[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 229th episode of the Atlas Society Ask. My name is Lawrence Olivo. I am the senior Project Manager here at the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun and creative ways like animated videos and graphic novels. Today, our CEO, Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I am delighted to have with me Atlas Society senior fellow Robert Tracinski and also our founder, David Kelly, who will be joining us a little bit later on during this webinar to talk about free speech, very topically, because we recently released a new Pocket Guy to free speech, written by Rob Tracinski himself. So for those of you who are watching us on Instagram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, please don't hesitate. Put your comments, put your questions in the comment section and we'll get to many as we can near the end of the show. But for now, I'm going to pass things over to Rob to get us started. Rob, thanks so much for doing this.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Thanks. Thanks, Lawrence, for being the host here. Yeah, so we just did a pocket guide to free speech, and it's sort of a very broad overview. I see. These are pocket guides. They're not long. So I had a lot of material to cover to cover this whole range of interesting issues of free speech. I'm just going to pull out a couple to talk about to begin with and some interesting things that I learned while sort of doing the research to put this together.
But I want to say, you said this is timely because the Pocket guy's coming out. Well, it's also timely because there are always fights going on about free speech. And here's an example, one that I think particularly timely.
So there's been this debate going on about in Florida. They've had this attempt to say, oh, we're going to ban woke indoctrination in the schools, or transgender ideology and various types of inappropriate sexual content in books that are in the schools. And the thing is that as much as you might be sympathetic to the idea of, okay, there shouldn't be woke indoctrination in the schools. I've been warning for a while that the standards they had were so sort of overly broad and vague, yet also kind of church lady ish. Right. Like any reference to sexuality at all, they have to ban it. So it's kind of this just church lady puritanical aspect. So I've been warning for a while, at the rate they're going, they're going to have to start banning Ayn Rand books and lo and behold, that moment has come. I just saw an article where they had a list of various things that had been banned in schools, at school libraries in various counties. And I think it's, I may have this wrong, but I think it's Clay County, Florida. They there on the list of prohibited books is the Fountainhead. So I knew this moment was coming. And so this is one of these issues and I deal with this in the packet guide, not in that specific way but in a very broad general way that there are all these sort of weird kind of gray areas like well, what about schools? You know, they have to decide what books are right and what books are wrong, what books are appropriate, which books are inappropriate. You know, they're not going to be, I don't know, I might be dating myself this reference. They're not going to be storing, you know, Penthouse magazine in the school library. You know, they actually do have to have some standards. But at the same time there has been, there's a large body of law that says well look, they have to have sort of non ideologically biased standards. And at the same time they also, you know, they have to the, you know, the public schools for are serving kids up to age 18 who are, you know, adults or very near adults who are dealing with adult level material often.
So this has come up with people taking honors courses where they're covering college level material. And you have the church lady type saying oh no, no, you can't be reading that book, that's a bad, you know, that book has too much sex in it. And it's literally meant to be college level adult level work for the, for the kids in the honors or the advanced placement. And so I kind of wanted to. In this pocket guide I'm looking at things from more of a 3,000 foot level I think. I want to, I'm just going to give a brief overview of that as sort of we can work our way down to the hot button stuff. But I wanted to say that the timeliness of it is that there are actual fights going, going on about basically, you know, is it okay for people to be reading Ayn Rand books and should they, should they be banned?
The thing I want to talk about is the first thing that I think is very relevant to this is that the main thing that jumped out of my research, but it was more so than I was surprised by the extent to which was the case, is that free speech, historically, historically free speech basically comes out of people killing each other out of over religion. It comes from people killing each other over religion and then tried to figure out how not to do that. So, you know, freedom of religion and freedom of speech was not anybody's really plan A. And I mentioned that because I think there's something of a, of a narrative out there that you'll get from certain, I think certain religious right types who will say, oh, well, you know, free speech has its roots in the Protestant Reformation as the Protestants who wanted us to be freer to think. And there's an element of truth in that.
I was in London a couple years ago and saw that came across to my surprise in the middle of Whitehall, a statue of John Wycliffe. Who's John Wycliffe? Well, he's the first guy to translate the Bible into English and he became a major hero in Britain because they had this idea, especially during the Protestant era, that everybody should be reading the Bible for themselves. They shouldn't be getting it through the priests or through the church. They should be encountering the Bible directly. And they actually had a law for a while that every church in England had to have a copy of the Bible in English ready and available to be read by members of the general public. So this idea that, you know, we shouldn't be going through the authorities and the priesthood to find out what religion is about, we should read the Bible for ourselves, make our own decisions. So there's an element of that in Protestantism.
