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I have a right to lead my life however I like, including on intellectual issues, including on speaking or publishing or praying or what have you, as long as I leave others free to do the same. So it all is simply an expression of or a manifestation of my right to my life to lead it as I like. Freedom of the fundamental rights, freedom of.

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Conscience, academic freedom, freedom oppressed, and the right to listen. You're listening to, so to speak, the free speech podcast brought to you by fire, the foundation for individuals rights and expression. Alright, 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. I am, as always, your host, Nico Parino. Today we're going to have a discussion that I've wanted to have for a long time. Now we're going to talk about Ayn Rand, her philosophy of objectivism, and free speech. The impetus for the conversation is a new collection of essays titled the first essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom, which was published by the Ayn Rand Institute Press earlier this year and was edited by University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor Tara Smith. Like many people, I suspect, I first encountered Ayn Rand in college through the reading of her popular 1943 novel the Fountainhead, and her even more popular 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Collectively, the books have sold over 20 million copies. That's a lot. Now, ever since reading the novels, and ever since I devoted my career to defending free expression, I've wondered about the applicability of objectivism to free speech, and what Ayn Rand, who died in 1982, would have thought about some of today's high profile free speech controversies.

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In 2016, I actually spoke on a free speech panel at an Ayn Rand Institute conference in Atlanta and found myself in disagreement on some important points with my fellow panelist, DePaul University philosophy professor and objectivist scholar Jason Hill. One topic I'm particularly interested in discussing today, and that will be a point of departure for many free speech advocates, is objectivism's rejection of much of John Stuart Mill's philosophy. Two episodes ago, we discussed Mill and his undisputed influence on american free speech, law, and culture. But as Professor Smith argues in the book, Mill is a utilitarian and a collectivist who at a fundamental level opposes individual liberty. So we'll get into that. Our two guests today are the aforementioned Tara Smith, who, in addition to being a philosophy professor, holds the anthem foundation fellowship in the study of objectivism. Professor Smith, welcome onto the ship.

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It's great to be here. Thanks a lot for having us.

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And joining her is Ankar Ghatte, who is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on objectivism. He is also a contributor to the collection of essays we're discussing today. Ankar is in studio with me. Ankar, welcome onto the show.

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Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having us.

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So, Ankar, since you teach undergraduate and graduate courses on objectivism, I guess I'll start with you. What is objectivism?

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It's a philosophy that's pro reason that champions the individual's mind's ability to know reality. And that's your basic guide in life, should be what you know, what you can figure out, what you think, and as a result, come to value. So it's pro reason, it's pro this world. So it's, it rejects any concept and conception of the supernatural. So it's secular, atheistic, it's pro reason. And most controversial of all, I think, is that it's pro selfishness or it's pro egoism, putting it in a kind of less controversial way. It's pro the pursuit of happiness. So the way the Declaration of Independence puts it, that it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which means your own personal, individual happiness. And in terms of morality or the good, it says that's what is moral to do to pursue your own happiness, your own life. And as a result, it's, in politics, it's, you could put it, it's pro free market, it's pro capitalism, it's pro individual rights. But that flows out of the philosophy. It's a philosophy of individualism and a consequences in politics. You need to look at politics from the lens of, of the individual.

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And the concept of individual rights is, what does that.

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Professor Smith, the word objectivism, does that presume there's some sort of objective reality beyond which or by which, like this philosophy is built, or where does the word objectivism come from?

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Let me flag one thing before I directly address that. I just want to say that something that Ankar said about the pro egoism plank, so to speak, of objectivism, the support of your pursuit of your happiness, that's very individualistic, and that's going to be one of the points of contrast with the mill that you brought up later. So I don't mean to jump us to the mill, but I just want to put that on our minds.

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Right.

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It's the pursuit of my happiness.

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That's a good flag.

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Okay. But to, let's say you were asking about objectivism is there an objective reality? So objectivism gets its name from what Rand considers the way of using your mind in order to grasp the reality that really is there, whatever we think, whatever we might hope, and so on. So there is an independent reality. Now, strictly speaking, it's not that reality is objective. It's that human beings can be objective or not objective in the way that they think about their experience and the world around them. But it is only by following the objective methods of using one's mind that one can really reliably distinguish the true from the false. What's so from what's not so in the sense of. I think, you know, one very commonly understood sense of objectivity is. It's the rejection of relativism. It's the rejection of subjectivism.

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I was going to ask.

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Yeah, Rand does reject that sort of relativist idea that, well, the world is what you make it, or reality is. Is. Or facts are what this society or this culture thinks. No, there's a real world out there, and the sooner we figure it out, the better off we can be in terms of figuring out how to deal with it, how to navigate, achieve our ends, and so on.

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So, Ankar, where does free speech play into objectivism? Presumably, if you want to understand reality, you need to gather facts, and by part of gathering facts is hearing what other people have to say and how they observe reality.

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Yeah, it's very much about the quest for the truth. So I think of freedom of thought and freedom of speech as going together. One shouldn't make too much of a separation about them. And the fundamental is freedom of thought, that if I'm going to be able to navigate my life, figure out what I think is true, what I think is valuable, I have to do it. And that means I have to have the freedom to do it, to follow the evidence, where it leads, to ask questions, to not be too satisfied with sort of conventional answers. I need an aspect of that. As you were saying, in terms of freedom of speech is part of that pursuit, is talking to other people, learning from them, seeing what they're saying, what questions they're asking. The whole process is in part, social. It's inherently, it's, you have to do it. But part of that is conversing with other people. And so it's crucial that that freedom of thought includes freedom of expression.

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Yeah. Professor Smith, is that how you see Ayn Rand seeing it as well?

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Yes, very much. You know, go back to something that Ankar started out with in answering your question about objectivism. It's pro reason. It believes that human beings need to use their reason in order to understand the world and figure out how to act in the world. Right? But again, as Ankar was just saying, reasoning is autonomous in the sense that I can only think for myself. Other people might make me say things, they might, with a gun to my head, force me to parrot certain ideas. But if I don't get it, I don't get it. I don't think it, right. So I can be the sort of, I don't know, the robot for coercers of any sort, be it the guys hazing me at the fraternity or the authoritarians in Washington or wherever it might be. But unless I am free to engage in the kind of thinking that Ankar was just talking about, where I'm questioning, I'm wondering, yeah, I'm using other people as well. I'm talking to them to get their ideas and so on. Unless I'm thinking things through for myself, I'm not really engaged in a reasoning process. So freedom, as she sees it, is the precondition for our ability.

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It's no guarantee that we'll actually use this well or proceed objectively, but freedom is the precondition for our ability to actually exercise our minds in a rational, objective way so that we can understand.

