Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Should We Ban Hate Speech After Bondi?" with Andrew Lowenthal

Transcript

"Should We Ban Hate Speech After Bondi?" with Andrew Lowenthal · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Andrew Longthorl is with us if you're joining us on the live stream.
• 0:06
  There's lots going on in Australia and I think this is a useful time to touch base about
• 0:10
  it because in a global context where so much is happening abroad and we could be talking
• 0:15
  about Iran or Trump or whatever, Australians are focused on things that are also relevant
• 0:23
  to everybody else but just not pressing right now.
• 0:26
  Free speech, hate speech, jihadism, terrorism, not cancellation, not workness, literary festivals
• 0:34
  where people get uninvited, gun law reform, basically in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack.
• 0:42
  There's a lot of hubbub in Australia about should we at a state or federal level introduce
• 0:48
  more restrictions on guns. There seems to be a broad consensus that we should, except for on the
• 0:54
  conservative side of politics, the very conservative side of politics I should say because the mainstream
• 0:59
  conservative party is broadly in support of reforming gun laws to make them more strict.
• 1:04
  Then there's a parallel conversation about hate speech and free speech and what the contours of
• 1:10
  that should be. So the state government, correctly if I'm wrong in briefing any of this,
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  wants to introduce hate speech legislation that would outlaw intimidating slogans
• 1:24
  and vilification of racial and ethnic groups. Some people who are more pro hate speech laws
• 1:33
  and more anti-free speech want to expand that to include groups like LGBTQIA plus people.
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  The Muslim council of Australia wants to make sure that religion is included as a category
• 1:45
  so that it's hate speech. Why is that a plus for me?
• 1:49
  Well, we're certain that it's hate speech to criticize religions.
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  That is blasphemy law.
• 1:54
  Yeah, that's a blasphemy law, yeah, basically.
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  And at the same time, we've also got this concurrent and supposedly unrelated but thematically
• 2:04
  very much-related brujaha where Australia's largest literary festival, the Adelaide Riders Festival,
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  has had to be cancelled after almost all of the invitees boycott at the festival and walk
• 2:18
  out just weeks before it began because the festival uninvited a Palestinian Australian writer who
• 2:24
  had said things that were certainly anti-Zionist and probably edging up towards
• 2:30
  anti-Jewish and certainly participating in a narrative that a lot of people who are on the
• 2:37
  more pro-Israel or pro-Jewish side of things felt was insensitive especially in the wake of
• 2:44
  the Bondi terrorist attacks. So there's a lot of pouring over the tea leaves of that and saying,
• 2:49
  should she have been cancelled? How was she cancelled? Was she in the festival board a hypocrite
• 2:55
  for claiming that their free speech warriors at the same time as they had actually already
• 2:59
  participated in cancellations of themselves of their own at the very same festival? And into this
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  fray, Steph's the one and only Andrew Longthorne. Oh, carrying the flag of freedom.
• 3:10
  All the way. You've worked in the United States. You have an online freedom network which is called
• 3:21
  not love but leader net as in freedom net and it's for the Germans because you're a Nazi obviously.
• 3:29
  So you've called it a German name in the eyes of many on the left. Situators, what should I care
• 3:35
  about in what order? I mean, that was such a list even I thought there was a lot going on. I
• 3:41
  think some of that is quite pressing I would say. That was probably on your path. I mean, where?
• 3:49
  No, I mean, I was serious in that it seems, each one in isolation seems like a nothing burger
• 3:54
  in comparison to potential war with Iran. But it also, they also touch on these very deep themes
• 4:00
  that we've all been wrestling with for the past decade, which is free speech, hate speech,
• 4:05
  cancellation. What can you say? What can't you say? How should democracies tolerate extreme
• 4:11
  opinions and so on and so forth? But also, as we were kind of saying, kind of in the whole way,
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  I think it's actually a question about who we are. What is an Australian who's an Australian
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  collectively? Who are we? Etc. And I think Australia is quite confused about that or grappling
• 4:28
  with that because there's a lot of kind of new things happening, a lot of conversations,
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  it didn't used to have to happen. And a lot of an extreme inability to have uncomfortable
• 4:39
  conversations. I mean, I'm not Australian, but I mean, it's certainly not. Not just in America
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  going, well, yeah, Nick Fuentes, Rottaka Carlson, Ken and so on. And we're obviously nowhere near
• 4:50
  as far down the kind of like path of like insanity as many other places in the world,
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  I and it would be good to not go down that path. But I feel like we have taken several steps
• 5:00
  in that direction. And I think the Adelaide Festival is actually a good example of the kind of
• 5:05
  having taken too many steps down that pathway, where we're essentially in this kind of proxy
• 5:12
  wars of cancellation, where people are doing it on all sides. So, you know, the person who was
• 5:20
  cancelled from the Adelaide Festival, as you mentioned, I don't think she should have been
• 5:24
  cancelled. I don't think of what she says is very nice at all. Not that nicest is necessarily
• 5:31
  kind of the the metric. But I mean, it's interesting that she would even fit within the
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  other ten window because she's she's, she's, I imagine there's a lot more moderate Palestinians
• 5:41
  and that could have been invited. And yet she was kind of put on the platform. I'm not sure about
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  that. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think she was beyond the pale in the sense that if you're going
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  to pander to the anti Zionist position, then it's very difficult to do so without the, I mean,
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  it's very likely that the person is going to regard, well, should we just put some flesh on
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  the bones of what it is that she said so that we're not, we're not wrestling with a ghost here.
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  So for people who haven't followed this, this writer, this Palestinian Australian writer,
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  Randard Bill Futter, on the day after the October 7th attacks, she apparently posted an image
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  on Facebook of a parachuteist with the Palestinian flag, which seemed insensitive.
