I think the term free speech is. People always attack me like, oh, you say you're for a free speech, but you would, blah, blah, blah. I never say I'm for a free speech. I hate that term. I think it is used interchangeably for several different concepts, some of which I am 100% for, some of which I am completely against. If you and I were going to have a conversation about apple, and you're talking about something that grows on trees and I'm talking about laptops, we're using the same word, but we're going to be talking past each other. Freedom of speech, fundamental rights, freedom of conscience. Acronym is 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. Hello, and 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. I am, as always, your host, Nico Perino. Today's episode looks at free speech from the perspective of one anarchist. I say one anarchist because our guest today, Michael Malice, who describes himself as an anarchist without adjectives, freely admits that many anarchists would disagree with some or much of what he has to say about free speech. Michael is the author of several books, including Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong il, the New Right, a journey to the Fringe of american politics, the anarchist Handbook, and most recently, the White Pill, a tale of good and evil. Michael also hosts the podcast. You're welcome. And was the subject of the 2006 graphic novel Ego and Hubris. Now, before we begin today, I wanted to share a few short reflections on this episode. This was one of those conversations that after it was done, I just couldn't stop thinking about.

This is probably the first time I've had a self described anarchist on the show. Much of our dialog on the show, and society at large, is about how free speech works in relationship to the state, what are or should be the bounds of the First Amendment, for example. But in an anarchist society, the state doesn't exist, and free speech doesn't really exist. Free association is the core right, and people are free to police their private associations, including their members of speech, as they wish. It's elegant in its simplicity, but begs the question whether there are any normative judgments people should make of these associations. Michael and I get into these questions a little bit, but since I rarely confront anarchist arguments against free speech, I was admittedly more unprepared to confront his arguments than I would have liked. This episode is a good representation of John Stuart Mill's truism that both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field. I also generally wasn't on top of my game, as evidenced by the fact that when I was recording the placeholder introduction for this episode, I mindlessly read the title of Michael's first book as the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong II rather than Kim Jong il, to which Michael appropriately ribbed me.

First time I came across Michael's work, in fact, was when he wrote Dear reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong II, which Kim Jong il? Kim Jong il?

Are you serious?

This was extra embarrassing given that I was first introduced to Michael's work at a 2014 event at Cato about the very book that I mispronounced. Now Michael defines anarchism as the phrase you do not speak for me with everything else simply being application. Perhaps my biggest regret from this conversation was that I didn't do more to press Michael on the application of his principles to specific individual cases. For example, I wish I had more concrete case studies at hand to dig deeper into the application of his views to things like cancel culture, the rights of people to join extremist groups such as the Klan, or to his contrarian take that nobody had their free speech rights violated during the McCarthy era. I probably should have had more concrete examples at the ready, because I'm actually reading Robert Carroll's series on Lyndon Baines Johnson right now and just finished the chapters about Leland Olds, who was a man who was driven out of government by Johnson after two decades of widely credited successful service because Olds's earlier pre government work involved pro labor writings, which were used by politicians, including Lyndon Johnson, to cast him as a communist.

Carroll alleges that the real reason Johnson went after Olds was because Johnson's political backers saw Olds as an impediment to their charging higher prices for energy. Now, it's of course important to acknowledge that political importantties serve at the whims of the president and Congress, and no free speech rights were violated in Olds's case. But I would have loved to have dug deeper into whether there's any principle at stake when the government publicly smears people without adequate due process and makes them functionally unemployable thereafter, as was the case with Olds. I actually wish I had included fire president CEO Greg Lukianoff in this conversation. Like Michael, he views the red scare periods with a nuance that is often not found in most popular discussions of those times. Greg readily acknowledges that there were actual soviet spies in government, for example. But I don't think he would dismiss the free speech concerns altogether. Also, unlike Michael, Greg believes cancel culture is real, that it poses a threat to free speech. He sees it as representing a unique period in american history, and he's obviously very critical of it. Greg's new book, the Canceling of the American mind, which we've discussed on this show before, is devoted to making all of those very arguments.

