Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / James Kirchick: Is Hate Speech OK?

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James Kirchick: Is Hate Speech OK? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you. The government should be able to punish you,
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find you potentially even throw you in jail for expressing certain ideas.
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The crazy thing is, that is not really an uncomfortable idea. It's an idea we live with in most
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societies all the time. Every day, many countries that we live in have hate speech laws,
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the several governments in Australia, including the government of the state that I live in,
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past laws within the past two years, against knowingly displaying Nazi symbols.
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There are also pushes to ban the Hile Hitler salute. And you might think, well, why not just
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live in a society in which awful people aren't allowed to do awful things and say awful things?
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That, of course, is not the position of so-called American Free Speech Absolutists.
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One of whom, although he may dispute that particular characterization, is James Kirchick,
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the historian and journalist and best-selling author. Jamie's been on the show before. He's a
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columnist for Tablet Magazine. He's a writer at large for Air Mail. He is the author of the New York
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Times bestseller, Secret City, the hidden history of gay Washington. And I wanted to talk to him again
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because I saw a piece that he'd written in the New York Times. A guest essay in entitled
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Campus Speech Codes should be abolished. This is all part of the conversation that erupted
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after three heads of prominent American campuses were hauled before Congress to explain the situation
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on American campuses in terms of the harassment and vilification of Jewish students by well-meaning,
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well, I assume well-meaning, sometimes probably not well-meaning, pro-Palestinian protesters,
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and what appeared to be a double standard, let's say, where for the past few years,
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anyone who was accused of offending the sensibilities of students of color or transgender students
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was excluded from the public square, sometimes punish, sometimes penalize, sometimes deprived
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stripped of their jobs because they were creating an unsafe space or they were erasing the lived
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experience of students or negating their identity. And then the moment the tables are turned and
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it is Jewish students who are being asked to answer for Israel's crimes, those standards
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fall by the wayside. This conversation with Jamie is not specifically about that. I wanted to have
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the bigger conversation about the contours of freedom of speech, about how much speech should be
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permissible in a civilized society and whether or not artificial intelligence and social media
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algorithms are going to change the game on the relationship between the state and what we can say
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and what we can think and what we can argue. Bear with us in the first 10 minutes of this conversation
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because Jamie articulates a fairly arcane but ultimately fascinating story about someone who
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he knew who is in Germany and has been being prosecuted by the German government for the publication
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of a swastika which is a crime. If you're not aware, Germany still has crimes, has criminal
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offenses that were concocted in the wake of World War II against pretty much anything to do with
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Nazism. You can't walk down the street with a swastika on your t-shirt, you'll be arrested in
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Germany. Bear with us while we go through the arcane of that because the conversation does turn
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around to much more keen and present and relevant topics for you and what you can say in the future.
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Enjoy this conversation with the one and only James Purchase.
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Maybe tell us about this German bloke who I saw you writing about who this American guy in
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Germany who was charged and I'm pleased to see has just been acquitted of what crime exactly
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are the Germans. He was being charged with promoting national socialism. I mean, should we get
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into the history? Have you started recording? Yeah, let's start recording it. I was living in Berlin
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about a decade ago and I signed up for this script writing class with this guy named CJ Hopkins who
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was an expat American living in Berlin who was, you know, every four years Americans of either
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political persuasion, they love to complain or threaten. You know, if this person wins the election,
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I am moving overseas. I'm moving to Canada. I think this really started with George W. Bush.
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She started a lot in 2004. There were a lot of celebrities. I can't remember which one. So we're
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threatening to leave the country of George W. Bush one. Of course, none of them did. You heard
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it a lot again. I was counting my money because I that was the first to present a US presidential
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election that I bet on on an online gambling site because I was so confident that George W. Bush
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was going to win and all of my friends were so confident that John Kerry was going to win.
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Yeah, I just to spite them. I put my money where my mouth was and I think I won about $700.
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Well, good for you. But so this guy, CJ Hopkins was actually one of the only people that I'm
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aware of who actually did move, not necessarily because of the election. He left in the summer of 2004
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so it was before the election. But he was, you know, he's a, he described himself as an old lefty,
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a playwright. He was big in the anarchist scene. I described him in the article I wrote for the
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Atlantic as sort of reminding me of Jeff Lebowski because he has long hair and a ponytail and he
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hand rolls tobacco cigarettes and kind of goes on the left. That's the dude for the dude. That's the dude.
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So he yeah, he'd been living in Berlin for a couple years and was teaching a script writing class
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for aspiring playwrights or screenwriters and I signed up for it. And I didn't, I left Berlin
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not long after to move back to the United States and around and I didn't really keep in touch
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with him. But around 2016, I got, he started sending out these sort of political
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screeds or commentaries that he wrote from his very kind of, I'm trying to explain this,
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obviously, old left perspective. You're trying to be very careful although the word screed
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didn't help. Well, I didn't commentry become a screed. If someone decided to write me my writing
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is a screed that would be your watch, which I'm helping. But I enjoyed them. That's the thing. I
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enjoyed them. I could have just deleted them or unsubscribe myself from his email list to which
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I never signed up for. He just added me. But I actually enjoyed reading them. Even though I just
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agreed with them, he was, he was sort of a gnome Chomsky I leftist, I would say. Very suspicious
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of all sorts of establishment power structures and narratives, um, becoming from an old lefty
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perspective as he himself described himself to me. And very, you know, from the beginning,
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skeptical of the capital R resistance in the United States, right? He didn't like Donald Trump,
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but I think he was sympathetic to Trump supporters, right? The kind of lump, the kind of lump in
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proletariat, um, the, the abandoned, you know, white working class. He wasn't so easy to kind of
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cast them off as all being insipient fascists and whatnot. So he was very critical of kind of
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mainstream liberal hysteria over Donald Trump. And that was sort of the, the, the, the, the,
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the gist of his political commentary. And he invented the sort of portmanteau of global cap for
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global capitalism, which was behind everything that was bad in the world. Um, and then COVID came
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along and it probably won't surprise your listeners to discover that CJ was suspicious of the
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vaccines to put it gently. And the public health measures, I'm sure he wrote some very stern
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things about Australia, about your country. Um, but he was living in German, but he was living in
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Germany, obviously, and the Germans, you know, took to their COVID restrictions with
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tutonic efficiency and, um, to start writing these very, you know, bold, uh, takedowns of COVID
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policy. He thought, I mean, I didn't follow it so closely, but I think he thought that it was
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basically all a hoax. Um, you know, used by the neoliberal global capitalist, um, conspiracy to
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distract from the workers revolution or whatnot. This really wasn't of much interest to me.
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What was of interest to me was that he put his essays together into a book that he self-published.
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And on the cover of the book, um, which by the way, the book was blurbed by
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RFK Jr, who called CJ, uh, the Jeremiah of our time, just to give you when, you know, in an idea
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where he's coming from, but the cover of the book had the cover of the book had a face mask
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with a very translucent, barely visible swat stick on it. And it should be clear from this that
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he's not promoting swat stickers or national socialism. He's actually using it as a symbol of
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all the the hates in order to compare the, the public health policies that he despises to national
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socialism and totalitarianism and all the bad things that happened in Germany, you know, 1933
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to 1935. He's saying that mask mandates are a fascist. Our fascist. A fascist. Yeah. Our fascist.
