When you think about it, all law, all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. That's exactly what we're doing here, is we are restricting freedom, but we're doing it for the common good. You will see throughout our Constitution, yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good. Everything needs to be balanced. And if your views on other people's identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.

Freedom of the fundamental rights, freedom of conscience, academic freedom, freedom of press, and.

The right to listen.

You're listening to So to Speak, the Free Speech podcast brought to you by Fire, the foundation for individual rights and Expression. Hey, folks. Welcome back to So to Speak, the Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. As I teased on previous episodes, this is our 200th episode, and as we did during our 100th episode back in December of 2019, we are going to be talking about the state of free expression, not just here in America, but across the globe. We're going to be having kind of a freewheeling conversation, talking about the efforts to police hate speech, the efforts to police speech on social media and the internet, the new categories of speech that we didn't really hear a lot about in 2019, although I think they're around to some extent, this idea of misinformation, disinformation and then this other category called mal information, which is true, but insidious information, that is the kind of new rage for those looking to police or censor speech on the Internet. Want to talk, of course, a little bit about everything that's happening surrounding the Israel Hamas conflict and the implications from that for free expression.

Want to talk about cancel culture? This podcast started in April of 2016, and I'm not sure that phrase had really come into the public lexicon yet. So, back in 2015, Fire released a documentary called can we take a joke? Which was about free expression and stand up comedy. And at least in 2015, I don't remember cancel culture being a phrase because we called it when we were doing promotion for that film, outrage culture. And this kind of concept had been popularized by John Ronson in his book. So you have been publicly shamed. So maybe publicly shamed was the phrase that was used previously. But cancel culture has become a topic in free expression circles, sometimes implicates the First Amendment, but more broadly implicates principles of free speech and what it means to have a culture of free speech. So we can debate that a little bit on the show. We're going to debate whatever else happens to strike our fancy as both being important and relevant. When this show was founded, in April 2016. There was no TikTok. This was pre the Brexit referendum. This was pre me, too, pre Donald Trump. No george Floyd fire hadn't expanded our mission off campus.

Milo Yiannopoulos hadn't been firebombed at UC Berkeley. Charles Murray hadn't been attacked at Middlebury. Bret Weinstein hadn't been run off evergreen State College's campus. I think it's Bret Weinstein. Excuse me, Bret, for that. Bret is a past guest on this podcast, so I hope he'll forgive me, but joining me to have this kind of conversation on where things have gone and been since April of 2016 when we started this show, is a past, so to speak, guest Brendan O'Neill. Brendan last appeared on this podcast on October 20, 2016. You might remember that he is a British author and journalist. He was the editor of Spiked from 2007 to September of 2021, and he is currently Spike's chief political writer. And as he was telling me before the show, the host of a popular podcast as well, which I encourage you all to check out, and I'll put in the show notes, his latest book is Heretics Manifesto. I think it's also your only book, right, Brendan? Yeah. Came out in June of this year. I encourage folks to also check that out. Brendan, welcome back.

Hey, Nico.

How's it going? It's going. And joining us for the first time on this show is Mark Randaza. Mark is a first Amendment attorney and the managing partner at Randaza Legal Group. Mark, interestingly, has represented many controversial figures in First Amendment cases spanning the political spectrum. These folks include Alex Jones, Mike Sernovich, chuck Johnson and the founder of the neo Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Andrew Englin. And Mark, I actually want to start with you because my producer prepared that bio. I hope he got it all right.

I mean, I represent some nice people.

Too, but when we started the show, one of the reasons I started this show is because I wanted to get some of these old school, free speech First Amendment attorneys on the podcast talking about why they do what they do and why they defend who they defend. So the first series we ran when we started, so to speak, in April of 2016 was called the Defending My Enemy series. It featured Arya Nyer, who was the former executive director of the ACLU. The executive director of the ACLU during the Skokie case.

The old ACLU.

The old ACLU? Yes. And he wrote a book called Defending My Enemy. I mean, he was a refugee of the Holocaust, Jewish man himself, and he was explaining in long form why he thought it was important that the ACLU take the case and that he defend the rights of his enemies, although he was not an attorney. David Goldberger was the lead attorney on that case out of Illinois affiliate. But we also talked in that series with David Baugh, who was a black criminal defense attorney who volunteered to defend the Klansman Barry Elton Black's right to burn a cross at a Klans rally during the trial stage of that case that would then go on to become the Supreme Court case of Virginia v. Black. And then we also spoke with Glenn Greenwald, who, before he was popular as a journalist, he was once a lawyer, and as a gay man of Jewish descent, defended the First Amendment rights of neo Nazis and white supremacists as well. So that's my setup to ask you, Mark, whether there's still an interest among young attorneys coming up through the bar to take these sorts of cases in the same way you do.

And why is it important, in your opinion?

I like getting old because now I can dump on young people like old people have done for generations. I will say it seems less, but that spirit is not extinct. I work for another organization. I do work for them that they are extremely anti gay rights, and my associate insisted on working for them on his wedding day to his husband.

Oh, wow.

And I was like, Man, I love you. Like seeing somebody in their 20s insist that he works on that file on this day.

And why did he insist on it, though?

Because that's what the real deal is. When we first got a call from Anglin, for example, Andrew Anglin, I guess you'd call him, a notorious international Nazi.

The founder of The Daily Stormer, right? Yeah.

I was very excited to get that call because I said, yeah, man, that's when I feel like I'm doing my best work, is when I can really sit there and say, god, I wish my client would shut up, but I refuse to let the government or the court process do that. And I called my partner before we took the client on, I called my partner Jay Woolman, who's a very observant I don't know if he's Orthodox, but he's just prior to Orthodox Jewish. And I asked him, I said, hey, is it all right if we take this client? He says, well, why the fuck you asking me? And I said, Look, Jay, I just feel like it's just good manners, right? And he says, don't you ever challenge my commitment to the First Amendment again. He says, yes, we're taking the client. And I insist on having my name on every filing in that case. And then one day he's on the front page of the Jerusalem Post that says, meet the Jewish lawyer defending the Nazi. That made him pretty popular at the synagogue. The next are in. It's so easy to defend free speech when you drink.