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Yeah. And did Rand live out this ideal? When I think of Ayn Rand, I think as someone who mints no words in criticizing her enemies, did she ever seek to censor them?

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To censor enemies?

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She was involved in house on american activities committee, but I understand that she had some compunction with how that group went well over time. Yeah.

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So she, you can read her own thoughts of why she testified before the house of Un american activities. She makes a crucial distinction that what the government was doing was not policing ideas. It wasn't trying to penalize people just for the ideas or the theories they advocate. Part of what they were investigating is membership in the Communist Party. And I think it was right, and I think this was her view. The Communist Party was a political organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the american government. And the government investigating that is like investigating a criminal plot and relevant to it. So ideas are relevant to that. Why would someone join the Communist Party if they don't have any sympathy towards communism? So part of that investigation will involve thinking about the ideas people hold, but they're not being penalized because of the idea, they're being penalized because they're membership of what could be viewed, I think, as a criminal gang, except it's political and financed by another nation that's hostile to the US.

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Yeah, sure. I recently read Jennifer Byrne's biography of Ayn Rand. I'm not sure what you guys think of it, called goddess of the market. And in there, it talks about her involvement with the House on American Activities Committee and her text, Screen Guide for Americans. Burns writes that in the guide, Rand portrayed Hollywood communists as veritable Ellsworth Tuis, carefully smuggling small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories. Eventually, these bits will act like the drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock they are trying to split is americanism, Rand wrote. To resist this movie, producers and writers must understand that politics flowed from moral premises, was Rand's argument. So after writing the screen Guide for Americans, Rand was invited to testify at QAC, and she did so. But she later, as you said, was concerned that the investigation was veering off from an investigation into communist party membership and into just communist sympathies, for example, ideological sympathies. Do you believe political party affiliation, to the extent you're affiliated with communists, shouldn't be protected political activity in the United States?

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I mean, I would say it depends what the party is. So if you're a part of the Democrats or the Republicans, it's not a subject for government investigation. But if it's really, this is a foreign power and it's a party that's dedicated to the overthrow of the government and the violent overthrow, that's a different issue. In the same way, if you think of just other associations, non political, you can be a member of all kinds of different fraternities, clubs and so on. If you're a member of the Mafia, is it, can the government investigate that yet? Because they think this is.

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Professor Smith, I would just say I.

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Think it's not, you know, is it a party or not, or is it a membership or not? It's what's the activities of that organization? But what's the activities of that organization? Are they posing a threat or worse, to other people's rights? So it was, again, that clear distinction between you have the right to espouse whatever views you want to join with others in parties or other sorts of organizations, to espouse views to read, to discuss, and so on. But you don't have the right to go beyond that insofar as you're actually taking actions to, whether it be overthrow the government or use violence against certain, you know, your opponents on abortion issues or immigration issues or whatever it is. So it's really the, the activity, I think as opposed to simply the. Of course, she was a staunch advocate. If you should be able to read whoever, you know, they should all, you know, read your communists, read your compt, you know. Yes, she was very harsh on all sorts of views that she disagreed with, but her idea was read them, think about them, question them, but don't use any force against others in your advocacy of the ideas that you end up supporting.

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And here's some of the history I think is relevant. So there was this kind of view that it was overblown, the communist penetration in the us government and the spying. And I think what's emerged historically is it was underplayed. There was more spies and penetration of communists in government and other american organizations. I think that's what historians have discovered in the last 50 years when the archives opened after the wall fell. So I think there was a real concern. And if you think just like, say, the whole atomic program, the atomic bomb in the spine of it, like this was a major, major issue of these are the communist, I view is like the Nazis. They're butchers on that scale. And the idea that, oh, they might get their hands on the bomb, that should have been a major, major issue. And that the government is investigating sort of communist penetration in this kind of thing, I definitely think the government should have been doing that.

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The question, and I think the criticism that a lot of free speech advocates lobby against HUAC is that it reached beyond the government into private associations, for example, such as Hollywood. But he brought up the Nazis, right? The one paradigmatic free speech case, of course, is the Nazis rallying in Skokie. Frank Collin was the leader. He was the leader of a political party, the National Socialist Party of America. And we take it as dogma that that speech should have been protected. Do you think Frank Collins should have been able to form a political party in that sense? Or is the distinction for you guys the existence of this foreign entity and the connection to it, as opposed to like, an independent, regressive, fascist political movement that's United States born and organized?

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I mean, I think the foreign power is relevant because it's an issue of. That's part of how the force is being introduced. But it's partly, as Tara was saying, it's what their activities, what their program and mission is. And if it really is that it's not, we're going to be voted into power, but we're going to seize power. That's a threat. And it doesn't really matter in this case. It doesn't really matter what their ideological program if it's fascist, communist, or not much of an ideology. It's just we want to hold power. We're going to try to seize power and overthrow the government. That has to be viewed as, that's no longer peaceful advocacy of ideas trying to get elected. It's trying to seize the machinery of force, and that's a threat. I think any citizen should view that.

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Yeah, I think free speech advocacy was. Look at it from like, there are a lot of dumb people saying a lot of dumb things all the time. Right. But the distinction is to whether there's actual criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government as opposed to just this amorphous call for the overthrow of the government. Tara, so do you, is general amorphous calls to overthrow the government? See, is the means of production, what have you. Should they be protected, or is it really the coordination?

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Yes, I think. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. No, yes. I mean, very much I agree with what Ankar was just saying. And that's not to say that there won't be some cases where it's hard to figure out, you know, there are some organizations and what they do. And, you know, some of these kinds of cases have come before the courts. But, yeah, no, just, you know, the broad advocacy of certain sorts of ideas which would, you know, change our system radically, that's okay. But not the use of force, you know, not the initiation of real force against people or restricting their rights.

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And Ayn Rand's on record that, I mean, the idea that she would think you can jail communist, Marxist of various fascists, no, you can't do that when it's just an issue of ideas, but you can cross the line to actual action. And when that happens, the government should be very strict in regard to that. And there's a tendency to think of, well, because we don't want to intrude on the realm of ideas. They sort of, they're reluctant to intercede. And I think part of the having a distinction between expression and advocacy of ideas and taking actual actions, having a bright line that that's very different will make it that, no, we're not intruding on the realm of ideas if we're stopping some kind of criminal plot. And it doesn't matter what their ideas are. It's just we're agnostic about that because the issue is now they're plotting to do something that's illegal.