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And the German government, they have this very kind of we're a wellian sounding, um, digital
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agency called like the cyber command, which basically spends all day, you know, um, searching
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for posts that could violate German hate speech laws, which are very stringent or more,
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by the, some of the most stringent in the Western world for obvious historical reasons,
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although CJ argued, and he's right about this, that, you know, while you may not be allowed to
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use a swat sticker to promote national socialism, like you can't actually go out in the streets with
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a swat sticker, um, endorsing the Nazis. And that's by the way, that's a policy that CJ agrees with
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as he told me. There are exceptions in the German constitution for when you can display a swat sticker,
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for instance, educational texts, right? If you're publishing a book about Nazi Germany,
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a historical book about Nazi Germany, it's kind of hard to do that without showing photographs
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that will feature a swat sticker. You can also use it for satirical purposes, and there's a case
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that he, that he mentioned to me, um, uh, a German satirical television show was commenting on the
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election in neighboring Austria, where the far right freedom party did very well, and they had an
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image of a schnitzel, the national dish of Austria, in the shape of a swat sticker, right? And so
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that's an acceptable use of a swat sticker, and then you can also use it to protest
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anti-constitutional activities. Now the activities that um, CJ was protesting against with his
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swat sticker are not anti-constitutional, at least the German government doesn't even
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them to be anti-constitutional. He perceived them to be anti-constitutional, right? He was using
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a swat sticker to protest policies that he considered to be fascist, and that's actually allowable
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by the German law, and he made his case in court. They actually dragged him to court, and he was
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in court earlier this week, um, and he posted his statement on his sub-stack, and he, um, this,
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this was the case that he made, and this, and, and fortunately the, the, the judge ruled in his
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favor. Um, but I found it an interesting story to relate to people, to Americans in particular,
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to say, look, here's what happens in countries that don't have the First Amendment, right?
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Something that seems to us so obvious, right? Like, actually, you know, using a swat sticker
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to attack, um, ideas that you consider to be fascistic. In the hands of the government,
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it's, um, it's in always in the eye of the beholder. That's the problem with speech regulations.
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Is that what it's normal ways in the eye of the beholder in this case so much, because the guy
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was acquitted. He was, yes, he was acquitted, but he had to go through an eight-month-thorough
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deal. He had to hire a lawyer. He was threatened with jail time or a fine. Um, yes, look,
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justice prevailed in the end, of course, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the
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government has the power to do, um, what it did to, to, to, I mean, it's so the, the, the, I want to
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expand the conversation into one broader one about free speech, especially in the American context,
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and the difference between the free speech attitudes of, of the United States and other liberal
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democracies. But if the argument is, well, what is the argument? Because you said that C.J.
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is actually in support of laws that ban the public display of Nazi symbols. Uh, so are you in
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support of those laws? Like I just want to get where we each are on free speech, or do you think
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I'm not going to be able to write around with that. In America, I don't support, I wouldn't
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support that. In Germany, I'm not in German. So it's not for me to say, I would say I understand
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where those laws came from. They were actually created by the United States and Britain and France
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and the Soviet Union, which were the allied occupying powers that defeated Nazi Germany. They banned
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political parties or they banned the Nazi party. They banned expressions of Nazism. Um, there was a
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de-notsification process. It wasn't perfect. And in fact, there were lots of former Nazis who
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occupied positions of power and, and some influence in post-war Germany. And we recruited some of
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them to work for us, the United States, um, in our battle against the Soviets. Because a lot of these
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Nazis had important intelligence, um, information and skills and whatnot, right? Um, look, if the Germans
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decide for themselves after having waged this war that, you know, destroyed the world and murdered
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millions of people, um, that they want to ban, um, certain political expressions, political parties.
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That's not really for me to say. Um, it's getting tricky now because they're the second biggest
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party in Germany is a far-right party. That's the first time this has ever happened in post-war
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Germany. The alternative for Deutschland. And there's a debate about whether or not this party
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should be banned. Um, look, I can understand banning a political party that is actually actively
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trying to undermine the constitutional order. I mean, you can't do that in the United States.
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If you're involved in plotting to overthrow the United States government, you'll get a knock
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on your door from the FBI and rightly so. I just, I don't personally think that the AFD
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can be, can be faulted for doing that. And it's actually a very high bar. There's only two parties
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that have ever been banned in post-war Germany. One was a sort of, basically, a group of former
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Nazis who had started a party. They actually called it the Socialist Reich party. It was banned in
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1955. And then they also banned the West German Communist Party. Um, this was also in the 1950s or
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early 60s. But now there, there, there, there is a Communist Party again in Germany. And that's
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it. I mean, there's a, there's an even further right party in Germany called the National Democratic
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Party, which is much more explicitly fascistic. Uh, and they have not been banned. Um, so I actually,
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I think the Germans have, they've, they've worked out a pretty good, um, balance, right, between
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wanting to prevent the worst, um, elements of their history from rising again while also
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protecting freedom of expression, which is something that is guaranteed in their, in their
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constitution. But these two values are in competition with one. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the,
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it sounds like your general critique is that they go too far and try to, in the former, rather,
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you know, without, with disregard for, for the latter, and that in an ideal world, we'd have a,
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a wider, um, field of free speech than the Germans. And then, then people who are advocating
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for hate speech laws would have like to take it out of the specific German context. One reason why
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it intrigues me is because last year, Australia, actually, it wasn't last year now, it was 2022,
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got to get used to its apps, 2024 already. Um, uh, several Australian states banned, uh,
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introduced these laws. And so now in New South Wales, it's, uh, which is the most populous state
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in Australia, where I live, where Sydney is. It's an offense to, I'm going to read it exactly.
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It's a criminal offense to knowingly display a Nazi symbol in public without a reasonable excuse.
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And this was not reduced. Yeah. That's a reasonable reason. That's right. Well, we'll,
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we'll wait for the jurisprudence on this. I'm not sure if it's an unseated in the, in the
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legislation, or if that's being left up to courts. Um, but a reasonable excuse, one would assume
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is something along the lines of what you were talking about in the German case. You know,
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it's being done satirically. It's being, yeah, for commentary, it's being done for protest,
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it's being done ironically, something like that, rather than, but some hammer, I'm assuming hammer
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cycles have not been banned in Australia. No, that's right. Exactly. But then there was,
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I have a problem. I mean, I don't think anything should be banned. I do think it's,
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it's interesting that they decided to ban the swastika as much as I hate Nazis. You know,
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the Communist killed a lot more people in the 20th century than the Nazis did. So I find it
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interesting how selective they are. And I think it was a response to a specific set of protests
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where you'd had skinheads and, you know, neo-Nazis. I mean, to be honest, small vanishing
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small numbers, you know, dozens or scores of, sure, Yarnal losers, but showing up in prominent
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places in Australian cities flying in a Nazi flags and so on. I can't remember what this would
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have been in response to in 2021, 2022 must have been COVID-related maybe. I think it just came
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out of the general unrest and sort of civil craziness that we saw, you know, throughout the
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course of the pandemic. And so, yeah, I was conflicted about these laws and these responses.
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The one part of me, you know, was raised in the American conception of free speech.
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And then another part of me thinks, why is it not a legitimate move for a society that just
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wants to be a welcoming place to everywhere and to carve out of bounds certain ideas. And there's
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not it. And whilst I think there are lots of risks in curtailing, in ruling out ideas as beyond
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the pale before we've heard them aired properly, I'm not sure how much airing you need to do
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of the idea that Jews should be incinerated before you can collectively conclude that it's not very
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useful. Well, there are lots of things that are not very useful that we allow people to say.
