 to the Iran Brooks show. All right, so I think that's enough on North Korea. I want to talk about Antifa. Antifa is a so-called anti-fascist movement that has grown significantly, it's been around for quite a long time. It actually has hooks back into the 1920s and 30s in Europe. It was part of kind of the punk rock scene during the 1980s. There was then part of the anti-globalization riots and during the early 2000s. And if you remember, when they rioted in Seattle and damaged their cars there. But at least in the United States, it has grown significantly since Donald Trump was elected. There's no question if you look at traffic, if you look at membership, if you look at their activity on campuses and everywhere else, they have grown. And they've capitalized over the rise over the last couple of decades of a hard left of a, some people call it alt left, hard left, whatever you want to call it, anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-individualistic, pro-racist, collectivist, tribalist kind of left. And a very, very, very much anti-free speech left. And they've capitalized on that. And the next step, of course, for anti-free speech left is to promote violence in the name of silencing what they call offensive speech. So you saw articles in The New York Times and elsewhere, op-eds, not articles, editorials by university professors claiming that speech is violence. And think about it, you could make that claim, right? Speech offends, that offense causes you to have, I don't know, it causes you to be depressed and that has physical consequences. And therefore, speech is violence and speech must be suppressed, just like violence is suppressed. Now, which speech, who gets to determine what's offensive, what is hate? Well, of course, the powers to be, the authorities get to decide all of that for us. But in the meantime, since the authorities are not doing that, since the authorities are not doing that, since the universities are not doing that, I mean, all these people are allowed to speak on campuses and voice their opinions. And universities are not doing much about it and the government is not doing anything about it and the police are not silencing all these people who are speaking. I mean, even neo-Nazis are speaking and demonstrating and have websites and all this stuff. Then somebody has to do something about this. This is all wrong. This is a just, this is immoral. This is evil and carnate. And therefore, what you need is Antifa to go around defending us, protecting us from speech that is violence, that is offensive, that is, the equivalent of violence. And the Antifa are always going to say, as long as they, and they have an intellectual support, they're always gonna say, look, all we're doing is self-defense. All we're doing is protecting ourselves from the things those people over there are saying, because what they're saying is so disgusting, is so offensive, it is violent. So our violence is not initiation of force. Our violence is self-defense. And you're not against self-defense. None of us are against self-defense. We're all for self-defense. We believe violence is okay in self-defense. So therefore, you cannot come after us, say Antifa, because we're just acting in self-defense and we're filling in, we're filling in for the deficiencies of the police, for the deficiencies of the legal system, for the deficiencies of our universities, for the fact that we're way too tolerant of violence from the so-called right. And speech is violence. Therefore, when they speak, we should not be tolerant of it. We should shut them down. We should silence them. So Antifa views itself as very much as a vigilante group. People out there have committed crimes. Those crimes are speech crimes. And it's the Antifa's job. It's a job that we're doing. It's Antifa's responsibility. It's Antifa's mission to bring justice to the world and to silence those who use speech in violent ways. How did I do? I mean, that was a pretty good, that was pretty good defense of Antifa, right? Yeah, and that's the problem. The problem is there's almost nobody out there who can argue against them. And that's the problem that the left faces. I think many people on the left are very uncomfortable with Antifa. And you see that in articles in the New York Times and in Atlantic Magazine and other places where they're clearly uncomfortable with us. So for example, there was an article on the rise of the violent left on the Atlantic. And it's a very good article. It's worth reading. And he documents the violence and he's a lefty. It's clear he's a lefty. But can he really argue with them? Can he really make the case of why free speech is a value? And it's less you can unless you can, unless you can argue that free, that speech is never violence unless it's incitement or fraud, right? There's specific cases which the law already recognizes where speech morphs into action, morphs into violence. But these have to be objectively defended which is not easy. So it's very difficult to argue against them now. Why is it important to argue against them? Not because you can convince any of them, but because the people are most consistent with the point of view. Ultimately shape the intellectual culture. They actually start causing people to gravitate in their direction. They actually shift the middle in their direction. They shift the entire argument in their direction. And the outcome of Antifa will be, this is my prediction, will be if not challenged. If not challenged philosophically and intellectually, put aside the police response which we'll get to. But if it's not challenged intellectually and philosophically, then their view will become legitimate. And if their view becomes legitimate, what we will get is what we already have to some extent in Europe. We will get hate speech laws. And it won't be Antifa shutting down speeches. It won't be Antifa shutting down certain points of view. It'll be the police enforcing hate speech laws. But it's coming. You know it's coming. Europe