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Yeah. Free speech advocates advocate for kind of a high bar in this space, and it goes back to a 1960s Supreme Court case called Brandenburg, the United States, in which it says in order for speech to become incitement, it needs to be likely to cause imminent lawless action. And the one risk you have, if you have a lower bar, is the sort of thing that you're getting in Brazil right now, where they're essentially banning a whole social media platform because Elon Musk, in part, wouldn't take down right wing speakers on the platform. And so if you have this amorphous standard where it's like, overthrow the government or disrupt the democratic process, and you ban speech that might lead to something like that, or is interpreted to lead to something like that, then you have political speech that's in the crosshairs. And that's just, that's the risk.

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I mean, what you're talking about is part of why rand was a great opponent of what today we know as hate speech restrictions or offensive speech restrictions. Right. Short of that kind of direct incitement of imminent violence. Right. Imminent infringement of other people's rights, you could say whatever the hell you want.

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Right.

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You know, on your property and your land or, you know, with, you know, places you have rented and, all right, within the confines. The confines of property rights, you can say the most offensive things, the most hateful things, and so on, because that you don't hate. Those are your thoughts. That's not anybody for anybody else to keep you from doing so far, as long as you're not, again, obstructing their freedom of action.

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Yeah. I'd make one caution about the issue of the imminence. So it being it's in for incitement, I think that makes sense that it has to be imminent. So you're inciting people that they're going to take some violent action now versus two weeks from now. They could think about it, should I really be doing this? And then the inciter's not liable and legally liable in that sense. But plotting happens over a long period of time.

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Yeah. Criminal conspiracy. There'll be another exception to the First Amendment.

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Yeah. And I don't think that's properly thought of about how imminent it is. It's how organized and deliberate that you really have evidence that there's a plot. It might be that it's gonna be carried out two years from now. I would think a terrorist for plotting an attack like 911, that could be years in the making. So there, it's not imminence, but you have to have real evidence that there's actual plot, not just as you're saying, oh, they posted on the Internet saying, oh, I wish we could get rid of the us government. You have to have that. There's evidence of a plot.

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Yeah. And you had mentioned that Ayn Rand was supportive of the rights for even communists to speak. I think it's important here to provide some of her backstory, what that means to her, because she was an escapee of the Soviet Union, right, Ankar?

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Yes. I mean, she fledae the Soviet Union. I mean, she witnessed the start of the revolution, was adamantly opposed to it, and knew that she'd likely. I mean, she'd be persecuted and likely imprisoned or even killed for her view. I mean, her burgeoning views, she was radically opposed. So to live, she had to get out of the Soviet Union. She came to America because America is the land of the free. And so, yeah, so she's seen firsthand the destructive nature of communist ideology. And she still, in America was. Yeah, you can advocate this ideology. You can't take up arms in regards.

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She was a great fan as a student in the USSR. She was a great. Or what became the USSR, you know, a great fan of film. And I think if I'm. And you might be able to correct me on this, Ankar, but, you know, foreign film included and got these images of a freer world. And also, yes, in that she had some idea of what she was getting into. But she also, her thought was not a product of history. Her thought was a product of the exercise of her mind. To the extent that she could exercise her mind even in Russia, she was using her mind in a very firsthand way to go back to what we were talking about before thinking things through for herself and questioning the dogmas, you know, that she and everybody else around her were made to obey. It's like, whoa, she thought for herself. And that's what really generated even the interest and the attraction to certain american ideals. And then I think the more she learned about many american ideals, including many of the founding fathers ideas, including their ideas of intellectual freedom. You know, she saw how these meshed with what she was developing in terms of her philosophy.

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The anchor.

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Yeah.

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If people are interested in the sort of early Ayn Rand, she said that we. The living, her first novel, and it's set in Soviet Union, is as close to an autobiography as she'll write. And the lead character, Kira, in that novel, I think it contains Ayn Ratten's ideas, attitudes towards life. And in that story, the people who are sort of being suffocating in communist Russia, they get a glimpse of life abroad, and the notion of just the abroad, what it means, and it's sort of a lifeline. Like, life could be radically different than what it is here in this kind of depressing, morbid situation that I think is autobiographical. And the movies played this. There's stories of her going to watch a movie again, just because there was a scene of sort of a background of New York, the skyline of New York City. And just to get a glimpse of that again, she'd watch the whole movie. And that gives you, I think, some of the emotional atmosphere.

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I believe she had a quote somewhere that's somewhere along the lines of, like, the skyline of New York City is greater than any natural wonder man could ever see. And I definitely felt that way. I lived in New York for two years, and I actually was working at fire here in DC. And I told my boss, Greg Lukianoff is like, if I die never having lived in New York City, I'm going to go to my grave with regrets. It's one of those places I get off the train and I just feel a rush of energy. Some people get off the train in New York and feel overwhelmed. My wife is one of them. But I love New York City. And I lived at 29th and third, midtown, and I had this beautiful view from the 27th floor across the skyline. And I was like, man created this. It's incredible what the New York City skyline is and everything that went into it. And so I've always looked back on that Ayn Rand quote about that, which I haven't committed to memory, somewhere along these lines and thought, wow, was she right? Why was she right?

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The one other question I want to ask about Ayn Rand, and this is something she gets from her critics a lot, is surrounding her group, the collective, which was the group of students that was built up around her in New York City and beyond. And there are allegations that she was pretty sensorial within that group. I'm just going to read a passage from this gentleman, John Hospers, who's quoted in Jennifer Burns's biography. This is Hospers speaking of his experience. I felt as if I were in a strange church where I didn't belong, where all the other people were singing the chance they were expected to, and only I did not conform. And where to deny a single thing was considered heresy. And the attitude of the audience in the lecture hall shocked me even more rational. Good heavens. An army of the faithful repeating the same incantations and asking questions only about details or applications, never questioning the tenets of the true faith. And then Rand had responded angrily to Hospur's writing through all the years that I spent formulating my philosophical system, I was looking desperately for intelligent agreement, or at least for intelligent disagreement, she wrote.

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Today, I'm not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer. And there are a couple of passages here in Burns's biography where it seems like Ayn Rain had a certain conception of what her philosophy is, and she didn't brook much questioning within the collective. And there were actually some people who were kicked out of the collective for that questioning. So I want to get your guys perspective on how she comported herself in the collective, whether you think she was maybe more sensorial than she had been.

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A few things people should read the letters of Ayn Rand. She was a copious correspondent with all sorts of people, John Hospers included, people you've never heard of who would write her about her fiction and sometimes have a question. And what you see consistently in the courtesy and the seriousness with which she engaged people's questions was never berating people for asking an honest question, generally, you know, giving some explanations and at times coupled with, oh, I would suggest that you relook at this passage in light of this other passage and so on, but definitely encouraging people to do their own thinking. So, I mean, just one, you know, the letters occur to me, having about a year or so ago, reread a lot of them. You get actually, you get such benevolence, such generosity toward anyone who is seriously interested. A couple of other things. There were many people intimate with Ayn Ra, I mean, who knew her well, who were part of the so called collective, and well beyond that, you know, a certain period of that time, who will tell you about how open she was to criticism and so on. Now, what she would not Brook was people purporting to stand for objectivism, to stand for her philosophy in any way, getting it wrong or misrepresenting it, that's not her philosophy.