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And I don't trust government bureaucrats to determine those things.
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And that's just, it's a slippery slope. And that might sound like a cliché, but yes,
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they're going to ban Naziism now. But that definition of Naziism will expand. And we've already
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seen that. We've already seen a lot, you know, this word fascist used to mean something very
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simple in particular. And I think it was George Orwell who said that at some point, you know,
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progressives use the term fascist to describe anything they don't like. And that's long been the case
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now. And you see that on university campuses, I've been called a fascist multiple times by people.
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I'm not at all made for the record. Right. So why would we, you know, you and I might be able to
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agree because we're reasonable people that, yes, these things and those individuals and those
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books are not, are promoting Naziism. But I just, I don't, I don't trust many people to make
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that decision. And therefore, I don't think that it's that anyone should have the power to
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censor anything. We have to look at laws. Well, we have, look, there, we have a first amendment.
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And there are, there are things you cannot say. You cannot, you cannot incite imminent violence.
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That is not allowed by the first amendment. There's also defamation, which is a whole legal
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category, right? So, I mean, saying, saying that one is a free speech absolutist, which is sort
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of a pejorative, it doesn't mean that you're allowed to go around saying anything. But it's
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pretty broad with, with some very specifically defined exceptions. And I would absolutely take
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the American free speech regime over that of any other country in the world. When I was hosting
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a morning television show on the public broadcaster, I saw a deluge of tweets calling me an RWFNJ.
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I don't know if you've ever heard of an RWFNJ. Right, we're fucking something.
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Right, we're not fucking. No, no, no, right wing fascist. Right in fact, you're almost there.
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Not job. Not job. Yes, right wing fascist. Not job.
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Yes. Okay. Zeps is just about RWFNJ. So you don't have to listen to anything that he says.
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So there, there, there, there is a parallel sphere of legislation, which is laws against denigrating
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groups. I assume I can pick where you're going with that one. But do you want to give us,
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share your thoughts about, you know, there are, so rather than merely speed, let's say I get up
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on the town hall steps. And I'm not, I'm no longer waving my Nazi flag,
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because I can't do that anymore in New South Wales. But I am, and I'm not, and I know that I
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can't talk about how all of the Jews in the world should be rounded up and driven into the sea
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or gassed. But I, because that might be considered like an imminent threat or inciting,
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incitement of violence towards Australian Jews. But I, I might be able to talk in general terms
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about how we'll have Palestine from the river to the sea and the world and world jewelry has been,
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has had its bloodied hands as the puppeteers of global finance and global governments for too long.
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And the Jews will get what's coming to them and justice will be found. Now there are debates
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about whether that kind of language should be permissible when you're talking about groups,
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rather than individuals, should it? Yes, it should. Because again, who is to determine what constitutes
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acceptable speech? I mean, is talking about, I'm just trying to think of examples of speech that
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would currently be considered appropriate or, or not hateful, but that might be determined as such
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if we allow the government to ban it. I mean, if you talk about, I don't know, racial differences
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in certain, on standardized test scores, would that be considered racist to point out that
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maybe Asians do better at math than the average white person or something? I don't know. I mean,
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there's all these, there's all these potential mine, mine fields when it, when it comes to this that,
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I mean, just to give you an example of these, of the very controversial high profile testimony
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that was given on Capitol Hill in the United States a couple, well, last month, by the university
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president who got into a lot of trouble when they were asked our calls for Jewish genocide,
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do they violate your campus policies? And the president's gotten to a lot of trouble
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for saying that it was context dependent. Now, they should have been ridiculed and criticized
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for this only because they're hypocrites, because while they think that calls for Jewish genocide
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is context dependent, they show no such concern whatsoever when it comes to, I don't know,
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saying that there's two sexes. If you say that at Harvard, you could lose your job. That's actually
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happened, right? So there's every other group in the world, okay, except the Jews. There's
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this different standard that exists when it comes to Jews. And maybe that's maybe the topic for
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another podcast or where we could talk about that. But clearly, these university presidents were
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being hypocrites because they don't believe in free speech, right? All of a sudden they had this new
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found free speech absolutism when it came to calling for the genocide of the Jews. We know that
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they wouldn't behave that way or answer the question that way. If it was any other group that was
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blacks that it was gay people, certainly if it was trans people, they would not have responded that way.
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My ideal vision is actually a campus where you can stand on the quad with a sign that says
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despicable things, right? I mean, a sign that says gas the Jews. If you're standing on the quad and
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you're not directing it at any individual specific person, that would be protected by the first
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amendment. And therefore, most universities, well, state universities would have to respect that
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because they're beholden to the first amendment. And private universities aspire to first amendment
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principles. If you're standing in front of the campus Jewish center with a sign that says gas
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the Jews, that is a different story, right? And I'm just using this example to illustrate that
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there is context. It is context dependent, right? There's context dependent to me makes it,
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makes me feel like you're already yielding the point that there needs to be some interpretation.
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I mean, it seems like the absolutism of your position is, you know, we can't leave gray areas
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because these dumb bureaucrats and judges, unelected judges are going to be telling us what we can
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and can't say. But then you say, of course, there's context where if you do it in one place,
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it means one thing and another place it means another thing. Well, who's going to make those
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contextual decisions if not judges? A judge? Well, there's a famous 1969 Supreme Court case,
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Ohio versus Brandenburg. It dealt with a speech by I believe the leader of the Nazi party or maybe
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the KKK some far right group. And that was where we have the legal standard that speech is not legally
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acceptable if it is encouraging imminent lawless action. And that's ultimately yes, that's going
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to be decided upon perhaps by the police who are watching the incident take place.
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But yes, that's the constitutional jurisprudence. And that's that that's where I draw the line.
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Imminent law or something. You're encouraging violence, right? You're encouraging violence, yes.
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Right. You could also write a law that says if you're encouraging the denigration
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and abuse and hate of a group of people, yeah, I don't know what's denigration. What's denigration?
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Well, what's the violence? Insightment of violence is a much more specific
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category. It's a much more specific category. I mean, I think we could disagree about whether or
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another sign that says gas the Jews outside the Jewish center is an incitement of violence.
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I could imagine a plausible argument that it's not. You're not actually doing anything to those
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Jews. You're just saying that in principle in theory, you know, an abstract group of people
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called Jews should be gas. Not that anyone got it. We could. And it might also be dependent about
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what the person is saying. It might also be dependent upon if there's a group surrounding this
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person. I'm not a constitutional lawyer. So I can't speak to that. But I do. No, it is just that
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that the the the absolute rate of the free speech position just is it falls apart on inspection
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because either way we're in the game of making sort of nuanced distinctions that are context
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dependent. It just so happens that you want the the line to be drawn precisely where it happens
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to be drawn in the United States right now. Yes. Yes. But there's no there's no like objective
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reason for that. You just like the way that line is. It's not an absolute position. All of the
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the thing I don't use the term absolute as I said, that's that's a pejorative that's that's
29:16
applied to people such as myself. I'm a supporter of the First Amendment and I'm a supporter of
29:22
the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on this. There isn't a Supreme Court decision on the First
29:27
Amendment on free speech that I've disagreed with. They've gotten this right and that's been under
29:32
liberal courts and that's been under conservative courts. And I think that's that's a very important
29:40
fact to acknowledge, right? That this is something that has been maintained across decades
29:45
of Supreme Court courts that have been composed of different political persuasions.
