Dismantling the Arguments of Censorship & Hate Speech with Glenn Greenwald

Think you've got a firm grasp on free speech and what it entails? Prepare to have your perspectives challenged as we sit down with esteemed journalist Glenn Greenwald. Together, we prod the murky depths of the hate speech debate, dismantling the often-used justification for speech restriction. Glenn illuminates the startling subjectivity of defining 'hate speech' and unpacks the power dynamics at play in the act of censoring speech. Delving into current global conflicts, we connect these abstract debates to very real circumstances.

We cast a critical eye on the hypocrisy of free speech advocates, considering the implications of recent controversies on college campuses. Highlighting the inconsistencies of prominent voices on both the left and right, Glenn offers insights that might leave you feeling 'politically homeless'. But fear not, we also spotlight those who've remained steadfast in their support for free speech, such as the organization FIRE. We traverse the battlefield of controversial opinions, censorship in media, and the danger of equating political criticism with hate speech, referencing the landmark Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Join us as we take a deep dive into the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict and its reflections on American censorship. We scrutinize the American right's exceptions to their free speech advocacy concerning Israel and discuss the recent censorship of pro-Palestinian voices. Greenwald’s extensive knowledge and firsthand accounts breathe life into the ongoing debates, giving listeners a fresh look at the multifaceted world of free speech. The implications of these discussions reach far beyond our borders, as we reflect on the contrasts between US constitutional protections for free speech and the realities in other countries. Listen in and prepare to have your understanding of free speech both questioned and enriched.

0:00 Debunking Hate Speech 

12:37 The Hypocrisy of Free Speech Advocates

22:24 Free Speech, Censorship, and Controversial Opinions

30:19 Israel Exception and Censorship in America

35:15 Political Criticism and Censorship Complexity

41:53 Free Speech and Censorship in Media

Music: Coma-Media (intro)
                 WinkingFoxMusic (outro)
Recorded: 12/15/23

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in today. Today's episode breaks down the infamous congressional exchange between Republican Representative Elise Stefanik and the University Presidents of Harvard, mit and U Penn. We also dive deep into the hypocrisy of these University Presidents and their own schools policies. But, as well as the quote-unquote free speech warriors of these past years, we talk about hate speech and debunk that it's not protected by the First Amendment and that most people would actually be in favor of hate speech, depending on specific context, and that's widely accepted in society, as is. This conversation is with special guest Glenn Greenwald.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Greenwald is a renowned journalist, former constitutional lawyer and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, no Place to Hide, is about the US surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. In 2013, forum Policy Magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 global thinkers. He was the debut winner, along with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, of the Park Center IF Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008 and also received the 2010 Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source, edward Snowden. He received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. The NSA reporting he led for the Guardian as well was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2019, he received a special prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led the imprisonment of former Brazilian president Lula da Silva. After working as a journalist at Salon and the Guardian, greenwald co-founded the Air Incept in 2013 and co-founded the Air Incept Brazil in 2016. He resigned from the Air Incept in 2020, however, to return to independent journalism.

Speaker 1: 2:21

Glenn now hosts and operates the new show System Update, which airs live on weeknights at 7 pm Eastern time on Rumble, but can also be found on Spotify, apple and YouTube as well. You can tune in there for unencumbered analysis and investigate reporting, captive to no dogba nor faction. The last thing I'll say is if you enjoy this episode, if you enjoy the content, the conversation, all I ask is that you rate on Spotify, apple and share with a friend, but if you like it a lot, I also ask you to subscribe. Thank you, welcome to the show, glenn. Really happy to have you here today, man.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 3:12

So hate speech and incitement to violence are often leveraged as this justification for restriction on speech. But hearing you and a few others over the recent weeks, I would like to also know how you think of those terms and those specific calls to action and if they have any validity or not in how you approach this issue.

Speaker 2: 3:38

The idea of hate speech is essentially a fabricated or invented concept. That is quite new If you go back and look at the debates about free speech that occurred, let's say, at the time of the Enlightenment, before the founding of the United States, when people like Voltaire and John Locke and a lot of those Western European philosophers and political activists were demanding the right to speak. There was no distinction drawn between speech filled with love and benevolence that should be permitted, but then speech filled with hate that should be prohibited. It really has become this kind of invented concept that is used in many ways to justify censorship by people who don't want to admit that they actually believe in censorship. So they'll draw this distinction between free speech and hate speech and they'll say free speech is fine but hate speech isn't. And the two problems with this are, I think, obvious. One is there is no definition of hate speech. There's no objective criteria for how to define it or identify it. It's completely subjective, it's in the eyes of the person judging it and usually will be determined by whoever has the most power. And that automatically means that if you carve out an exception to free speech for quote, unquote hate speech, you're basically swallowing up all idea of free speech, since censorship then becomes easily imposed by simply decreeing something dissent or oppositional views as hate speech, and now you get to justify its suppression.