But what you actually see historically is the minute the Protestants, you know, break off from the Catholic church and establish themselves as the dominant power in a certain area and you know, they get into control and get into the power, what do they do? They immediately begin to ban Catholicism and to punish people for having the wrong non protestant religious views. So what happens is, you know, throughout the, basically the 16th and 17th century, in the early days, in the early centuries of Protestantism, what you have is a series of knockdown, drag out religious wars in Europe and massively devastating something people say up to half of the population of Germany dies in these wars that are raging between the Protestants and the Catholics. And eventually what starts to happen, what emerges from that and especially what emerges from in England where you're going back and forth, you have the tug of the pole, the push and the pull of Catholic versus Protestant and not just Catholic, Protestant, but different kinds of Protestantism. You have the Church of England versus the Presbyterians and you have these nonconformist sects who are sort of not that different from the Church of England, but they don't conform to certain beliefs or certain practices.
And so In England, you start to get this idea of, well, wait a minute, we should just simply have the state stay out of it, let everybody have their religious freedom, that it's improper to coerce people in their religious views. And so John Locke is the guy who becomes the key figure. Milton. John Milton, a little before him, in the 1640s and 1660s, making arguments. But it's John Locke who comes along in 1690, roughly, with a book called A Letter Concerning Toleration is. It's a long letter that he writes that then gets translated, where he makes the case, he says that light and evidence are the only things that are proper to convince you, to genuinely convince you of an idea. And so only light and evidence, only arguments are appropriate to determine people's beliefs. And coercion cannot make you actually believe anything. It can make you mouth certain words, it can make you go through certain motions, but it can't make you actually believe anything. And he says, look, if religion means anything, it has to be the inward conviction of the mind. You're not going to be saved, you're not going to go to heaven. God isn't going to be happy with you just because you mouthed the words but didn't believe them. Only that inward conviction will work. And therefore you have to be able to use the light evidence argument to come to your position. So you're fully convinced.
And coercion is inappropriate because it cannot actually convince you of something.
Now, the interesting thing about that, from my perspective, is that it sets, I think, a really important sort of foundation for freedom of speech, which is it really comes out of the idea that there's a revolution that has happened actually in religion and theology at about this time, where it's this view that reasoning and argument and reasoning, light and evidence are not just something you use for science, not just something used for politics, but that light and evidence, arguments and reasoning and facts are relevant to discussion of religion. There's actually a whole field of which Locke is part, called natural religion. The idea that you should develop your religious theology from observation of nature and her arguments and evidence, and there's a sort of an embrace of rationality in the field of religion and theology.
And this is a huge, you know, a huge sort of philosophical change that had been building up for many centuries. And that's sort of the tipping point. And what it establishes for us historically is that reason is the basis for arguments for freedom of speech. The idea that you need to base your opinions and your actions on reason, on evidence and argument and logic. And that's why you need coercion to be out of it. Because, you know, if you, if you bring in coercion, it breaks up that chain of going from the evidence, using reasoning, using logic, debating and balancing the different arguments and being able to come to a decision. You can't go through that if you're being coercively interfered with. Now, it's fascinating to me, though, that this did not begin as an argument in politics. It began as an argument. We didn't come up with the idea that, well, we need to have freedom of speech so we can come up with the right political viewpoints by having a proper debate and balancing all the different arguments for all the different policies and coming to the right conclusion. That's not how we came up with freedom of speech primarily as a historical matter. That comes later. But what comes first is this idea of this is how we're going to solve these religious conflicts of which people were literally killing each other in large numbers. So we're going to do that by embracing reason as a way of dealing with even the most important, the most profound, the most philosophical issues of morality and what is the nature of the universe. All those issues are going to be subject to argument and debate and the use of reason. And that's why we need to have freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But that comes out of the bad experience of trying the opposite of reason and argument, which is trying to, you know, kill as many people as required in order to. To have everybody have all the exact same religious views. And basically, after we try that for 30 years, literally 30 years to 30 years or, and basically a vast devastation, many people kill that we still don't have an answer to everybody having the same religion. Then there's that impetus to say, let's call a truce.
Let's have this all happen through argument and reason, through coercion. Now, what happens later is, of course, you know, at the first, I think it's not a political thing because there are very few. There are no real democracies in the 1600s. There are no real democracies, there are no real places that Britain is the closest you get and, you know, they're starting to assert the supremacy of Parliament over the King. But eventually you get also the idea that, well, look, if you have a system of representative government, system of where the people are voting for different policies, then the people have to be able to have discussions, they have to be able to debate, they have to go back and forth, they have to consider a subject from all sides and come to A decision. And we get the more political argument for freedom of speech, which I think is also relevant, very relevant today.
