 This last week, week and a half now, or traveling, it's hard to tell, timing-wise, has really been scary. I think the last four or five years have really seen an escalation in the threats to free speech in this country. To the threats of what I'd call recognized free speech. Because there's already speech that is not recognized and therefore the free speech is already violation. For example, commercial speech is not protected. But to protected speech, I don't think I've ever seen as many threats to protected speech over the last, as I've seen over the last four or five years. And then this last week, this has escalated to a level of, oh my God, is the government really going to be able to get away with this? And given that I haven't seen much uproar about it, you could argue that yes, the government can and is going to get away with it. You can think of it as, you know, I in Rand always said that free speech is kind of the bastion. Free speech falls, how do we advocate for change? How do we fight for a better world? What is left for us in terms of fighting? Free speech is the one right that we must protect above all others so that we can fight for our other rights. So that we can demand that our other rights be protected, be respected. But without the ability to speak, we have nothing. And as compared to Europe, as compared to the rest of the world, the United States has been a bastion of free speech. It's been a place where you could count on the fact that the government was not going to outlaw you. Europe has hate speech laws, which basically say the things that the powers to be viewed as hate speech hasn't affected us yet, us being, let's say, in Rand Objectivism, but could, imaginably. Because hate speech, I mean, how do you define hate speech? It's completely non-objective. It's completely arbitrary, completely left at the discretion of the regulator. Well, America was one place in which there didn't seem to be much risk of hate speech laws. Because, you know, our constitution protects free speech explicitly. And the Supreme Court, with all its problems and all its failings, has done a pretty good job protecting that speech. And to a large extent, we live in an America where there is more legal free speech. There's less government restrictions on speech than maybe ever before. Arthur, thank you. That is very generous. And I will get to your question in a little bit. But last week it broke. It didn't break. It was just an offhand comment by Biden's press secretary that they are, quote, advising Facebook of what they consider misinformation. Now, of course, they're using as a cover for this violation of free speech. What they're using as a cover is a so-called emergency of COVID. I think the emergency is over, really. Whoever doesn't want to get vaccinated seems to me like that's their problem. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff out there against vaccines. There's a lot of stuff out there about alternative treatments. There's a lot of stuff out there that from a scientific perspective, you could say is questionable. But historically, we have understood that it's not, not, not, not the government's job to screen for misinformation. Indeed, the government screening, banning what it considers misinformation is clearly a violation of the First Amendment. It is clearly a restriction on our free speech rights. And yet the Biden administration was suggesting that that's exactly what they're doing. Now they're just advising Facebook, advising at the same time as there are bills going through Congress right now to regulate, control, break up big tech. And you would think that big tech would be advised to listen to the advice that the Biden administration has for them. Otherwise, who knows if those bills would not be passed, signed into law. So here's a club. I'm going to beat you over the head with it. But I'm just advising you not to say X. I'm just advising you to take the stuff that I don't like off the internet. And it's in a sense been like this for a long time because of course this started at least this round of it. We might be able to go back further in history and see this in past administrations. But it certainly started with in the last few years. And I'm going to, I'm going to get to some of the bills that are going through Congress right now. They're pretty scary stuff what what what the Democrats are proposing to pass in terms of, you know, attacking big tech and restricting their freedom of speech. But this of course started with with Trump. Trump was the one who raised the whole issue of section 230 Trump and Republicans in Congress. You know, last year Republicans in Congress actively engaged in attempts to modify section 230. Now, let me just say this, it very well could be that we should modify section 230. It very well could be as Amy Peacock has said, there are ways to make it better law. You know, we could get into that whole debate. I'm not that convinced, but let's, you know, I'm willing to give that a benefit of the doubt. But just remember the once you open the can of wounds. Once you start talking about it, debating it, putting it on the table. The people most passionate about these issues. The people who most want to constrain speech are going to jump on the opportunity. They're the ones who are going to be dictating what is and isn't appropriate speech. They're the ones who are going to use the, what do you call it, the rewriting of 230 to benefit them. You will lose control. You, the better people will actually lose control over the ability to reshape 230. It won't be what you want it to be. Let's assume Republicans had a positive view, a good view. They don't. But if they did, they're not going to be the ones determining it. Not the better elements between the, within the Republican party. So when Trump raised this, Trump raised it. He was clearly threatening to use, to appeal section 230, which would clearly harm, damage the business model of the social media groups. And he clearly was using it throughout his presidency, particularly in the latter two years as a club against those groups. You could argue, I don't know if it's true, but you could argue that Twitter would have kicked Trump off the platform much earlier, if not for the fact that he was threatening use of 230, which is a clear violation of Twitter's free speech, if that's true. I mean, Trump himself tweeted