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  In 2024, she tweeted, the goal is decolonization and the end of this murderous Zionist colony.
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  So yeah, end of this murderous Zionist colony is, whilst that is obviously
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  extreme in the sense that it's calling for a nation to be annihilated, basically, it is also
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  consistent with the broadly accepted Palestinian view of the world, which is that it's not just,
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  this isn't just about the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. This is fundamentally
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  about whether or not there should be a Jewish ethno state in the region or what Palestinians should
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  control that land. And in 2024, she also reshared those leaked details of 600 Australian Jews who were
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  in a, they were creatives and academics, they were not political activists or, you know,
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  political Zionists. In fact, I was added to this list for a period and subsequently,
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  they were all doxed as if they were, you know, legitimate targets of hate just because they were
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  Jewish. So she participated in that doxing. And then she and nine other academics sent a letter to
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  the Adelaide Festival Board Chair and to its director and to its CEO asking them to rescind
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  an invitation to Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist. Subsequently, he was
• 7:52
  disinvited, although they said that he couldn't attend due to a scheduling clash.
• 7:57
  Yes, we seriously confirmed, I think as well. Well, no, he confirmed, they made it sound like
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  there was a scheduling clash between his schedule and the festival. He just confirmed that he was
• 8:09
  invited and then received the follow up email, uninviting him due to a scheduling clash on their path.
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  And he said there was no scheduling clash on his part. And then the latest news this morning is
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  that a fellow board member of the Adelaide Festival has broken ranks and said, no, actually,
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  the board director, Louise Adelaide did cancel Friedman. He's broken the silence on the board
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  thing and said that it wasn't a scheduling thing. And then Louise Adelaide's only
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  response is to say, I can't believe that a board member would break the secrecy of the board,
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  not to deny that. This is incredibly unprofessional of him. So when Adelaide, who I know a bit
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  and who I like and so I don't want to make it seem like I'm throwing her under the bus, but you
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  know, these are her words. She announced her resignation as director of the Adelaide Festival in
• 9:00
  the Guardians. Oh, announced. Right. She announced it, saying that she can't be party to the
• 9:07
  silencing of this Palestinian Australian writer. And she said, I can't be parties to silencing
• 9:11
  writers. So with a heavy heart, I'm resigning from my role as the director, writers and writing
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  matters, even when they're presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us, we need writers
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  now more than ever as our media closes up as our politicians grow daily more cowed by real power
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  as Australia grows more unjust and unequal, which just seems, does seem hypocritical because she
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  is an aunt. She believes in anti-Israel positions. She, you know, agitated for and supported and
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  enacted the cancellation of a prominent American voice in the form of Thomas Friedman. She participated
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  in the elevation and the platforming of an extremely anti-Israel voice. And then when that person
• 9:59
  was then canceled against her will under supposed pressure from the governor of South Australia,
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  who's like, sorry, the premier of South Australia, who's like the governor of an American state.
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  And then people resigned in protest. She makes it a free speech thing even at the same time
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  as she's obviously participated in the same thing in the other direction. So I don't
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  know. And also interestingly in that, let us make reference to I think psychosocial will being
• 10:28
  that like, like, calls for these things or kind of safety in these spaces is wrong. You shouldn't
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  call for these spaces to be safe, which is exactly what progressives have been doing forever
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  in the last kind of 10 years. And saying we'll note unsafe space. And actually one of the other
• 10:48
  ones that you could add to that list is that the same writer as such activist signed the
• 10:56
  letter to cancel Debra Conway, who's a prominent Australian pro-Israel singer. Oh, I missed that
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  bit. Is everyone from the Perth festival, along with 500 other kind of progressives.
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  Including you, I got a kind of online spat with a friend or I don't know what the status is
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  anymore. Because they essentially put up a post saying, oh, you know, this is what's going on
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  in Adelaide is so wrong free speech. Et cetera. And then I like looked at this letter. And I was
• 11:24
  like, oh, you're actually on that letter kind of thing as well. So this, I mean, this is on a letter
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  trying to cancel Debra Conway's musician from a festival. From a festival. And this is what is
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  so tricky, specifically, I think about the case of Palestine and Israel is that identity gets
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  very easily confused with politics in the sense that, you know, not that I want to sound like I'm
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  totally in favor of the cancellation of the Palestinian activist and writer. But she was cancelled for
• 11:56
  things she said. She wasn't cancelled for her ethnicity. Cancelling Debra Conway or doxing
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  Australian Jewish creatives is canceling them because of their ethnicity, not because of things
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  that they've said. The letter cited things that she said. Well, I mean, it's, I know there were
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  ridiculous because it was saying that these that was creating an unsafe space. And it's highly
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  likely that a Jewish person is going to have a that a lay left wing Jewish person is going to have
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  a more conflicted and nuanced attitude towards the war in Gaza than either a fully a full-throated
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  defender of Palestinians will or a person who's just, you know, a lay person who all they do is see
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  images of murdered babies. And that's the only conclusion that they can come to about what's
• 12:49
  going on over there. So needless to say, a Jewish Australian is likely to try to inject some kind
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  of qualifications into it, which can be misconstrued as being a defensive, like Zionist barbarism.