29:52
But I do think that incitement to violence is a much more narrow concept than denigration.
30:01
Denigration is so much more subjective. That that word is so much more subjective. I mean,
30:06
I can just say and I think you would agree with me that people on the progressive left
30:12
have a much much broader conception of what qualifies as denigration or hate speech or hate speech,
30:20
by the way, which is just another synonym, I think, for denigration. They have a much broader
30:26
concept of what constitutes hate speech or denigration than people like myself.
30:32
Yes. Saying that saying that trans women are not women would be considered denigration by them.
30:39
It would be considered hate speech by that. If those progressives got their way, I'd be in
30:44
jail for what I just said. I've no doubt about that because they've said it. They've made it
30:49
explicitly clear. So I don't that's why that's why I'm so, um, and quote unquote,
30:55
absolutist about this because I've seen what what the anti-free speech forces want. They're very
31:00
clear about what they want. They in the in the institutions that they control,
31:04
you know, some major, you know, media institutions in the academy, they've shown us how they will
31:12
behave if given governmental power, right? So if you look at American universities, they're places
31:17
where they're where free speech principles are not upheld, right? Where students and professors
31:22
are routinely punished and ostracized sometimes lose their jobs because of their speech.
31:29
So we actually have a petri dish of what the anti-free speech forces would do if given
31:38
governmental power. And it's it's American higher education. And it's I would say some American
31:44
media institutions circa 2020. They've gotten they've gotten better. They've moved a little bit
31:51
back more to the center since the madness of 2020. But no, we have lots of examples of where
31:59
this progressive, um, and by the way, it happens on the right too, okay? The the in the United States,
32:05
the right has its bug bears. And they are they are cracking down on speech that they don't like as well.
32:12
But I think just if you look at most of the influential American institutions, Hollywood,
32:17
the media, academia, the nonprofit sector, right, those are dominated by the progressive left.
32:22
They are in control of those institutions. Um, yeah, no, they they do not subscribe to the
32:29
principles that I've articulated here. And I think it's very ominous what would happen if those
32:35
if individuals with that sort of conception of free speech were to actually get the power.
32:43
Um, it would it would be quite disturbing. I mean, don't we sort of see that in some of the right
32:49
wing anti free speech laws in the sense that the I mean, I'm on your page that there's a there's
32:57
a hegemonia of sensorious social justice types in in academia and the media. But they wield their
33:07
anti free speech thread in sort of subtle cultural ways, right? I mean, they don't,
33:13
I don't tend to ask rules. And then that triggers the right, uh, yeah, in places like Florida,
33:19
to pass laws against the promulgation of those social justice ideas and those laws then become
33:27
actual anti speech, I mean, anti idea laws, which right, I know that organizations like fire,
33:34
which you, you know, you are a fellow at go in and bat on behalf of the woke to have the freedom
33:41
to argue their positions against, you know, to the great credit of places like fire. But
33:49
can you just reflect on that dynamic where or is there a difference that we should be concerned
33:53
about because when I speak to lefties, a lot of them say, you know, you you guys all bang on in
33:58
your heterodox, you know, bullshit about, you know, how sensorious the left is when the actual
34:03
real world in position of anti free speech, you know, anti freedom of thought policies is coming
34:11
from the right. Well, in terms of the government, yes, in that state governments, some red state
34:19
governments have passed measures to that, that are absolutely anti free speech. And they should
34:28
be condemned and ruled back. I don't know how blind to some of these are to people who I
34:34
haven't followed closely. No, I'm, I think if you would look at maybe the stop woke act in Florida,
34:41
which Ron DeSantis has championed and it prohibits the teaching of certain concepts,
34:49
like say, critical race theory. And the problem with these laws, I think, is that they're so broad
34:55
that they could be used to, they could be used to punish people who are simply, you know,
35:01
teaching concepts that have long been established and not seen as particularly controversial.
35:07
I mean, there was the infamous, you know, don't say gay law that he passed in 2022,
35:14
which made it illegal to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity issues from
35:21
kindergarten to eighth grade, something like that. That's another example. And I criticize that
35:27
in the New York Times as well back in 2022 when that when that was, when that law was passed.
35:33
So yes, there are two both sides are guilty of this. Absolutely. But when it comes to the right,
35:41
it's, it's state governments. When it comes to the left, it's, like I said, it's all these
35:49
institutions, the academy, the Hollywood, you know, Hollywood. And it's more subtle, it's more
35:53
social. It's not legal, right? In the sense that people are not being legally honest. I don't know
35:57
what's worth. I mean, what is worse? I don't know how you would qualify or quantify what's
36:03
worse. It seems to me just being a writer and a journalist that this, that the sort of self-censorship
36:09
and the culture of restraint and the culture of self-censorship that's overtaken so many of our
36:17
creative industries that you can't really measure that, right? You can't measure that in terms of,
36:23
oh, like this person was, uh, lost their job, right? Or, or, or, um, I mean, you might
36:30
don't be able to. Let's talk about, well, let's talk about book bans. Let's, this book bans,
36:33
which I have a problem with, because there are no books that are banned in the United States,
36:37
right? I don't, I don't like that term. I prefer book restrictions. And really what it boils
36:43
down to in a lot of cases is yes, most of these restrictions or bans, if you will, they're coming
36:48
from the rice. It's books that are about race and gender identity and sexual orientation. Those
36:54
are the ones that are targeted. Um, but none of these books are, are, are banned. You can still buy
37:01
them. You could, you could go on Amazon and get them. You can go to a bookstore and a lot of, um,
37:06
and in some cases, I should say, what we're seeing is a disagreement over the age of
37:11
appropriateness of certain concepts and ideas. So this book that is the most, that's cited as
37:17
being the most banned book in America. It's called genderqueer. And I've looked at it. And you
37:23
know what, there are, you know, they talk about dildos and they talk about very explicit sexual acts.
37:30
And I can understand why a parent, and you're, you're a parent, okay, you're, you're a gay parent.
37:36
I can understand why parents might not want their, you know, grade school age children seeing
37:43
this material. And so I think a lot of the, as a gay parent, our house is festooned with dildos,
37:48
of course, my six-year-olds to play with, which is why we shouldn't have been allowed to marry
37:53
in the first place, Jamie. I think a lot of these debates, what we're seeing is a conflation
37:58
between, um, people who would legitimately just want to ban, who don't, who don't want young
38:03
people to be exposed at all to the concept of homosexuality. And other parents who might just
38:09
have a good faith disagreements about the age at which young people should be exposed to this.
38:14
I think that's a lot of what's going on here. But then there was an interesting piece in the
38:21
Free Press a week or two ago, looking at the books that are actually stocked in public school
38:28
libraries. And you see that they're overwhelmingly left-wing books. And there's the author of the
38:34
piece. He went through a list of very prominent books by conservative scholars and authors,
38:38
and he, and he, and he listed the percentage of public libraries that held them. And it was
38:43
very, very small, right? Like 10% of the libraries that he surveyed carry any books by Thomas
38:49
Sol, who's one of the most distinct black, black conservative, um, economists and really social
38:56
thinkers in the country. Whereas, you know, they all have Ibramx candy, all of his books, right?
