conservatives and right-wing figures, all that's left are the people wearing suits and ties who are arguing logically and clearly, But the left just runs amok and you end up with, you know, like, Sarah Jong and other, like, crazy people posting racist nonsense.
Just getting away with it.
Antifa makes the left look just absolutely ridiculous and crazy.
But there's a lot of people who just fall in line and support it.
And there are people like me, who have always been on the left, now saying, like, I don't have anything to do with those crazy people.
Right, so there is really, and I feel this personally, right, this interesting tension between the principle and the civil rights argument, and the sort of ruthless political pragmatism of what would be best for the conservative movement.
I mean, yeah, in many ways, the conservative movement is not benefited by, say, Richard Spencer getting the right to speak, or even Laura Loomer getting the right to speak.
Just from an abstract, if you were solely thinking about how do we win elections, and you were making laws solely based on that calculation, You might come down on the side of actually, yeah, we should restrict some of the crazies because that would improve our chances.
That would mean there was less, you know, it'd be a harder target to hit for the left.
And since the left doesn't police their own, we have easy targets going the other direction.
Um, but I embrace this position because I think it's the moral thing to do.
Also, I think that there's no, since we're not in, you know, even more pragmatic, we're not in control of the social media companies.
So we don't get to decide when it stops, right?
We don't get to say, okay, you've kicked out the worst of the worst.
Now you're going to stop and you're just going to let everybody else stay on the platform.
No worries.
Like clearly that's not happening.
You know, my co, my buddy, my editor in chief was suspended from Facebook three days ago for on basically call it the Megan Murphy grounds, right?
And that's another extremely nightmarish thing, is you're going to have people who are self-censoring because, yeah, that's a great analogy, the Sword of Damocles.
Facebook could just be like, eh, you're gone.
the sword of Damocles hanging over all of our heads.
And that's another extremely nightmarish thing is you're going to have people who are self-censoring
because yeah, that's a great analogy, the sword of Damocles.
Facebook could just be like, eh, you're gone.
Bye.
Yep.
I look at Paul Just Watson's videos and sure, there are a lot of offensive videos.
I don't watch a ton of his content, so I don't want to act like I know him perfectly, but I do know he's got the failures of modern architecture and stuff, so it's like, you know, that's weird.
But I think it's the affiliation with Infowars that ultimately gets him out, because they're just getting rid of all of it.
So anyway, I don't want to go on too long, so I'll just ask you one more question.
There are a lot of state laws popping up.
Florida's failed, I believe.
It's indefinitely postponed.
Texas wants to pass this law that says if you claim to be unbiased, then you must act in that way.
And California, today, they're doing a third reading that would restrict censorship for social media companies.
What do you think is going to happen?
What do you think is going to end up happening with these state laws?
So, I mean, I don't know about any individual state law, but I am a big proponent of the idea of focusing sort of grassroots energy on state-level legislation to create consumer protection laws protecting their citizens from being censored by social media companies.
Because I don't see, you know, federal is going to be really hard.
Congress is in the hands of that, you know, the House is in the Democrats' hands.
I don't think they want to help us.
So, but there's plenty of states that have completely Republican legislatures who have plenty of conservative citizens in their states who want to be protected from Facebook and Twitter coming in and ruining their lives.
I mean, this is not uncommon.
States have consumer protection laws all over the place.
So that actually brings up a really interesting point.
Again, why it's so important to take the focus from to writing a statute that gives citizens a private right of action, as opposed to relying on regulators ex ante to solve the problem for you.
You know, I mean, most people, when they think of laws, they're like, oh, it's going to be lowest learners.
Another very common argument. Lowest learner will be the one regulating your speech rights.
You don't want that. It's like, no, I agree. I don't.
So I want to draw up a law that instead gives the user the right to go to court
to force the company to comply with the law and give them their account back.
And that's doable. There are plenty of cases where you can do it.
So that's how you avoid the problem of regulators kind of looking in the other way
at laws they don't really want to enforce.
It's harder for judges to do that because they know they have an appellate judge sitting above them
who's going to criticize them if they decide to butcher the law.
Yeah, so I'm Will Chamberlain on both Twitter and Periscope, but more importantly, we just launched a brand new, well, not brand new, the oldest conservative magazine in existence.
We just relaunched it, Human Events, www.humanevents.com.
We're trying to put out beautiful, really in-depth, interesting commentary and news, and I think if you guys take a look, you will enjoy it.