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  There was, I think there was actually, there were some qualifications around children and something,
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  something. And then, maybe I think the main point to zoom out is people are kind of trying to
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  cancel each other across the board. I mean, some would say it's more this or it's more that. And
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  this is the, I think what the Adelaide Festival is essentially like the kind of peak insanity of
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  this kind of like constant process of, I'm going to cancel you, I'm going to cancel you, etc,
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  etc. Rather than, if you don't like the speaker, don't turn up to the session. If you don't like the
• 13:32
  festival platform in the speaker, don't go to the festival. If you really don't like the festival,
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  rattle letter, like do a podcast, like do something. But I think basically operating in that
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  system, I mean, the people who resigned from the festival would say that that is what they're doing,
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  that they're like, it's tricky to know what is a patient is, is an endorsement and when
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  it's merely participation. But I mean, I think that's the problem. It's just like,
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  it's just because I'm, do I end up, am I endorse, am I, am I here now endorsing every single
• 14:02
  steam in the Josh sets? I certainly hope so. But like no one thinks that. Yeah. Well, no,
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  obviously, as you clearly, some people do. Some people do. And some people do think that because I
• 14:13
  have you on the show, I'm endorsing everything that you said. I mean, people will say, like,
• 14:16
  oh, you can't trust Josh, what Josh Zep says. You know, he talks to Candace Owens.
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  He talks to Tony Abbott. Talk to Tony Abbott. Even worse.
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  I mean, so there is this perception that if you like platform people,
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  yeah, I mean, but I think that's one of the things we absolutely have to get rid of. And I think
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  pointing out the hypocrisy of the kind of cross cancellation is one of the ways to do that.
• 14:40
  Okay. Everyone needs to stop doing this because it's just a kind of death spiral for kind of
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  conversations we have. And essentially eats away at our democratic fabric. But then what happens when
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  because there's a curation process in the appointment of these people in the first place.
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  It's not like these, like I wrestle a bit with this in the sense that I don't believe that people
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  should be hounded out of their jobs or that we should work behind the scenes to try to
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  coerce publishers or studios or networks or whatever into firing people,
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  ex-communicating them. We shouldn't be pressuring agents and managers from, you know,
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  publicists from not working with people because their ideas are beyond the pale,
• 15:28
  so that they're functionally excluded from society. But when it comes to the case of,
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  here is a literary festival that has made a conscious choice to elevate the views of this person
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  who is speaking on behalf of what many people would regard as being a deluded or deranged or
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  hate adjacent worldview. I'm speaking theoretically here. I don't know enough about, you know,
• 15:55
  this activist's work to know if that's true, but that's the perspective of the people who wanted
• 15:59
  her canceled. Then it's almost like the quote unquote cancellation is really just an expression of
• 16:11
  pulling back from an overly sympathetic stance towards a particular worldview rather than, like,
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  nobody's, I don't think, or nobody that I would support is trying to get her to render her
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  incapable of publishing future books or articles or going on podcasts or...
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  Well, you could argue that her being removed from the festival essentially does, and I think this
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  might be one of the arguments she's making, kind of taints her reputation or damage that then
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  does impinge upon her ability to make. Probably means she sells... Well, actually, now she's probably
• 16:45
  sold more. Now she's totally selling more books and now, et cetera, it's always probably that argument
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  in it might be hard to make, but you could also see another situation where for someone actually
• 16:55
  them being removed from a festival or something that does do kind of sustained reputational damage
• 17:00
  and does limit their ability to then go out and make money. I think it was in kind of hindsight.
• 17:06
  Well, I think in foresight you could have seen that this was a bad idea as far as I'm concerned
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  into the... I don't think she should have been. Invite someone, you live with it, okay? That's
• 17:15
  generally my attitude. You just might have a decision. And then if that now makes your festival
• 17:20
  look silly, then so be it, then you live with your decision, and then ask some difficult questions,
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  and say, why did you post this on October 8th in the context of post-bondai,
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  how do you situate your kind of past statements and activism? Well, I also don't know what the context
• 17:39
  to have a conference was that. It may have just been her having a platform to read a passage from
• 17:44
  her book, but then so change it up. We don't think this is enough, actually, given the new context.
• 17:50
  So we want to have a conversation with Josh Steps. Absolutely. Or something. Or another prominent
• 17:55
  Jewish Australian who's not a deranged, you know, Natalini. And no one would have near who person
• 17:59
  to engage with her. That's absolutely right. No one would have complained about. And I think
• 18:03
  that would have been the right response, because clearly what was done was a wrong response,
• 18:07
  and they've collapsed this whole festival, which, you know, and I think made the whole situation far,
• 18:14
  far worse. And so there's, there's some big much bigger problem here in terms of like,
• 18:20
  who's running these festivals, who's putting pressure? The people that the festivals don't seem
• 18:24
  to be at a resist sustained pressure, because such is this one. There's other ones and you can point
• 18:29
  to other festivals around the world. It was the Bendigo Riders festival. There was the Sydney
• 18:33
  Riders festival. Where the people in running the festival aren't really in charge of the festival.
• 18:39
  The kind of the mob is in charge of the festival. Right. And everyone's kind of preemptively
• 18:44
  thinking about what the mob or various different mobs might do and how they need to kind of program
• 18:50
  and curate as a result. And I think that you're a director, I mean, you're just a director of
• 18:57
  a festival. I mean, it's kind of important, but it's also kind of not that important. It's like,
• 19:01
  I mean, I think where it becomes more difficult is the public money question, because if they
• 19:06
  were all kind of independent festivals, then you go, well, you start your own festival, etc, etc.
• 19:12
  But here you are taking money from the public person. So there is a little bit of a
• 19:18
  zero sumeness in that sense. About it because someone else is not getting that public money.
• 19:24
  Still, it's like, I think you'll point someone for the duration and a period for three years or
• 19:29
  five years to run a festival. And then they get to run it the way they get to run it. But people
• 19:34
  don't like it. People don't like it. I think this kind of, there's just too much meddling.