The client's know. I have defended clients who I just love their know. Steve Novella at Science Based Medicine, for example. I did a case for him. And you always wonder, do I have a blind spot here? Because I want his speech to continue. When you really don't want someone's speech to continue when you wish you could talk them out of talking voluntarily. I think that's when you're more of a priest of free speech.

Do judges get this?

Some of them do, but that's always.

Been the case, right? I mean, I guess it's a question of whether it's gotten better or worse.

I find that I've had judges that get it. But remember, especially in federal court, you've also got to get by the clerks, and that's one of the biggest in what way, though?

In what way? For those non lawyers out there, when.

You'Re a clerk to a judge, you have a lot of power, because when I clerked for a judge and sometimes the judge would say, go find me a case that says this, and you'd go find it. But sometimes they just ask you, what is the law on this? And your memo will be very influential. It doesn't mean the judge won't think for themselves sometimes, but people are busy. It's like someone hands you a memo, and that can be where you go with it. Or even if the judge is sitting there in a room with two or three clerks and is listening to them pepper him with reasons that or her with reasons that this party cannot possibly be allowed to prevail, that's going to have some influence. And I definitely will say that the young lawyers that are being cranked out of the law schools now while there are still a population of them that thinks this way, it definitely is a diminishing population that feels that way.

Well, it feels like this kind of neutral principles approach was the old school, some might call neoliberal consensus. I was just reading an article in First Things, which is a kind of new conservative publication by, I think, Helen Andrews, which was reporting on the ACLU and talking about her perception that the ACLU has banned these neutral principles, but not arguing that they should return to the neutral principles, but rather they should return to principles. Legal frameworks surrounding the comet. Good. So it's like there's not even a constituency on the right. Or maybe there is, but it's waning that's in favor of these sorts of neutral principles, which would animate then the reason that we defend people that we disagree brendan, go ahead, Mark.

No, no, I want to hear from Brendan.

No, I was going to ask Brendan, because eight years ago you spoke at the Oxford Union and you argued in favor of the motion. The House believes the right to free speech always includes the right to offend. And you made this point that I haven't really heard before, that you said that intolerance to those who give offense is one of the oldest foulest forms of intolerance. Intolerance to those who give offense is one of the oldest foulest forms of intolerance. I want you to break that down for me, because part of what you think is like you should be intolerant to intolerance. You kind of meet bad speech or speech you perceive to be bad with more speech, but you should do the kind of neutral, principle thing that Mark does of defending the rights of that speaker, sort of I might disagree with what you say, but I'll defend at your death the right to say it so unpack. That for us. And if you want to extrapolate a little bit on the conversation we've been.

Having yeah, well, firstly, listening to Mark talk about how willing he is to defend the speech of people he doesn't like very much and how willing other attorneys and lawyers are to do so as well it's really remarkable to hear stuff like that. It's really enlivening to hear it because we don't have that tradition in Britain, we just don't have there. Of course, there are some voices here that defend freedom of speech. There have been over the years, but they're usually quite timid and quite quiet and they're increasingly reluctant to defend the speech rights of people they oppose, people they hate. And in fact, censorship in Britain is now very, very ideological. You're expected to want to crush the speech of the people you oppose. That is taken as a normal thing to do. Whereas I've always gone by the opposite idea, which is that if you are serious about freedom of speech, your chief task is to defend it for people who you hate and whose ideas you hate. And if you don't do that, then you're falling at the very first hurdle. And this is not even an original know, going back even long before the Skokie case, back with the old ACLU, the good ACLU, you go back centuries before that to Thomas Payne, of course, one of the great Britons who contributed so much to the American Revolution and then later to the French Revolution.

He made the point that he who would guard his own liberty must do so for his enemy first, because if he doesn't, he will set a precedent that will one day reach to him. That is the foundation stone of freedom more broadly, and freedom of speech specifically. So it's really good to hear Mark and of course, you, Nico and other people in the US who are still willing to defend the speech rights of people whose speech they disagree with. It's so important to do that. In relation to the intolerance question, I've never liked the idea that we should be intolerant of the intolerant, because to me, intolerance doesn't just mean being sniffy or being critical or being fiercely critical, all of which are central parts of public debate and public life. Intolerance suggests a kind of brimming desire, I think, to stop something from being said. Intolerance, I think, suggests a crossing of the line from criticism and rebuke and ridicule, which are legitimate things to do. It crosses a line into a desire to shut someone down or to treat them as so beyond the pale that they can't possibly have any kind of platform in public life.

So I don't like the idea of intolerance. And one of the points I made in that Oxford Union talk a few years ago is that Oxford University now has cancel culture running riot. I was canceled from speaking at Oxford in 2014. I was due to speak on a debate about abortion, me versus another man, another male journalist. But it was shut down by a mob of feminists who said that men don't have the right to talk about abortion. And one of the points I made in my Oxford Union speech about freedom of speech a couple of years after that incident was just to say, look, you students think you're so radical and original with your cancel culture, but in fact, people have been canceled at Oxford for hundreds of years. People who dare to translate the Bible into English, for example, which was once an offense punishable by death. They were hounded out of Oxford University in the 13 and 14 hundreds. Shelley was hounded out of Oxford for writing a defense of atheism. Lord Alfred Douglas, who is better known as Bozy, who was the boyfriend of Oscar Wilde. He was persecuted at Oxford for publishing a magazine there called The Chameleon, which was an openly homosexual magazine in the late 1890s.

He was hounded out of Oxford for publishing that. So cancel culture on campus is not original. There have always been intolerant people at places like Oxford. It's just that their targets change over time. And I think learning the lessons of intolerance from the past can often help us help to guard us against it in the present.

Since we've gone to cancel culture already, I want to ask kind of the obvious question related to Cancel Culture at this moment, which is surrounding the kind of conflict now, you know, Brendan, I broadly agree with you. When? We talk about and the distinctions you draw between vigorous response and intolerance, I think, which you define as kind of like trying to shut people down or deny them access to an education or employment or whatever, otherwise punish them for their speech. And I think a culture that has an instinct where our first response in response to speech we don't like isn't to find a way to censor it or cancel or punish the speaker, but to meet it with more speech is a healthy, free speech culture. It's a culture that sees value. What's that?

Where can I find this mythical place?

Oh, no, you just have to come over to fire's office here in DC. We mix the Kool Aid every day at lunch, and all you have to do is drink it, and then you hallucinate this mythical place.