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You know, her philosophy was, these are my doctrines, right? We can criticize those, we can talk about those, but we can call other ideas my philosophy of objectivism. So on that, yes, she was very insistent, and I think rightfully so. Let me also point out one of the central virtues, moral virtues, in her book is the virtue of independence, which she sees as materially making one's own way in the world and intellectually reaching one's own conclusion. And she was a great, again, explicit advocate of the need to do your own thinking. But it didn't mean that certain thoughts were going to escape critical, you know, criticism.

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Are those letters available somewhere in a collection or online?

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Yes.

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Okay.

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Yes.

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Where can that work?

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In the, yes, they're published books, and I believe they're all available now free online, aren't they?

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Yeah, there's a lot, at least a lot of them are available online. But, yeah, it's a thick book. The letters of Ayn Rand, edited by Mike Berliner.

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It's a thick.

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Right.

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But I mean, but you could look up particular figures or questions about, you know, it's got a good index, so you can go to what you're looking for.

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Yeah. You don't need to go cover to cover. You can use it as a name.

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But I will say it's many of her letters to the no names, the people whose names aren't particularly, oh, I'll look for that name in the index because he was a famous philosopher or a famous playwright of the era. It's oftentimes the just, you know, some housewife in Peoria or whatever, and you get these really interesting, sometimes extended. Not just a one off either. I mean, sometimes a real correspondence develops over four years between her and this businessman and wherever it might be.

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I know she was a critic of Mises and Hayek and Friedman to different degrees over her lifetime. I'd love to see some of those correspondences for those who are interested in libertarian thought.

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Yeah, they're surprised there's not much correspondence. She had a relationship with Mises and Hazlitt, but they met in person, so there's not that much correspondence. There's another book that's the Marginalia of Ayn Rat. So of books in her library where she had marginal notes and stuff. And there's some Hayek and mises there that you can read some comments on what she's reading of theirs. So that's what I would reference for that. So you put it as was she sensorial? And I think we should come back to that because I don't think that. I think censorship should be restricted to government activity and we shouldn't ascribe it to private individuals. On the issue of it as being like dogma, I think it's crystal clear, as Tara was saying, that Ayn Rand did not treat her philosophy as a dogma. She thought of it as a science which requires observation, lengthy argument and analysis. And with hospers in that, the letters, there's a whole chapter. So they had an extensive correspondence, and they're discussing and debating and arguing the idea. If you read that and think that she treats her philosophy like a dogma, I think it will disabuse people of that.

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But I would say this, and this is part of, I think of what you brought up, of what Hospers was commenting on. So you can differentiate between did Ayn Rand think of her philosophy and treat it as dogma versus did some other people treat it like that? And I think the answer to that, my guess is for the, I mean, I wasn't around during the collective, but it that, yes, there were people like that, because I've seen it in the present day that people would treat the philosophy like that. And there's a reason for that. Most people's model for philosophy is religion. So they bring all their attitudes that they have towards religion with philosophy, and they think, well, it's a dogma, and we're just, you're the authority, tell us what to do, and we'll follow and so on. And she was opposed to that, but it doesn't.

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She was an atheist, right?

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She was an atheist, and she was opposed to all the paraphernalia of dogma. And she would always tell people, again, you can see it in the letters, you need to think for yourself and think if this is right, think that this is true. But people, religion teaches you, you can have a shortcut to these kinds of things. And that's a real phenomenon.

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So Ayn Rand wrote in her, actually, let me ask one more question. The collective. You think about someone who hates collectivism, calling their group the collective. Where did that come from?

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It was an inside joke, is my interest.

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Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense.

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All right.

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In her 1962 essay, the Fascist New Frontier, Ayn Rand writes, freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression, or punitive action by the government and nothing else. It does not mean the right to demand the financial support or the material means to express your views at the expense of other men who may not wish to support you. Professor Smith, can you talk about that belief? She only saw it as the government. I mean, the sensorial won't be a word in her lexicon.

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Well, no, censorial will be a word, but it's an adverb, meaning like censorship in certain respects. But we've got to be so careful with language, right? Especially, you know, in the debates about intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, we use metaphors a lot. We use parallels a lot that are not literally true. So, yes, censorship is government restriction of your rightful speech. Why? Why isn't this just a linguistic issue? Because there's a fundamental difference in kind between forcing you to do something or forcing you to shut up about something, saying, I don't want to deal with you, right? The government coercion can shut you down. If I propose some deal to you, Nico, or to you on car, and you don't like it, you don't like the terms of employment that I'm offering or participation in my social media platform or whatever it might be, I offer you some terms, take them or leave them. But if I'm a private company, you know, however large and influential I might be, if I'm just a private individual, individual, I can't shut you down. I leave you free to go find somebody else if you can, good luck.

[00:34:00]

But I don't want to deal with you. And if we think of that, what the private individual, a private group or private company is doing, if that censorship, and that's not supposed to be allowed, what happened to my right to choose who I associate with, who I trade with, who I speak to, and whose speech I don't support or do support? Right. The right to free speech, the right to intellectual freedom is also the right to not engage with certain people and not support certain ideas. If you say, oh, no, Facebook is censoring me, they've got to be made to allow what I said, then to hell with the rights of the facebooks of the world and so on.

[00:34:39]

I'm glad you brought up Facebook. Right. So I think it's a confusing issue for a lot of people who care about free speech. And I think fire confused some folks and our positions on it, because on the one hand, you talk about the net choice Supreme Court cases where you have Texas and Florida telling the social media companies how they must moderate content or what content they must host or what content they can't take down. And we go into court and say, no, there's this free association, Facebook and X, all these companies have their own first amendment right to associate around shared values. On the other hand, we're supportive of the challenge to the government in Murthy v. Missouri, where the government was job owning these social media companies to take down speech.

[00:35:29]

Sorry, could you say that again? Your position on Murthy.

[00:35:31]

So, Murphy, you have the allegation that the government was coercing social media platforms to censor where they otherwise didn't want to do so, pressuring these.

[00:35:41]

Yeah, yeah.