Somebody mentioned in the comments brings up libel. We're going to get to that. Libel is a very. Libel and slander. These are very tricky ones. Defamation, those are very tricky ones. They're very sort of contentious and subject to a lot of abuse. Now, the other big thing I want to establish before we then go to more back and forth or more discussion is that the big thing that I found in setting out the issue and discussing the issue of free speech, setting out all the arguments, looking at the history of it, is there's actually two different, very different things that we mean by free speech. And they actually have different standards and people tried to make them go by the same standards and it just doesn't work out, in my view. And that is that there is a political concept of freedom of speech and that has to do with what can the government do? Can the government ban you from saying something? Can the government suspend the publication of magazines? Can the government. John Milton had argued against a scheme for licensing publications that to be able to publish a book, you had to go get a clergyman to read it and sign off of it and give you a license to say, oh, this is a. This is an acceptable book. It's not. It doesn't contain anything religiously wrong.
He was arguing against this licensing. So the political concept of free speech has to do with what can the government do in limiting people's speech? And that's a very, very broad standard. So basically the answer is the government cannot really do much of anything at all. We'll get to libel and slander. Those are. There are a few places where government. The government can come in and do a few things. There are some things that are not proper applications of freedom of speech. But for the most part, if you're talking about making an argument expressing a religious view, expressing idea on politics or policy, what can the government could do? Nothing. That's the concept of freedom of speech.
However, there's also a second concept of freedom of speech that we have, and that's actually. The funny thing is that that's actually where we spend most of our debates on right now, which is not about what the government can do. The second concept of free speech is the concept of private free speech. And it's not free speech in the same sense of freedom from coercion. This is more about an openness to or intolerance of debate. Now we call it free speech and there's connection between the Two, but it's a very different thing. It's not about, you know, somebody banning you in the sense of coercing you, telling you you will go to jail if you say this. It's not somebody saying, well, I'm going to kick you off of my forum or I'm not going to publish you, or I'm. We're not going to invite you to present at this symposium. We think your views are beyond the pale. And the interesting thing is that you cannot have the same, this idea that, you know, the standards that you have for political freedom of speech is so very wide and vague. Basically, you cannot exclude anyone. No matter how stupid or outrageous their views are, you cannot, with a few narrow exceptions, you cannot exclude anyone.
And then, whereas in the concept of freedom of speech as a social norm, this is really a moral rather than a political concept of freedom of speech, what we really are saying is you should tolerate a wide array of views. You should be open to a lot of different ideas, but you can't be. But by its very nature, in private discussion, you can't be open to absolutely everything. So, you know, openness and tolerance means somebody with unconventional views you should listen to. But, you know, for example, you don't have to have, you know, flat earthers at a, at a conference of geologists.
There are certain, you know, it's appropriate and actually kind of necessary to say there are certain views that have, we've hashed this out. You know, this, this view has nothing to offer to any rational discussion. So we're just going to exclude it. We're not going to ban it. You can go write your own books, but we're not going to invite you in to talk at our event. We're not going to invite you onto our forum, et cetera. And anybody who's run, by the way, anybody's run or participated in an Internet forum, I mean, I've done this back since, what, the 80s when it was, you know, these sort of bulletin board type of things. Anyone knows that, you know, to keep a forum like that civil and useful, you do kind of have to have the ability to occasionally ban somebody who's just a troll. I mean, this concept of the Internet troll sort of sums it up. There are some people who are there to cause trouble and not to add to the debate. And you have to be able to say, look, go elsewhere, go somewhere else, bother somebody else while we have, while the adults have a discussion.
So, you know that you have these two different standards of freedom of speech. One is sort of a Moral, ethical, and I think also maybe epistemological, this idea that we have to have a wide range of ideas open to counter arguments, open to unconventional views. And so we have to give wide latitude to considering a lot of different views, but not this. But you cannot apply the same sort of complete openness of we can't ban anything because this is not really about banning anything. This is about inviting people in. It's about creating a forum or having a discussion. It's about who you invite in. And you can't. You literally cannot invite everybody in, no matter how troublesome or worthless their standards are. So I think that. But here's where I go back to. And this is to wrap up. Here's where I go back to that. The standard, the basis for free speech from the very beginning has been you need free speech in order to allow the operation of reason. And I think that's how reason becomes the standard in both situations. The reason is the need for people to use. Reason is why you can't have the government coming in and using coercion. But on the other hand, the need for reason is also why you have to. When you make these decisions in private forums about who do you include, who do you exclude? How open are you to a variety of different views? The standard is you're open to different views so that you can have a process of reason, a process of deliberation and debate where you consider all the different, you know, a wide variety of different counter arguments to make sure you're not going off the rails.
But reason is the standard. So if somebody is bringing something that is not rationally valuable, you are entitled to occasionally make that determination. What this person's adding is not useful, and we're not going to bring them into our discussion. All right, so that's the broad overview. And I have discussion about their exceptions to what the government can do. And we could talk about, you know, incitement to violence and things like that, but I want to open it to discussion or to comments from someone else. Dave, I don't know if David is on yet.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Okay, thank you, Rob. David, I don't know if you're with us right now or able to speak. If you can, go ahead and give us a shout.