Speaker 2: 5:13

The other problem with it is, if you think about it, there's a lot of speech that is filled with hatred that, of course, we think is valid to express. A lot of people express hatred for the people who attacked the country on 9-11. A lot of people express hatred for the North Korean dictator. A lot of people express hatred for Hamas. A lot of people express hatred for a lot of different things, a lot of different people, a lot of different groups, a lot of different countries, and most people believe that at least some of those expressions of hatred are valid. So even if you could identify speech as composed of hatred in some objective way, it still wouldn't be the case that we would want the ability to ban it, since all kinds of speech. You know the American republic was founded based on hatred for the British king and his acts of repression. So the idea that somehow we were supposed to ban or exclude from the protections of free speech hateful ideas, I think falls apart upon just the most minimal scrutiny.

Speaker 1: 6:21

I think it's pretty interesting too, because rather popular but simplistic worldview lens breaks down the world into pretty much two categories the oppressor and the oppressed. And what you mentioned too is that the people who have more of the power or who have the most power in that given dynamic and situation are the ones who are going to suppress that speech. And you see that as current conflict with Israel and Palestine and the discourse happening across the world, but specifically in the United States we also saw in the summer 2020. And there's this whole dynamic of well, since we're oppressed quote unquote oppressed that needs to be censored, and oftentimes say it is on special campuses, but then simultaneously, if it's being suppressed, then you obviously have power to suppress that speech. So it's almost like this paradox where you're oppressed, you have no power, but simultaneously you are suppressing other's speech and their thought and their say right to assembly.

Speaker 2: 7:26

No, I think it's a great point. I always say that censorship is a weapon, by definition, of the majority of the powerful. There's this idea on the left that censorship is needed to protect marginalized groups or weak groups or groups that are targeted with oppression. But if you, as you just astutely pointed out, if you are the group that has the power to suppress or censor others, by definition you are wielding a lot of power, and that's the reason why censorship will almost always be used not to suppress majoritarian views, but views that are on the fringes or the margins or that is regarded as as dissent. Majoritarian factions don't need protection. The whole point of the Bill of Rights, in fact, is to protect minorities, so it's like there's a guarantee, for example, in the Bill of Rights, for religious liberty. Obviously, the people who need that protection are not people who believe in a religion shared by the majority of people. The people who need religious liberty are those who have a religion that is looked down upon or disliked by the majority of people. Same with free speech. Free speech is not something that you need if your views are ones held by the majority or those in power. You only need those protections if you are a dissident if you're somebody who is expressing a view held in contempt by the majority. That's the first thing.

Speaker 2: 8:47

The other thing I would say is the question of who has power and who doesn't. Who's powerful, who's powerless is a much more difficult assessment to make than it might seem at first glance. So after the George Floyd murders, for example, there was an attempt to say that in the United States, black people are in a press group, that they have no power, that they need all these protections. And yet you instantly saw, all around the country, gigantic protests that erupted in defense of black people in the United States, against the idea of racism. And so you can look at certain data for example, who has economic power in the United States and make the case that black people are the ones who are with the less power.

Speaker 2: 9:31

But if you go into, say, universities where there has been an affirmative attempt to ensure an overrepresentation of certain minority groups, but not just that, but that the people in power have certain left-wing views that are designed to protect so-called marginalized groups, then the power might be very different, in terms of who wields it and why, than it is in the broader society. So I think it's often times it's a shifting dynamic, who the powerful are, who the powerless are, and that's why I don't think it's a very helpful metric to determine anything. We shouldn't be handing out rights based on who's powerless and who's powerful, because that can shift at any moment and often does.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Yeah, and rather just take a principled stand on the issue than laying it be situational or how you personally may feel about it. And in that same kind of vein, you recently had 600 Harvard faculty members sign petition urging Harvard leaders to keep Claudine Gay in her position as the president of that university. I take no issue with that petition alone, but when you juxtapose it with the behavior of these elite universities and their faculty in prior years, it's kind of appalling, because Harvard kind of, in my opinion, and fire the foundation for individual rights and expression. Harvard is this sensorious regime now masquerading as a bashing for free speech. In essence, and according to that same organization they fire and you're familiar with them, I'm pretty sure quite a bit.

Speaker 1: 11:01

They conduct these college free speech rankings and Harvard has consistently finished in the bottom 25th percentile below other schools at like 225 schools. And this year's ranking Harvard was just dead last please, dead last. And ironically, second to last was U Penn. And one incident that contributed to their abysmal ranking in 2022 was when Harvard disembodied a feminist philosopher, Devin Buckley from the English department of colloquium on campus over her views and her takes on gender and transgender issues as well. And, as mentioned, I believe that we're both principled in our beliefs on free speech, but evidently these universities, these you know faculty leaders, are not. I'm curious on what your thoughts are on why these presidents gave the answers that align close to the First Amendment free speech.