• 19:39
  I mean, even though I, which means doesn't mean I probably disagree with like 90% of what gets
• 19:44
  programmed at cultural festivals in Australia. And I think sometimes the over the over the
• 19:50
  window they're drawing is either too narrow or too wide, but like that's life. Like you don't
• 19:57
  get to live inside your own over to window. Like you have to interact with other people's
• 20:02
  over some windows and deal with it, which isn't to say, like obviously some people say, well,
• 20:07
  her comments were so aggressive that they made me like not just uncomfortable, but like,
• 20:14
  fear for my seat. But that's bullshit. I mean, that's obviously. That would be the argument.
• 20:19
  Like the, the amount, you know, the conversation around safety is like, yeah, as we all know,
• 20:24
  so grossly inflated. I mean, I have so many, you know, Gen Z friends and colleagues who just
• 20:29
  talk about safety is like as if, as if it's just another synonym for comfort. So like, you know,
• 20:38
  I don't want to go out wearing, now I have, I have, I have, gay friends who'll be like, I don't
• 20:43
  want to go out wearing this because, you know, I'm frequently rendered, I'm frequently made to
• 20:49
  feel unsafe. And when I actually, what are they wearing? Well, it might be something flamboyant,
• 20:53
  right? But when I actually dig into it, that was, that was victim blaming, right? Well, what they
• 20:59
  mean is that someone will like raise an eyebrow or make a remark if they walk into a 7-11 and
• 21:07
  biopack a cigarette. So while they're wearing a dress tube or, you know, or whatever. Yeah,
• 21:12
  that's not, I mean, that could in some circumstances be an implied threat, but 90% of the time or more,
• 21:20
  that's going to be just someone finding it peculiar because it is peculiar in the context and
• 21:26
  remarking upon it. I didn't know if gay people smoked. Exactly. That's why you raised an eyebrow
• 21:31
  being like, really? Gen Z kind of owed $50 for a cigarette for a pack of cigarettes. But the
• 21:37
  public money thing is interesting because not only is it, does it introduce the phenomenon,
• 21:42
  you mentioned, which is the public money is scarce. So only money that's going towards ex-voice
• 21:48
  is not going towards why voice. But it also means that there's another entity in the room
• 21:54
  exerting influence, which is the state of the world. Yeah. And so it seems that in this case,
• 21:59
  the premier of the state, the governor had actually put in a call to a, a, a,
• 22:05
  come number who on the board, but the director or so the chair or something saying, I'm getting a lot
• 22:11
  of people who are contacting me who are concerned about this particular speaker. I'm definitely not
• 22:17
  saying that your funding will be withdrawn. He says he said. Yeah. And I'm not, this is not an
• 22:23
  instruction because we're all at arm's length. And this is not a business. You are absolutely
• 22:28
  independent. I just wanted to relate to you, my, you know, what I'm hearing. And of course,
• 22:33
  he was more explicit like in the media, where he didn't tell us that in terms of not in terms
• 22:37
  of the pressure he put on, but he just said, yeah, she should have been cancelled. Yeah.
• 22:40
  So he, he did heartily endorse the cancellation. I think that is a, the dangerous space.
• 22:46
  Definitely. As well where senior government officials are basically directly pressuring
• 22:52
  festivals about who they can and cannot. Yes. I mean, especially in the wake of snafu's like
• 22:57
  at the ABC where the former ABC chair, I debuts rose, would, it would insert herself into
• 23:02
  editorial decisions about who and who shouldn't be in the air. Someone who's hired for a week
• 23:06
  and had two or three days ago in the country for three days and then became a national like,
• 23:11
  you know, hero because I think that, I think this is also I think this, the people who are in
• 23:15
  charge do have, there's some competency problems in that there are these new kind of social phenomena
• 23:22
  that they don't know how to manage and handle. Like, they're in this kind of networked
• 23:27
  internet digital environment and they don't know how to deal when like this stuff pops up and
• 23:33
  they know how to deal with it when it was the 80s and then I'm not kind of being kind of doing
• 23:37
  an anti boomer rave, but maybe it's going to slightly sound like that. For some of them,
• 23:40
  they came of age in the 50s depending on who we're talking about. But I mean, it's like
• 23:46
  people are ill equipped. I think to deal with this new environment, the leadership of these
• 23:50
  kind of festivals and spaces and institutions don't know how to deal them because you kind of get,
• 23:55
  you know, having run a kind of medium-sized NGO, you kind of get a little bit kind of
• 24:03
  not trapped, but you kind of sometimes feel like you're being puppeteered by the staff and you're
• 24:08
  not really actually in charge because the staff have a lot more power now, which is good in many
• 24:14
  respects, but they also have this power of like insane reputational damage because you can just
• 24:19
  get on the internet and just start saying things about you and say, oh, this person's bad that
• 24:24
  because of X, Y and said, and you can't really do very much about it. You can go through defamation
• 24:29
  prophecies, et cetera, but you have this kind of children of the corn type, type situation where
• 24:35
  people in charge are not really in charge. And so this kind of, and somebody's a whole new
• 24:39
  authority model that needs to be developed. Well, they've come to believe that they're in charge.
• 24:44
  Well, yeah, they also exactly because I think they've just been way too cowed.
