 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, earlier today I had an opportunity to speak to a group of lawyers at the Federalist Society luncheon in Montgomery, Alabama. Given everything that's been going on this week, Alex Jones being kicked off of several social media sites. Our friends Scott Horton and Daniel McAdams being de-platformed by Twitter. I decided to talk about free speech in the age of big tech and inquire whether these are truly private companies or whether they are in fact highly state connected, almost government sponsored enterprises that are involved in a very PC, very sinister and very illiberal suppression of thought and speech in this country. Stay tuned for Mises Weekends. I think there's something happening in this country and we might loosely call it PC that bodes very poorly for our future if we don't fight back. A few years ago the organization I'm involved with, Mises Institute, had an event in Dallas, Texas. Now this is way back in that innocent era known as 2015. And at this event we titled it Against PC The Fight for Free Expression and we attacked the whole concept of political correctness as illiberal and dangerous. So we actually got quite a bit of grief from people on both sides of the political spectrum after we held this conference, especially in the libertarian sphere. There are people who sort of identify as libertarians, not just civil libertarians, but economic and social libertarians. But on the left side of things, left libertarians gave us a lot of grief. They said, no, no, no Jeff, you're overreacting. This is sort of a right wing shibboleth. Political correctness is not some onerous thing. It's really just about civility. It's about kindness. It's about being nice to other people. It's about inclusivity, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought at the time, you know, it's interesting that we have to have this new speak. We have to have this new kind of thought process to give us what you're claiming. It purports to give us which is social cohesion. Last time I checked, I think our grandparents had a mechanism for installing social cohesion. It was called manners. And there used to even be people who were charged with instilling this mechanism in little mini-humans. They were called parents. But fast forward to the 2015 and all of a sudden, no, no, no, we need to be told by our social betters how to speak and think about things. And if we fast forward today with all that's been happening just in the last couple of weeks if you're following some of the social media brouhaha's and everything that's happening with Trump and everything that is happening with the supposed breakdown of civility between the left and the right in this country, I wonder if some of our critics back in 2015 would change their minds. Some of you may have been following the episode with Alex Jones, who's a provocateur of sorts, a conspiracy theorist of sorts, if you say so, who's active on a lot of different platforms his own, but also platforms that are hosted by organizations like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, of course. And he was de-platformed by many, not all, apparently Twitter kept him on. He was de-platformed by several of these big tech firms all at the same time, which in a sense sort of made it feel conspiratorial and just emboldened his fans to think that way. And I was reading some of the back and forth. Very trite things said about this. Well, it's free speech. Well, it's not free speech because they're private platforms, et cetera. There wasn't much interesting going on, but for those of you who consider yourselves conservatives, I would like to point out that David French at National Review is A-OK with what happened to Mr. Jones. So if any of you are national review subscribers, I suggest you send him a nasty gram. There's a lot of different words for this. In PC, we can call it Neo-McCarthyism, we can call it cultural Marxism. And I know we all think of these terms that they're vague, they're loaded with context, they're not necessarily easily defined. OK, now I'll grant you that. But so are lots of things that exist. The term society is vague and hard to define. Society exists. The term civilization is broad and vague and hard to define, but it still exists. So I think we can take a stab at defining what we'll call PC but what is really this authoritarian imposition of thought control that I think is really gaining traction in the United States. And here's the definition, a working definition. It's a little lawyerly, so bear with me. Political correctness is the conscious, designed manipulation of language intended to change the way people speak, write, think, feel, and even act. In furtherance of an agenda. So if we think about this in terms of manipulation, it feels very Soviet in a sense. It's a form of policing us, of policing our thoughts and words. And it takes many forms. But it always comes back to this idea that there is officially sanctioned thought. And if you're outside of it, maybe you're not a good person. So it's not just outright proposals for so-called hate speech laws which are big throughout the West. America has been exempt so far, but don't kid yourselves. But there's lots of other ways that don't necessarily involve government, like deplatforming, like we saw this past week, or banning by social media companies. There's also shadow banning, which is where you're still permitted to have discourse on social media outlets, but no one can find you. Snitching on people. Doxing them at their place of employment. Mobbing people in restaurants and public spaces. We've seen that. You might have heard the term called othering, which is an attempt to sort of portray people as beyond the pale. And in extreme cases, loss of one's job, one's career, maybe even one's friends, or reputation based on wrong thought or wrong speak. So all of this is very sinister in my view. And it's an attempt to silence those people whom the silence serves believer beyond the allowable range of public discourse. And what it's doing, of course, is it's creating the most invidious and dangerous form of censorship of all, which is self-censorship. And we all engage in it to an extent in our personal lives. Let's be honest. So political