Speaker 2: 11:53

why their own policies and own universities, and maybe past behavior, do not so I think these last two months have been among the most difficult and the most depressing from the perspective of someone who is a principal civil libertarian or free speech proponent. Because, on the one hand, the answers that these college presidents gave at that congressional hearing were answers that I support. I think they gave the correct answers. If you look at it in isolation, if you actually pull back a little bit from and look at the broader context of what that hearing was about, not just the two minutes that ended up being viral that determined everything, but the broader discussion. Before they got to the discussion of whether advocacy of genocide against Jewish students should be deemed to be a violation of the student code, there was an attempt, like there is more broadly, to suggest that most pro-Palestinian phrases or most pro-Palestinian advocacy is implicitly a call to murder Jews. In the same way that a lot of left liberal activists will try to justify the censorship of right-wing speech by claiming that right-wing speech on policing or affirmative action, immigration or LGBT issues, even though they don't go around saying kill all black people, kill all immigrants, kill all trans people they say implicitly that's really what they want, that's really what they're calling for. There's an attempt to say that pro-Palestinian advocacy or criticism of Israel or even anti-Zionism is implicitly an attempt to try and commit genocide against Jews. And only then did they start asking is the advocacy of genocide against Jews something that violates the code of conduct on campus? And the reason why there was this hesitancy on the part of college admitted these presidents to say yes, it would be is because they were saying it depends on what the speech is, it depends on what the actions are, which is exactly the correct thing. I mean, if you write an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson saying why the recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 was misguided and why it should be reversed, obviously you should be permitted to do that. That can't possibly be a violation of the student code, because the idea of these universities, they say, is to adhere to the First Amendment, doctrine of free speech, and clearly that's well within the First Amendment, free speech protection. So saying it depends on the context. You know it's a much different thing. If you're going up every day to a Jewish student on campus and screaming in their face kill all Jews. That becomes a form of harassment, obviously. So they gave the right answer.

Speaker 2: 14:38

The problem is it was so hard to defend them because they are frauds. They don't actually believe in the principles they were invoking in general, given the long history of censorship on college campuses that these exact schools and these exact administrators have been supporting. So it was not all entirely true, it just me. It was actual hatred.

Speaker 2: 14:55

Part of the problem became those who really do want a sensor on campuses to silence Israel critics had this argument that was correct, which is that these people are hypocrites and are very poor messengers for this free speech cause, and that is true. The problem is that a lot of them actually don't care about the hypocrisy. They actually do want a sensor. But I have to say too, there's been the same hypocrisy, not just on the left, where a lot of people have suddenly discovered the importance of free speech principles now that they see that the people they agree with, namely pro-Palestinian advocates or anti-Israel advocates, are being censored, so many people say no, that's the censorship. This is wrong.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Even though they've been cheering censorship for years against their political enemies, many un-American right are doing exactly the same thing. I mean the reason why I become somebody who finds alignment with and, you know, kind of has a lot of support from people on the American right, despite long having been deemed by some to be on the left, is in part because of my advocacy of free speech, which they like, because in the last six or seven years a lot of the censorship was aimed at right-wing speech, starting on October 7th. I watched so many of those people I mean like people who built their entire brands and careers based on pretending to believe in free speech turn on a dime and start cheering all kinds of censorship and cancellation. So that's why I say it's been a very depressing two months. From a perspective of a civil libertarian is you have both sides proving they don't actually have any authentic free speech convictions, even though they claim they do, and they're each kind of lobbying, hypocrisy, accusations of the other, and both of them are correct.

Speaker 1: 16:39

And that reminds me, when I was speaking up right at Palumbo just a few weeks ago, that it seems as if free speech and this principle stand has become an issue of the politically homeless, that both sides really reject it or embrace it, the paying on the circumstances Like most nobly. You have suddenly been Shapiro, who was built an entire business and career off defending free speech and going against certain DEI initiatives, such as and Barry Weisz, and Barry Weisz as well. Yeah, no.

Speaker 2: 17:12

And Dave Rubin.

Speaker 1: 17:14

Yeah, I mean, there's a laundry list of people, unfortunately. So. And when you go through all these people, specifically for Shapiro that I saw even embracing racial quotas, like he later went back. And for a certain company coming down saying we're going to open up 180 job recs exclusively for Jewish students the Jewish students, excuse me, because they're facing like harassment and we want to create a space for them where they can thrive and Tim saying this is great, thank you or love. This, I think, was the exact name.