• 24:48
  They have, and they're too cowardly. They've been way too cowed, and they don't exert
• 24:51
  authority, which in some ways is interesting maybe going, this is kind of switch to the Trump
• 24:55
  administration, which is they've just kind of gone, or we just don't care, right? Because in some
• 25:01
  ways, the power of the kind of work was to get senior people in leadership to care about what
• 25:10
  the repercussions might be for them. And as soon as you start going, well, don't care, I'm not
• 25:14
  budding my tongue anymore. They lose all their power. I don't care about the consequences,
• 25:17
  et cetera. And then that's this kind of, I think as resulted, part of the backlash to that is
• 25:22
  resulted in this overly kind of muscular kind of, well, I really don't care. And I'm just like
• 25:29
  going to do whatever the hell want. And then it, and then that also just kind of fuels the whole
• 25:33
  cycle. Well, that's right. And whether they actually don't care about the marble, whether they
• 25:38
  just care more about the mob that claims to be pushing back against the people who were too
• 25:43
  sensorious on the left is another question. Like, you know, it's not like Trump and
• 25:48
  JD Vance and Stephen Miller are operating in an ecosystem that is detached from Megan Kelly,
• 25:57
  Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes. So like, there is, they've also got their cheerleaders
• 26:03
  and their mob. But I guess also all those people operate in an environment where they're economically
• 26:08
  secure, whereas some in that, even if the mob comes for them, like Ben Shapiro's people can
• 26:14
  donate more money to, he's going to be able to raise more capital for investments. Whereas if
• 26:18
  you're inside a kind of left wing space, essentially, your economic security is put at great risk
• 26:25
  because you're going to get removed from the, the economy, essentially, that you are part of.
• 26:31
  And so you're, you're, you have to, but I mean, if you, if you're Antoinette Latouf or you're
• 26:38
  this writer or you, you know, you are canceled for a reason, I mean, more like a weird adler kind of
• 26:46
  thing. So if someone comes, like the festive director kind of thing who's in that economy,
• 26:51
  yes, who's like a senior person running an issue, a kind of progressive style institution,
• 26:57
  they are, they can, they're much more at the mercy of the kind of work mob than like a kind of
• 27:07
  making Kelly is because like it's not making Kelly's not going to lose money or her position if
• 27:10
  the whole bunch of work people come for her. No, no, you're just saying what I'm saying. The analog
• 27:15
  would be that there is a right wing mob that fuels support for the Trump side of things. And
• 27:24
  that characterizes itself as being a reactionary backlash to the left wing mob. But I'm just
• 27:29
  disputing your characterization that the left has a mob. And then the right is just saying we're not
• 27:34
  going to do mob politics. I know I'm just sort of saying it's actually also a mob on the right.
• 27:41
  I don't really find itself by it in its opposition. I'm just saying that because they're outside of
• 27:45
  the kind of progressive economy, but they're not outside of their own mob economy. Oh, no,
• 27:50
  they're not. They have their own mob economy as well. And they can also have audience,
• 27:53
  capture, et cetera, et cetera. But they're outside. They don't have to worry about getting cancelled.
• 27:57
  No, no, in a way, well, they cancelations of mostly intramural. That's right. But they get
• 28:04
  cancelled by their own people. Yeah, that's exactly too far. You know, cancellation, I think,
• 28:08
  is mostly an intramural. Yes, definitely. It's obviously, I mean, almost by definition,
• 28:12
  because you have to have purchased within the clan in order to be able to exclude someone from
• 28:16
  the clan. If they're outside of the clan already, you've got nothing to cancel them from.
• 28:20
  I mean, the mob dynamics is really interesting that you say that because each side believes that
• 28:26
  they're not a mob, but that the other side is, right? So if you talk to one of the progressive
• 28:33
  types about what went on with the doxing of the Jewish creatives or the cancellation of Debra Conway,
• 28:39
  the Jewish musician. Which wasn't cancelled, but the attempt. The attempt.
• 28:43
  What they will, the mob that they will talk about is the nefarious network of fairly powerful
• 28:50
  Jewish Australians or Jewish people anywhere who use their connections to people in finance
• 28:56
  and the media and politics to influence things. So it's the WhatsApp group of, I think it was
• 29:04
  lawyers for Israel or something like that, who were an extremely prosynist group of lawyers who
• 29:11
  were agitating for the cancellation of people who were, you know, to pro-Palestinian or something
• 29:17
  after October 7th. That's what, that's where they regard as being the locus of sinister mob power
• 29:24
  to be. On the other side, people who are more skeptical about the pro-Palestinian or work
• 29:33
  left progressive mob will view the actual mob with power as being this loose network of
• 29:42
  social media motivated people whose sympathies are always deranged by algorithms and by their
• 29:48
  own cluelessness about complicated issues like the Middle East and who go on marches across the
• 29:52
  harbour bridge with people holding signs that say globalize the interferer, even if they don't
• 29:57
  really know what they're talking about and couldn't tell you what happened in 1967. And so each,
• 30:02
  you know, the people who are marching across the harbour bridge think that people in positions of
• 30:07
  power are too easily cowed by sinister powerful forces who are pulling strings behind the scenes.
• 30:17
  And the people who object to the people who are marching across the harbour bridge in favor of
• 30:22
  Gaza think that people in positions of power are too easily cowed by outrageous on Twitter
• 30:28
  and people writing earnest columns in the Guardian. And both sides are right. I mean,
• 30:33
  people in positions of power are too cowed by either the two cow, they're too afraid of mobs on
• 30:40
  Twitter and they're too afraid of angry letters from powerful individuals who are, you know,
• 30:46
  trying to get somebody fired. Yeah. But they're essentially operating in the same dynamic space,
• 30:52
  which is not to have a conversation, but essentially to exert other forms of power to
• 30:58
  like remove people's voices to silence them. And yes, and I agree, both, both, it's probably
• 31:03
  more than one. But across the spectrum, most people don't seem to think that like when they use the
• 31:09
  same tactics, they're doing anything wrong. Whereas I think the whole problem is the tactic
• 31:14
  full stop that need because everyone's essentially not everyone. Many people are contributing to
• 31:19
  essentially degeneration of the ability for us to have kind of sophisticated discourse
• 31:27
  about our society and where it is headed. And essentially that crumbles slowly, slowly, slowly
• 31:33
  into a kind of much less effective democracy. So I actually think in some, it's actually existential
• 31:39
  because you don't kind of see it, you don't see it crumbling like in real time or maybe there
• 31:44
  are moments where you kind of see it crumbling in real time like last week or this week,
• 31:49
  but it's just kind of ebbing. It does feel like it's ebbing away in a way. And if we don't find a
• 31:55
  new way to kind of do things, then we're just going to get trapped in this spiral. And so what's the
• 32:02
  circuit breaker? Because this isn't seem like Adelaide is going to be the circuit breaker.