correctness is not just a social issue, like abortion. And it's not just part of the cult's words. It's actually an attempt to frame what we say about everything. So in that sense, PC is an overriding issue that affects all others. A couple of anecdotes that serve us today. Some of you might know the writer Kevin Williamson, who was a longtime writer for a national review and was recently given what is really a higher profile job writing for The Atlantic. The Atlantic magazine purports to be sort of an independent thought. It definitely skews left. But nonetheless, because he was identified as a conservative, a lot of Atlantic readers were aghast when this was announced and they started digging into his old tweets. And it turns out he had some very incendiary tweets about abortion. He's apparently pro-lifer and made some joking or mocking references to applying to the death penalty to women who go get an abortion. So this was considered an absolute outrage by folks on the left. An online mob of sorts was formed and The Atlantic felt the heat and buckled to it and pulled the rug out from Mr. Williams, said, no, no, no, we've changed our minds. We're not going to have Mr. Williamson right at The Atlantic. Okay, fair enough. The Atlantic's a private magazine. But you may have also heard about a woman named Sarah Jiang Zhang, I hope I'm saying that right, who was recently hired to the advisory board of the editorial component of The New York Times, the newspaper of record of sorts for the West. Sad as that may be. And she too had a lot of incendiary tweets in her background, some very silly stuff, but some very malicious and nasty stuff. And so in this instance, the right wing got active and busy on social media going after her and blasting her. But the difference was, of course, that The New York Times said, no, you know, we hear what you're saying, but we look back at those tweets, we talk to her about it. She doesn't believe that stuff anymore. And we're going to have her at The New York Times. We're not going to let the mob win. And frankly, I don't care if Sarah Jiang is on the New York Times editorial board. They don't take New York Times editorials with any seriousness whatsoever. And so it's of no concern to me. And I'm kind of glad they stood up, to be frank. I think that this is a good thing. I would like to see more organizations doing that and saying, no, we're going to have her. And more importantly, to be fair, I think some of the sentiments she voiced in those tweets are what a lot of folks on the left actually think. They might not just be so impolite as to say them publicly. But here's the thing. Both Sarah Jiang and Kevin Williamson are going to be AOK. They are mildly famous people with mildly successful careers who will go on to do other things in their lives if for some reason The New York Times or in Kevin Williamson's case, The Atlantic didn't work out. These are people with probably a little bit of money and some name ID and some opportunities out there in the world. But not everybody is like that. So I'd like to bring up an anecdote that has a little different ending, particularly with respect to a couple of friends of mine. One of them's name is Dan and McAdams. He heads up the Ron Paul Institute in Texas, which is a very anti-interventionist, anti-war small group. And Scott Horton. Scott Horton is also a libertarian activist, very anti-war, and wrote a book called Fool's Arend, which really documents what I agree with some of you may not, foolishness in terms of our never ending longest war in human history in US history, excuse me, in Afghanistan, a war on which we spent trillions of dollars. So anyway, both of these gentlemen got kicked off Twitter earlier this week. They were involved in a spat with another Twitterer and saying some things back and forth, and they defended a guy who was saying something like, I hope the Trump zombies come eat you or something like that. And so somebody got upset and said, well, this violates Twitter's terms of service. You ought to ban these guys because they're threatening violence. No one was threatening violence. But nonetheless, they were both kicked off Twitter. And for people who really operate on very little money, people who operate at the margins of public discourse, a platform like Twitter is very valuable, very, very valuable to them, and it's no longer available. So, you know, the state didn't come along and say, Scott Horton and Danny McAdams, you can't say that. If you continue to say that, we're going to find you. Uncle Sam is going to find you or your state or county is going to find you. The government didn't come along and say, we're going to put you in jail if you don't stop yammering about the war in Afghanistan. None of that happened. But in a sense, their lives and the lives of some other people who have been attacked on social media actually did get smaller. If we think about it, when someone goes to jail, they're literally in a cage and they can't have any contact with their friends and family, they can't work, et cetera. So we've really contained their life and made it smaller. But to a lesser extent, we're kind of doing that with these social media outrage mobs. We're not putting people in jail, but we might be diminishing their lives, making their lives smaller in terms of their career opportunities, the money they might make, their circle of friends, their circle of influence. These things shrink. So they're not in jail, but they did get smaller. So there's certainly a punishment element to it. And frankly, when I look at the Mises Institute, which is considered in the world of economics, it's considered a radical organization, it would not take much for someone like Google to come along and say, we're going to erase the Mises Institute from our search results. So unless you're using DuckDuckGo or one of the other browsers, you're not even going to find them. Or we're just going to disappear their search results to page 20 because we don't like the Mises Institute anymore. A lot of our web traffic comes from Google searches, probably about 50, 60%. That would dramatically affect our ability to get our message out if Google ever decided to do that. Our reach would get smaller. So here's the conundrum, at least for me, is