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Okay, I. I can hear you. Can you hear me?
[00:19:42] Speaker A: We can hear you. We can't see you, though, but we can hear you.
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Yeah, my video is not performing, so I'm sorry about that.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: This is. This is. This is all about reason, David. So we just need the voice.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: I know, but I'm Not John Gwalt, technically as well as philosophically expert. But I want to say a couple things. First of all, I think Rob's distinction is really important and really needs to be stressed because there are very, very different standards and approaches between political free speech, which I agree is absolute, and what Rob costume mores and manners. And a good example of this is. Well, let me first actually address a question in from the chat that libel and slander, I think these are valid exceptions to free speech because if I'm libeled and there are standards for that in law, but what is, what is at risk here is my reputation. You know, like, like Rob, I'm a writer. So, you know, my income depends on my reputation. And the payment for it has all come in, you know, being paid for writing something. But you know, for all of us, you know, those, those royalties or, you know, the payments for the, what we, what we publish goes away of all cash. And you know, what keeps us going, our asset is our reputation. So if someone libels Rob and says, you know, he's just making this up or, you know, I mean, they can, they can issue an opinion.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: I'm thinking, I'm thinking of, yeah, I'm thinking of trying to think of a good slander, reliable abuse. But let's say you say I'm in the pay of the Russians.
Yeah, that actually happens there. People have actually been paid by the Russians. But if you say, oh, you know, he's being paid by a foreign government to say this, that would be a good actionable, right, lawsuitable thing.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: If it says, if it's a misrepresentation of fact involving. That would naturally damage your reputation, was one which is one of your assets, a kind of, a kind of intellectual property, then you know, it's actionable in, in response, but it is not. But if they, someone just says, I don't like Rob's newsletter, okay, you just let it roll off your back. You can't, you can't sue for libel or, or slander for that matter, if, if it's a matter, if it's an opinion statement. And granted, the distinction between fact and opinion is difficult to draw. I've written about that for my logic book co author Debbie Hudgens.
But in any case, let me go on to, you know, just one example, and that is universities. This is an interesting test case of the distinction because on the one hand, universities, good ones anyway, practice a kind of academic freedom that is scholars can say in class and write whatever, whatever their best judgment is, if they're Good. And they can publish anything without being sanctioned or governed by the school. But a school has certainly got the right to impose conditions students.
You know, ideally academic freedom means applies to students as well as faculty. They should be able to raise questions in class or you know, gather on their own and talk about issues. That's part of what education does. But every college and university has admission standards. So not all students get to talk. If they don't get admitted, they're not in the community.
Teachers are required, in most cases require a PhD. So you're not going to hire a flat earther to teach geology. To use Rob's example, there are many other conduct the universities do or at least should always set rules about protests on campus because the campus belongs to the school. But it's complicated because government is so involved at every level of education.
Even at college, at the college level.
Even private organizations often get government money. And we know that government control follows control follows money.
So schools can, are limited in what they can do. They're, you know, they're subject to.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: You.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: Know, non discrimination by race and gender and so forth. They are.
But I must say I'm a. This is the case and it occurs all through the welfare state of government supporting. One thing after another is that we have a conflict between the purpose of education which requires certain freedom of inquiry and discussion and the state's ownership which is, you know, is inimical to freedom across a wide range. So that's one thing. Another thing is that universities and colleges aren't perfectly entitled to impose their own restrictions. I mean Catholic colleges sometimes really, you know, require that students be Catholics or at least attend services and so forth.
To the extent that they are not dependent on government money, that's fine. There's students like historic black students of black colleges that admitted people only of a certain race and that serves a purpose.
I don't consider that a violation of academic freedom. That's just their choice.
But unfortunately government money has led to bad effects. What I will say is that one response that is also becoming all too common is for governments to list what can't be taught. Like the, like the Florida legislation about anti woke stuff. I think there are some other states doing that and legislation is absolutely wrong.
We already have enough political involvement through subsidies into education and it's even worse at the high school level.
But so anyway, that is, that's what I want to say about universities now ideally, you know, as an academic myself, I for 10 years I taught at Vassar College and which was quite left at the Time even in the 80s when I was teaching there.
But I was never ever told not to teach that and no one would have dared.
And my department kind of thought it was interesting that I was an outlier, a philosopher, philosophical opinion.
So I really prize economic freedom and I'm sorry that it's partly compromised by government funding and control and also by the more recent effort to impose legislative restrictions on public schools. I don't deny that they have a right because they're funding them, but it's still a bad policy because it conflicts with all the virtues and values of academic freedom.