Excellent.

But no, it's a culture that sees value in curiosity, dissent, devil's advocacy, thought of experimentation. My boss, Greg Lukianoff, likes to talk about how you can kind of see a healthy, free speech culture in the idioms that you use right in America. I grew up hearing all the time, it's a free country, to each his own sticks, and know these sorts of things that know, you have the right to say that, you have the right to believe that, but I also have the right to respond. And words aren't violence, right? They might be hurtful, but they're not the same thing as violence. But with the Israel Hamas stuff right now, you see kind of shifting definitions surrounding cancel culture in response to some of the students on campus in particular, who had come out and said israel was entirely to blame for the attacks on October 7. And you had law firms, I think was it Winston or Wilson Strong revoked an employment opportunity for a student at NYU who said Israel was entirely to blame. You had those 30 some OD student groups at Harvard sign on to a letter that said made more or less the same argument.

You had a bus driving around campus flashing their photos and their names and all that with a purpose to kind of chill their speech or get them fired or had them brought up on charges on campus. So it's like, how do we think about that in the context of cancel culture? You see now some arguments being made that cancel culture is when you mobilize a mob online or elsewhere to try and get someone punished for something that they say that falls within the scope of overton's window, like acceptable public opinion. Like, we're having a debate right now about whether biological males should be able to participate in female sports. And you've seen people canceled for making that argument. And it's an argument that is very much part of the public debate, part of public policy debate, which a plurality, if not a majority of Americans might be on either side of it. But the argument in the Israel Hamas context is like but raping and murdering and plundering, such as what you saw on October 7, that's beyond the pale. So we shouldn't criticize employers for then moving to kind of fire or revoke job offers to those students.

So I'd love to hear both of your perspectives on how you kind of think through.

I'm very impressed with how college campuses seem to have all of a sudden found room for multiple sides of a debate that could be quite offensive. I have to ask, will it stick, the fact that we are allowing people to protest in favor of I was just shocked when I woke up on October eigth and saw there are actually people in the streets protesting against the victims of a massive crime. It's like going out there and protesting in favor of the Hutu genocide in Rwanda. Let's just do that. But the campuses are tolerating that. If I saw this as a change in philosophy, I'd be really optimistic about the future of free speech right now, but it doesn't seem to be that that's what it is.

When you say a change of philosophy, if you think this means that campuses have found Jesus and from here on forward, they won't be exercising double standards in the policing of speech.

Yeah, I would love to believe that that's what's know, I'm too pessimistic and probably just too I'm not all that bright, but maybe I'm just barely over the intelligence quotient it takes to know that that's not what's happening at A.

It reminds me of two cases that Fire dealt with in recent years. One university of San Diego, I believe, or San Diego State professor Thomas Smith wrote on his own personal blog, arguing in favor of the lab lake theory of the coronavirus. And he said, anyone who believes that it didn't come out from a lab is swallowing Chinese cockswaddle, essentially Chinese propaganda. He was brought up and investigated for discrimination charges for making this argument. And then at Emerson College on the other coast, Boston, you had a student group, a Turning Point USA group that handed out stickers that say China kind of suss on them. Clearly a critique of the Chinese government. But the president of that university sent out a campus wide communication accusing them of anti Asian hate and bias, despite the fact that the vice president of that group, KJ lineham, was herself Asian. Yeah, right. And so you do have to wonder about these double standards. Right. All speech that offends can be argued to be violent, but then when there's actual speech supporting actual violence, it gets a pass. And that's not me saying that these pro Hamas or pro Palestinian protesters should be investigated and punished and expelled.

It's me saying you can wonder why donors and alumni are saying, what the fuck, right?

Yeah, it's maybe time to stop donating. Look, if there hadn't been we're on two to three generations of complete capture of the academic I look, I used to think of myself as a leftist. I've read Gramshee. I used to think that'll never happen. And I'm like, Holy shit, gramshee totally called know, take over the institutions, and you take over. You know, if there was a little more balance among, I think among academics politically and administrators at the academic institutions politically, perhaps you would see a little more balance in how speech is tolerated on campuses. But you don't you have to pass a political litmus test to get anywhere near a college campus or a law school now, and you wouldn't have the slightest chance in hell. Hell, I'm too far right wing. I guess I'm right wing now because everything moved, and here I am sitting in the same spot, and I'm like, wow, I'm sitting around here with a lot of people with mega hats on, but they won't stick around long because they already are calling for people to be censored who say things they don't like. So you're no friend of mine because you have a MAGA hat on.

You're a friend of mine because you believe in freedom of.

Yeah, I think, you know, the double standards on campus are actually mind blowing. I mean, it boggles the mind when you see these people who don't even recognize their own. These are we're talking about campuses where people have said it's racist to ask someone, where are you know, they used to have a list of microaggressions at some campuses, including the UCLA. And those racist microaggressions included questions like where are you from? Or even saying, I don't see race, I only see character, which if that sounds familiar, it's because it's pretty much word for word what you know, he would be disinvited from many campuses these days for his stubborn belief in character over color. We've had such bizarre controversies. Do you remember Oberlin College? There was a big controversy about sushi being served in the cafeteria, which apparently was cultural appropriation. We've seen students saying that going to yoga classes is racist because unless you're Indian, you shouldn't do it. It's just as bad. In know, student unions here have banned the wearing of sombreros because apparently that is cultural appropriation of Mexican culture or something. They've banned Eminem's music because it's homophobic. They've banned that Robin Thick song Blurred Lines because it's misogynistic.

I mean, they really have banned almost everything on the basis that it's racist or bigoted in some way. And yet then when we have a genuinely racist pogrom of the kind that we haven't seen since the 1940s, a racist onslaught against the Jewish people, then they stop talking about racism and they call it resistance. Then they go onto the campus quad, the campus square, and they cheer on Hamas, essentially, and they hound anyone who has the opposite view. So these are the kind of people for whom starting a conversation by asking where you're from is a racist crime, but an actual pogrom that slaughters more than 1000 Jewish people is something worth supporting. So the moral decay on our campuses cannot be underestimated. But I'm also slightly torn because I think what we've also recognized over the past six or seven weeks is firstly, that many students are completely morally lost, but also that the right cannot be trusted on freedom of speech because some people on the right are relishing the cancelation of these assholes, let's call them what they are. They're relishing their cancelation, their job losses and so on. Now, I understand the temptation to laugh at these people and say, you're now getting a taste of your own medicine.