Speaker 2: 17:44

And then a few hours. Love this.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Yeah, and then a few hours later saying, well, it should be open to everyone. So it's as you mentioned starting off. It is depressing because it's like I thought we were like aligned on this, like we may not be aligned on everything, but I thought like there was at least some you know noble faction people that were aligned on, like free speech, even when it wasn't convenient to you, but, as you mentioned, like flipping on dime on. When this happens, when this occurs on an issue that you actually support I guess the majority view and then it's the people who you believe are out there saying things that you don't like and you think are this, and that it's like, oh, now we have to like shut their speech down, and that's the depressing part. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:30

Yeah, you know, and I do think, first of all, there have been some notable exceptions, I mean like Tucker Carlson and Keith O'Nan's and I think like, most importantly, fireorg, which became very popular among conservatives because they were the only ones defending right-wing speech. You know, the ACLU does very occasionally, but not really so much anymore and Fireorg has been unflinching in doing things like condemning Governor DeSantis for trying to close down a pro-Palestinian group in the University of Florida system and just in general, you know, kind of waging war on any attempt to erode free speech in the name of protecting Israel, which they should be doing. But it's risky for them to do that because a lot of their donors and a lot of their supporters are conservatives, just like when the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, illinois, in 1977, a lot of the ACLU's donors, most of them in fact, were Jewish and they lost so many donors from having done that that they almost went bankrupt. They became very close to no longer being able to exist. The ACLU did because of that free speech stance.

Speaker 2: 19:36

I think one of the things important to realize is that we're all human beings, which means we all have the same kind of general DNA and drive, and one of the things that shapes us is that we are tribalistic. We evolved for thousands and thousands of years where we needed tribal acceptance, we needed to kind of see the world as our tribe versus them, and everybody who evolved to this point has a component of that in them. So there's a natural tendency to view the world tribalistically. And then I think there's also, you know, people feel very strongly about some issues. You know people are Totzen's birth, if you're an American Jew, if you're an American evangelical to view Israel not just as an important country but as, like, the most important country, the thing that God wants you to protect. And these are very strong passions and we all have that, you know.

Speaker 2: 20:29

We all have things that people say we're like wait, this is really dangerous, this is really bad. None of us is immune from that tendency, that temptation, but I think our obligation is to make sure that we're fighting against that as much as we can in order to adhere to our principles. And I've always had with free speech that for me, people who are standing up and defending free speech when it comes time to defend the right of people who agree with them to speak, that's a work-less physician. Nothing is easier in the world than doing that. The times when it matters really the only times when it matters are when the views that you most hate are the ones under attack, and what you do in that situation is the only real determinant for whether or not you have a free speech conviction.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Yeah, I think there's actually an excellent, actually, mlk quote that goes into this, where he once said that you judge the character of a man not where he stands in times of comfort and convenience. You judge the character of a man where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. And this is the time of challenge and controversy. I did a brief monologue on why this should be rejected, this notion of restricting speech. And now you have Nobel alumni or faculty, excuse me at like Eupen, claire Finkelstein, specifically coming out and running the op-ed in the Washington Post saying we have to restrict speech to combat anti-semitism and she kind of just dismisses the notion that you fight hate speech with more speech and we are everyone over it, like the whole thing when hate speech. But I believe she received a lot of pushback for that.

Speaker 1: 22:04

But even regardless it's, you have to like put yourself, you have to imagine yourself kind of in the position of someone on the other person's side. And when, even if you're not a political person this is about trying to communicate too like if you're not a political person, you're kind of just like what you're going with, what your gut tells you, it's like okay, that's fair. Simultaneously, just think about controversial opinion you do have. Like it could be anything whatsoever If there was the majority coming out saying like, disagreeing with you. Do you think it's like appropriate whatsoever for someone to try and restrict how you like speak on it? Probably not. Like there's very like few cases where it should be restricted and a lot of people call the incitement to violence and I was curious on like what they're referring to, like the second, the violence and how it's not protected and most likely they're referring to like the imminent lawless action which was it was a separate Brandenburg Brandenburg.

Speaker 2: 22:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Versailles, ohio, 1969. Thank you, and with that Supreme Court rolling, that's what kind of made the distinction where there's actually this directed, likely chance of violence in the moment or near future where that speech would not be protected. Excuse me, and referencing directly that hearing, the congressional hearing we saw that the former president of UPenn, liz McGill. She stated that speech that was so severe and pervasive will be classified as target harassment, and I think she said that more than once. I was curious, like why is she using? Like why severe and pervasive? Not that I like to disagree, but it's like this language that she's returning to and personally, after looking up, and I believe like she's directly referring to the 99 Supreme Court rolling in Davis versus Monroe County Board of Education, which the Supreme Court did find a school board could be liable for student on student harassment if it is quote so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive and that so it undermines and detracts from the victim's educational experience that the victim students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Unquote, however, like this is once again more a deviation from UPenn's own policies. In 2019, they actually changed their guide to sexual harassment and, among other policies, and defined it as any un-wanted verbal conduct. That quote has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working or study environment. Unquote. And someone could easily argue that these protests are kind of cultivating that on campus and that's why it's so pernicious that when you kind of have these well-intended policy changes, for whatever reason, that these could be the effects that someone could easily argue that this is, quote unquote like sexual harassment or harassment just at large, based on UPenn's own policies. So it's almost as like that congressional hearing when the representative, elise Saphonic like she was almost right in a sense about her like questioning their policies because those policies do align with what she was saying. Not that I agree with those policies nonetheless, but it's just an interesting point out that the representative is right on the school's own policies but is wrong from a free speech First Amendment perspective and is, yeah, I disagree on that end.