39:01
So that's not banning, right? They're not, I mean, are they banning conservative books? I
39:06
don't know. No one's ever looked into it, right? But, you know, the librarians, the ALA, the American
39:12
Library Association is absolutely and ideologically captured, progressive, left-wing institution.
39:18
And so it wouldn't surprise me that most librarians who are the ones choosing what books
39:22
go on the library shelves are left-wing progressives. And, you know, so much of what determines
39:29
what goes on a library shelf is determined by the individual librarian. So is that censorship?
39:36
Is that banning? I love the, I love the idea in this whole debate that in 2024, you know,
39:42
the content of our minds is determined by what happens to be a physical library bookshelf.
39:47
As if we're all in 1955, going to the library, you know, this is, this is somehow yesterday's
39:54
battle, but I take the point, I take the point nonetheless. I mean, I do, in terms of which is what,
39:58
which is worse, the, the sort of subtle censuriousness of the left versus the, you know, the legal,
40:08
sort of prohibitions that are imposed by the right, I understand that as, as kind of writers,
40:13
ourselves, we're inclined to see, to feel the censuriousness of the left more keenly, but I guarantee
40:20
that if you were hauled before a kangaroo caught with the threat of jail time as a result of having
40:24
published something, you would probably feel, but that's never happened. But that's not happening
40:29
in red states. No one's being threatened when you're jail time. When you compare whether or not,
40:33
like the force of the law or the force of social norms is worse, surely the, the strong arm of the
40:41
state is always the most brutalizing form of oppression. Sure. Yes, although I will say that, you
40:48
know, Donald Trump was in power, Donald Trump was president for four years. And while he was
40:53
president, there was never an attempt to censor social media, like there was under Biden,
41:00
and the Biden administration actually had its attempts to censor information about COVID struck
41:07
down by courts in this country, right? So, you know, and, and, and Donald Trump never, never prosecuted
41:16
a journalist, Barack Obama did. The Obama administration sued the, um, it brought charges against
41:22
the Associated Press, I believe, and tried to tap their seize their records due to leaks, right,
41:28
to government leaks to reporters. So, I agree. I'm glad you raised the Biden thing because
41:37
I also wanted to raise the, you know, to sort of expand this into this universe that we're
41:42
evolving into in the 21st century, in which social media and algorithms and artificial
41:47
intelligence are much more widespread and are shaping a lot more of our conversations and
41:53
generating a lot more of our conversations, perhaps, imminently, without us even knowing whether
41:58
or not it's a human being that we're talking to online or whether or not the information really
42:01
does come from the source that we hope that it does. So, the Biden case, if I understand it, had
42:08
something to do with, remind me of the contours of that, it was basically about medical misinformation
42:14
being spread on social media during that. You were pressuring social media companies to,
42:19
uh, to ban, to basically censor, well, again, maybe, maybe that's like, to not, well, to, to,
42:26
to deprioritize, to deprioritize whatever the term is, um, or to just prevent from appearing on
42:33
its, to take off from its platforms. Um, right. What, what it determined to be medical information,
42:39
concerning, COVID, masks, whatnot. Yeah. So this became obviously a big tricky thing for us
42:46
for someone like me to balance during the pandemic as well, because I was working for the
42:50
National Public Broadcaster with a strong emphasis on truth, a strong cultural instinct to downplay
42:57
potential conspiracy theories. That instinct probably went too far during the pandemic.
43:03
I became an outlier. I wrote an article during, towards the end of the Australian lockdowns in
43:09
Sydney's biggest Broadsheet newspaper, calling for an end to lockdowns and saying, I think it's,
43:14
you know, it's time we all regained some sanity about human rights, uh, rather than
43:20
focusing obsessively on public health. And that got me pilloried by people who said that I didn't
43:25
care about grandma dying. Um, nonetheless, the next time there's a pandemic, we're going to be
43:32
in an information ecosystem in which I can understand the desire for the zone not to be flooded by
43:40
complete bullshit, where the only incentives are algorithmic ones for people to share and click
43:46
and respond. Right? Like, is that not a problem in your mind or is it a problem? But the solutions
43:51
would be so deleterious to free speech that we have to give up on shrug or where you're on that.
43:58
Yeah, I do. I think, um, look, there's always been disinformation and I'm using, I'm using air quotes.
44:03
Uh, that's a term. It's sort of, first of all, that's a term that's been with us really since the
44:09
Cold War. Um, and it made a comeback in the 2010s. And I was there to witness it because I was
44:15
living in central and eastern Europe covering Russian disinformation efforts against the countries
44:21
and its near abroad. Um, and then in 2014, they used those, they used those tools very effectively
44:28
in their annexation of Crimea. And then what happens? I saw this with my own eyes moving back to the
44:34
United States. I saw this disinformation concept became politicized in the American political debate.
44:40
And all of a sudden, what we had used to refer to as just lies, which are things that politicians do
44:46
all the time was now being labeled disinformation. And it became for progressives, um, a sort of
44:53
progressive version of what Donald Trump referred to as fake news, right? If Donald Trump didn't like
44:58
something or the mega people didn't like something, they called it fake news. And I saw more and more
45:03
progressive started using this term disinformation, which sounds a lot more clinical and serious
45:09
than fake news does, but they would use it to basically stigmatize and label information that
45:15
they didn't like was labeled disinformation. So, you know, people lying and spreading falsehoods
45:21
has been around with us since, you know, Adam and Eve, okay? Like this is not a new concept.
45:27
What's changed, obviously, is the velocity with which this, um, information could be transmitted.
45:33
And that's through of every informational issue because of the internet, right? Because of technology.
45:40
Um, but I'm wary of all these efforts now aimed at stopping it. I don't, uh, because you see what
45:46
happens. You see someone like CJ Hopkins, right? Who was merely doing, it was doing satire, okay?
45:52
He wasn't, he wasn't putting out disinformation. There's, there's some people who might say that
45:56
what he was writing about COVID was disinformation. But what happened, you know, you have these massive
46:02
government, uh, you know, bureaucracies are assigned with going, you know, they're, they're probably
46:09
outsourcing it to AI at this point, right? To just look at articles or to look at statements
46:15
and to judge whether or not it's disinformation. But I don't know how you can look at the, um,
46:20
record of the mainstream media or the governments over the past 10 years and tell me that they should
46:26
be entrusted with determining what's information. I'll just go through a couple things. I mean,
46:31
the russia gate scandal. That was pretty much just a lot of that was disinformation. A lot of
46:38
the things that the mainstream media wanted us to believe about Donald Trump's relationship to
46:44
Russia has been proven to be false over the past several years. Well, I don't want to go down
46:50
the russia gate. You know, when I russia gate, but I'm saying, what, yeah, what don't you'll matter
46:54
wanted us to believe was fat. Absolutely. What the New York Times, uh, at oil page,
46:58
one of those to believe turned out to be broadly true. I mean, um, you know, no one, no one,
47:03
good. Yeah. We can, we can pass what we mean by the point stands, right? But the point stands
47:07
is that there are things that that that that that the mainstream are mainstream respected institutions
47:12
including our government and our politicians want us to believe as true are later proven to be
47:18
maybe not so true. And I just don't, I just do not understand how we can put the power of the
47:26
government. We can leave it to the government to determine for us what's true and what's not true.