But it's a temptation we have to resist with every fiber of our being. Because if we don't defend their right to say, I love Hamas, or their right to say, Israel is a terrorist state and it deserves to be attacked, both of which I consider to be grotesque statements. If we don't defend their right to do that, then we're giving up on freedom of speech as well. So it's important, I think, to call out how profound the moral rot in the university has become, but also to defend people's freedom, to express those disgusting ideas.

Mark, I see you over there nodding your yeah.

Oh, look, I just want him to call me and remind me to stick with that moral every day. Because you're right, because I have seen I'm guilty of this, of looking at it and going, how does it feel now, you assholes? You're right. Would I defend somebody's right to say, israel got what it had coming on October 7? Yeah, I would. Now, after we left the courthouse, I'd probably spit at them, but I would absolutely stand there and defend that. But it is difficult. I have people who have cheered the work I've done. A large number of them happen to be Jewish and who have reached out to me and said, what can we do about this on campuses? And I'm, like, do. About what? Be careful what you're saying. This is a weapon. I've been saying, don't touch that. It's the ring of power. Don't pick it up. Don't touch it. Don't wear it. Even when it feels most tempting to do so. But I still have to sometimes I always try to challenge what I believe, though, and I think about what is a good argument against what I believe. It's real easy for the I think the three of us probably could just enter one of us could go to sleep and give the other one a piece of their brain and say, hey, you handle this talk.

And they probably aside from my New England accent, your British accent, and your newscaster one, they wouldn't know who's different. But then I think about Rwanda in 1994, right? When you go on the air and say, cut down the tall trees was Radio Mill colleens, if I could go back to 1994 and suppress the free speech rights of Radio Milkolines, would I do it? And I have to answer I don't know. I need to have that level of humility. Because what I see now is more akin to I don't think we were on the verge of Nazi Germany, but we might be on the verge of and I'm not trying to say, like, any day now, but it does seem almost as if our freedom of expression is rotting. Our freedom of expression? And I don't know what to do about know. When you talk about what's happened in what happened at Emerson College, don't tell me that there wasn't a couple phone calls made from some Chinese donors that said to do that. That wasn't just because college campuses, if there's one group they care about less than Jews, it's Asians. So let's not think that all of a sudden they were ready to defend the honor of Asian Americans.

I believe that the Chinese know as well as the. The Soviets did let's infiltrate and use their freedom of expression against them. I think back to even my own activities. Like, I got a hilarious picture of myself from 1988 when I went to the Stop the Clan rally in Philadelphia. And a friend of mine saw it about a year ago and said, so you were working for the Soviets. What are you talking about? And I described the scene. I said, wow, yeah, we went to this squat house in this burned out neighborhood in West Philly, and we had printers and photocopiers and screen printing machines and satellite phones. And I just figured, I don't know, where are the chicks at? And so to the extent they infiltrate us to create dissent among us and to weaken us, what can we do about that, yet still maintain our principles? And I have the humility to say I have no idea.

Well, yeah, so you frame it as our free expression is rotting our free expression. And I want to ask Brendan about what's happening in Ireland right now, where I think the folks who are proposing this new kind of hate speech law god, yeah, Justice Bill of 2022. And then there's a parentheses that incess citement to violence or hatred and hate offenses. So context here. A couple of days ago, there were protests that turned into, in some cases, violent riots in Dublin. And of course the politicians in Ireland were aghast at this. This was the result of a man stabbing, I think, a woman and some children outside of school. It turns out. This was, I believe, a 50 year old Algerian man, so an immigrant. These protests were widely reported as being in response to the increase in migration and immigration into Ireland. And so in response to this, which they see having been animated in part by conversations on social media, you have the Irish Prime Minister vowing to modernize laws against hatred in the coming weeks. The bill that was proposed said that racism and xenophobia phobia are direct violations of the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.

And then one of the punishable crimes relates to xenophobia is merely the commission of an act referred to in point A by public dissemination or distribution of tracks, pictures, or other material which can roughly apply to political pamphlets. Memes. As Elon Musk said, language being proposed as law in Ireland means this could literally happen to you for having a meme on your phone. He was responding to another user who posted a GIF of a police you know, when you say freedom expression might be rotting our freedom expression, I think some of the folks in Ireland would be making the same argument. And I want to play a clip from that's going around social media right now from Ireland's Green Party Senator Pauline Riley, in which she says this when.

You think about it, all law, all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. That's exactly what we're doing here, is we are restricting freedom, but we're doing it for the common good. You will see throughout our Constitution, yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good. Everything needs to be balanced. And if your views on other people's identities go to make their lives unsafe, Insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.

We must have freedom from freedom. Comrade.

Well, Brendan, I follow you on instagram. You spend some time in Ireland, you write and reach these markets. You take controversial stances on controversial issues. Your last book, your collection of essays heretics, Manifesto. I mean, I think you're self describing yourself as a heretic. Theoretically, if these sorts of laws are passed because you take controversial positions on trans issues, for example, you could be put in the censor scope. So, I mean, how do you think about all of this? And as someone living in the UK, and the UK has its, you know, you know, Britain has its own problems. I mean, how do you think about all this?

You know, it's it's very worrying what is happening in Ireland. I love Ireland. My parents are from Ireland. Every single person. I did 23 ANDME recently, where you test your DNA and 98% of my DNA is from Ireland, which is unusually high. So I'm about as Irish as it gets.

I have to ask, where the other 2%?

There was a little bit of Middle Eastern, I think, which is from my Hat Plow group, great great grandmother or something like that. But, yeah, mostly Ireland and a tiny dash of Scotland. So I love Ireland. I go there all the time. I have family and friends there. But Ireland is increasingly a lost cause, I'm sorry to know. One of the other things we saw in Ireland over the past couple of weeks was a debate at University College Dublin about the Israel Hamas war, where a Muslim student in the audience stands up and says to a Jewish student, we are going to do 7 October again and again and again. We're going to get all of you. And what was most shocking about that video was everyone else in the audience just sitting around saying nothing. These are the future leaders of Ireland. These are the bright young things at University College Dublin. And they just sat there. And it reminded me of an experience I had speaking at Trinity College Dublin, which is their Oxford. It's like the highest seat of learning in Ireland. I spoke there in 2015 about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and I was against someone from a Muslim organization who, in his speech, he essentially defended the killing as an expression of fury with Islamophobia and racism.