Speaker 2: 25:35

The problem here. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier about hate speech. I made the obvious point that hate speech is subjective. But then this other point that to some extent a lot of political speech is based in hatred and a lot of that speech is speech that almost everybody would agree should be permitted. Same thing is true with incitement to violence. If you think about it, almost any political stance you take has the potential to incite violence.

Speaker 2: 26:00

Bill O'Reilly one of his big issues when he was at the peak of his fame and influence on Fox News was he would report on individual abortion doctors who were performing a large number of abortions or were promoting their abortion procedures in a way that Bill O'Reilly thought was offensive. Bill O'Reilly was a Catholic. He's pro-life and very anti-abortion. One of the doctors on whom he most focused ended up being murdered by a pro-life activist, shot outside of his clinic. Obviously there was an attempt to say Bill O'Reilly was responsible for that murder because his criticism of this doctor is what provoked somebody to go and murder. Maybe that was even true. Maybe that person did hear about this doctor from Bill O'Reilly. I don't remember all the details, but this is true for every position that you can take. So in 2018, there was a person who went to a softball field in Washington DC where he knew that Republican Congress members gathered on Saturday to play softball and he went and he shot up a bunch of them, tried to kill as many as he could and he shot Steve Scalise, the Republican House whip, and almost killed him. Turns out he was a huge fan of Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow and was constantly posting every day what they were saying that Republicans are Putin apologists, that they are Kremlin agents, that they're white supremacists, that they want to bring fascism to the United States. Obviously, if you go on the air every day and say the Republican Party or white supremacists do want to bring fascism to the United States, there's a chance so many of your audience might get so inspired by what you're saying and so full of hatred that they will go and want to murder in that cause.

Speaker 2: 27:38

There was a famous politician in Holland in 2003, Pym Fortune, who was gay but he was right-wing and he was very popular and he was almost about to win the prime ministership, and an environmental activist went and murdered him because he was mocking climate change. That is why we have to be so careful with this notion that speech that incites violence can be suppressed, because all political speech other than the most anodyne and banal has the potential to inspire violence. That's why the case in Brandenburg is so important, because what it said is the only kinds of speech that you can restrict based on this incitement ground are where you have a crowd gathered outside someone's house with torches and you say go burn down that person's house. That's what it means by inciting imminent lawless action that you're basically. It's kind of like you can't have a mafia boss who gathers people and says, go murder that person, and then his underlings go and murder a person and then he says, no, I have free speech, I didn't do the murder, I just told them to do the murder. You have to have that exception in part of it. It has to be extremely narrow.

Speaker 2: 28:51

Again, you're absolutely right that these campuses have been engaging in a crusade for censorship for all these years, that when they stand up and defend free speech and invoke free speech principles, it does make it seem like the reason they're doing that is not because of any belief in free speech, but because their support for this one cause, namely criticism of Israel or the pro-Palestinian cause.

Speaker 2: 29:15

Like we were saying earlier, here's now a case where it's a group of people who have used the fees university presidents agree with and now suddenly they're pretending to be free speech activists.

Speaker 2: 29:25

The one thing I do want to add to this, which I think has been overlooked in a lot of instances, is that, as somebody who's been reporting on free speech for a long time, and then as somebody who did a lot of work on the First Amendment when I was a litigator, a constitutional lawyer, before I became a journalist, one of the most common forms of censorship in the United States, both in general and on college campuses specifically, has been censorship of Israel critics, censorship of pro-Palestinian students.

Speaker 2: 29:55

I think there's a lot of people on the right. I'm hearing a lot of people on the right justify what is being done by saying oh, look, it's fine. Finally time for the left to understand what censorship is and to finally make them live under the rules that they themselves have imposed, when in reality, this is a very common form of censorship for a long time to censor Israel critics. And I've been talking for many years now telling my new friends on the American right that I know you, think you're the faction that defends free speech and in many cases you are, but the American right has long had an Israel exception to its free speech advocacy that I think you should be alert to and aware of not falling into that trap.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And when you say, like getting a taste of your own mess and that reminds me of when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, and then there was some censorship on the left and people on the right were like, huh, your turn now.