[00:35:42]

And that the threat of this government censorship was forcing these private associations that have their own first amendment rights to censor. And there being this downstream consequence for the users of the platform. Now, the Supreme Court ended up ruling that the users who filed the suit, the users who were censored, alleging that the government pressured these social media companies, they didn't have standing. Yeah, I think if you read the case and it was Facebook, for example, that sued the government over this job owning, they probably, they would have, probably would have had standing and they probably would have won. But when people think about social media right now, they think about censorship. They think about what happened during COVID where these platforms were moderating content surrounding masking or vaccines or around the election, where they were moderating content around the election. And fire has always advocated that these companies have a First Amendment right to do that. Now, from a normative perspective, you might think it's stupid. And we're willing to make those normative arguments that these policies are ripe with double standards, that to the extent you're ex and you profess yourself to be the town square and your censoring users are deplatforming them, who are participating in such consequential conversations as the pandemic, for example, you're not no such thing.

[00:36:56]

So there's this lack of truth in advertising. But at the same time, we would defend the First Amendment right to do so. I think that's a distinction that some people confuse. But would rand and you guys, as kind of objectivist thinkers, be willing to make not only that First Amendment argument that the government shouldn't do the censorship, but also the normative argument that what these social media companies were doing is dumb and wrong headed?

[00:37:18]

Before answering, can I just, can you expand a little bit on what you mean by job owning? When you said the government, I think you said a couple of times the government job owning these companies, what does job owning mean? Yes, I think it's a package deal of things that need to be differentiated.

[00:37:34]

Sure. So it's when the government comes in. And Mark Zuckerberg talked a little bit about this in his letter in response to the House Judiciary Committee, a subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, and is essentially saying, it's a nice restaurant there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

[00:37:51]

Well, the Vulo case was one of the. Right. The new York Vulo case.

[00:37:54]

Yeah. So in that case, you have the insurance regulator in the state of New York, York, who's pulling in the bankers for the National Rifle association and saying, hey, we don't like your association with the National Rifle association. This is in the wake of Parkland. There are all these other things that we're looking into, but we're going to just turn a blind eye to those. If you guys drop the NRA as a client and the Supreme Court said that was unconstitutional jawbroning, unconstitutional pressure. It was essentially coercion of a private entity and their free associations. And so the social media companies, in this case, some of the users who filed suit in Murthy, Missouri, argued that the government was doing that in the social media context as well. And now you need to look at each of the conversations that the social media companies are having with the government in isolation and saying, like, you know, was this coercive? Was there a legitimate threat by it, or was this just the government giving its opinion? Right.

[00:38:49]

Right.

[00:38:50]

And so a lot of that can get whitewashed, those nuances, when you're talking about it from a broad perspective. But, you know, government jawboning does exist.

[00:39:00]

Oh, yeah. That separation, I think is really important. Is it the government expressing a certain opinion? And as government officials, they have to be able to do some of that versus is there an implied threat? And the implied threat here can mean just, oh, it'll be harder for you to get a permit or a regulation or there's some permission that you need. So there's this kind of quid pro quo that might not be obvious, but that that is a violation of freedom of speech of these companies. But that, that separation, I think, is very important.

[00:39:33]

It's not that the government may never speak to private companies. It's not like, oh, you know, if the government is speaking at all, you know, if the government has good information that, you know, there is a certain threat, I think it's perfectly fine for them to bring that to the attention of platforms and others who might be spreading it, but without this implied threat of we're going to take away this permission or that regulation, which is so often what goes on today. So, yeah, I mean, I was very sympathetic with the suit in Murphy, but.

[00:40:06]

On the normative question. Right. Would you ever feel comfortable criticizing the way these social media companies moderate their content?

[00:40:12]

Of course, but not their right to do so, which I think sounds like the position that you would. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the right, the right to freedom of action is the right to exercise it in some really idiotic ways and worse. Right. I mean, I have a right to be a jerk. I have a right to be immoral in many ways. I have the freedom and I should have the freedom to engage in all sorts of policies with which I deeply disagree. But what I don't have the right to do is interfere with anybody else's, you know, setting up their own companies with their own content moderation policies, if that's the arena that we're talking about or what have you, but you can certainly objectively criticize the way that different people exercise their rights while defending staunchly their right to set up their company by whatever asinine policies they want or whatever.

[00:41:06]

Yeah, well, I would say for the social media companies, most of the criticism I hear, I think, is stupid.

[00:41:14]

And criticism from who?

[00:41:16]

About how their content moderation policies are. And the stupid, there's sort of a presumption from many critics that what they're doing is easy to do, and if I were in charge, I could obviously do it better. You've never operated an organization at this scale. And first and foremost, with the social media companies, Facebook, YouTube, I mean, meta now, YouTube and so on. I think, first and foremost, what the recognition has to be is the incredible value that these companies have created. They created, they're innovative, they've done something that has never before been done. They've done it at a worldwide scale, made interconnection so incredibly easy. And I mean, the positives that have come from this are, I mean, just careers on YouTube that never existed before. All of that is their achievement. And most people can do that, couldn't do that achievement. And then, yes, there's issues about, well, but you've got this content on the platform, and some of them are, I think we're very sensitive to this. I think Zuckerberg was very like, he was trying that we want the content. There's a real positive. There are negatives. Can we design our algorithm to help with this?

[00:42:35]

It's not an easy task to do it. And the idea that some guy on his couch or some post or person was taken down, that's obviously wrong. If I were in charge, I could do something different. Create your own social media company and try to do it.

[00:42:50]

Now, I think that's a really important point, that it's worth underscoring the volume alone of what's posted, of what's puts on, of what is, you know, placed on some of these platforms, you know, round the clock, every day, round the world, and there are some tough call, right? And trying to get those right now, that's a phenomenal service that they do, and they're going to get it wrong sometimes. But, yeah, that presumption of, oh, it would be so easy. We could do it, you know, just we three together.

[00:43:18]

Well, we had on the podcast a couple episodes ago, Representative Christopher Cox, who was the co author with Ron Wyden of section 230. And section 230 is a statute that shields these companies from liability for third party content. In part to address the challenge of the Internet and the volume of content that's produced, and essentially says that the creators of the content third party are liable for what they post and not the hosts of it. But that's. That's very controversial now. It's. It seeks to address a unique problem with the Internet. And I think over time, it's gotten somewhat watered down in the Sesta foster debate and the debate surrounding backpage. But it's. It's also interesting because you have the founder of Telegram who is being detained right now in France for lack of moderation of content or not engaging with the government surrounding his encrypted messaging service. I would have a hard time, although I'm less sure than I would have been a couple of years ago, believing that that would have been allowed to happen in the United States because of section 230. And you guys talk about section 230 a little bit in your book, and you said, you talk about how the question surrounding the liability is a difficult one, but nobody has, has suggested a better approach than what section 230 is at the moment, given the unique challenges of moderating content on the Internet.