In short, it would have been fun to hear Greg and Michael unpack these two subjects. They also both have family histories dealing with soviet oppression. Perhaps we can get them both on the show at a future date if Michael's willing to come back. Now, despite these misgivings about my contributions, my personal contributions to this conversation, I did really enjoy talking to Michael. He has a commanding knowledge of history. He is smart, he is funny, and importantly, he lends a perspective to these issues that aren't often shared in free speech conversations. And for that, his voice on these issues is even more important and makes all of us smarter. Now I'll get myself out of the way and get onto the conversation. Here is Michael Malice. You describe yourself as an anarchist without adjectives. I think that was a phrase you used on the Rubin report.

Correct.

What does it mean to be an anarchist without, you know, the black flag.

Of anarchism comes in many colors, and you've got the original anarchists who are communists. You have contemporary anarcho capitalists who the ancoms don't regard as anarchists at all. And I don't swear fealty to any one of these schools. I think they all bring something very useful to the table. And I'm not going to say one group are the real anarchists and the other group are not. And they both also have their flaws as well.

What would you say? Kind of is the cliff notes version of the definition of anarchism as you see it.

The definition of anarchism as I see it is simply the phrase you do not speak for me, and everything else is simply application.

Who are, like, the most prominent anarchists today? Would you say? Like, if you're talking to just someone who has a kind of passing interest in politics, who might they think of.

As is Noam Chomsky's number one, Russell Brand is number two, and I'm number like. That's the list. It's not a very big or impressive list.

So the purpose of today's conversation is to talk about free speech, kind of in a world where you don't have a government, right, in an anarchist system. It's not something that we've ever considered on this podcast before. How do you view free speech in an anarchist system? Does it exist if you don't have a state to reference?

Yeah, I'm going to take a little bit of a detour because I'm a big fan of what fire does, and I'm going to show how free speech is corralled. So Noam Chomsky, who I just mentioned a second ago, has this superb quote, and I want to get it exactly right. Here it is. And he says, the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. I had comedian podcaster Jimmy Dore on my show, and he talks about, if you're watching a panel on, like, CNN, and I can curse, right, the range of opinion will go from should we bomb the shit out of Syria? To should we bomb the living shit out of Syria? The view, which is the Karen mothership, does this superbly well. You've got four old Stalinists, and then you have a Republican who thinks Trump is the devil. And that is your range of political opinion on the View. As my budy Kurt Mexico said, there's a reason it's called the view and not the views. Right? So what happens is when you do a show where there's a panel, right away, you've got a preconceived topic, and that topic itself is not up for discussion.

So if you go onto a panel and you don't agree with the premise of the topic, a, it's going to be a train wreck because you're negotiating something that isn't up for debate, not broadly speaking, but in the context of that segment. But then also, you're just not going to be asked back. So I bring that up here because I don't agree with this premise at all. And we're going to have, in a friendly way, like a breakdown of why, how that is used to manipulate discourse in even a free market or a largely free market. I think the term free speech is, people always attack me like, oh, you say you're for free speech, but you would, blah, blah, blah. I never say I'm for a free speech. I hate that term. I think it is used interchangeably for several different concepts, some of which I am 100% for, some of which I am completely against. If you and I were going to have a conversation about Apple and you're talking about something that grows on trees and I'm talking about laptops. We're using the same word, but we're going to be talking past each other.

Right?

So free speech is used to mean the illegality and immorality of governments to restrict discourse and communication between the citizens. Right. And that is something that is indisputably true from my perspective. It's also used to mean that it's a good thing, broadly speaking, for as many people to have their voices heard and to run their mouths as possible, something which is I'm completely against and which makes absolutely no sense. And it's also used to mean that you, as someone who's vaguely or even strongly for free speech, have a duty or should have a preference to hear other people out, which is also something that's completely crazy. So you'll hear this in social media when you block someone or mute them. Oh, I thought you're for free speech. For free speech. One is, I do the other. So people take these terms, they completely remove them from context, and they throw them around like some kind of flag or shield, to be more accurate, to kind of defend themselves. So I don't like that term. I don't believe in that term. I think it's an incoherent term, and I am much more interested in. And I think there's a lot of people who.