Speaker 1: 30:54

But right there, in that very moment, you forego that principled stance and you almost justify the actions that were taken against you beforehand by the other side because it wasn't about the principles, about losing and winning, which is so. I think you know I'm the president in today's politics that it's not really about what is best for the person or best for the principle or this country's society or the case may be, but rather just a winning and losing and kind of under the guise of whatever you know virtue signal or something else may be, they kind of they try to like leverage themselves. So when they're the minority, like oh, we're taking the principled stand because that's like the only thing you could justify you know, that's where you can lean on when you think you're kind of losing, but once you get the majority, it's like we have the power, I don't care for you like abuse that or not, like we're the ones who are winning this, and I find that extremely problematic.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Yeah, I mean I'm not entirely opposed in all cases to a kind of tactic that requires people who are imposing standards on other people to force them to live under those standards, even if those standards are unjust. So you know, democrats and liberals have been lecturing and condemning people in border towns, forever telling them that they're racist because they're concerned about the number of immigrants arriving in their communities. And so a lot of Republican governors who live in these, who govern these states overrun by newly arrived immigrants, decided to send a lot of them to New York and DC and Chicago. And then, of course, suddenly these Democratic governors and mayors started saying wait, we can't, we're not equipped to handle these number of people. We need to do something at the border.

Speaker 2: 32:43

There are times when it can be justified to force people to live under an unjust standard they're imposing on others in order for them to realize that it's unjust and to kind of cause them to start advocating no longer for its maintenance, but it's undermining. The problem here is that there are two problems. One is, you know, when I was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on his ex-show early on as part of this war, maybe a couple of weeks after October 7, three or four weeks, and the point he made was you know, through a whole series of interesting and kind of almost coincidental events, it's the American right that has now become the primary champions of free speech. That has always been a left-wing cause. I mean, like the free speech movement began at Berkeley, you know, a lot of the justices wrote the key First Amendment decisions that, like Brandenburg and others, were often left-wing jurists. But it is the American right, for all these reasons, that have become the primary opponents of censorship. And what he said was to watch them turn on a dime this way in order to protect this foreign country. He said he's very concerned that they've lost all credibility in the future to stand up and eject because everybody just watched them cheer censorship the minute it became an issue that they really believed in.

Speaker 2: 34:01

The other problem with it is that I just don't believe. I do not believe that the reason a lot of people on the right are cheering censorship is because of this hypocrisy angle Because, like I said, censorship of Israel critics and pro-Palestinian voices has been going on for a long time, well before this kind of left-wing censorship a scandal on college campuses even emerged. I think a lot of them genuinely believe in the censorship of Israel critics. They don't want to admit that they believe in censorship, so they're masquerading it as just kind of a attempt to force the left to have a case to their own medicine.

Speaker 2: 34:40

So even if it were justified, I think it's very questionable about whether it's wise. But even if it's wise, I don't believe that's what's going on for a lot of them. Some of them probably feel that way, like, oh, I'm against censorship, but if we're going to have censorship, the left should have to live under it too. But I think that a lot of people who just believe again that Israel is such an important cause that when they hear criticisms of Israel, especially harsh ones, they hear it as something over the line, as something just different in type that is not like the kinds of ideas that have been censored in the past.

Speaker 1: 35:15

Yeah, and I think that goes into the discerning, the criticism between anti-Zionism, anti-semitism, like oftentimes they could go together for sure, but they're not mutually exclusive and the house passing that resolution that kind of binds them together. That makes it problematic. For those same reasons, if you should be able to critique a political system, like crystal ball on breaking points makes this point all the time Like you should be able to critique a political system without being labeled like a this or that. And this is what the reason I mentioned this, because that's what that resolution and proponents of are effectively doing. They're making it like above the law, that you can't criticize everything below it.

Speaker 1: 35:56

But once you get there you have to stop. You just can't do it. And we don't even have that in the United States. No one's advocating that. You know, if you criticize the United States then you should be thrown in jail. It's just odd that this is happening for this foreign state which a lot of people have close ties to, and I can understand that. But it's like you wouldn't do that here, would you? And like no, why would I ever do that? It's like well, why are you trying to do it for, like over there? It's really bizarre. I try to empathize with it and it's almost like this, just this bizarre scenario that people get thrown into and have to deal with.

Speaker 2: 36:29

Yeah, I mean first of all again, this is kind of the part of the hypocrisy that we haven't talked about which was it's not just censorship and it's not just cancellation, but one of the main grievances that the American right over the past say six or seven years really. A lot of this emerged with Donald Trump. A grievance I supported was that one of the primary tactics of the left, of the of left liberals in the United States, is, when they have a viewpoint with which they disagree, they can't engage it on the merits. What they instead try to do is to say it's tantamount to some form of bigotry, that anybody who advocates it is not engaged in some sort of good faith political debate but instead just hates members of a minority group. And it's the same thing. Are there people who are opposed to immigration because they're white nationalists and don't want non-white people entering the United States? Yes, some people who are opposed to immigration are opposed to immigration because they're white nationalists. That doesn't mean that everybody who opposes immigration is doing it for racist reasons, even though some of the people who are guilty of that. Are there some people who oppose affirmative action because they're anti-black racists? Yes, there are some people opposed to affirmative action because they are, they're actually racist. But obviously there's a huge number of people opposed to affirmative action who are not that. So these positions are not inherently bigoted.