that I'm one of those deadly, boring doctrinaire libertarians. As far as I'm concerned, we could probably get by without government roads, we could probably get by without government courts, police, etc. I'm a doctrinaire died-in-the-wool libertarian. I don't really believe in the concept of public goods. I'm just being open with you. I don't think we need to apply public utilities regulation or common-carry regulation or whatever to social media. And really, what's happening in the last few years has forced me to challenge my own views on this. I'm a little struggling with it because five or ten years ago I would have said, oh, come on, the lowest-level DMV clerk or traffic cop has more power over your life than Google. They can come along and ruin your day, not give you the sticker for your car or deny you or give you a traffic ticket. And Google, your relationship with Google is entirely voluntary, just like it is with the Catholic Church or something, whereas the IRS, your relationship with the IRS is involuntary. So that's the difference between Google and the state. And that's fair enough, and that fits a lot of neat little boxes for me and for a lot of people conceptually. But social media is where the conversation takes place today. Kicking someone off social media is almost like kicking them out of, let's say, the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in London where you go stand on a box. The Hyde Park is a public park. I don't know if it's City of London or City of Westminster, but it's a public park. So people would say, well, Jeff, that's a public park and Google's private. But nonetheless, Hyde Park is where you go stand on a soapbox or at least you used to before the internet to make your point in London. Social media is the place where a lot of people go to make their point today. People who don't have a room like this or a microphone or a beautiful luncheon, maybe they're at home, maybe they're poor, maybe they're handicapped, maybe they can't go out. Maybe Twitter's quite a lifeline to them. So the short answer is, well, go build your own social media platforms that don't kick libertarians or mises.org or Scott Horton offer them and go after the advertisers of people at places like Facebook and Twitter that do kick you off. Okay. And I accept that answer to an extent. But what happens when these companies, these tech and social media companies are so heavily involved with government? You know, what happens when they work with the government at all levels? They are involved in data collection and spying and developing weapons in many cases. AI, artificial intelligence. Some of the big companies like Amazon provide cloud services to all kinds of federal agencies. So these tech companies derive a lot of their social and economic and even cultural power, not just from their competence in the marketplace. And I would say Facebook is pretty competent in social media, but increasingly from their connections to government as well or at least the threat of their connections to government. You know, what if there is, in effect, in fact, sort of what we might call a media-industrial complex just like we use the term warfare-industrial complex. What if there's a media-industrial complex and what if it really does create sort of an undeserving tech power elite? People who would not have the power in poll they have if it wasn't for this melding of corporate and state power. So at what point are, what I assume, all of us as civil libertarians, at what point are we justified in beginning to oppose these powerful tech companies and media companies when they blur the distinction between outright First Amendment violations by an expressly government actor and then the quasi-private silencing of alternative voices like Alex Jones by state-connected actors? At some point there's a little bit of a fine line there. I won't pretend to have the answer, but it's troubling to me. But here's the thing, here's what's so, I think, bewildering to a lot of us who haven't necessarily been paying attention, but now we're forced to pay attention, is how did we get to where we are? And I think we got to where we are by stealth because we haven't really recognized or come to terms with the triumph of progressivism in this country over the last 100 years. If we think about progressivism, which is the mantra of tech companies, which is also the mantra of most people in government, is really the dominant force in society. It frames every debate we have, whether that's political, cultural, social, economic. We're speaking to each other in terms of a progressive framework, and we don't see it because we're so caught up in these outmoded ideas of left and right or liberal, conservative. And so, progressivism and its influence becomes like the furniture or a potted plant. We don't notice it anymore, but we live among it. And when I use the term progressive, for most of us in this room, that probably means left wing. We think, well, that's a person on the left is a progressive. That's not entirely accurate. I think there are right-wing progressives as well. Progressive is somebody who thinks humankind is malleable and that it ought to be conformed to serve the state or society or the collective or whatever it serves better. In other words, humans need to evolve. They need to get better so that we can get on with our grandiose plans, which is what progressives are. They're people with grandiose plans. So in that sense, they exist on both the left and right. On the left, this generally takes the form of some kind of socialist collectivism, social democracy, as the buzzword today. On the right, it sometimes takes the form militarism or national greatness concepts that we're going to go, like George W. Bush, we're going to go instill democracy wherever it's needed, good and hard, even if that's among centuries-old Taliban mindsets. So what it really gets down to is that their progressives are marked by grandiosity about what government can do, about what government can accomplish. If only these pesky citizens would stop pursuing their own ends all the time. They tend to do that. So in every meaningful way, really, progressives of all stripes control politics, they control government, they control business, they control