So I want to say that's my example of an intermediate case where we have, I mean, universities are one place, probably a prominent place, where cultural freedom of speech can and should operate, but the political controls are just waiting in the wings. And I oppose all of them, even as bad as many universities are today.
I'm totally against the legislation, against WOKE or anything else.
And I think there's a case for that.
I want to just mention another topic that often comes up in this context and that is about fake news. We're often to social media, which I should say, by and large I regard social media as a swamp. I spend as little time as I can there.
But unfortunately, you know, there are. Let me give you some examples. First of all, I mean the response to fake news is.
Starts with your commitment to reason, which warns you against being gullible and look for evidence. I mean here are some here that someone once did, recently did the top fake news sites on Facebook. Let me just read you some of the news sites.
One, Obama signs executive order banning the pledge of allegiance in school schools nationwide.
Now that had, let's see, two. Two million hits, two million views. Another one, police find 19 white female bodies in freezers with black lives matter carved into their skin.
That got half a million.
I could go on, but there are.
You just look at those and you must, you have to know. Any intelligent person has to know these are fake. You know, there would be a huge scandal in the news. There would be front page stuff on every media and there isn't. They're just you, you have to be a sucker, a real sucker to go for them or believe anything. And on top of which there are, there are many, many counter counters to a fake news. It's, I mean, I mentioned reason. That's, that's a primary one. Of course fact checkers have emerged because of the problem.
There are guides to what, what, what is credible, how to search the web for credible information. I mean these have, you know, sprung up over the last 10 years or so as the fake news exploded. So, you know, I, I don't consider it a problem and certainly not one for governments to be involved in. This is again a cultural issue. Believe what there's evidence for, not what you, you know, what sounds plausible or exciting.
And unfortunately we have a populace that. Some studies have shown that fake news spreads much more rapidly than truth.
They're complicated studies how the researchers separated truth from false. But what they did was plausible and it's disturbing. But that's a problem with people. The failure, the absence of proper education, proper use of their minds, simple minded, you know, use of the web. And those are human failings. They're not a problem with fake news itself. Responsibility always comes back to the person reading and accepting or denying.
So that's what I had to say about that. I just want to maybe finish by saying that as Rob said, reason is the foundation for both political freedom of speech and the cultural benevolent form of outreach to people.
And those are both good. But I want to just focus on political freedom of speech.
I want to emphasize that philosophically, freedom of speech, property rights, the right to life, and ancillary things like freedom of the press, freedom of religion are all tied together. They are a unity, all based on reasons. And that reveals itself, that fact reveals itself when you ask, you know, for example, in the electronic media, for many years they were completely managed by government, the fcc, with all kinds of rules and licenses and regulations and.
But that also violated the property rights of media owners.
It violated the rights of consumers, their own ability to seek out information because it was all government control. This is again the electronic media, not the free press. The free press had the benefit of being put forward in the First Amendment at a time when classical liberals who believed in freedom were the founders of the US government. But it has since become a corrupted standard.
So the. I think that this is, this is a salient point about rights. If you violate one of the classical rights, life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, you violate all the others directly or indirectly. So they all trace back to reason theoretically, and they interweave in their practical implementation and effects.
So let me, I'll just finish there and glad to take questions jump into the discussion.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: So. Well, Lawrence, I think we got one little quick point I want to make and I think we got a bunch of stuff building up in the column. Comments. You want to just speed through a bunch of that?
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Sure, go ahead, say what you have to say first.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Okay. So one of the things I wanted to say is that, you know, when struck me, especially when David was talking about academic freedom, where you know, the field has to uphold certain standards so you don't have the flat earthers as the geology convention, let's use that as our standard example.
But at the same time, you want to be able to chain a wide range of unusual views. And oftentimes that's a difficult balance to make. But it's because reason itself is difficult reason, it takes effort and it takes effort and initiative. And these are difficult, legitimately difficult questions to answer sometimes like what's a crackpot view versus what is an unconventional view that could be the truth? And sometimes people have made wrong judgments about what's the crackpot thing that's outside, beyond the pale and what's the brilliant new idea that's going to sweep the field.