And he got cheers from the audience and I was so horrified by this that I completely broke university speaking protocol. I stood up and I shouted, you are defending murder, you're defending mass murder, you're defending the execution of journalists. And I was booed, I was jeered and I was forced to sit down. So it's been clear to me for some time that there is a moral rot in the Irish Academy, just as there is in American campuses and British ones as well. But I think what Ireland demonstrates quite clearly, to my mind, is that censorship is a more likely cause of violence than freedom of, you know, one of the things we hear all the time these days is that freedom of speech is a risky business, which it is, of course, that's part of the reason we love it. And if we have too much freedom of speech, it will incite hatred, it will incite violence, it will license people to behave in a terrible, bigoted way. I actually think that's far truer off censorship, because what censorship does, it gives people the idea that their views and their beliefs and their religions are so wonderful and perfect and sacrosanct that no one can criticize them, no one can blaspheme against them, no one can call them into question.

And if they do, they are an evil person deserving of some form of know. The classic example of this is the you know, those two killers grew up in France. They were born in France, they were not foreigners. They grew up in a country in which it is against the law, potentially. They have hate speech laws in France which makes it potentially illegal to defame Islam or to be mean about Islam. The celebrated French novelist Michelle Welbeck has been dragged to court for insulting Islam. Bridget Bardot has been fined. The actress turned animal rights campaigner. She's been fined in a court of law in France for insulting Muslims, particularly the way they treat their animals. So these killers grew up in a country which says that it is problematic and potentially punishable to criticize Islam. All they did was take it a step further and change the punishment from finding someone to killing them. But the logic of it was already set in motion by the political correctness of the French state. And I think what is clear to me from the Irish riot a few days ago in Dublin huge riot. The worst civil disturbances they've had for many years.

That, too was a product of censorship. Because numerous people in Dublin, particularly working class people, have been trying for the past few years to raise concerns about mass immigration, to raise their concerns about how many people are coming into the country, how many state resources are being given to them. And every turn they're either prevented from marching or they're demonized as racists and bigots. They're shunned from polite society, they're attacked by the President of Ireland and the government of Ireland. And it seems to me that that riot in response to an immigrant stabbing three kids and a teacher, that was an outburst of fury when every other avenue of expression was shut down. To these people, that's really fundamentally what happened here. And Ireland's immigration numbers are extraordinary. One in five people in Ireland was born overseas. That's 20% of people living in an island. Now, to give you a sense, during America's great melting pot era, in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds, around between 14 and 16% of people in America were born outside of America. Today in Ireland, it's 20%. An island is a small country and it's not a rich country.

It's causing tensions, but people are not allowed to speak on it. And therefore there was that explosion of violence. So I think again and again across Europe, we see a situation where I refer to the Irish Ride as the fury of the Know. If you cancel people, shut them down, prevent them from expressing legitimate views, you create a situation where they blow up. So to respond to that by intensifying hate speech laws which will potentially see people being arrested and fined for expressing their views, it's worse than useless. It's throwing petrol onto the fire.

But of course, it'll only be used to arrest and silence one side of the debate. Because when the Prime Minister of Ireland stands up or was it Ireland or Scotland or both where he stood up and know, these institutions are far too white. What's fucking Ireland, isn't it sort of what I expect. I don't really have a problem with Know if somebody wants to say that in Know, I have widely different views on how I vote depending on which country I'm voting in. In Italy, I vote very hardline anti immigrant. In the United States. I love Immigration. If I went into a coma and woke up a year later and everybody was speaking Uzbek and they were Buddhists or whatever, hey, that's how the current of an immigrant nation works. I like that diversity, although I hate that word. But nobody likes diversity. Why don't we maintain the source of that diversity? You can't have an Irish community if there is no Irish fountain. I'm shocked to hear that 20% of Ireland is foreign born. Meanwhile, you don't have anybody at the UAE in the UAE saying maybe we should take a bunch of immigrants from the Middle East.

And why do they always travel west? They never travel east. And it's funny, that my only criticism of Islam. I really don't know a whole lot about it, but seems just as reasonable as my religious beliefs. So it seems okay. But the only problem with it is it seems to be the most thin skinned belief system in the world that we've ever the when the know Trey Parker and Matt Stone made the Book of Mormon. Just making fun. Of Mormons incessantly on the Broadway stage. The Mormons responded by taking out an ad in the play bill that said, okay, you've seen the play. Now see what we're about.

I didn't know that did Mormons because of that.

Whatever else you could say about Mormonism, you got to respect that. You've got to really look up to that. And Muslims in Islam can't deal with cartoons. What is wrong with you people?

Yaka Mushangama, who's a senior fellow at Fire, head of the future free Speech project at Vanderbilt and founder of Gesticia out in Denmark, he wrote the book Free Speech. It's a history of free speech from Socrates and social media. And he does explore the history of Islam. And there was kind of a golden age for free thought relatively way back when. And so I urge know, I got.

To admit, when they Sicily, we had it pretty good as bring them back for a little bit.

It's good to get another Italian, although you're far more Italian than I am. My grandfather's family came from Bari, Italy, which is southeastern.

When I first took on we had mentioned Andrew Anglin before. When I first took him on as a client, I did tell him, I said, look, you're going to have to accept something said your legal team is going to be a Sicilian, an Orthodox Jew and a gay guy who's married to a Puerto Rican guy and they have a ginger sex slave that lives with them. And the line goes quiet for about 5 seconds and he says now every word in this sentence is doing work. So sir, technically Sicilians are white. Now, in your face to my in law.