Speaker 2: 37:52

So are there people who are opposed to Zionism because they're anti-Semitic? Yes, of course there are, but it doesn't make anti-Zionism inherently anti-Semitic. In fact, zionism is a very new ideology. It didn't exist until the early parts of the 20th century. It was a very controversial ideology, even among Jews in Europe and all throughout the world. And even now there are religious sects of Judaism that view Zionism as incompatible with Judaism and who are anti-Zionists. There are all kinds of people who are anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.

Speaker 2: 38:30

And even if it were true that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, it's not. But even if it were true, you still don't want the United States Congress being in the business of issuing decrees, as you said, about what the outer boundaries of political discourse are. That is not the job of the United States Congress to do even an advisory role. Because what that means is, once the United States Congress says that a certain view is bigoted, obviously citizens, especially ones who are vulnerable to firing and all kinds of things, will not want to be associated with a view or they will be afraid to express a view that the United States Congress has just characterized as inherently bigoted.

Speaker 2: 39:13

And again, it's just so stunning to watch all these people on the American right, who have been objecting to these kinds of formalized attempts to chill political speech, now suddenly be applauding it.

Speaker 2: 39:30

And I think that they are really doing themselves a huge disservice, because the people who are imposing the censorship against Israel critics it's not the American right. I think there's a lot of people on the American right who think like oh, finally, I'm in charge of the censorship regime instead of being its victim. The only reason, the only reason Israel critics are being censored is because the establishment in the United States is pro-Israel Democrats and the establishment Republicans, centrists, the power centers are all pro-Israel, so the American right are not the ones in control of the censorship regime. Suddenly they're just passengers, they're just cheerleaders on the sideline applauding for it because they happen to be aligned with the establishment and their pro-Israel views. But by strengthening and fortifying the system, very soon, once this war is over and we move on to other things, that system will again be used against the very people cheering it now, and they are acting completely against their own self-interest, beyond all the hypocrisy and other kinds of criticisms we voiced of them.

Speaker 1: 40:38

And I believe you were recently on the Piers Morgan show speaking about this in the panel and I was just curious on what you thought of because I saw your one post on how you were being interrupted and you couldn't really express that view on, say, alc Jones being brought back to Twitter or whatever the case may be, and I'm curious on kind of what your experience has been on these different programs and how you think people, how effective you think it is like this kind of fight for free speech and persuading people that hey, we shouldn't be censoring or we shouldn't be restricting.

Speaker 2: 41:17

Well, it's funny. In general, I have an absolute rule that.

Speaker 2: 41:20

I do not participate in panel discussions on television because they just always are. They just always degrade into a circus that I think just like ends up demeaning everybody involved. You have to like scream and fight for it to be heard and yelling over people and fighting about being interrupted, and it's usually just bickering and it's like an attempt to like just have people say, oh, you kicked that. I just I hate the whole thing. Obviously, at the beginning of my career I did a lot of those things because when you're starting off and you don't have any choices, you take what you can get in order to have a platform to be heard. But I have an absolute I do not do panel Like. You have to go back many, many years to find me participating in a panel on television. And the first time I was on with Piers to talk about the war itself, I was on with this crazy woman and the only reason I went on is because I didn't know I was going to be part of a panel. They asked me to come on. I said yes. It was only like literally 30 seconds before the segment began when I heard them doing a sound check with other people that I realized I was part of a panel and I almost hung up and it was just a crazy person who just was ranting and raving and saying the most deranged stuff and I ended up, you know, leaving saying God, why, why should have hung up, and I don't know why. I said yes this time. I didn't know it was going to be part of the panel, because I asked, but it just kind of affirmed my decision not to be part of the panel. I will never do that again, unless it's like a very carefully selected one and it's a format designed to foster real debate. It's just, it's what happens is this sort of thing, and I just I hate it. It's never constructive or nutritious for anybody. But I do think it's ironic that Piers Morgan views himself as a extreme free speech proponent. The name of the show is uncensored and yet I have heard him many times advocating censorship because there's certain things that are a bridge too far for him. And I think what this illustrates is for as many critiques I have about the United States and our political culture and I have a long, long, long list of them but one thing that we do actually still do better than most, if not all, countries is we inculcate people to believe that free speech is a universal value, like an extremist version of actually wrote about this when I right, when I started writing about politics in 2006,. That my own blog.

Speaker 2: 43:35

And there's this British historian, david Irving, who is known as a Holocaust denialist, a Holocaust revisionist or denialist. He is that, and in Western Europe and a lot of states in Western Europe, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust or to revise, to engage in Holocaust revisionism, and he was put on trial, I believe in Austria, and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. And to Western Europeans this seems totally normal. This is there's not even European.

Speaker 2: 44:01

You know people on the European right, like the mainstream European right, objected this. They think this is how it should be, and I read an article basically saying that. For as much you know constant disagreement that people on the American left and the American right have with each other. It's interesting this is one kind of unifying value that as Americans, we just all instinctively believe that people shouldn't go to prison because their political views or scholarly views were worse still, are deemed to be crimes. I think that has changed a lot and I think that has eroded a lot, but I think in Pierce Morgan you kind of see that even a British person who wants to be, who wants to situate themselves on the far end extreme of being in pro free speech, still has an advocacy of censorship that you, an American ear, comes off as authoritarian.