has it already. And Europe usually, given the trends in the United States, Europe is where we're heading. So the First Amendment cannot stand up to a systematic, unopposed, philosophical, intellectual attack. It cannot. And who defends the First Amendment? A bunch of conservatives who often cannot make the argument for free speech. Cannot make the argument, philosophical and intellectual argument for why free speech is an absolute. For why speech is never, ever, ever violence except when it's not speech, when it is violence. Opinion cannot be violence. Incitement, fraud, those are the, those are what constitute violence. It's when, you know, action is demanded. Action is the consequence. So the speech becomes action. But that is the kind of intellectual, philosophical defense that needs to be taken. You know, that's for example, what at the Anduin Institute we are doing in engaging in a philosophical, intellectual defense of free speech. Because without it, free speech will fall and Antifa will win. And that is the goal. The goal is to move, you know, in sports what they call, to move the goalposts, to move the discussion, to move the agenda. And they're winning with that because, you know, A, because they've got the media on their side and because the so-called right has almost no arguments against them. You know, so the discussion today is boiling down to Antifa versus the neo-Nazis. That's not a discussion. That's ridiculous. Where is the intellectual right arguing against Antifa? Arguing against their points that they are making about speech, that's the essence. And that's why, you know, I'm supportive of anybody today fighting for free speech, even if I disagree with them on a lot of other things. Free speech is the issue of our time. Free speech is the issue we must protect. We must defend. We must fight for right now because it's under attack both from right and from left. And I've talked about this a lot about how Donald Trump is in attack on free speech. But the right has always been weak on free speech. The real attack is coming now from the left, which traditionally has been pro-free speech. And now it's just flipped. So now who's for free speech, really? Almost nobody, almost nobody. I, you know, just to give you an example of the right being anti-free speech. So one of the issues that has happened over the last few weeks is that some tech companies have banned, like neo-Nazis from being on their servers, or Google, of course kicked out that kid who wrote the Google memo. YouTube will not sell ads on some content and actually will ban certain people. So Patreon, so of others. And what is the right's response to that? It was not an intellectual philosophical argument about the virtue of free speech and an open discussion in society. It was, we need to regulate Google. We need to break Google up. Indeed, the left and the right have united on one agenda item, which is, let's attack Google, let's go after Google, let's break them up, let's regulate them, let's view them as a utility, let's force them to have, to accept all opinions. YouTube and everybody else. So, you know, this is a very, very scary place we find ourselves in because of, I think, the impotence of people in the right to defend free speech properly. I think they are defenders of free speech. David Rubin and a lot of the people that he has on his show, I strongly recommend the Rubin Report on YouTube. Look up, Dave Rubin on YouTube. Rubin Report on YouTube, actually, a couple of weeks ago, I was, he interviewed me, but the people he interviews are part of the people trying to articulate an intellectual philosophical defense of free speech, which is so crucial today. All right, if you want in on the conversation about Antifa, if you have any theories about Antifa, if you know what needs to be done about Antifa, or if you want to talk about free speech, generally, 888-900-3393-888-900-3393, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you have to say about Antifa. Have you been in any of these demonstrations? Okay, when we come back, I want to talk about what Antifa's done recently, Berkeley, Boston are the places. I want to talk about the media's response to Antifa, which I think is interesting. And I want to talk about the ever-growing definition of fascism that Antifa relies on in order to sustain itself. All right, so if you have anything to say about any of that, 888-900-3393, you're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network, we're here every Sunday from 11 and one Pacific time. And... 10. You know, we'll talk to you right after this break that's coming up. Five. Five. The Iraq Book Show. All right, so maybe the most important topic of our generation, of our time, will be free speech, defending free speech, arguing for free speech, and crushing the arguments made by these lefties and by the right on this issue of free speech. You have to change the way people think about this issue. We have to. We have to insist. Now, I'm not going to give you the whole philosophical argument here. I recommend, I have a number of podcasts on this issue. You can look at them on the podcast app. You can also go to YouTube and look up your on-book free speech. You'll find a lot of videos that I've done, talks that I've done. I'm going to be giving some talks in Europe this next month on free speech. Those will be up on YouTube. And I also want to recommend Steve Simpson from the Ironman Institute's book, Defending Free Speech. You can get it on Amazon. It's like $6.95 on a kindola paperback. It's definitely worth getting with essays about free speech. And there's a lot more to come. Look up on the Ironman Institute website. We have a lot of information about free speech. But the essential argument is this, in my view. And this is why it's hard because some of the preconditions for this argument don't exist in our culture. Our culture, we have to understand that human survival, human flourishing depends on the free exercise of the human mind. Reason is man's