at some point, I think in October 2020, October last year, he tweeted repeal section 230. Did he ask for anything in return? Did he use this club? Of course he did, but in less of an explicit way as the Democrats are doing. And then of course, there was the case which I commented on it at the time where the White House was considering not approving the deal between CNN and AT&T, because it was not happy with CNN and because it was not happy with certain properties. Because it was not happy with speech. So Trump launched a real attack on the principles of free speech. It's criticisms of media, it's criticisms of the newspapers, not just a private citizen's criticisms, but it's president who wields a large club. Very dangerous. Very dangerous. Now I know, I know many of you hate big tech. Oh, they're so powerful. I don't buy it. Sorry, I don't buy it. I mean, I'm critical of them, but I don't think they're that powerful. For the first time in all of human history, we have alternatives to big media. You can online find whatever you want, whatever alternative view you want, any perspective you want. You can find anything you want. Big tech isn't that powerful. Not as compared to let's say CBS, NBC and ABC were in the heyday when there was no Fox, no CNN, no internet, no talk radio, no right wing talk radio, nothing. Three big channels providing you with the news in segments every night and everybody in the United States watch these three big channels all presenting a basically leftist perspective. And you could have read the newspaper instead of watching TV, but then you got the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times all basically left wing, just the same as they are today. And what alternatives did you have if you wanted something else? You could sign up for a newsletter. But that was it. There was one voice in this country. That's when media had power. What the internet has done, it has demolished that power. You think social media is more powerful, social media makes it less powerful. It grants you access to anything you want. Now it turns out most Americans want, or many Americans want, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, but you can get whatever you want. By the way, it's ironic, but Donald Trump in his lawsuit, whoops, Donald Trump in his lawsuit, you know, Donald Trump is suing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, I think. But Donald Trump in his lawsuit claims that these players, the social media companies, violated his first amendment rights. Now his lawyers know that private companies can't violate the first amendment. So they're not really blaming the companies. What they're saying is that the first amendment rights were violated because Democrats put pressure on social media to dump Trump. Social media wouldn't have done it if not for political pressure, from political, from political party. That is from government. Again, ironic, coming from Trump, who used political power, at least used the threat of political power constantly. It's unlikely he's going to win this lawsuit, partially because if you're going to sue anybody, if you're claiming the government put pressure on Twitter to get rid of you, who should you sue? Twitter? No, Twitter's the victim here. Who should you sue? The government. He should sue the Democrats. He should sue the Biden administration, claiming that they violated his first amendment rights. He's not going to do that because I don't think he can prove his case. So it's unlikely. But it's going to be interesting to see if it ever goes to trial and how it's going to play out. So Democrats now, not only is the Biden administration suggesting, quote, to Facebook what they shouldn't post on the pandemic. You know, Biden actually said that Facebook was killing people by allowing for, quote, misinformation. Now notice that is a very dangerous step. Now you associate information with deaths, with physical force, with violence. That is again a path towards not allowing that speech, using government power to avoid that speech in the name of public safety. So the government is using the COVID crisis. Democrats are using the COVID crisis to basically come in and try to regulate speech that is occurring on private platforms. It's truly sickening. Even though, I mean, yeah, most of the stuff that I think they're flagging is misinformation, probably is misinformation. Not the government's job. Not what government does. That is your responsibility to figure out whether what you take seriously is misinformation or not. Not to be told by others. Let's see. By the way, a number of states, Republican controlled states are in different processes of passing laws to restrict the ability of Twitter, Facebook and other social media to exclude politicians from their platforms, to take them off, which is interesting. We live in a country where we're all created equal. Why are politicians special? Florida has already passed this bill. We'll see. I think it will be ruled unconstitutional, but Florida has already passed this bill where it's illegal, according to the state of Florida for Twitter, to exclude politicians from their platform. They can exclude you. They can exclude me. Politicians, they're special. How did we get to the point in this country where politicians are special? There are servants with the special ones. Texas is considering bills like this. Iowa is considering bills like this. There's a variety of different bills in state legislatures trying to go after social media. But some of the scariest stuff is coming out of Democrats in the House and the Senate. So on Thursday of last week, Democratic senators introduced a bill to hold Facebook, YouTube and other social media companies responsible for the proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health related claims on their website. Now listen to this. Listen to this title. And you tell me if this is not one of the scariest things you've ever seen in American politics. It's called the Health Misinformation Act. The Health Misinformation Act. Now as far as I know, it's the government that's been responsible for most of the health misinformation over the last 50, 60 years. Isn't it the government's view of saturated fat that is being misinformed? Isn't it the government's view of greens and sugars and other stuff that's being misinformed? The Health Misinformation Act targets a