Speaker 1: 44:50

Yeah, and wrapping up here, but really pleased you said that because when it's just research and searching briefly like different countries free speech protections, like there are a number of countries that have like semi strong free speech protections in the Constitution, but it's really about like we abide under free speech but none of which have Congress like their constitutional body as such, as we do in the United States, will not make any law impeding on free speech or infringing on free speech, which is the key difference, because laws can be changed, guidelines to be over like written and ignored. But only here in the United States do we have the actual like wording in our like Bill writes in our constitutional say body that you cannot like the Congress cannot infringe upon that, which is a key difference compared to just saying, oh, we like abide under free speech.

Speaker 2: 45:45

Yeah, the UK has no constitution. You know and I was doing this note in reporting and I was doing it at first with the Guardian in the UK there were widespread calls for the Guardian editors and for me, the reporters, to be criminally prosecuted, and that was the first time. I've always known that British don't have a constitution because they're a monarchy. So you can't have a monarchy in the Constitution restricting the rule of the monarch, because the whole idea of the monarchy is they are the ones anointed by God to rule. So you wouldn't make sense to have a list of freedoms that emanate from the people that impose limits on the monarchies. They don't. And in modern day life it actually matters because there's no constitution to which you can appeal. If the Congress or the parliament wants to use something, there's nothing limiting them from doing it. They now they did end up being restricted by the EU, which does have a kind of convention, and that's one of the reasons there was so much of a desire to leave the EU, so that they didn't have their own sovereignty constricted by this document that supersedes the decisions of the body. But in general this is the case.

Speaker 2: 46:50

I live in Brazil. I've lived here for 18 years and there has been censorship controversies Recently. A lot of this comes from the attempt to censor the internet, which obviously is becoming the primary means by which we communicate, by which people receive their news, and when you have these kind of earth shattering anti-elite movements the election of Donald Trump and Brexit here in Brazil, the election of Jair Bolsonaro the elite have been panicking and saying we can't allow free speech anymore, because when you allow people to speak freely without our control and guidance and limits, they go crazy and they start doing things that are insane, that we don't want. It's a very anti-democratic impulse and I became one of the leading people in Brazil standing up and saying this is authoritarian. You can't have this kind of censorship. The way to beat the Brazilian right in Bolsonaro is not a legitimate means to feed them, to censor and make illegal those opinions, and I had been really supported by the Brazilian left up until that point because a lot of the work that I did benefited the Brazilian left in terms of my reporting, and they immediately turned against me because they don't even pretend in Brazil to be even free speech.

Speaker 2: 47:57

They believe free speech is a right-wing, fascist concept and increasingly so does Western Europe, one of the most repressive laws is a law that the UK adopted and then followed by the EU. The UK is called the Online Safety Act, the EU is called the Digital Services Act, there's one in Canada, now there's one in Ireland. That's worse than all of them. What they're doing is they're kind of, that hasn't passed yet, but they're trying to exploit these riots as a means of saying we need more control on hate speech. So every time one of these countries moves just a little bit further, it signals to those other countries they can go further too. And we are really heading toward this dystopian framework where, increasingly, governments control the things we can say on the internet, which, increasingly, is the only meaningful form of free speech that matters, and that's where every most political discourse takes place, and I don't really think there's an issue of greater importance than that 100% well, glenn, it's been an absolute pleasure, really fascinating conversation and just closing things up, where can people go to support you?

Speaker 1: 49:03

keep up with what you're doing and your work? What channels and pages should people look to?

Speaker 2: 49:10

Yes, I have a nightly show, monday through Friday that's live at 7pm, eastern on Rumble, called System Update, and as part of that we have a platform on Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform that operates like Substack, which I left to go join Rumble, where we do a lot of written journalism and a lot of written interaction with our subscribers that people can do there, obviously, on Twitter Axe rather, and other social media platforms. I'm there as well, other than TikTok, where our show got banned, but I think it's now been reinstated. So, anyway, I'm around and people have no trouble. I've never heard complaints that people have a problem finding me, but those are the places people can go. And, yeah, I want to congratulate you on the work you're doing. We got the invite, we looked into it and I told my team like, yeah, let's do this. I like to appear on newer platforms, ones that are growing, if I think they deserve a bigger audience. So, congratulations on what you're doing and I hope you'll keep it up.

Speaker 1: 50:08

Really appreciate that, glenn, and for anyone listening, please take a look out on Glenn's shows. They're also available on Spotify and Apple, which is where I usually tune into, right, exactly.

Speaker 2: 50:16

You're a better PR person than I am for myself. But, yeah, thank you for noting that.

Speaker 1: 50:20

Of course. Well, take care, glenn and I'll see you guys. We'll talk soon.