It would be beneficial if they were completely marginalized and silenced. And that is how free markets work, which is when someone is a completely reprehensible person. And I'll leave it to people watching this to define it in their own personal way. You're under no obligation to hear them out or to provide them a microphone or know countenance their ideas. It doesn't have to be something political. I'm not interested in hearing Randy Weingarten's view on why school choice is a bad idea. I don't believe head of the teachers union. I don't believe a word coming out of her mouth. I think she is an evil person who is destroying the lives of many children. And I'm not interested in what she has to say. Now, she legally has the right to do whatever she wants, but in terms of this free speech milieu that let's all put our ideas in the marketplace and come to some kind of consensus of truth in this kind of enlightenment model, I think that's something I'm not at all interested in doing.

What do you think about kind of a culture of free expression? Sort of this idea? And this is kind of what John Stewart Mill talks about in his 1859 treatise on liberty. He wasn't really speaking about government censorship, but he was more speaking about a conformist culture in Victorian England that didn't have a broader kind of Overton window of acceptable opinion, that people were just too sensitive. And that's, I think what you get a little bit of today from folks who are kind of like the people you were talking about before. You're violating my. I think what they're actually saying, although albeit inarticulately, and maybe I'm saying it inarticulately right now as well, is that there are things that a lot of people believe, but they just don't feel like they can speak up about it.

Sure.

Whether it's Covid, whether it's trans rights, you name it. But they have this sense, and we always look at the past through rose colored glasses, that in the past, society was more open to dissenters, was more open to playing devil's advocacy. Again, we look at the past through rose colored glasses.

But it's a lie. That's a complete lie. It was a felony to teach women how to use birth control to prevent pregnancy from happening. And they went undercover to visit doctors as cops. And if a doctor. I'm not talking about abortion. I'm talking about condoms and prophylactics. It was a felony to explain this to people. It was a felony to mail them information about using this to people in the Adams administration. The second president. It was a felony to criticize the government. The Sedition act, the very first thing that was censored under our beloved constitution was political speech to criticize the government. This claim that the most important thing that the First Amendment protects is political speech might be true culturally. It is completely false historically, because that is the first thing that they targeted. And understandably so. There were books, Ulysses as an example, where it was illegal to mail them. And this isn't like Antebellum's confederacy times. This is the 20th century. And also another thing conservatives don't like, I'm not saying you're a conservative, is that the free speech League and these early organizations that were organized to promote this kind of discourse were commies.

And not like lefties, like, I mean, today, like literal communists. Teddy Roosevelt wanted people deported and succeed in doing so for having views that he regarded as anathema. That fire in a movie theater, crowded theater, quote, was about people saying that the draft was unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that it's okay to censor that. So this boomer Kong claim that we used to have this perspective on free discourse is a complete lie and is as ahistoric as the 1619 Project America. And pretty much every culture has always and has to have some kind of censorious aspect to it. Now, there are certain pockets where free discourse is much more accepted than in others, and that's, broadly speaking, a great thing. But this claim that we're ever going to be at a place where all the ideas are on the table is not only crazy, but, I think, undesirable because I don't want to have it destigmatized for people to be discussing sexuality with children. So there are certain things that everyone listening to this will have their own line where, like, you know what? It's good that some things aren't even talked about at all, because once you start talking about them, some people start doing them.

Violence is another one. Once that becomes normalized in speech, it's not that long until people are pulling out their guns. Now, in some cases, that's a good thing, but it's still not a fun thing.

I think you're right. And if you look at a far enough back time horizon, you are going to find extraordinary examples of censorship. In some case, cases, you don't even have to look that far back. Right. But a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves in America about the McCarthy era, around World War I and the shank case, which is what you referenced, which is where the fire in.

A crowded theater, who had their free speech harmed by the McCarthy era.