[00:44:43]

Yeah. My basic view of this is, if our government stopped doing so many things that I think it should not be doing, it would pay a lot more attention to things it should be doing. And thinking about liability in the Internet. I mean, Internet obviously is something new. There's something right in thinking, I think, of social media companies like YouTube and meta, that they're more. They're not the creators of the content, they're not the authors. They're much more like a bookstore, that there's all kinds of things you can go in, and if there's some kind of libel in a particular book, it's not the bookstores, it's the author of that book. But on the other hand, there are issues about, okay, if you bring to their attention, you've got content up that's breaking copyright and so on. What is the responsibility of these companies, then? And that's to think of how that works and how the law should be that requires new law for a new creation like the Internet. And section 230, I think, was a start, but there's a lot more thinking that's warranted that I think hasn't happened.

[00:45:46]

Yeah, well, I mean, in the United States, you could go out to these companies, subpoena them for access to user information for the person who posted that third party content that was. So there are ways to do it that doesn't create an excess burden or liability for the host, but it would require focusing on the actual creator of the content itself. Two podcasts ago, we discussed a book, the Supreme Court and the philosopher. And the argument in that book is essentially starting with Oliver Wendell Holmes dissent in the Abrams case in 1919. John Stuart Mill's philosophy surrounding free speech just imbues the Supreme Court's approach to freedom of expression, reminding listeners that prior to 1931, no government restriction on speech was struck down by the Supreme Court. I think that shocks a lot of people. There were a lot of dissents arguing for what we see now as the current position on free speech at the Supreme Court, beginning with that 1919. And part of it was that Oliver Wendell Holmes had a conversation with a gentleman who encouraged him to reread Mill. And this is between Oliver Wendell Holmes majority opinion in a schenck case, which put into jail some socialists in Philadelphia who handed out anti draft leaflets.

[00:46:59]

And then later that same year, he writes the dissent in Abrams, which dealt with people handing out essentially socialist leaflets, communist, pro communist leaflets in New York. And something happened in that summer, and they think it's that he reread Mill and had this conversation with this man, Harold. But, Ankar, you. I quoted Professor Smith earlier on Mill. You write that rand was adamant that people should not think of Mill as being on the side of individual rights. That's going to shock a lot of people. Why?

[00:47:29]

I mean, he's very explicit on that. If you read the start of utilitarianism, it's. I'm not basing this in some kind of abstract doctrine of right. I mean, that's individual rights. I mean, both Bentham and Mill were. I mean, Bentham is. Rights are. What is it, nonsense on stilts? So the american conception is individualistic. It means the right pertains to the individual. It's your pursuit of your own happiness. Mill, in moral philosophy, is not about the pursuit of your own happiness. It's the greatest happiness for the greatest number. That's a collectivistic perspective, not an individualistic perspective. And therefore, that in politics, he's going to bring that lens, not the individualist lens, but the collectivist lens, I think, should not be surprising. It's what he's arguing. And if you take seriously that, don't just run him together with the founding fathers and think, oh, they're both on the side of freedom, they must have thought in the same way. No, they're radically different. Jefferson and Mill, for instance. They're very different. Or Madison and Mill. And Mill's explicit. So it's just, this isn't, I think, a complex issue of interpretation. It's just taking seriously what he's actually saying and what he's actually saying.

[00:48:51]

It's not about individual rights. It's not about the individual. It's about the collective.

[00:48:54]

Professor Smith is a lot of that come outside of chapter two of on Liberty. So if you look at chapter two of on Liberty, which is his discussion of freedom of expression, I don't think you see as much of that. It might be there and some of the lines, I think it is there, but.

[00:49:09]

Right. Most of this comes from elsewhere. So, I mean, first thing to underscore is simply, and Angkor referred to it quickly, like, okay, read your own liberty. Libertarians or likers of free speech. Right. But a notice what else? He wrote this whole influential thin book on utilitarianism, and there are implicit references to that utilitarian standardization, even within, on liberty and even within the chapter on freedom of expression. So I think, I mean, here's. It's very understandable, I think very understandable that Mill has been as enamored as he has been, I'm sorry. As it. I'm getting my grammar wrong now that, that free speech advocates like Mill, and it goes well beyond the influence on the Supreme Court that you were talking about in the podcast a few weeks ago with those authors, I mean, worldwide, some of the best minds who support free speech, at least, you know, purportedly mill, is their man. Why is that? He makes a lot of good points about the great value of open exchange of ideas. I mean, that chapter in on liberty, there are aspects of it which you might even call it's a tour de force of the tremendous value of not assuming your own infallibility and not taking things as dogma and hearing the other side.

[00:50:33]

And if you don't know the arguments for the other side, then you really don't understand. I mean, he makes many, many, many good points simply about the benefits of the practice of freedom of speech. But he doesn't understand that you have a right to free speech, even when what you're saying is to go back to what we were talking about before. Asinine or stupid right. The right to free speech doesn't come from the usefulness of your speech to others, useful as it often can be. It's that need for the freedom to think such that you really can think. So it's rooted in individual liberty. The kind of quote right that you'll get from mill is a permission. It's conditional. You have the right to speak. As long as this is really good for society. But when it's not.

[00:51:27]

Well, Mill is also concerned with what you might call the tyranny of the majority. Now, that's not his phrase. I think that's Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase from his journeys through America. But he was very much kind of a transgressor in Victorian England, and he was concerned about just the acceptability of playfulness with ideas in that society. And so I think that informs a lot of his philosophy and the usefulness, to use your phrase, Professor Smith, that he describes in on liberty. I mean, what do you guys think of his arguments surrounding uncertainty? He's like, we need to have freedom of speech, because there are three possible billet, the possible options with any argument that it's right to, that it's partially right, or that it's untrue. And in all three cases, we benefit from hearing arguments on the other side. Ankar.

[00:52:23]

There'S something true about what he's arguing, I think something false. So there are many issues that I think are settled and can be settled in an individual mind, and it's not that you have to keep sort of checking them. Well, what's the latest? Take something that with hate speech, Holocaust denial, it's not like you have to spend day every two years look at what are the Holocaust deniers saying? And let me think about that. And so it's no, it said that what they say is a fantasy. It has no relationship to the truth. And you can dismiss that and not revisit it, not think that's a continuous check on my thinking. It's on. And yet I still think you cannot censor those people because it. But from a collectivist perspective, and hate speech laws, I'm from Canada, we have hate speech laws. They're given a million justification that the harm they create is more than the harm of putting up, silencing these few individuals, tossing them out of schools they can't teach, even putting them in jail. It's a balancing of the harms is very much how mill thinks of it. And it's explicit in canadian law that this is what they're doing.