I did want to piggyback on something brendan was saying fire when we expanded in 2002 and leading up to that, we had done some work with ad agencies. One great agency, DeVito Verity, had this brilliant idea of doing an ad about a tea kettle, right? When you're heating up the water for your tea, you got the kettle and you have all this pressure that builds up as the water heats steam before it sort of blows and makes the noise to alert you that the tea is ready. That's kind of how free speech functions, right? It's like that release valve that makes the noise that doesn't let the pressure boil over into violence. And I was watching this documentary came out last year called this Place Rules. I don't know if you saw it. It's about Andrew Callahan. It's made by this director, Andrew Callahan. It culminates with January 6 here in the United States, but follows kind of extreme political movements mostly focused on the right leading up to it. And there's this telling moment in the documentary where he kind of gets into editorial mode and is talking about the subjects he's interviewing. He's saying what is the effect when a bunch of people believe there's a conspiracy to shut them up?

And then you have evidence that there actually is a conspiracy to shut them up, talking about the efforts and coordination between the government and social media companies. Right? Yeah. That's going to radicalize people. And one of the things, most valuable things about freedom of speech, I think, to me, is that it's a way to trust the system. It's a way to trust what comes out of the system. So we were drawing parallels between the kind of neutral principles that animate the defense of offensive speakers in the court of law. And I think one of the reasons it's so important to have, for example, criminal defense attorneys who will take on every client, or state appointed defense attorneys for those who can't afford one, or civil attorneys like you, Mark. Is because in order for folks to trust the justice or the outcome of any civil or criminal proceeding, they need to trust the process was fair. And I think that applies to our knowledge producing process as well within society. In order for us to trust the decisions that go into our public policy, when you live in a democratic republic like we have in the United States, you need to trust that every voice had a say.

And if every voice feels like it has a say, I think it's more likely that all those disparate voices will get aboard whatever outcome comes from it. But if you have a situation, for example, like you had in 19, there'll.

At least be some buy in. Yes, sure.

And then when you have censorship, a lot of people blame the rise of Nazism on freedom of speech, but folks don't realize the sort of political violence that was allowed to happen there and the censorship as well that happened to the Nazi Party that was used as a propaganda tool within Weimar Germany between 1925. People forget this, 1925 and 1927. I'm reading William Shrier as the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Hiller was banned from speaking. What did Joseph Goebles do? Put together a propaganda campaign that said one man amongst 2 million people cannot speak in Germany. The man, of course, was Hitler, and the ban was eventually.

Enshrines. I think it enshrines some nasty speech with kind of an air of mystique when it's censored. Because you see this when you have these. I mean, frankly, they're lying assholes when they talk about Banned Books Week. Like, show me one book in Banned Books Week that's actually banned. My kid's walking around with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird under her arm and nobody's looking at her funny. You want to have banned books week? Then put mine comp in the Anarchist Cookbook and Hitman, which is actually banned. Put some actual banned books there. But I remember when we were in high school, whoever had the copy of The Anarchist Cookbook that week, we'd hand it around to each other. We never did any well, we did some of the stuff in there, but if it had been freely available I don't think we would have thought of ourselves as so cool for having a copy of it.

Yeah, the forbidden fruit.

If you make this certain kind of speech I think some people like this kind of speech because it's offensive. And, like Anglin's a great example. The guy can't even have a domain name. Google just took his domain name and.

Wouldn'T give it back because yeah, there was that situation, what, in 2017. Was it Cloudflare, which is one of the main denial of service preventers that most websites use to prevent these sorts of attack, and I've just, like, stopped servicing.

Do you think that made his website less popular? You're wrong. It made the people who are fans of it even more committed.

Well, that's another trend that we're seeing, right? Are these otherwise kind of, sort of neutral Internet infrastructure companies that are increasingly becoming political? None of us think that because of what we say or what we believe. Know, Brendan, I know out there in London you have your own companies, but here that at TNT or Verizon, the phone companies are going to come and shut down our internet or our phone lines. They might, but on the internet you have PayPal. Finding people, as we saw, was that earlier this year or last year, if you engaged in WrongSpeak, wouldn't give you any information about why you see Cloudflare taking away this sort of protection against denial of service.

The really spooky part is they won't tell you why. Almost no service that will ban you will tell you why just because we said so, and that's why.

Yeah. I think one of the really worrying things about censorship today is the rise of corporate censorships, capitalist censorship. In some ways, it's even worse than state censorship because it's so unaccountable, there's nothing you can do about it. At least with the government, you can vote them out and hopefully vote for a different party that is a bit more pro freedom. But as you say, Nico, we've had PayPal preventing people from accessing their funds because it doesn't like what they say. Of course, there was the case of the Canadian truckers who were deprived of money that was raised for them on GoFundMe, I think, or one of those funding platforms, and they weren't allowed to have that money because the unaccountable owners of that platform didn't like what they were saying. We've seen numerous cases here in Britain of what is referred to as de banking. It happened to Nigel Farage, very well known British politician, former leader of the Brexit Party. He was debanked from Kootz Bank and an internal document was leaked which showed that they actually talked openly within the bank about his problematic views. The fact that he's a climate change skeptic, the fact that he criticized Black Lives Matter, the fact that he criticizes the trans issue, all of that was held against him and his bank account was closed.

Now, of course, if you don't have a bank account, you can't operate in the modern world. So it's a very severe form of punishment. One thing that worries me when I go to the US. I absolutely love going to the US. It's a wonderful place. But I do sometimes worry that American libertarians in particular are not ready for this discussion we need to have about corporate tyranny and corporate censorship because they feel torn, I think, between defending the private property rights of these businesses to do what they want to do and the free speech rights of the average citizen or consumer to think what he or she wants to think. Now, my view as someone who, like Mark, comes from the left, but everyone calls me right wing. I haven't moved, but everyone else seems to have moved. As someone who comes originally from the left, my old fashioned view is that a citizen's free speech rights are more important than a private company's private property rights. And our government here in the UK at least, has already said that there are certain things that private companies are forbidden from doing. You are not allowed to sack a woman because she gets pregnant.

You are not allowed to refuse to give someone a job because he believes in Allah. You are not allowed to refuse to give someone a job because he's black. So we already restrict their right to do certain things, and it makes sense to me that we might want to restrict their right to attack citizens and consumers for what they think.