• 32:05
  I mean, the backlash to the hate speech laws is interesting as a potential circuit breaker,
• 32:10
  because I was thinking the coalition and quite possibly the Greens were just going to go ahead
• 32:17
  with it. And now both of them have basically pulled out and said we're not. I mean, for different
• 32:21
  reasons, as you've seen, in some ways, the Greens did raise concerns about human rights and
• 32:26
  protest laws, but they're also saying, well, you need to add like another hundred groups
• 32:32
  to these hate speech laws, because you know, you've only, it's too narrow. It's not, it's not broad.
• 32:39
  They're like, we want to be able to engage in the hate speech that we want to engage in,
• 32:43
  namely hate speech against Jews, or you know, certainly coded hate speech against Jews,
• 32:49
  really over hate speech against Israel. And at the same time, we want to include a whole bunch
• 32:55
  of more protections for the people who we favor. And you can't do that. And you can't,
• 33:02
  none of this works essentially. This model of trying to kind of finagle every single little bit
• 33:08
  of micromanaging like speech is just, it's impossible. And the kind of proposals they are just going
• 33:13
  to end up essentially, we've been kind of quite fortunate of not going down the kind of UK. Well,
• 33:19
  not as far down the kind of UK line of all these kind of, you know, police door knocks and people
• 33:24
  getting arrested for tweets and like that largely to my understanding hasn't happened in Australia,
• 33:30
  but essentially these laws. Just explain what you're talking about in the UK for people who are
• 33:33
  out across it. I mean, my understanding is that the specific is that there are 12,000 arrests
• 33:40
  or visits per year in the UK from police for often what are called non-crime hate incidents.
• 33:48
  I think they've started to pull back a little bit on those because they just got so non-crime
• 33:53
  hate incident could be your grandmother writing on Facebook. There are too many migrants in this
• 34:00
  country or you know Muslims should go to where they came from. I don't recognize my street.
• 34:06
  But I mean sometimes they're more, they're more serious than that as well. If they're really more
• 34:12
  serious than they can reach the threshold of a crime. Well, yeah, exactly. They don't reach
• 34:17
  the threshold of qualification or intimidation or incitement. Yeah, then it would be in a different
• 34:22
  category presumably. So it is bonkers. And I mean, the fact that you get stories like
• 34:28
  Graham Linner and the comedy writer who became, you know, a fairly I would say unseemly and
• 34:34
  deranged anti-trans person. I think he got too obsessed by that particular issue in ways that
• 34:39
  were unconstructive. Nonetheless, he wasn't calling for trans people to be beaten or round it up
• 34:45
  and you know, or there was something about punching in the face at some point. I think he was making
• 34:51
  a joke. It was a joke, but it was a joke and it didn't super masculine and it didn't require
• 34:57
  have him any police to like turn up. Yeah, I'm sorry. We got to complain from the states and there
• 35:02
  were, you know, a half dozen or whatever police officers to there to arrest him. Yeah, for having
• 35:08
  done nothing, but for just having talked in ways that were mean. Yeah. And no actual online.
• 35:15
  Not a serious threat to anyone in a physical sense. So yes, we don't quite have that. We haven't
• 35:22
  gone down that road yet, but this would totally send us down that road. These new hate speech
• 35:27
  souls. Because you don't know. In the current incarnation, would they? And this is what I wanted to
• 35:30
  maybe argue with you. I mean, I'm getting to the point where I'm less on your total free speech
• 35:35
  absolute aside. I know I wouldn't say I'm total free speech. What would your position be
• 35:40
  in terms of in terms of dealing with so the the initial proposal post bond terrorist attack
• 35:48
  was to make it a crime to, well, it's already a crime to incite violence against people on the
• 35:55
  basis of their race or ethnicity, but it would make it a crime. It would make hate speech against
• 36:00
  only the categories of race or ethnicity a crime. Now, I'm very leery. In fact, I'm super not more
• 36:07
  than leery. I'm super opposed to any kind of legislation that would criminalize people's opinions
• 36:15
  about beliefs. Yeah. Beliefs. So I don't want any hate speech legislation to cover religion,
• 36:22
  because religion is a set of beliefs. You have to be able to criticize people's worldviews.
• 36:26
  That would be like outlawing criticism of Marxism or capitalism. You have to be able to
• 36:32
  criticize shintoism or Christianity or whatever. These are a set of ideas. But I do
• 36:39
  not have a huge problem anymore given how crazy and deranged and hateful the world is becoming
• 36:47
  with medium-sized cultures like Australia just going, you're just not going to be saying that people
• 36:56
  are vermin because of their race or ethnicity. But just things that they don't have any control over
• 37:03
  that are obvious that they're wearing on their... Yeah, but there's largely already laws for all
• 37:08
  of that. We've got so many hate speech laws at the state level and at the federal level.