47:33
And I would just say to the to the to the to the progressives who seem to be most intent on this.
47:43
You know, Donald Trump could be president again. Okay. So do you want, this is the thing when
47:48
you live in a democracy is that people come in and out of government. Sometimes there's people
47:53
that you like with, with have the reins of power. Oftentimes there's people that you don't like
47:58
with the reins of power. And unless you have a neutral standard, right? Unless you have first
48:04
principles that you stick to, if you give the power of the government to censor things,
48:09
then you might enjoy it while you're the ones in charge. And I think this is why a lot of
48:14
progressive support this now is because they control their institute, they control the academy,
48:19
they basically have the mainstream media. They don't know what it's like to have to give up
48:23
power every four, you know, every other four years to someone that you don't like because they're
48:28
so used to it or so in your to having this unquestioned authority to determine what's acceptable
48:34
within the areas that they dominate and they control. But in the democracy, that's not how the
48:38
government works. So unless you're willing to give Donald Trump and his minions the power to
48:44
determine what's fake news or disinformation, that I don't understand how you can support the
48:50
government having the power to do that. So I mean, it comes down to edge cases, right? I mean,
48:56
this comes back to the holding up of the sign of gas the Jews in the quadrangle versus the holding
49:02
up of the sign outside the Jewish students center. The, the devil's going to be in the details. And
49:09
I am really conflicted. I mean, I find myself twisted up in pretzels about this because I share
49:17
the concerns that you're articulating. You don't want to live in a turnkey dictatorship where,
49:23
you know, all of the systems are in place for a party to just come in and flick a switch and
49:27
all of a sudden, you know, you find that all of the silly jokes that you tweeted eight years ago
49:33
are grounds for you being having enough at the door from the federal police.
49:37
At the same time, there are facts where people's lives are on the line, on the basis of whether
49:45
those facts can be disseminated. So, you know, one fact might be who was the winner of the 2020
49:52
election. That's an important fact that has a truth that like there is a truth balance there,
49:58
right? We're not sure the more opinion. So, but the legal sorry, I don't want to interrupt,
50:03
yeah, yeah, let me go to them to the more perhaps interesting one that has parallels to COVID.
50:08
I mean, I think about what the next pandemic might look like. Let's imagine that there's some
50:14
nightmare scenario where Ebola becomes, you know, more deadly or rather more dangerous because
50:25
perhaps it's less deadly less quickly and you get an outbreak in a town in Alaska because
50:33
someone has just flown back there from West Africa and the government wants to quarantine a
50:41
portion of Alaska and prevent anyone from going in or out and, you know, there's a vaccination
50:46
program to vaccinate everyone in Alaska forcibly to contain Ebola because if it gets out,
50:51
you're talking about a hundred million Americans dying and the global pandemic.
50:56
So, you can imagine instantly what the information landscape starts to look like there.
51:03
When you have your mini Bret Weinstein's all over the place talking about how this is actually
51:10
a government plot and there is no Ebola or maybe there is a Ebola but maybe actually the vaccines
51:17
are a way of installing compliance among the population or they have something in them that's
51:21
going to affect your brain and make you more of a sheep or, I mean, the whole gamut right from
51:26
the most extreme conspiracy theories to just the more legitimate vaccine skepticism of uninformed
51:32
people not wanting people in white lab coats to jab things in their arms. Does there ever come a point
51:39
at which, you know, the public health body is able to say we require social media companies to
51:48
deprioritize this sort of put an asterisk next to all of that and we need social media companies
51:53
to post at the top of their pages the official, you know, CDC recommendation about what's
52:02
going on or is that beyond the pale? Well, it sounds like you're raising a sort of ticking time
52:09
hypothesis that we often heard during the war on terrorism when people would debate the ethics
52:16
of torture and you often heard people say, well, what if, you know, yes, we oppose torture because
52:21
it's inhumane and we've signed international conventions. It's in our constitution that we can't
52:27
torture people but what if there's a terrorist who has information on how he has the code for how
52:34
to diffuse a ticking time bomb that's in the middle of Manhattan and it's going to kill millions of
52:39
people and the only way you're going to get the information out of him is if you start, you know,
52:44
pulling out his fingernails or waterboarding him, right? So this sounds right. Just to clarify,
52:50
the only problem with a ticking time bomb scenario is if it then gets misused in a non ticking time
52:55
bomb scenario, ticking time bomb scenarios are useful in teasing out the edges of the edge cases
53:02
as long as you don't use them fallaciously in cases which are not in fact as dire.
53:09
Okay, but it sounds similar to the hypothetical that you're raising.
53:13
Yeah, I'm saying there was no problem with the war on terror ticking time bomb.
53:17
Oh, okay. Well, we had big debates about that.
53:20
It was just there were lots. Yeah, yeah. But it was stupid because the dick Chinese of the world
53:24
wanted to use the ticking time bomb scenario to justify randomly collecting people off the
53:28
battlefield and then torturing them at Gitmo, but those weren't ticking time bomb cases.
53:33
Well, they're, well, in some cases, they might have had information that might not have led to
53:38
the deaths of millions of people, but in some of those cases, Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, he was a very
53:43
high value terrorist who had information that would save, would save the lives of, you know,
53:50
maybe hundreds of people on a plane, right? So is torture okay in certain circumstances?
53:56
I mean, I think it's a nice rule to have to never torture anybody and that's a rule that countries
54:02
ought to have for it. If you want to get me to put my ethics 101 philosophy like blue sky hat on,
54:09
then I think everyone, every reasonable person would agree that if you knew that the outcome
54:13
was that you were going to save millions of lives, there would be scenarios in which torture would
54:17
be morally justified. But this thing, there's some tension to me about, you know, I take your
54:22
point that I'm, I mean, potentially constructing an extreme scenario, but I think extreme scenarios
54:27
can be useful in teasing out what the edge of our, you know, where are principles start to fall apart,
54:33
and that helps us to understand, sure, what those principles are. Well, to go back to the example,
54:39
you said about a potential Ebola outbreak. I mean, I don't know, we just lived through a
54:43
global pandemic. Do you think that someone like Brett Weinstein should have been
54:48
deplatformed or criminally prosecuted for saying the crazy shit that he said? No. Okay. Why not?
55:03
Well, I mean, there are all kinds of reasons, but all the reasons I could give would be
55:09
contingent ones because they're not, it's not a ticking time bomb scenario. I don't think he
55:13
should be prosecuted for the same reason that I don't think that anybody who we actually tortured
55:17
at Gitmo should have been tortured. The stakes weren't high enough. The pandemic wasn't bad enough,
55:23
but I'm not the one who claims to be clinging to be upholding, I mean, I know you don't like the
55:27
word absolute, but, you know, some fundamental principle here. I'm the one who understands that
55:33
the gray area is a messy. So I could, you know, I could write an entire 20,000 word thesis about
55:39
why Brett Weinstein should be allowed to behave exactly as he has. Yeah. And at the same time,
55:44
why I would support government in positions on freedom of speech during a different public
55:53
health crisis. But it's right to determine the severity of the public health crisis that would
56:06
then, I mean, hopefully we the people through the people who we elect to run our public health
56:11
bureaucracies. I know that's not very reassuring. Who performed so admirably in the last pandemic,
56:19
right, that we should entrust them. I mean, you know, they performed, I don't know about your
56:23
country. In our country, they didn't. There's very, very low trust in our public health bureaucracy.