[00:53:42]

It's thinking about the public good. And if we think the public good is better off prohibiting this expression, we can prohibit it. And it's even the reverse in canadian law. If we think it's beneficial for the public good, we can permit it. So the same, the exact same content of speech, they can penalize and criminalize or nothing depending on how they think it plays for the public good, which is basically the thinking of the harm that it does to society at large, regardless of the harm that you're doing to an individual.

[00:54:15]

Yeah. It's central to his idea, is the harm principle. Right. Does something cause harm? And I think when most free speech advocates think about the harm principle, they think about what you, Professor Smith, talk about in your essay, which is the distinction between speech and action. We think of harm as being actions, right? Harms being things like physical harm, for example. But in Mill's philosophy surrounding the harm principle, you might think it could also involve words. And that's what, for example, the canadian government and other more speech restrictive governments might be seizing on.

[00:54:44]

Well, all I was going to say in connection with what Ankar was just saying is, and a lot of the debate these days about so called misinformation is exactly right. Oh, that's bad information for people to have. That's not helpful. So we better shut. You know, we better call that misinformation.

[00:55:00]

And.

[00:55:01]

Okay, that's. Okay. We can silence that. It's all out of the same playbook.

[00:55:06]

I put another very important thing about Mill, and you brought up about Mill. That part of our liberty is about sort of social conformity. Mill packages together two things that I think have to be dramatically separated. And you can see Ayn Rand separating this in her thought. So was Ayn Rand concerned about social conformity? If you read the Fountainhead, it's about an individual set in a world of conformists. So. And it, like, that's a huge problem.

[00:55:35]

That was her in the Soviet Union.

[00:55:36]

That was her in the Soviet Union. But. But in America versus the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the conformity is enforced at the point of the gun. If you don't toe the party line, if you don't go to your marxist classes and recite the dogma, you will lose your job, be put in jail, sent to Siberia. In America. That's not what happened. It was just. You'd be ostracized. People wouldn't want to deal with you. They think you're crazy. That's what happens to the hero hour Rourke in the fountainhead early on. That is permissible. The fight against that is to advocate better ideas of which the fountainhead was doing. Mill puts those two together. And if the conformity is a product of coercion of physical force of the government, that. And if it's just people thinking you're wrong, I don't want to associate with you. That's a problem. And he's treating them in the same way. They have to be radically separate. So Ayn ran to take a different aspect of conformity. She was against the FCC. And I think, understanding the FCC, what part of what it did is enforced sort of a mainstream kind of view on everybody.

[00:56:46]

We'll only give you licenses if you do this. And that created conformity in America, but that was conformity through coercion versus conformity of, like, we all are religious and an atheist, and we won't elect an atheist or we won't deal with it. That social conformity, that has to be fought in a different way.

[00:57:02]

So, to just summarize where we're at on Rand versus mill, Rand saw freedom of speech as an individual, right? And that is something that she held to be paramount. Whereas Mill more looked at freedom of speech as something that is useful in living your life. Right.

[00:57:20]

Well, but useful for society. I think that's part of what's crucial.

[00:57:25]

I mean, it's very useful for, in Rand's view, it's very useful for you, the individual, and there will be great social benefits as well.

[00:57:33]

Useful insofar as it allows you to develop your capacity to reason, I'm assuming.

[00:57:38]

Yes. And to think and to understand and exchange with other people and learn from them and take advantage of all the great ideas and products that everybody else brings. But the basis of my individual right to freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of journalism, of the press is the same as I have a right to lead my life, however I like, including on intellectual issues, including on speaking or publishing or praying or what have you, as long as I leave others free to do the same. So it all is simply an expression of, or a manifestation of my right to my life, to lead it as I like. Right. As opposed to the social good. There were one or two things I wanted to come back to.

[00:58:17]

If I. If we have a moment, let's do it.

[00:58:19]

Okay. The FCC just. I mean, just fasten on the very concept, right? The Federal Communications Commission. Oh. I mean, just think about. I mean, we're so used to it. We're all. Not that. All right, we weren't here, but fancy that. In the United States of America, we're going to have a federal communications commission. Isn't that an interesting idea? Isn't that.

[00:58:44]

I thought that.

[00:58:45]

I thought the middle sea stood for censorship. It was the federal censorship commission, but I must have gotten that wrong.

[00:58:50]

Well taken, Nico.

[00:58:51]

Well taken.

[00:58:52]

Yeah. But I think also something else Ankar was talking about. I don't think he actually used the phrase that Mill uses, which is social tyranny. And I think in the spirit of what Ankar is saying. No, mill that, again, maybe metaphorically, but let's be careful here. When it's simply voluntary, private social pressure, influential as that may be, right, when we boycott that company or ostracize that person, that can be incredibly powerful and have real effects. But as long as it's not coercive, as long as it's not the government or somebody else coercing, keeping you from, you know, literally keeping you from dealing with others, that's not tyranny. So this, again, is that difference between, you know, what's censorship and what's not censorship and action and speech, and we'll leave you free to speak, but that doesn't mean you're, you're free of negative consequences or of unwelcome repercussions of the views that you espouse.

[00:59:52]

So you guys have one other contributor to the first Amendment, essays on the imperative of intellectual freedom, Gregory Salmieri. And unfortunately, he's not here with us. But I was reading through the book, and there is one criticism of fire that I want to read for our listeners and get your guys take on. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't, but we can discuss it. Greg writes, it's a mistake to assume that it's always good to engage in an activity with someone, even a person whom you judge to be good. On balance, it's possible that by participating, you may be supporting something bad about them in that particular activity. For example, while I believe that many people involved in the foundation for individual rights and expression are good people. Thanks, Greg. There are certain conferences, discussions, or workshops that I wouldn't participate in. If I did decide to participate, I would consider the premise being supported and whether it aligns with my values. For instance, if the discussion is about Mill's principle of freedom, I would need to consider whether signing on to such a conference is helping to further that premise or if there's a chance to challenge it.

[01:00:53]

Wondering what you guys think about this, this idea of kind of engaging with folks who might disagree with you going to their conferences, what does that say about you as a participant?

[01:01:04]

Well, I think it is complicated. That is because I don't think there's an across the board answer here. You always or you never engage with people with whom you disagree on? I mean, I think you do have to look at each case of what would this be? What, in the full context, would my participation be supporting or sort of telegraphing tele broadcasting that I support or not. But I think that's going to vary in different cases. And it is a hard, you know, a hard call sometimes. And certainly the Ayn Rand Institute, right, where Ankar works, where I serve on the board, it faces these kind of questions sometimes, and it's, it's not a no brainer. I mean, it can be tough and all, but I think we have to be careful that in the advocacy of free expression, of ideas, free speech, we don't sometimes hide behind the freedom of the speech to refrain from being properly critical of the content of the speech, even when we're broadly allies and important allies on certain things to recognize. Okay, but sorry, I can't get into this. Mill. You know, I don't think Mill is really the solution.