So you have to have, that's why you have to have that openness. But I think that a passage I took from Ayn Rand, which I think was clarifying because she talks about being the idea of being open minded versus closed minded, she says, well, that's the wrong way to put it. You don't need an open mind, you need an active mind. So, you know, if you're an active, you have an active mind, you are seeking out all the evidence, you're seeking out all the counterarguments, you're trying to take on all comers, so to speak. You're trying to bring in as much as possible that you can find. You're being active in seeking out the truth, but at the same time you're not open in the sense it's just being wide open and not letting anything in. And that's how you don't fall for the fake news or you don't fall for the conspiracy theories or the crackpot views is if you're being active minded. All right, so, but in recognizing there did that these questions could often be difficult, that's a great way to transition into doing some of these things that are brought up in the comments because people will find, you know, in any system, people will find the weak spots in the system. They'll find the, the, the, the borderline cases, the things that are truly difficult. So a couple I want to breeze through a couple that I think are easy, like hate crimes. Somebody has hate speech. Well, they asked about hate speech. You know, the problem with, in the political concept of freedom of speech, you can't have any laws against hate speech because that's basically a law defining speech as being wrong because of its content and you can't say that speech of a certain content. So what they're really saying is you can't say, you cannot say things that are, that we consider to be racist. And of course, anytime you have a government ban, there's somebody who games the system to say, well, you know, I can there, therefore, I have an incentive to define whatever view I don't like as being racist and therefore get it banned. So, you know, and so they often have very vague standards that are open to abuse. And that's, by the way, we're going to find out what, how they do that from the right in a moment, because that's this whole thing about, in Florida, they said, oh, well, we're going to ban pornography. And if you look at, there's Project 2025, this thing done by the Heritage foundation, and everybody's saying, is that Trump's agenda? Well, you know, they get inside, he gets into power, he gets elected, and everybody says, yes, this is his agenda. Well, they, they define that we have to keep pornography out of the schools. And if you look at it, they say, well, what we mean by that is gender ideology. So it's actually, you know, certain views on homosexuality and, and gender. That's what we actually want to ban, not pornography. So it's, again, to say, you, you find something that you think, you say you can ban, but you define it so vaguely that it can cover everything you don't like. And that's the, that's the game, name of the game. So that's why the government certainly can't be in the business of banning hate speech, because it's being division in the, in the business of defining what's acceptable and unacceptable content. And then, you know, in private discussion, you know, we have, I think it is totally valid and legitimate to say, you know, we should be. Your freedom of speech includes your freedom to criticize people who, you know, if somebody comes out and says something racist, you have the right to go out and say, that's a terrible thing that you said. You know, you're a bad person for saying it. You also have the right to encourage private boycotts.
But the thing is that this, you know, again, the standard of reason has to be used. You don't.
We have sort of a boy who cries wolf thing that's happened where everything gets defined as racist. And therefore people immediately dismiss anything that you say, you know, if you say something's racist. But there are still racists out there saying racist things. So, you know, if you abuse, if you, if you define this so broadly that you target anybody who has views you don't like, you abuse it so much that you actually, you know, decrease the, the social stigma. But social stigmas are, have a role to the extent that they are not trying to stifle legitimate opposing viewpoints. All right, so that's my quick pass on that.
But the more interesting one has to do. We talked about fake news and somebody mentioned about, you know, trying to de. Amplify getting government. Can government tell social media companies to de. Amplify what it considers misinformation? Especially like somebody saying scientific misinformation? Well, for one thing, there's a whole lot of actual legitimate scientific misinformation out there. And I think especially these days right now we're awash in this whole sort of RFK Jr. Anti vaccine, big Pharma, a lot of huge amounts of just scientifically unfounded views on vaccines and nutrition and that sort of thing. And people are getting, people get their bristles up. Oh, are you censoring me? Well, no, you are actually saying something that is not scientifically founded.
And unfortunately it's very popular right now. So a lot of people trying to push back on it.
And so, you know, the. So I would say definitely the government can't tell.
Social media companies do this in the sense of ordering them to do it. Now, where it gets complicated, of course, is that sometimes, like during the pandemic, the COVID 19 pandemic, the social media companies really wanted for their own PR and possibly for their own consciences to say, to make sure that they're not setting out wrong information because, you know, people's lives are saved. People could die if they, if, if, if wrong information about COVID gets out there and people take, fail to take a precaution or take a medicine that's, that's actually bad for them or what, you know, some, some miracle cure that's actually bad for them, people could actually die. And then we, the social media companies are going to get blamed for it. So they had an interest in trying to sort of suppress some of the misinformation. Now the problem is with the fast moving. And this is where it gets complicated, right? Because with a fast moving situation like that, it's kind of hard to tell what is the correct information and what's the incorrect information. Especially early on in the pandemic when we actually science scientists were still scrambling to figure out it's a new virus. They don't know everything about it.
But the issue that came up was one of jawboning and this is. Jawboning is actually a term that's used by experts who talk about this legally. And jawboning is when the government doesn't give you an order, doesn't ban something, it doesn't say, you can't say this. What it doesn't say is it says, well, you know, we really think you shouldn't have this. You shouldn't be saying these things. And maybe there would be bad consequences for you in terms of regulation or something else where there's like this implicit threat.