basic means of survival. It is by means by which we survive and thrive and flourish on this earth. It's by use of our mind. It's by use of our reason. It's our thinking capabilities, right? I hope that's obvious. It isn't. I know it isn't. To most people, it isn't. To 90% of people, maybe it isn't. Now, what is the product of thinking? The product of thinking is some kind of action. And one of those actions, one of the most important actions is speaking, writing, conveying the content of your thought. It's letting the world know. And if you have, if thinking is so important, we must protect it. And then we must protect the products of that thought. The products of the thought must be protected because otherwise people won't do the thinking. They won't do the thinking if you can't write. You know, it's not a surprise that there are more scientists once science is freed up from religious authoritarianism than there was during the period where the Catholic church controlled everything. And if you were a scientist and discovered something new, there was the threat of being burned to the stake. So when you free the human mind up, more thinking gets done, more truth gets discovered, and the world is a better place, for individuals, for human beings. So you have to respect thinking and you have to respect the product of thinking. And you know, one product, the most important product of thinking is speech. It's the ability to convey that thinking to other people, to teach, to educate. And some of the thinking is really, really bad. Some of it's really, really stupid. We've heard a lot of really, really stupid things in the last few weeks. But who gets to decide what is the good speech and what is the bad speech? The government, people with guns, we know how that ends. You have to allow for the junk, for the garbage, for the offensive, for the stupid, in order to get to the truth, in order to get to the truth. And some of us will never know what is true, what is not when somebody says it today, because it's not our field, it's not our profession. Oh, you know, we're just ignorant. We just don't know. So who gets a judge? Well, in the end of the day, the market does. We do, but we don't have the ability to shut people up. We shouldn't have the ability to shut people up. If I don't like what you're saying, if I think it's untrue, I think it's false, I shouldn't have the ability to silence you. And if we do, then the future is over. Then we slowly decline into authoritarianism, into the rule by those who get to decide what is true and what is not, what is allowed and what is not, what can be spoken and what cannot, what can be thought and what cannot. But that's the world Antifa wants to take us in. And it is, they're out there protecting, protecting, what they view as, right? You know, protecting us from fascists. But this is the problem Antifa faces. Well, it doesn't really, it's not a real problem. Problem Antifa has is, they're not that many neo-Nazis and they're not that many white supremacists, they're not that many fascists, explicit fascists in America today. Not real fascists, fascists who believe in authoritarian government and the silencing of speech and the police states and, you know, in control over the entire economy. They're not that many real fascists. They're quite, they're too many for my liking and they're more than probably most people think, but they're not that many. But Antifa doesn't view those people as fascists. Antifa is not interested in a dictionary definition of fascism. Antifa's not interested in an historical definition of fascism. Antifa's not interested in knowledge. They're interested in emotion. And to them, a fascist is anybody they disagree with. Anybody that is outside of the leftist norm, anybody outside of what they've been taught is acceptable. Anything outside of convention, leftist academic convention. So, and you know, there was a good article, I don't agree with all of it, but there were pieces of it. Holman Jenkins wrote a good article about this if a couple of, I guess about a week ago, a week and a half ago. The article is called The Great Nazi Scare of 2017. The Great Nazi Scare of 2017. Now, I don't agree with some of what he writes, but a lot of what he writes is interesting. He's one of my favorite authors generally. He writes with a Wall Street Journal two, three times a week. And he writes, you know, since there's a shortage, then you become, if you oppose raising them in a minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, you're a fascist. If you don't think climate change is going to be catastrophic, you're a racist. If you believe capitalism is a good system, you're a racist and a fascist. So anything, any position you take, which is not leftist, which is not borderline socialist, which is not, you know, on somewhere on the left spectrum of economic issues, let's say, because the right left spectrum is useless when it comes to a lot of these issues. Anywhere on that side, right, you're immediately, if you're not on that side, you immediately branded a racist and a fascist. And, you know, so if you're tough on foreign policy, this is another one. If you say the kind of things I said earlier in the show about North Korea, you're obviously a racist and a fascist. If you take positions, if you take a position about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like your pro-Israel, because it's a civilized country, then you're a fascist and a racist. Now, I know this because I've been a target of this, right? So I appeared at an Exeter University to give a talk on free speech of all things. What's that? To give a talk on free speech. And because I've written about, you know, that Israel's a good country, because I've written pro-American stuff and pro-individual rights stuff, and because I'm pro-capitalist, I was immediately branded a racist and a fascist. And my event, they try to shut it down. And indeed, for weeks afterwards on Twitter, they constantly attacked everything that I say, as though he's just a racist and a fascist. Why? Because I hold views that are not part of this leftist, you know, mainstream. And Antifa is there to protect the conventional leftist view. All right, when we come back, we'll kind of wrap up the show. But before we do that, we have to take this break. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network. So, we're talking about Antifa. And Antifa's not interested in going after fascists, real fascists. Antifa's interested in going after anybody who disagrees with them. Antifa's interested in violence, and you could see that in Boston. I know a few soap pictures of the demonstration in Boston. Anybody who was, I don't know, a Trump supporter or anybody who argued with them got beaten up. And when they ran out of people to beat up, they started throwing rocks and bottles full of urine at the police. So, Antifa's not interested in real fascists. That is not what they were about. They were interested in violence. They're interested in destruction. And they target, at the end of the day, is the police. That's what they really hate. Because it's not that Antifa are communists. People love to throw out communists and neo-Moxism and stuff like that. But these people are much worse than communists. They're much worse than Marxists because they don't believe in anything. They're nihilists. They are nihilists. They're anarchists. They want to destroy for the sake of destroying. They want, you know, they want all police gone so that they can have and get their kicks without anybody stopping them. They are much more, you know, corrupt intellectually than a communist. A communist is about as corrupt intellectually as you can get, an ideology that's responsible for the death of over 100 million people. These people are worse. They want to get all everything. They have no ideology, no vision. They are militant. They're violent. They want to destroy. They want to knock down. They want to break stuff. That's all they care about. And they can't be reasoned with. They can't be, you can't discuss anything with them. Right? In Berkeley, again, they were just beating people up. Again, if you expressed an opposing position. I mean, Ben Shapiro is no fascist. You might disagree with him. I disagree with him on a lot of things. But he's not a fascist. So, Antifa is not about fascism. Antifa is about using violence to silence and ultimately control all those who you disagree with. And it's not for anything. They're not for an agenda. At least with the communists, you'd say, look, communist, it's a bad system. It doesn't work. These guys don't want a system. They just want the entire focus. Everything about them is driven by hate and destruction. It's not geared towards establishing a dictatorship like in North Korea. I mean, that is the outcome, but it's not what they dream about. They don't dream about some utopia which the proletarian all commune spiritually and work hard to enhance human life, which is kind of the ridiculous notion of a communist utopia. No, they don't care about any of that. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys would start killing commies if communism was a thing. Communism is not a thing. What's a thing is nihilism. That's the thing. It's just a pure joy and destroying stuff. And it's so, such a deep corruption, such a deep, deep corruption, such a deep, deep darkness in their soul and such a blindness to values. And that darkness in their soul is an anti-value darkness, an anti-value orientation. That's at the end what they are. Now again, people get caught up in this and I'm sure there's some innocent people there who are just having fun as if beating people up is fun. It's not. They are morally culpable, are morally responsible. But some of them might grow out of it, but these are bad people. These are bad people. And they need to be pointed out. And one of the great evils of the world in which we live today is that the media is culpable here because the media says nothing about them. They don't talk about them. You know, again, once in a while you'll get a good article like in Atlantic about the rise of the violence left. Now it's true, as the New York Times keep pointing out, they haven't killed that many people. Two minutes. They've only killed some. Some is enough. And if you embolden them as the New York Times is constantly doing by relying people on their pages to defend them, then they will kill people. It's just a matter of time. They will grow more violent and they will kill more. And they will silence more. So the media here is culpable by not reporting. How much did you see about Boston and about Berkeley? Some. But with no judgment. Imagine if those were racist doing the same kind of damage. The media would have been all over the story and they would have been condemning it left and right. But when it's Antifa, nobody says a word. When it's the left, nobody says a word. And partially because. Certainly the left, but even the right today have no philosophical, intellectual arguments about the fundamental issue that Antifa is bringing out. How do you address speech when it is offensive? So at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I still believe that this is a philosophical battle. This is an intellectual battle. Yeah, I mean, it would be nice that the police actually protected us and they better start doing that. But we will now win. We cannot win unless we launch a free speech offensive. A philosophical offensive. 30. An intellectual offensive. And one grounded on the value of reason, on the virtue of rationality. Any defense short of that will fail and the Antifas of the world will win. All right, we will win though. We're gonna launch that offensive. You're listening to your own book show. We're here on the Blaze Radio Network every Sunday from 11 to one, 11 to one Pacific time. And thanks for listening. Three. Clear. Applying the principles of... All right. Thanks, Ellie. Thank you. I'll see you next week. I will actually next week. So just...