Why isn't free speech seen as a positive right? If I have a positive right to not be discriminated against, which is, okay, why don't I have a positive right to free speech? Why shouldn't that know here in the US. I don't know if you're familiar with it, Brendan, but there's a case called Prunyard, and Prunyard is where I have a lot of friends at Fire, and usually if there's more than three of them with me, they're all yelling at me that Pruneyard is an abomination. Pruneyard is definitely an anti libertarian case. And Prunyard was a shopping mall that had bought up. And this is where I first started getting interested in free speech jurisprudence, was I lived in Florida, and I lived in this county where everything was either a private homeowners association or a shopping mall. And it actually looked on the map to where you had government grounds, public space, these little narrow strips around that's, where you could protest. Well, Prunyard recognized that under the California constitution, this shopping mall had become the public square, and thus they had an obligation to allow protest there within reason. It couldn't be so bad that it would make it that you couldn't shop there, but you had to allow someone to hand out leaflets.

Prunyard is a derelict on the sea of jurisprudence and is probably going to be overturned. But I've had a very unpopular view around free speech people. And most very strong free speech advocates in the US think that my position is stupid and awful. But I believe that Prunyard should not just remain intact, but should come onto the Internet and should come into other areas where you own such a big free speech platform. Now, where do I draw the line? I don't know. I'm not smart enough to do that. But if you own such a large free speech platform that it has become the de facto town square, you should have at least some requirement to tolerate more free speech on it than if it's just your personal blog. Much like if I own a little coffee shop, maybe I don't need to allow people to protest in favor of Hamas inside my coffee shop, but if I own the shopping mall that owns the coffee shop, maybe I do have to allow them to peacefully walk through holding their signs.

I certainly think that I really agree with that, and I at least think that social media companies, despite being private companies, ought to permit all the speech that is already legally permitted in the country in which they're operating. I mean, that's the bottom line. Now, that raises all sorts of questions about how Twitter operates in Saudi Arabia, for example, or how social media operates in China, where they're very authoritarian. And there is a difficult question here that I'm also possibly not intelligent enough to answer, which is the question of whether we really want Silicon Valley billionaires to be forcing sovereign nations to adopt a different standard of speech than the one that they actually want to adopt. So I'm not saying it's a straightforward question that we want Elon Musk to ride into, I don't know, Pakistan and tell them that they have to allow everyone to say whatever they want and to call Muhammad a pedophile or whatever people do. I'm not sure I want Musk to play that slightly imperial role. However, when X, Twitter, whatever it's called, is operating in a country like Britain, we should have a fair expectation that you won't be banished from that platform, which is like a modern town square.

You won't be banished from that platform for saying things that are legal to say in Britain. So over the past few years, pre musk feminists in Britain were banned for life from Twitter for saying that men are not women, and for saying that if you have a penis, you are male, not female. They were literally banned from saying that. But it's not illegal yet to say that in Britain. So this was overreach by corporations punishing citizens in a very real way for saying things that we as a democratic nation have agreed that it is acceptable to say. So that's where it is very problematic. Musk has obviously changed things quite a lot, but I think social media should go further and be compelled to allow people to speak as freely as their nation allows them to speak.

See, this is where I think I play the minority voice that yells at Mark around the dinner table because they're.

Strong enough, they can exist with opposition.

No, but I agree with you guys in principle, right? A lot of our public conversation happens in these digital town squares that are owned by private companies, right? And if we're talking about free speech as being a release valve, so to speak, and a lot of the places that free speech happens is on these social media companies where censorship also happens. You could see that the relief valve might not be operating as it should know, free speech isn't just a government censorship discussion. Go back to John Stuart Mill who wrote that not because of the laws of England, but because of the cultural conformity of England, but and this is where the rubber hits the road, right? So you might agree with that in principle. What do you do about free association values, right? So is the principle then that fire or any other organization that's mission based can't fire employees who are no longer on board with free speech? If we are worried about the capture ideologically of institutions of higher ed, what do you do when a corporation can't get rid of the ideologues, right, who are undermining the mission of the university?

This is just going to be a weapon that's going to be utilized from the people to burl their way into side of organizations and wreak terror and divert them from a mission. There's this phrase, gosh management is just going to be caught up with HR, right? The whole time you can't get rid of people who are undermining the mission. And then you also have on the social media front, I'm glad we're getting into social media. This is kind of where we'll wrap up social media and the Internet of like, okay, it's all principle. Everything legal in the United States should be allowed in these platforms. But these platforms rise and fall on how they make editorial judgments. I mean, the content that you get fed is based on the algorithm and the algorithm is what distinguishes it from other platforms. And better algorithms that feed you more relevant or interesting content that you engage with are the ones that are going to succeed and the other ones are not. Like, I don't even go on Facebook.

Anymore because a Catholic chat board should I have to also have transsexual porn.

On mean you could, you could make the Hobby Lobby argument, right? Like this is a closely held mission, ideologically based corporation. So that's where the exception. Whereas if you work for Chase Bank, it's different. But at the same time, legal speech, if we're talking about the United States, legal speech on social media companies is crush videos, beheading videos, hardcore. Like you need to be on board with that too, because to censor that would be. A content based or arguably viewpoint based restriction, nobody's going to want to use those social media platforms. One of the arguments that NetChoice makes, the trade group that represents some of these social media companies like Government's, free to set up its own social media platform and have the First Amendment prevail, but no one's going to want to use that platform. That's not necessarily an argument against First Amendment. It's an argument in favor of freedom of association and people being able to associate around the ideas and values they care about. So I agree with you guys in principle, and it is deeply concerning to me how censorious American corporations have become, although I think it's getting slightly better in the last year.

Slightly better. But it's like, how do you navigate all those tricky add on questions?

At the very least, you could have a requirement of transparency. Even I will recognize you are asking for some lines to be drawn that I don't know, that I'm smart enough on my own to draw them, but at the very damn least, they could be transparent and you could say, what have I done? Where is the resolution? Because in other contexts, we haven't had a hard time drawing those lines. I don't want to get too deep into tech stuff, but in the domain name space, for example, if you have a reasonable policy, that reasonable policy has been the UDRP arbitration procedure. Bang. That has worked imperfectly, but better than nothing for the entire history of the Internet or most of the history of the Internet. So is there a way to say over a certain size you have to permit X, Y, or Z? But yeah, where do you draw the line? Because let's forget about just parade of horribles of crush porn, but just the spam you might have. How can you limit spam? Because you'll have every single thing on Twitter will become send $40 to Nigeria and you'll get $40 billion. Right, but I'd be more comfortable with community flagging.

Right?