Well, you can look at Oppenheimer. They touch on that. They talk about how Oppenheimer lost his clearances because of his alleged communist affiliations.

Yeah, but his speech was in no way infringed. He could say, whatever the hell, if I go up here and say I'm a Klansman and you don't want to have me on your podcast, in what way is my first amendment free speech restricted?

No, I'm not saying it is, but what you found during the McCarthy era were government hearings where they essentially browbed a bunch of people for being communist. And some of them were members of.

A secret organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government in service of a foreign dictator who had engaged, not that recently, not that long before that, in genocide of millions of his own citizens. So to portray this as somehow like, oh, I voted for the Green party and I got kicked out of my job, is completely disingenuous. I'm not saying you're doing that, but that's how it's.

No, sure, sure. And I do agree that there is not enough nuance that's brought to the McCarthy era. But even if you take that as a justifiable reason to censor someone. Right.

How are they being censored?

Well, we can look at the college professors who lost their jobs. Right. And if we're talking about at least state power, you're talking about, in many cases, state universities.

But how are they censored? You don't have a right to say whatever you want. If I'm a chef at a restaurant, I can't go out into where the people are sitting and start delivering talks about health care. Like you can't say whatever you want at someone else's job. That doesn't make any sense.

Sure. And I don't disagree with that. In that last example, I'm talking about professors at public colleges and universities with tenure, in many cases losing their tenureship with a lack of due process. We're talking about state universities. Right. And again, you're anarchist. Right. So you might not believe that within the context of a college or university environment that the state should be able to or shouldn't be able to punish a professor for their viewpoints. Right. Or for their political beliefs or allegiances. But the case law, as it's developed over the years, has found that to the extent you are a tenured faculty member at a college or university campus, that they can't fire you alone for your political beliefs.

But they were being fired for being members of a terrorist group. They were not being fired for their political beliefs.

By and large, you can believe anything. Right. The question is, were you conspiring to overthrow the government?

Right? No. Were you a member of a secret organization, a card carrying member? It's not. Do you like marks? It was. Were you taking orders from Stalin? That's not the same.

No, it's definitely not the. You know, you'd have to look at any individual example to see whether they were actually conspiring. And this is actually. I'm glad you bring it up, Michael, because this is part of the discussion around free speech on college campuses right now surrounding students for justice in Palestine. Right. You have a number of chapters of students for justice in Palestine on college campuses right now who are chanting, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free or into FADA. Right. And some of the arguments that in this case the state of Florida is making is that these groups are conspiring with Hamas or they are providing material support for terrorism because they are supporting the actions that Hamas took in Israel on October 7. And the argument that fire has made is that you need to show a lot more than that they member of an organization that is supportive of some actions that a terrorist organization make. Right. Is there communication between students for justice in Palestine about how they're going to support this organization? Are they providing financial support? So there needs to be a little bit more than just, well, they support the actions of this group.

Right. And that's where due process comes in. Right. That's where you kind of find out the facts of any individual circumstance, but just kind of creating a blanket exception to the first Amendment in this case, for anyone who supports Hamas or is a member of students for justice in Palestine, I think is painting with a broad brush and creating a sort of guilt by association that we've largely stood against in the. I mean, do you disagree?

I don't think that's what guilt by association means. Like, if I'm a member of a group, let's take it out of the Hamas situation. If the Klan is a terrorist group, right. The purpose of the KKK was to terrorize innocent people in order to extra legally impose an order and to keep them in a state of submission and fear. Right. So if I'm a member of a group that's called Students for the clan, if I'm not coordinating with the clan and I'm not making any exchange with David Duke or something like that, and the administration says, this isn't something secret. You're calling yourselves students for the clan. This kind of rhetoric is not acceptable on my campus. I don't think there's a question here of, I don't know what due process would look like because that's not a crime. You certainly legally have every right to support and promote the Klan. Point being, it is perfectly appropriate in that case, and I want to take it away from Hamas because that's much more ambiguous than the Klan for most people. I think it's perfectly acceptable in that case for administrators to be. We're not. This is a line we're not willing to cross.