56:29
And rightfully so, not all public health bureaucracy had been, I mean, put it this way as a thought
56:35
experiment, if you wanted to turn up the dial 10% on the effectiveness of the public health bureaucracy
56:41
or turn the dial up 10% on the Brett Weinstein notification of the information landscape,
56:48
you would probably do more harm with the latter than with the former. Like Australia had a more
56:53
obedient and authoritarian approach towards COVID. We had 90% fewer deaths per capita. And you know,
57:04
obviously there were trade-offs in terms of people's ability to move around that Americans didn't
57:11
have to endure. But I don't think that you can say that the main cause of the calamity of COVID
57:18
was public health effectiveness when the places that put greater faith in public health institutions
57:26
performed better than those that didn't. So I'll actually draw a comparison here, which will be
57:32
instructive, I think, for your Australian listeners who have had a very different experience with
57:39
the gun issue. And it's a connection between the first amendment and the second amendment. And it's
57:44
that most Americans, in this might seem very strange to your listeners, but most Americans view
57:51
the first amendment in the same way that they do the second amendment. And that they view the
57:56
negative consequences of the first amendment. And there are negative consequences of the first
58:00
amendment, right? There's the, we've discussed them all today for 45 minutes. You have to endure
58:06
crap that you don't want to listen to, hateful speech, denigrating speech, false medical
58:10
information speech. Americans have decided that those costs do not outweigh the benefits of having
58:18
a very liberal, small, liberal free speech regime. And they take the same attitude to the second
58:24
amendment, by the way. So we have all these mass shootings in this country. And after everyone,
58:29
people say, how can these Americans put up with this? And I remember, remember, especially after
58:34
the Newtown massacre, the school in Connecticut, right, where the young 20, over 20 young children
58:40
were killed. And the reason I would say why we haven't really meaningfully changed our gun
58:48
laws, unlike your country where it just took one massacre, and then basically you had gun confiscation.
58:54
Is that Americans view the sector the negative externalities in the same way that they
58:58
of gun violence as they do the negative externalities of free speech so that yes, you know,
59:06
how many 10,000 people are killed by guns in America every year? That includes a lot of
59:10
suicides, by the way. But let's say thousands of people are killed through crime or mass shootings.
59:16
I think that whatever the number is, right, whatever the number is, Americans view it in the same
59:23
ways they do the first amendment, right? So where the kids who are killed in the school,
59:28
it's terrible. We don't like it, but it's the cost that we put up with as a society to have this
59:34
right to bear arms. And I'm not speaking for myself. I don't own guns. I'm agnostic on the
59:40
second amendments. It's not something that is personally important to me. I didn't grow up with
59:45
the guns. I'm just trying to explain to you, this is how most Americans, right? This is how most
59:50
Americans view these two freedoms. So you just said, you know, you had 90% less deaths per capita
59:57
than America. I don't think if you said that to Americans, they say, oh, we would, we want to
1:00:01
do what the Australians did. It doesn't matter to us. We want our freedom. We want our freedom.
1:00:07
And you can, you can mock us for that. You can say that we're a bunch of cowboys and we're stupid
1:00:14
and we're degenerates and we're backwards. But that is really what's at the heart of this country.
1:00:20
And it's what distinguishes America. And it's what distinguishes America.
1:00:24
From really every other society on earth, even the ones that are closest to us because
1:00:28
America and Australia are actually probably two countries that are the most close to each other.
1:00:33
We're both former British colonies. Well, you guys still are part of the Commonwealth. I know
1:00:39
that's sort of up for debate every now and then. But we're very, you know, we're kind of front tier
1:00:43
societies. We're multi-racial societies. But on this issue, we're actually quite different.
1:00:50
Yeah. And I think we saw something interesting about Australia during the pandemic, I think.
1:00:55
And just so you're aware, I have about as many US listeners as I do Australian listeners.
1:01:00
So these conversations are always interesting because I think you never know which part of the audience
1:01:05
that the listry is coming from. It is, there are so many things, so many places to go with
1:01:13
what you just said. I mean, I think there are a lot of interesting points that you just made.
1:01:16
And I would just point out it is mostly a descriptive point that you just made, not a normative one.
1:01:23
You're not necessarily claiming that it's a good thing that Americans are obsessed with
1:01:28
the idea of freedom. I would also point out that to people who, to lefties in America who say,
1:01:34
oh, we could have just done what Australia did, either on guns or on COVID, I completely agree
1:01:40
that it's a nonsensical argument because Americans would not have put up with what Australians
1:01:44
put up with. And what was it? It would have been a silver. There would have been a massive
1:01:49
civil unrest. It would have required a level of police. I know that during COVID occasionally,
1:01:55
there were viral videos on social media floating around of like police arresting people on a beach
1:02:00
or something, but that was extremely rare and all the compliance essentially in Australia was
1:02:06
voluntary. It wouldn't have been in America and you would have had clashes with police in a way
1:02:10
because the population would not have sucked it up the way that I was used to it. But sorry,
1:02:13
what were you just about to say? No, I was just going to say actually that part of the reason,
1:02:17
I think, for the lack of authoritarian COVID policies in the United States is that in the back of
1:02:24
every American politician's head is this understanding that a huge percentage of our population is armed.
1:02:33
Right. So there are there are things that American politicians are policies that American
1:02:37
politicians cannot even contemplate doing because they know that there would be impossible to enforce.
1:02:44
Right. So the sort of, but I don't think that the, I think there's so much civil unrest that can come
1:02:49
about before the gun gets pulled out that it has more to do with an ideological difference,
1:02:55
like a temperamental difference about obedience and freedom than it does towards firearms because
1:03:01
you didn't even get, you know, the mass rallies in Australia that you would expect to get sure
1:03:06
for you actually got to the shooting part, you know, like there's a long way between staying
1:03:11
obediently locked inside your house and shooting up the local courthouse or police station that
1:03:17
little many, many ways that you can express your displeasure that Australians on the whole did not
1:03:21
did not engage in. I would just say that on your point about the Second Amendment,
1:03:25
that's, it's an astute point, but it's also one that is not going to appeal very much
1:03:31
because, and I know, it offends me a little bit because I have so much more sympathy towards
1:03:37
the First Amendment than I do towards the Second, but the problem with guns in America
1:03:45
is not that the Second Amendment exists. It's that there are lots and lots of things that you could
1:03:50
do within the bounds of the Second Amendment to make America more safe with respect to guns
1:03:56
without breaching the Second Amendment that nonetheless are not done. I mean, as Obama said in
1:04:01
his speech after Newtown, if this isn't enough, then what is? Like just in order to, for example,
1:04:09
register all guns or require or impose a truly national background check system that functions and
1:04:17
doesn't have a patchwork of stakes falling through the holes, reliant on the compliance of
1:04:21
local authorities, you know, banning semi-automatic weapons as the Clinton administration did.