If enough people vote to diminish it, then at least you've got some kind of a consensus being built. And it's not just one person, and usually it is just one person with way too much power sitting in some cubicle in Palo Alto who decides this person's banned for life.

And that's that what's really concerning to me on the social media front right now is what the European Union is trying to do with the Digital Services Act, right? So in this case, you have Elon Musk, who is trying to make the platform freer for a diversity of political and ideological running, who has threats made against him by regulators within the European Union that want social media. Companies to police the speech on their platforms under pain of a fine of up to 6% of that year's total gross revenue if they don't remove this content. The argument is that hate speech is illegal in the EU grounds for prosecution. And this Digital Services Act extends that online. And this is Jacob, who I mentioned earlier, has talked about this being the exportation of censorship. So here in the United States, Brendan, I don't know how familiar with this. California is a huge economy, so when it sets emission standards for cars, those then become the emission standards for across the country because you don't want to have a separate car built for California versus a car for Montana. Europe is a huge market, too. So are you going to create a separate X or separate Twitter and all the resources and time and energy and expense that goes into that versus the rest of the world in order to comply with this Digital Service Act?

It's a worrying trend, but I guess you and London and Britain don't have to deal with that anymore because you're not in the the what is it now?

We have the online safety. You know, we liberated ourselves from the European Union by voting for Brexit, so you'd think we wouldn't be subject to these kinds of laws. But of course, we have our own version with the online safety bill, which know not that dissimilar to the Digital Services Act legislation in Europe. The thing is, following on from what I said earlier, there's a little bit of a contradiction in what I'm saying. I realize that because on the one hand, I think it's legitimate for government to take action against corporations in order to ensure that they don't censor citizens unnecessarily or unfairly or unjustly. I think that's the right of a democratically elected government to put pressure on private companies in that way. However, I recognize that I'm talking about governments that do not believe in freedom of speech themselves. That includes the British Government. It includes all of the governments of the European Union. So it's a very difficult situation one finds oneself in where you don't trust the unaccountable corporate power of Silicon Valley ideologues, but nor do you really trust your own government to defend your right to speak freely. So it's a difficult situation.

There's no question about that. And with the Digital Services Act, as you say, it's this act that puts pressure on social media companies, especially the large ones, that have millions of followers, to take down illegal content, to take down potentially harmful content, to take down misinformation and hate speech and so on. But of course, in various European countries, all sorts of things count as hate speech. So there's just been a case in Finland, for example, where a former politician has been dragged through the courts for quoting the Bible on homosexuality in a leaflet that she wrote. She's been taken through the courts for that. We also had a court case in Austria a few years ago where a woman was punished and it was upheld by the European courts because she said that Muhammad was a pedophile. We've had cases in the UK, where people have been arrested or at least visited by the police for posting supposedly transphobic content. Fairly recently, the police visited a woman, a lesbian, who posted online that men aren't lesbians. That used to be a common sense piece of knowledge a few years ago. Now it's a potential hate speech crime that the police can visit you for and tell you off for.

So these kinds of legislation are terrifying, because if social media platforms are being forced or pressured to take down content that might run foul of local laws, they will take down everything. They will urge on the side of caution. 6% of their annual revenue is a hell of a lot of money. If they find that amount of money, billions of pounds, billions of Euro, they would much rather censor us rather than pay that money. So we're entering a new era of digital censorship. One thing that really worries me is the collapse of the dream of internet freedom. I'm old enough to remember 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when the Internet was coming up, there was a real sense that this was more revolutionary than the printing press. Because for the first time in human history, you would be able to publish your thoughts and your ideas not only without the state breathing down your neck, but without even the old infrastructure of editors and publishers breathing down your neck. You would be liberated from all the old forms of control and discrimination. To say what you want to say to however many people you're able to say it to.

It was seen as completely revolutionary. But that's fizzled out now. It's fizzled out under you got to.

Get through five or six companies. Could you imagine if, back in the pre Internet days, you went into the store to buy a ream of paper to print out your pamphlets, and the guy looked at you and said, well, I've heard you've got some things to say that are against what the regime wants to publish. So no paper for you, son. And the thought of that's maddening. But yeah, that your ISP you could go onto your website one morning and just find that your domain name registrar has decided to take your domain name because they don't like what you have to say. And sure, when that happened to Andrew Anglin, it's hard to say that his speech is okay. It's no secret I've told him I don't like it, but I still defend his rights. But what does the man can say that the trouble with fighting for human freedom is you spend most of your time defending scoundrels, because scoundrels, that oppression is first aimed and you have to stop all oppression at the beginning if it's going to be stopped at all.

Well, folks, I've gotten through a lot of the questions that I had prepared or the topics I had prepared for this. There were a couple of other ones that maybe I'll do a part two or ask you guys to do a part two at some point. But I've already kept you longer than I said I would, so I think we will.

I've enjoyed it a lot more than I knew I would.

Good. I think that's you agreeing to come back on Mark anytime, man.

Yeah.

And if you're ever and Brendan knows he has a standing invitation if you're ever in DC, let me know. Have you swing by Fire's DC office for those listeners who are interested in kind of fire stuff. We're expanding our DC office right now, and we're actually building dedicated podcast studio. It's going to be pretty cool. State of the art equipment, cool background. That's not just the windows in my office, although the windows in my office, I think are pretty cool, too. So either of you are in town, let's pop into the podcast studio and have a talk, so to speak. Yeah. Thank you again very much. And hang on until I'm done reading this outro because I need to get your files. This podcast is hosted by me, Nico Perino, and produced by my colleague Sam Niederholzer. It's also edited by my colleagues Aaron Reese and Ella Ross. You can learn more about so to speak by subscribing to our YouTube channel. This conversation will have a video component. That's your thing. Go to YouTube, subscribe to the channel. You'll get notifications every time a new podcast is posted. We also have a Twitter and Instagram account, which you can find by searching for free speech talk on Facebook.

We're at facebook.com slash Sotospeakpodcast, and if you have questions for us or hate mail for Brendan and Mark, you can email Sotospeak@thefire.org and I'll appreciate your feedback, and I'm sure Brendan and Mark would as well forward it along to them. If you enjoyed this episode, though, and you have positive things to say, consider leaving us a review on Apple podcasts or apply reviews. Help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.