• 37:11
  And we've handled these hate speech laws and they weren't and then some ways they've been used
• 37:16
  but in some ways they've been used in ridiculous ways like the guy, the person who spotted a Nazi
• 37:20
  tattoo on someone's calf at the beach and a thing and then kind of essentially went and reported
• 37:26
  that to the... Did that happen? Yeah, the Newcastle. Yeah. And it's like, do we want to go
• 37:31
  down that pathway in some ways? But what happened to the guy with the Nazi?
• 37:35
  I just, he got arrested at it at the next stage of the process. Because you're no longer allowed to.
• 37:40
  And that's a hate. It's a hate. It's a hate symbol. Nazi in singing. But also for me, I'm like,
• 37:46
  okay, cool. So thank you for telling me you're a Nazi. Yeah. Now I know you're a Nazi. That's true.
• 37:51
  So I'm actually, I'm actually not for outlawing that and Hezbollah flag and it's like, okay, cool,
• 37:56
  you're affiliated with Hezbollah. Now I know. Like now it's clear. And they're all... I think it's
• 38:01
  hang on. There's a distinction between intimidation and display, right? I mean, I don't think it's
• 38:06
  intimidation to display Hezbollah flag at a Palestinian march. No, that's right. But if you're
• 38:12
  occupying the downtown of a city every single weekend with mass rallies that are chanting
• 38:22
  very enthusiastically, a bunch of things that to a certain community will feel like intimidation.
• 38:31
  I mean, you had, but we got to feel like intimidation. That's the, I think that's the problem.
• 38:38
  It feels like intimidation to that group. Well, I just say it on your scientific test and you
• 38:44
  could send a bunch of people wearing Jewish skull caps, Yamalkers walking past these rallies.
• 38:51
  And if nothing happened to them and they weren't spat on and, you know, shoved or punched,
• 38:57
  then I suppose you could say that it's not intimidation and they were all making it up in their
• 39:00
  heads. But the reality was that week after week after week in 2024, our cities, portions of our
• 39:08
  cities were rendered out of bounds for over only Jewish people because of those rallies. So
• 39:21
  it's that's different from someone who simply spots a flag. Like, if you're a Muslim,
• 39:27
  if I go up to them outside a mosque, and I start, and I drag a dead pig and I start waving it around,
• 39:36
  right? That's very illegal. Or some other gesture of obvious intimidation or like, I don't know,
• 39:44
  what day animal cruelty grounds you've already, you're already in jail. Even just in Israel,
• 39:48
  even if I was suicidal enough to wave a, you know, a star of David at them, that would be different
• 39:55
  from if I was, but that simply, if I just had a star of David at my car, right? So I think the
• 40:02
  laws should be, should cover intentional, if they are going to be like intentional, but in the new
• 40:09
  ones, you don't even have to prove that someone was harmed. And so as you know, one can be harmed.
• 40:16
  Right. And then as I understand it in the new laws, it just a reasonable person could think that
• 40:21
  someone could be harmed. Right. And then you get, get five years in jail as I understand it,
• 40:26
  and the thing. So it's, it's really taking it to extreme. Also, we had all these hate speech laws
• 40:30
  pre-bondai. And did they stop bondai? Well, I know. All of them because they're talking about
• 40:34
  introducing them now. Well, we have more, but we had a lot. And I don't think bondai was caused by hate
• 40:40
  speech. No, that's a thing. So this is a wrong response. This is the other reason why I feel
• 40:44
  some sympathy for the writer who was canceled in the Adelaide Festival because although,
• 40:49
  just to loop that back in, as although you were saying, look, it probably enhances her profile
• 40:55
  actually to have been going through. I would also say that I am empathetic to her because she's now
• 41:01
  being connected to a terrorist attack when there's absolutely no evidence. In fact, she has said
• 41:08
  that she doesn't support violence for any reason. So she's obviously, and I do think it's,
• 41:14
  I do think it's really unfair for, and it's really delicate balance, right? Because I wrote a
• 41:21
  column for this, anyone in the age of a few weeks ago, which some people interpreted as making this
• 41:25
  link between pro-Palestine pro-Gaza protests and the bondai attack. I was very careful to say that
• 41:33
  I don't think that there's a link. What I was saying was we have not been at our best in turning
• 41:40
  the volume up on cool-headed reason and turning the volume down on sloganering, and I think that
• 41:45
  a climate which encourages knee-jerk groupthink is a climate that is more conducive to people acting,
• 41:53
  to nudging crazy people who are religiously, religious fanatics over the edge, which does not
• 42:01
  mean that I think that someone like her or someone who innocently just has a strident opinion
• 42:08
  against Israel is necessarily a cause of terrorism, but there's enough of a connection in the
• 42:15
  degradation of the conversation to make it problematic. I mean, I think the issue there is,
• 42:21
  let's see if you look at, say, the march for Australia, so these is kind of anti-immigration rallies.
• 42:26
  These are the right-wing white. Yeah. Yeah. Why, why, actually, sometimes you've, well, at least,
• 42:30
  of some of the videos, I've seen, there will be kind of like new marches. Actually, that's true.
• 42:32
  New marches who are like, you know, they don't know. So, they were like national socialist network,
• 42:38
  not actually a Nazi suit turned up, and my understanding is quite a lot of internal policing,
• 42:43
  which is like, get out. We don't want you here, because obviously, made it look really, really,
• 42:47
  made the people marching that really, really, really bad. I don't think that the same thing happened
• 42:52
  in the kind of pro-Palestine movement where it's like, oh, wait, you're really far out there
• 42:58
  group. Like, you're not welcome to, to like, turn up at our space anymore. You're actually going
• 43:04
  to make us look really, really bad. Actually, it was kind of papered over, and it was cut, and
• 43:10
  there was no kind of internal discipline mechanism, which actually the progressives are not
• 43:14
  only good at internal discipline these days. When they want to be. When they want to be. To basically,
• 43:19
  to say, no, you're not part of our movement, you're like, you're just way, way too far out there.