And so there are actually standards that were created legally. There were legal cases where standards were created to determine, well, when does this rise to the point of being an actual threat of government action versus, you know, on the other hand, the government has health agencies, it has the cdc, it has Centers for Disease Control, it has these National Institutes for Health. It has scientific experts working for the government shaping health policy. And they have a right to communicate to the public just like anybody else, right? So somebody from, you know, from the National Institutes for Health can go out there and actually say, we think this is true and we think this is false. And that's not government censorship. That's somebody from the government speaking.
So the big doctrine was developed here is what's called the counterspeech doctrine, right? That the answer to speech you don't like is other speech that counter. That counteracts that. So under the counter speech doctrine, the government has to be able to have experts go out and say things what it can't do. And there are actually been attempts to legally define. Here's where the cross the line. What you can't do is have the government ordering private publishers or private social media companies to saying, you have to suppress this or you or we'll punish you.
And that's. So this is where that sort of private public distinction comes in, that private efforts by social media companies, if you don't like them, go to a different social media company. There are a whole bunch of other alternatives now, especially now, but where the cutoff has to be, the government can't be giving orders.
What other ones do you like to see me take on, Lawrence?
[00:44:16] Speaker A: So there's one. Sorry, David, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I was just going to bring this up. There's a few questions when it comes to freedom of expression, which you know, is tied in with speech, because in regards to protests, David, you brought up about the protest in college campuses, but I see there are a few questions in the chat about protests in government facilities or in the middle of Streets and roads. So maybe we can talk a little bit about the philosophy behind expression and peaceable assembly and such.
[00:44:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, right. Well, first of all, good. We have to distinguish between speech and action and they're often intertwined. I mean even when I am, I'm talking right now, I'm speaking, but also taking an action of communicating with you guys. So. But there are legal standards. So protests are normally accepted as a legitimate way of expressing an opinion, you know, collectively with those who agree. And, but there are, it turns into, and that's a kind of action. But the bad kind of action is when they get violent as happens on universities and elsewhere.
So the thing is, because our streets and city parks are all government owned, you know, it's, it's. Most places have standards and app like ways of licensing a given protest if it's going to be. Amount to anything and get in the way of traffic or whatever. But that, that is, I think that's generally legitimate as long as it's peaceful.
The.
I'm sorry, the question about protests, but what is happening on college campuses now from Harvard on down, the pecking order with the anti Israeli protesters just, you know, I, there has been violence, there has been destruction of property and intimidation of other students, including especially maybe Jewish students. And that is, that ought to be banned by the university. I mean they have the right to do that and they should, but they often don't.
So even in, even in the cultural realm, cultural freedom of speech, that wouldn't, what's, what's happening on college campuses over the last year or so is not in my view does not fall within legitimate academic freedom or cultural freedom.
[00:47:11] Speaker B: Well, and one thing I would say there is that, you know, the dividing line isn't just simply violence in terms of actually somebody actually hitting somebody over the head. Because we had that and this happens occasionally. You have a protest. Somebody said the mostly peaceful protest because the mostly peaceful thing became notorious because it was a description where you had the guy talking about mostly peaceful protests and there was like this, this building on fire back behind him. Right. So it's clear that this was mostly peaceful meant actually a whole bunch of violence.
So you know, the, the, the divine line here isn't just is there violence? Are people hitting each other? It's also is the protest meant to intimidate or to, to block off someone? So that's one of the things you had on college campuses is I think it was at Columbia in the last, last year. I think it was last summer in Columbia that the Columbia University that they had students taking over one of the campus buildings and literally saying, you can't teach here, you can't do anything here. We are going to take this over. And you know, we're not just. We're not just out in public expressing our views. We're also preventing anybody else from doing anything. And that's, you know, interference with other people's rights to go about their lives. And it can also be intimidation. So it could be, you know, and this is.
There was protests at abortion clinics and abuse at women and trying to prevent access for women going to clinics that perform abortions. So this is some way where you're not just expressing your view, you're not just expressing your disapproval, you're actively trying to intimidate and prevent somebody else from doing something that you disapprove of. So again, the situation has to. And again, you define intimidation. Well, again, the temptation every time you. These are rational standards, right? And the government can create these standards and they've been adjudicated in courts.