provision in section 230, Trump and Republicans' favorite section, which protects platforms from being held liable for what their users post in most cases. The bill would strip the companies of that legal shield in their algorithms if their algorithms promote health misinformation during a public health crisis. Who defines a public health crisis? The government. Who defines what misinformation is? The government. Now they have to be careful for free speech rights or it doesn't apply if the misinformation is shown in chronological field. It's only if the algorithm is somehow promoting this. But everything is run by an algorithm. Information is not just provided free of an algorithm. The legislation leaves that up to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A completely neutral science-based organization which is responsible for declaring public health emergencies to define what constitutes health misinformation. It's truly scary and unbelievable that this is even under consideration in the United States Senate. I don't think this could pass the legal system unless it was so narrowly focused on section 230 that somehow it got away with it. It would just open up these companies the liability but to a large extent opening these companies the liability for these kind of things has the potential of destroying their business model completely. Of course the article goes on to say you remind us that a fighter President Biden said social platforms are killing people although he later walked it back. And said he meant that the people who spread misinformation about vaccines are irresponsible. Yes. But isn't it the people who post this stuff, the people who make these claims that are irresponsible. It's not the job of social media to make those calls for us. You don't like what people are saying. You think it's damaging. Sue them. See how far you get in that in court. So instead of suing the person who's doing the misinformation let's threaten the social media companies so that they do your censoring for you. YouTube is going to restrict even more health advice from non-authoritative sources. It's going to elevate in its search requests videos from authoritative sources. Who gets a side? What's an authority? Says the law which was intended to promote online speech and allow online services to grow. This is Senator Amy Klobuchar one of the so-called better Democrats. Now distorts legal incentives for platforms to respond to digital misinformation on critical health issues like COVID-19 and leaves people who suffer harm with little to no recourse. They can still sue the person who posted it and isn't the person who reads this the one responsible? Are we all so dumb? Assumed to be so dumb as we just read everything on these bulletin boards, on these social media platforms and it's their responsibility, not ours for screening it. I just have to, just a side comment because this is such a garbage. Hans says, do you really think the poor people who died in the building deserved it because they weren't proactively monitoring the structure? I never said that. You should actually learn to listen to what people say. And if you don't know before you make accusations like this, maybe write down what people say. What I said was that to the extent that they were warned that the building was danger and they were warned by several people over three years. To the extent that they refused to heed the warnings, make the changes necessary in order to fix the building. To the extent that they evaded the knowledge that their building was in danger even though engineer after engineer and if the engineer told them so. To that extent they don't deserve it. They suffered the consequences of their own decisions. That's what I said. I said it's right that the people who make the decisions suffer the consequences. Not that somebody else suffers the consequences of bad decisions. And since this is a condo building in which the residents of the condos are owners and are therefore the people who made the decision to evade, to ignore the warnings. They didn't deserve to die. Nobody deserves to die in that context. But they suffered the consequences of their own bad decisions. Now that's very different than saying that they deserved it because they weren't proactive. They didn't. It wasn't an issue of proactively. They were told. And actually, what's his name? Seder, Sam Seder said during the show, they were told they were warned. They were warned. That's exactly what Sam Seder said to me. And I said if they were warned and they made the decision not to do anything about it. And then they suffered the consequence of their own decisions which is better than you suffering consequence of somebody else's decisions. Come on people. People trusted relatives that it was a good place to stay. It's sad that they died. There were children there who don't deserve to die. I would never say people deserve to die. But the fact is when you make horrible decisions, innocent people are going to suffer. And most of the people who died were the ones unfortunately who made the bad decisions. But you see Sam wants to say, no, we should have government regulations and government controls to make sure that people don't make these bad decisions. And my point is that in this case the majority of the people who suffered are the people who made the bad decisions. And yes, innocence died as well. Innocence always died. Bad stuff always happens when people make bad decisions. But you claim you're trying to be fair but you're not being fair. You throw out a sentence like that. You throw out an accusation like that on a chat. Luckily I caught it and I can respond. But you throw accusations like that on a chat. People who might not have context now think that I am just, I think they deserve to die. I never said that. It would be bizarre for me to say something like that. So it's unbelievably frustrating that people twist the words that you say, twist them to make you seem as evil and as horrific as possible. For what? What's the purpose of that? What's the purpose of that? To make you look as evil and horrific as possible. There's not positive. There's not benevolent interpretation of this. I told you I'd get angry today. Anyway, so look, while it could be the section 230 needs reforming, this is what's going to happen if you reform it. It's the left that's going to get in there. Now, many