1:04:26
There are lots of things you could do to make that a gun safety measures that would be consistent
1:04:34
with the Second Amendment. Similarly, on the First Amendment, you know, a lot of these, you could
1:04:41
imagine a jurisprudence in which there was an overarching respect for people's right to free speech,
1:04:49
but there was more curtailment at the edges. Like, that's not the Supreme Court that America has,
1:04:54
but you can imagine one in which tolerated a certain amount of hate speech laws as consistent with
1:05:00
the First Amendment. So I actually think it would be easier. I agree with you more on the Second
1:05:05
Amendment and that there are more measures that could be taken to increase safety and what not
1:05:12
and to reduce the number of deaths. I don't, again, because I'm a free speech absolutist,
1:05:17
I don't think that that would be that possible. Because I really believe in this concept of
1:05:21
the slippery slope. Because in the argument that Second Amendment, you know, fanatics make as well,
1:05:28
that they can take out automatic weapons, then you're going to end up taking our muskets.
1:05:31
They do, and I don't think that it applies. I was just describing to you how most Americans view it.
1:05:35
I don't necessarily read with all I in the Second Amendment, but it does apply to the First.
1:05:40
Because there are different types of guns, right? There's like guns with certain magazines and
1:05:45
quantities of bullets that you can put in and the, I mean, there's just, there's a lot of technical
1:05:50
aspects of guns that don't apply when it comes to fanatics. I mean, the gun, I shouldn't call them
1:05:56
fanatics. That's majority of gunnuts. The pro gun person can say, well, of course, there are
1:06:04
distinctions between magazines and calendars and things, but there are distinctions between different
1:06:09
types of speech. And once you stop making laws about this caliper, the next step is to make laws
1:06:15
about this caliper and this caliper and this caliper. And before you know it, you've, you know,
1:06:19
they do make exactly a Second Amendment. They make that case. And the reason I would disagree with
1:06:23
them is that speech does not actually kill people. Whereas the, when we're talking about guns, we're
1:06:28
talking about instruments that can be used to kill people. And so, while again, I don't personally
1:06:33
agree with this, this concept that I described of connecting the first and the second amendments.
1:06:39
It's not me, Jamie Kirtchagoo agrees with it, but it is how I've, I've come to the conclusion that
1:06:43
that is how most Americans view the society. But doesn't the view is just to clarify the slippery
1:06:48
slope argument. Doesn't the phenomenon of slippery slopeism? In other words, the phenomenon of
1:06:52
starting in one place and, you know, gradually oozing your way towards a more authoritarian place.
1:07:00
Doesn't that phenomenon exist regardless of whether or not you're talking about a, you know,
1:07:05
a tool that kills people or something. It does. Oh, and this is a rocket ship. I mean, if the
1:07:13
phenomenon works, and the phenomenon works. Yes, I see what you're saying. Yes.
1:07:20
Yeah, we do have an element of absolutist. So we do have to be Second Amendment
1:07:27
absolutists if we don't want guns to be taken away. Not philosophically, but I've come to the
1:07:32
conclusion. I actually disagree a little bit with what you said earlier. I don't think that a lot
1:07:36
of these measures that you mentioned would actually have a meaningful impact. And that most of these
1:07:41
mass shootings are committed with guns that would have been legal under the automatic weapons ban.
1:07:49
What depends if we're talking about mass shootings, because as you know, mass shootings are
1:07:53
a main source of shooting. No, they're not. What's happened in Australia? Actually, just as a
1:07:57
brief aside, which will be interesting to American listeners, the reason why Australian
1:08:03
gun deaths have plummeted since those 1996 reforms, since the big buyback, is not actually because
1:08:10
of a reduction in the number of guns. There are more guns in Australia now than there were before
1:08:15
the buyback. It was a whole suite of other policies that were introduced alongside the mandatory
1:08:21
buyback, which were the registration of guns, the imposition of criminal liability. If your gun
1:08:28
is misused, you can't say, oh, it got stolen or I lost it. If you lose a gun and it then goes on
1:08:34
to kill somebody, then you are criminally liable, not for murder, but for serious penalties.
1:08:41
The registration of all guns so that when there's a crime involving a gun, the cops can sort of
1:08:46
trace it back and follow the bread prums. Those things really do matter. The biggest decline
1:08:53
was not homicide, but as you alluded to earlier, suicide, suicides plummeted in Australia when
1:08:58
guns were less available. I was under the impression that private gun ownership is effectively
1:09:04
illegal in Australia. Am I wrong? It's illegal for self-defense.
1:09:11
You can have it if you're a farmer, you can have it if you can demonstrate a need,
1:09:17
you can have it if you're a hobbyist, or if you're a recreational shooter, that sort of thing.
1:09:21
I think in most cases, you need to have guns locked up at a range, but if you're out in the bush,
1:09:30
you need to protect your livestock, you can have a gun.
1:09:33
Right. Did the number of gun owners decrease dramatically?
1:09:37
As a result of question, I don't know. Okay.
1:09:39
It may just be that the minority of people who are in guns have more guns as possible.
1:09:46
Great. I'm not going to keep you forever, Jamie. Is there a final thought that,
1:09:49
oh, I just wanted to talk about the academy. I just wanted to get your thoughts about to just
1:09:52
looping back to the abysmal performance of these university heads in front of Congress.
1:10:02
You said that you should be able to say anything on campus, at least on state campus,
1:10:08
because they get government funds, but is that the basis on which we should insist on academic
1:10:15
freedom of speech? Because I mean, schools get government funds and airports get government funds,
1:10:22
but we don't assume that you should be able to say anything you want in a primary school
1:10:26
and elementary school. No. Well, come on, there's, yes, primary schools and elementary schools
1:10:32
are dealing with young children. There are a whole vast elements of the human experience that we
1:10:38
don't talk about in front of children, but when we're dealing with adults, people who are 18 to 22,
1:10:45
I think universities should absolutely be places where we have wide and open debates and
1:10:52
discussions, and that means that you're going to get, yes, you're going to have oftentimes
1:10:56
people expressing views that you might find horrible and distasteful. And I experienced that when
1:11:02
I was at college, there were anti-Semitic, there was an anti-Semitic speaker who came my
1:11:07
freshman year, who said terrible things about how Israel was behind 9-11. This was shortly after 9-11
1:11:14
when I was at college, and it was sort of traumatizing if I could use that term. I was,
1:11:22
I went to the event, I sat in the back of the room, I went as a student journalist, I asked this
1:11:28
guy questions, and I wrote an article about it for the newspaper. You know, I developed a thick
1:11:34
skin, I moved on, I learned something about the world and about myself, which is that there are,
1:11:41
it's full of people with horrible ideas, and if you're going to be someone who's
1:11:47
involved in public debates and then involved in the world, you're going to encounter
1:11:53
those ideas. You're going to have to have uncomfortable conversations if I could invoke the title
1:11:57
of this podcast. And so absolutely, I think that universities should be models of institutions
1:12:08
that allow for speech no matter how distressing it might be.
1:12:17
Here, I mean, I was just alluding to the fact that I think we need an ethic of what the academy,
1:12:23
but I mean, but the academy may be a slightly wonky word for people who don't use it, but meaning
1:12:28
educational tertiary educational institutions, what therefore, and that we shouldn't
1:12:34
ground our free speech on campus arguments in the fact that they receive public funding
1:12:40
and they're theoretically beholden to the first amendment of the United States, that there needs
1:12:44
to be a deeper academic commitment to pluralism and diversity. And as you say, uncomfortable
1:12:51
conversations, regardless of where the institution's funding comes from, even if it's completely
1:12:55
private, if you call yourself a university, you should be up, you should be up for hearing every
1:13:01
possible point of view about everything. I mean, if not at the university, they're aware.
1:13:05
Exactly. Jamie, great to talk to you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.