The problem is any time you create a standard, there's somebody who then wants to gain the system. System. So that's why I think that. And now that's not a reason to throw out the standards. These are rational standards. They can be defined in concrete ways and they've been adjudicated in the courts. So that's where you have to. Then the problem does. It's not a legal problem. It's not a problem of, oh, we. It's not a problem of not having good standards. It's a problem of arguing the standards in good faith. Because the. One of the rules I take you should always look at for freedom of speech arguments is the general rule people have is free speech for me, but not for thee. And this is an old saying, I think Nat Hentoff used to be associated with this. He wrote a book by that title in the 90s, free speech for Me but not for Thee. So everybody shouts about free speech when they think their views are being suppressed and they want maximum free speech for people who agree with them. But then the minute they get into power, the minute they have the ability to scoot somebody else, they try to define the rules and say, oh, well, that's not free speech, that's hate speech, or that's incitement, or that's obstruction, or, you know, there's some reason why your speech is not protected. So that's something you should always have sort of a good idea of cynicism to attempts to try to define, to abuse those standards. So that's why you have to maintain. That's why your reason has to be used not just as the foundation of free speech in the sense of the justification for speech. Free speech. We need free speech so we can use reason to solve problems. It also, the invocation to use reason also has to be done in applying freedom of speech, that you actually have to be arguing in good faith and sticking to the facts and evidence and not trying to distort it and try to reinterpret everything to make somebody else's views illegal or to kick them out of your forum or whatever, because you just don't like what they have to say.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you for that, Rob and David, we've got about five minutes left before we have to close out. So I did want to touch on one last point, Rob. In your book, you have a section about the whole can't say fire in a crowded theater. And this is a conversation that keeps getting repeated over and over again online or on in media. So I figured this would be a chance to sort of just address that statement firsthand.
[00:51:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it was actually. You can't falsely say fire in a crowded theater. And yes, you know, this comes from a time when, you know, theaters were lit and heated by fire, and if there was a fire, you'd have a stampede and people would be run over. And you could actually, if you falsely shot a fire in a crowded theater, somebody could actually be killed. But what happened is this is actually from a dissenting opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was actually not accepted, and that has been rejected, the idea that you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. So this came up because Governor Waltz from Minnesota, when he was the vice presidential candidate, had said something, but you can't shout fire in a crowded theater now. But all the legal experts leaped forward at once to say, well, actually, this was not accepted as a standard. It's actually been rolled back. I actually saw Penn and Teller, Penn Jillette, shout fire in a crowded theater in the theater I was in in Chicago once. So it can be done.
He was doing a juggling act with. With. With torches. Juggling torches. But he couldn't do it because it's in Chicago, which has this, like, maniacal fire safety thing. Ever since The Great Fire 150 years ago, they had this maniacal. So they would not allow him to actually have an open flame in the theater. So he had the whole rant that he did on that, but in that he shouted fire in a crowded theater to show his dedication to freedom of speech.
But so this, this idea that there is, and this is a classic case of like abusing that sort of emergency, oh, it's an emergency, we can ban you because of that. And they're really, the numbers of exceptions to freedom of speech are very, very narrow. It has to be like actual direct incitement to violence. Right? So if I say, if I say Lawrence is a bad guy, right. That's my opinion. That's, that's. I'm free to say that even though it's not true, Lawrence is a great guy. But if I say Lawrence is a bad guy and you should kill him, you should string him up by the nearest lamppost, that's incitement to violence. And that would be, you know, because that's the speech is intimately acted to, attached to like an imminent urging people to contend, commit an act of violence. So there are very strict standards for the very narrow exceptions for what you can ban. But the sole sort of general. Anything inflammatory fighting words is another one. Anything inflammatory, anything that would make people angry, I can't say that has actually been, you know, in the courts, they have, they have knocked down all those standards. There has to be an actual, you know, you have to be. The speech has to be directly connected to an act of violence or intimidation, a direct threat. It has to be connected to. And it can't be just, you know, this is inflammatory. And I really do. It makes people angry because if you had the idea that makes people angry. There are lots of things that make people angry. And then you create an incentive for somebody to say, well, I'm going to make people really angry about something so I can ban it. Right. So this is what the fire and credit theater thing has as kind of been refuted and thrown out over the years.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: All right, perfect. Thank you for that.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: Rob.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: We're, we are at the top of the hour, so we're out of time.
But I do want to thank you both again for joining me today to talk about this. Again, for those of you watching the Pocket Guide to Free Speech, it's the latest Pocket Guide from the Atlas Society. We have a pinned link in the comment section on YouTube and Facebook and it's also in the description. So it is available as both a print version and a Amazon Kindle version. So you've got options, so we encourage you to check that out. And again, I want to thank everyone for asking their questions in the comments section. And again, David, Rob, thank you so much for joining me today.
So those of you at home, if you enjoyed this webinar if you enjoy everything that we do here at the Atlas Society, I encourage you, especially around this time of year, to consider a tax deductible donation to help the Atlas Society continue the work we're doing. We would appreciate
[email protected] donate and be sure to join us next week when JAG will be back to interview author Anthony Pompliano about his new book, how to Live an Extraordinary Life. So from all of us here, have a good Thanksgiving holiday again. David, Rob, thanks so much and take care.
[00:56:03] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:56:04] Speaker B: Bye, everyone.
[00:56:05] Speaker C: Thanks, Rob. Terrific.
[00:56:07] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.