legal scholars are claiming that even if you got rid of section 230, no court would hold the social media companies liable, liable for something some jerk posted that had misinformation in it. That indeed the courts would protect their First Amendment right. So even without section 230, all you would do with removing section 230 in my view is create massive numbers of lawsuits. And you would probably create social media that became defensive, became more like a publisher and restricted ability to post anything that wasn't plain vanilla. You'd actually get less interesting speech, less diversity, less conflict, less controversy. Now note, Stephen, thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate that. Note that Republicans are pushing this as well. Headline from CNBC. House Republicans outline principles for reforming section 230. What are the principles? Limiting the right of tech companies to exclude users based on their viewpoints of political affiliation. How is that not violating their free speech to exclude who they want to exclude, to keep who they want to keep? Isn't that part of what free speech protects? Requiring reasonable moderation practices to address harms like illegal drug sales and child exploitation. Who gets to decide what reasonable is? Which one? Which congressman? Which senator? Who gets to make that decision? Narrowing protected moderation to specific types of speech not protected by the First Amendment. Why are there, what speech is not protected by the First Amendment? Shouldn't under those circumstances? So I guess this, what this says is you can ban people only if they engage in speech not protected by the First Amendment. But you're violating then the free speech rights of the platforms themselves. Removing protection for discriminatory moderation decision based on viewpoints. Do you really want to go there? Do you really want to bring discrimination law into social media? It's going to be discrimination of viewpoints. I mean I'm sure, I'm sure the left is going to have a field day with that. That all these social media companies that discriminate against the left, or against gays, or against trans, or against fill in the blank of the oppressed group. These are Republicans who want to now control the speech of these social media companies. Now note too that these laws that the Republicans would like to pass only apply they say to big tech companies with annual revenues of one billion or more. Where is the quality before the law? Where is it? Where is the quality before law? Only big companies we're going to regulate, only big companies. That's bad enough that we have anti-trust laws. Now we're going to impose laws about speech. But only if you're big, if you're small, you can do whatever the hell you want. But if you're big, the government is going to control your speech. The government is going to tell you what's appropriate and what's inappropriate to speak. It's, I mean I get it that Democrats are doing this, but Republicans are doing. Trump did it. And now it's just the idea of the freedom to speech, the freedom to decide who to post and who not to post. What ideas you want affiliated with your website and what ideas you don't want affiliated with your website. That's going to hell. That's being pounded away by both sides of the political aisle. I mean this is the headline. Why Republicans and even a couple of Democrats want to throw out tech's favorite law. That's another headline from another publication, right? Republicans and Democrats both want to appeal part of digital content law, but experts say that will be extremely tough. Now again, maybe 230 needs to be rewritten, but do you trust these guys to rewrite it? Do you trust 230 to protect free speech or to violate free speech if the Democrats and Republicans of today, if Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley get to sit down and decide what's going to be in the law, is that what you want? I would rather take 230 as it is, even if it could be improved than to let these people dabble with it. And then on top of that, now you've got every special interest in the world wanting to regulate social media. On the left it's organizational change of color of change, anti-difamation league, common sense media. What do they want? They want social media to stop with hate speech. Hate speech. Bring those European laws to America. We do even a worse job with them. It's just unbelievable how bad things are. How bad things are because yes, we've got a Democrat in the White House, got an awful Democrat in the White House who isn't even coherent. He can't even finish sentences. We've got Democrats that have clearly been pulled and shifted out to the left, and then we've got Republicans who are not an opposition party. They just want to restrict different speech than the left does, in different ways, slightly. Although they all want to go after the same target. They all want to go after big tech in one way or another. Left and right are completely united about this. Completely united about this. And the consequence of that is our rights are being violated. And we are in a real risk right now to lose the protection of speech. It's already happening stealthily with government influencing, suggesting, recommending. Once you do that, it's all downhill. Once you accept that, once you shrug at that, once you don't care about that. And if you can bite it with the fact that there's no opposition party when it comes to these fundamental issues. There's nobody standing up for the rights of individuals. There's nobody standing up for inalienable rights. There's nobody standing up for free speech, the actual free speech. There's no, I don't know where you can get the hope, where that hope can come from. And this is why we have to fight all of them. The left and the right, we have to fight them all. We have to fight the bad ideas wherever they are. If we're the last people standing and defending free speech, then we need to be the ones defending free speech. And if that means we need to fight Democrats and Republicans, Republicans and Democrats, then so be it. That's our responsibility. That's our job. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect. Not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Alright, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. 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