• 43:26
  So, I think part of the problem is that Australia tends to go for technocratic solutions to
• 43:32
  everything, and I don't think the problem is a kind of problem with technology. Do we need more
• 43:39
  laws? Do we need to micro-manage this? Do we need to micro-manage that? We have all these
• 43:43
  safety stuff as well that we could talk about teen social media bound like everything is a
• 43:48
  kind of like technocratic legal problem to be solved rather than actually a political problem,
• 43:53
  or a problem that would actually be in some ways a harder conversation to have. And I also think
• 43:58
  part of the issue, as you were kind of saying with Mondays, that I see that essentially is
• 44:03
  a kind of security and intelligence failure. I mean, these guys were like, one of them was already
• 44:08
  on, had been on an easier kind of FBI or CIA kind of intelligence agency watch list that
• 44:16
  gone to the Southern Philippines, like literally a well-known kind of like extremist hotspot had not
• 44:22
  been questioned on the way back in apparently that even written that they went to Mindanael.
• 44:26
  Is that right? At least in their rival cars, the Philippines, I definitely know that they did
• 44:31
  in some of them said they had on the way back, but I don't that I cannot confirm. But it's like you
• 44:35
  would think that you might get stopped and ask a couple of questions coming back into the country.
• 44:40
  Oh, where have you been? Oh, some of the Philippines. Oh, interesting. Did I tell us about?
• 44:43
  Or even if you stopped there that your name would get sent up the chain.
• 44:48
  So many red flags and nothing comes up. And so this is why it's like for me part of this is also
• 44:55
  all a diversion from essentially failures of the government to say, well, it wasn't, it wasn't
• 45:01
  asked. It wasn't we the government and the security intelligence services that failed. It was all
• 45:06
  a hate speech. It was all the kind of bad people on the streets. It was all of this that and the other.
• 45:12
  And so it's this kind of dragnet approach to kind of trying to like deal with the problem,
• 45:17
  whereas actually you just need a kind of like you just should be spearfishing not doing not kind
• 45:22
  of like drift net across the whole of society. I would disagree a bit. But mainly on the question
• 45:31
  of hate speech as it relates to religiously religious fanaticism. I think you're right that
• 45:40
  the government wants to distract blame from its intelligence failures. I think the easiest way
• 45:45
  that it's doing that is by going to its safest and most popular territory, which is guns. It's
• 45:50
  funny that after every, you know, atrocity each country will go to the easiest thing that builds
• 45:57
  the greatest consensus. So in Australia, that's gun restrictions. In America where gun restrictions
• 46:03
  are incredibly unpopular, it's mental health or whatever. Right. After a mass shooting, nobody
• 46:08
  talks about guns except for the people who are already super enthusiastic about restricting guns.
• 46:12
  It's always like, well, you know, let's talk about the underlying issues of, you know,
• 46:16
  the problems with young men or like mental health or something like that. Here, the easier terrain
• 46:21
  for them to retreat to is let's talk about making it harder to get guns. But I think that the
• 46:25
  the problem is that they already did that once. And so it becomes a little bit harder to. Yeah,
• 46:29
  although it's atrophied quite a lot. So that I understand there is a little bit. I mean, not quite a
• 46:33
  lot. Being able to get a gun as a non-citizen, I was actually quite shocked that you can be a non-citizen
• 46:38
  and a non-multiple firearms. Yes, a non-multiple firearms. That's right. And also, yeah, be that close
• 46:42
  to someone who has been on the spot. Yeah, I can tell you it's watchless. Watchless.
• 46:46
  Watchless. No, but I mean, part of the problem is that the gun law restrictions were brought in
• 46:50
  almost 30 years ago. And the technology of guns has been moving so rapidly. There's this constant
• 46:56
  game of whack-a-mall where the authorities are supposed to classify them into these. But I'm also
• 47:01
  of the thing is like, if they see next time they'll get a car and they'll drive it down. Sure,
• 47:06
  and then they'll grab knives and they'll grab dead like if someone really wants to do something
• 47:10
  horrible, they will find. Yeah, but I mean, that's always the bullshit talking point of the NRA.
• 47:14
  I mean, it's like, yeah, they will. And it'll also happen. It also just happened less frequently.
• 47:20
  I mean, you only have to look at places. Yeah, I'm not like for zero places that aren't
• 47:24
  a lot. I don't think children should be given guns for their fifth birthday or anything.
• 47:28
  I just mean that is always the argument, but it's just not born out. There are 190 countries in
• 47:32
  the world and there's a very close correlation between what once you hold for all of the other
• 47:37
  factors, you know, people can always point to like Switzerland or something. But I would
• 47:39
  like you say the problem with this incident was not kind of well, there was some problem with
• 47:44
  their access to guns, but it wasn't kind of like the main thing. And I think what you're saying is
• 47:48
  right is that the government essentially is deflecting kind of responsibility and they kind of
• 47:53
  want what we need to be seen to be doing something because you can't you're not allowed to be
• 47:58
  seen to, you know, you have to, you can't just say don't just do something stand there.
• 48:02
  Which in some ways, they don't, I don't think they need very many new laws. And they certainly
• 48:07
  don't need to. No, they certainly don't need to produce hundreds of pages of them and then give
• 48:11
  people two days to comment on them. Get a human. Well, if you've listened to this much of the
• 48:17
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• 48:22
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