culture in America and in the West. The 20th century was irretrievably progressive. So this is our world today. From my view anyway, progressives overwhelmingly control both major political parties. They control the federal judiciary, along with all the federal departments and agencies. Don't think that as Trump changed any of this, 80% of federal employees in the administrative agencies don't come and go with the new administration, they're union members. So you see the tip of the iceberg, what you don't see is all those federal employees. And as you might know, for example, there are plenty of people who work for the IRS or the Treasury who just sort of shrug when Congress tries to change the regs on a certain tax bill. They just say, no, we're not going to do that. You'd be shocked if you spend any time in Washington the degree to which federal administrative agencies are a government unto themselves. Progressives dominate academia, no question. Universities K through 12 education, government and private, top to bottom, no question. Progressives run the American Medical Association, they run the American Bar Association, and thus these two traditionally conservative professions of medicine and law are steered leftward. Progressives run all supranational agencies and NGOs, things like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, almost all charities, foundations, nonprofits in the West. Almost all major corporations, global and domestic, are run by progressives, their boards are progressives, their corporate branding and messaging is progressive. If you doubt that, walk into Target sometime. Wall Street is undeniably progressive, gave overwhelmingly to Hillary over Trump. Silicon Valley, the tech industry are dominated by progressives, Google, Apple, Microsoft, but the old media overwhelmingly controlled by progressives. Broadcast news and print publications still today. Virtually all journalists self-identify as progressive. That's why Alex Jones exists because there was no other way for him to exist. Those outlets were not available to him. Progressives overwhelmingly run the social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. Progressives undeniably run Hollywood, pop culture. They hold sway over the film, TV, music, video industries. They control all the big streaming services like HBO, Netflix, Hulu, that you consume in the evening. All religious institutions in the West, from the Vatican to mainline Protestant churches to virtually all synagogues, are thoroughly progressive both politically and in terms of doctrine. When you put all this together, is there any wonder that progressives won every battle of the 20th century and that they're winning the 21st century ones as well? Think about it this way. Say around the time of the late 1800s, turn of the century, Teddy Roosevelt, what we think of as the progressive era, let's say the United States in 1900 was at five on the progressive scale. And let's say today it's at a hundred on the progressive scale. Well, anyone who suggests, well, let's push back from 100 to 98 is now a reactionary right-winger by definition. Or even somebody suggests, well, let's proceed from 100 to 105 a little slower than you're planning. That's all it takes, folks, to be branded a reactionary today. We simply don't fully recognize the world that we live in. So Orwell talked about this. He predicted it. I mean, he talked about language being used in consciously dishonest ways and that sort of circles us back to this idea of PC. Our language is being seized by some very illiberal forces in our society. People who are not well-intentioned, even as they tell us that their goal is to create a more just or more equitable world. And if we allow it to go on, we'll see consequences. Now, going back to Orwell, he was writing this in 1946. He has a great short essay you can find. It's called Politics in the English Language. It's only maybe 1500 words or something. It's online a couple different spots. Politics in the English Language, so great. I mean, what he distills in that few words is really interesting. But he used the term meaningless words to describe political jargon. And it surrounds us today. Words that are abused until they lose all value or meaning, either as a description or an epithet today. So here I'm quoting him. He says, and this is 1946, mind you. The word fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies something not desirable. That sounds applicable today. And here's another great quote from him. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one existed from all sides, it is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it. Well, I think that's certainly true today. So as a result, we have our whole set of meaningless words plaguing us today. Words like social justice, bigot, xenophobe, racist, fascist, misogynist, socialist, dreamer, snowflake, liberal, conservative, democracy, these have all become meaningless words. We don't even care to define them or use them precisely. But instead, we use them as bullets. We use them as bullets in a gun in a form of verbal warfare, not as honest descriptions. They're actually used dishonestly, intentionally dishonestly, as Orville put it, with the intent to deceive. So they're used to further the speakers or the writer's agenda rather than to create understanding, which I'll be all about. So I'll leave you with this. If there's any group that ought to guard against the misuse of language as lawyers, lawyers make their living, their stock and trade in words, in an argument. They make a living using words to convey specific meanings. Think about contract language. Think about trusts. Think about wills. Think about parsing a statute. Think about appellate decisions and how carefully lawyers parse the language in them. Moving a comma around in a document. I bet you've done that. Using the word may instead of shall, often that comes up in statutory language. All of these little things can have very real consequences. Remember when the Supreme Court decided that the fine levied by Obamacare was a-okay because it was a tax instead of a penalty? Well, that was a case of specious interpretation of words. So if lawyers won't police precision in language and demand better, who will? Thanks very much.