[01:02:14]

I think ultimately, he's only going to hurt the cause. So, you know, you've got to be that voice if you'll let me talk about my mill criticisms. Right. I. But if I may, I mean, thank you, Nico, for bringing up the criticism of fire. I mean, very much in the spirit that rand would approve. And I hate to say it, Mill would probably approve, too. But, you know.

[01:02:34]

Well, I'm glad you brought up the content of the speech and commenting on that, because that's one thing that distinguishes fire from groups like the ACLU. We are a one issue group. We defend freedom of expression, so we don't comment on the content of the speech we defend. We don't take a position on the content of the speech we defend. Nor could we. We're a nonpartisan organization with people from across the political, ideological spectrum who come together in support of this one broader big concept of freedom of speech, which is embodied in the First Amendment. So when we're going to different conferences and we're participating in different panels, for two reasons, we wouldn't not participate in the panel because of what the speakers might think, because that would be sort of commenting on the speech. But also, we're a big tent organization, and we want to go even into hostile environments where people who disagree with us are to make our arguments in the hopes that we can convince them and bring them around to our position. Now, of course, the big question is, would fire go and participate in a Holocaust denial conference if they were having a panel on free speech?

[01:03:44]

Right. Like, that's the hard question. I don't know. We haven't had those discussions or those invitations. But there is this generation of kind of old school civil libertarians who said, to hell with it. I'll go into any room and make my arguments. What am I afraid of? And this moral pollution, this idea of moral pollution by even being in the same room as people who believe bigoted, offensive, hateful things. Like, hell with folks. I'm here to make arguments and convince people all the way.

[01:04:07]

But I think it's not so much about the moral pollution as the. What would I be implying? I support or agree with. And if you think this is something like, if it's a free speech thing and you're talking about, you know, it's a free speech event panel or something, and yes, you're talking about even the most atrocious speech of the Holocaust deniers, or whom have you. But the issue is the freedom of speech, not, you know, the propriety or the validity of any of the views espoused by any of the groups that want to exercise their free speech, then there would be no such implication. Right? So I think insofar as people are having events that are about free speech, what I would think that even a fire would care about, even with your neutrality when it comes to the content of the beliefs espoused, would be the grounds of advocacy of force free speech, because those could really make a difference to your very mission as effective advocates for free speech. So all that's saying is that I would think that that would be something that should be on the radar screen of considerations.

[01:05:09]

Like, there are these people. There are these people with these really bad arguments for free speech, but we just want to do business with them because they're for free speech if the arguments aren't good. Again, I'm just talking very crudely here and quickly. But it's like, I don't know, are.

[01:05:23]

You going into these environments and catering your message, or, like, tailoring your message to support whatever cause they believe in? Are you going in and being true to yourself and making your case?

[01:05:32]

Yes, that's a crucial aspect of all this, for sure. And I definitely. I mean, there's no point in just preaching to the converted. You want to have the who, you know, where are the disagreements where we can have constructive disagreements, and you think really do some. Some good, for sure.

[01:05:46]

So I don't think it's just an issue of disagreement. And art is one voicing one's disagreement. One of the ways to think about it and to take it as it will be put colloquially is that actually actions speak louder than words. And it's often easy to say, I disagree with x, I disapprove of Y. But do your actions actually show that you disagree with x and you disapprove of y? And part of why freedom of association is so important is that you should associate with people that you think are good, there's some value to gain here and so on. And then you have to have the freedom to say, I don't want to associate with people. And if you actually have that freedom, then your associating with people conveys something, just the very action of associating. And part of what one has to really think about is, what does my action convey in associating with this? I'll give it, take a different kind of example than freedom of speech. One can say one's against Russia, Putin, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but if you think it's legitimate for them to be at the UN and you're going to go attend the UN and have conversations with them and treat them as a permanent member of the Security Council, are you really opposed to Russia?

[01:07:06]

Do you really think of it as a criminal regime if you think it's just another legitimate member of the United nations? And one has to really think about that, and the easiest thing to say is, oh, I'm against Putin, and I'm against its invasion of Ukraine. Yeah, but does your actions actually back that up? And that's a real issue in life that one should think carefully about.

[01:07:25]

Yeah, well, one could argue that in the realpolitik sense that it's important to have them in the fold because you can influence them against doing, you know, illiberal things. But then at the same time, they're members of the Security Council and can sometimes chair that and can sometimes vote down things that would be in favor of this sort of limited government or republican order. You said, what does the association convey? And I think this is where Greg and fire might have some disagreement. It's like there's the reality of the association and there's the perception of the association. Like when lawmakers work across the aisle to do things that I'm supportive of, I like that happening. Their work on this discrete issue does not suggest support for all of Bernie Sanders policies, for example. And then I also just exist in the space as a leader of fire, who for twelve or 13 years has been accused of being liberal organization, of being a conservative organization, because we defend speech on this side of the aisle or that side of the aisle, or we take money from this group or that group. And it's like, look at our record.

[01:08:31]

We're nonpartisan. We defend speech from every walk of life. And you have to be wary of taking people's perceptions of your associations at face value. And you need to do what you internally think is right. And know to be right and to hell with the critics.

[01:08:50]

Yeah, no, very much agree. And you can't just be hostage to anyone's perception, shall we say? Yes.

[01:08:57]

Well, guys, this was fun.

[01:08:58]

Definitely.

[01:08:59]

This is terrific. This is a lot of fun.

[01:09:01]

The book is the first essays on the imperative of intellectual freedom, edited by Tara Smith, with feature essays from both you, Ankar Gatte, and Gregory Salmieri. There's also this really interesting conversation that there's a transcript of at the end that dives into objectivism and rand and some of the questions surrounding big tech in 230. So I'll urge people to pick up the book and check out what we weren't able to get to today. Professor Smith, Don Carmen, thanks for coming on the show.

[01:09:31]

Thanks for having us.

[01:09:32]

Thanks a lot.

[01:09:33]

I am Nico Parino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my fire colleagues, including Aaron Reese and Chris Maltby. It's also co produced by my colleague Sam Lee, who's here in the studio with us to learn more about, so to speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or our substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. I will say if you want to get an email alert anytime a new podcast comes out, you can subscribe on Substack and. And there's also an option to subscribe on our website. On our website. Excuse me. You can follow us on x by searching for the handle free speech talk. You can also find us on Facebook. We take email if you have any responses to this conversation, we take emails@sotospeakhfire.org. dot if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify reviews. Help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.