And how do you see the Hamas situation as more ambiguous?

Because I don't know what exactly these students in Florida are saying.

Gotcha.

If they're simply for palestinian, we're for Palestine, we don't believe in Israel, blah, blah, blah, that's perfectly acceptable. If they're saying that we want to help Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, even if you believe the terrorism is justified, that is a very different situation.

So if you look at the kind of toolkit, I guess, is what has been the topic of that conversation, it more or less says that they're in kind of common cause with Hamas. But the common cause is kind of rhetorical support. It is pr support. It is, you know, marches, it is rallies, it is candlelight vigils. Do you see that as the sort of material support that is essentially becoming a part of a terrorist organization?

I would have to think about it and have to look at the specific case, but I am much more in favor of freedom of association than I am in terms of freedom of speech. I think everyone has morally the right to say whatever the hell they want, and everyone else morally has the right to engage with them or not as they see fit. It is government that abrogates this freedom of association, which is far more important, because if I don't have to ever deal with you, you can say whatever the hell you want. You can go f, off to your place, talk your talk, have your show, and we can live next to each other peaceably. But it's governments that force people to interact who otherwise would never have to normatively.

What do you think about freedom of speech and kind of the associated values, right? Let's say devil's advocacy, talking across lines of difference thought, experimentation, are these things that you think should be advocated for within most social contexts? Do you think they produce goods within various associations? I understand that in anarchist society, where everything is based around free association, right. That people can do whatever the hell they want and they can police their association however the hell they want. But then there's a question within that association. What is the normative good like, what is the small t toleration that should be encouraged? Or does it depend on the association?

Of course. Exactly. So we could take this out of the realm of politics. If you and I have a hamster breeding community, and we're breeding rare breeds of hamsters and long hair and albino, and someone's coming in with their politics, even the politics are perfectly banal and generic and the kind of stuff you could see on a t shirt and mall. It's perfectly appropriate for us to be like, don't come back to these meetings because that's not what we're. And, or you could know if it's Karen who's running the hamster group, and Karen thinks it's unambiguous, that literally everything has to be about how evil Trump is, then Karen will say, all right, like, well, what are you, a Trump supporter? You don't want to talk about Trump while we're trying to talk about hamsters. So there's no, I think should, I think know, anarchism as applied, in my view, is the understanding that is incumbent on all of us to set and define our own boundaries. And if we don't, then other people will cross those boundaries and it's going to have negative consequences on the self. And this is something I think is universal and applies to everyone regardless of their political persuasions.

And I think one of the big problems in general is people feel powerless, or are powerless to enforce their own personal boundaries. And it creates friction where some was not necessary.

Do you believe? I mean, I'm assuming not. But something significant is lost when you don't have public places where there isn't that sort of boundary policing, where people can say whatever the hell they want, where you can have a speaker's corner in London, for example, or not really. Right? That's the one thing that I think you lose in anarchist society in the free speech sense, which is just like, there is always some place you can go to speak freely, I guess. Besides, in anarchist society, it could be your house, or it could be your.

Property, or it could be social media. These are not government agencies. I mean, Elon, again, for quite some time, until Elon brought over Twitter, there was a complete corporate consensus as to Covid discussions, right? And everyone's just like, everyone's all black pilled. We're screwed, we're screwed, we're screwed. The point I always make is you don't need majority. That's the democratic model. You only need an alternative. And as long as you have one alternative, then this whole monopoly edifice collapses. And the misunderstanding, in my view, that most people have is the belief that markets tend toward monopoly, that eventually it's just going to be one place where everyone has to talk. But if you look at any field, if you and I were talking ten years ago, and I said that on every supermarket, there wouldn't be just be Diet Coke, but coke zero. There'd be two types of sugarless soda. I'd look like a crazy person. It's like a punchline from a bad comic. Yet that's the case. And no one even bats an we have in every aspect that's not under state control. We have more choices, more outlets. Before I was born, there were three networks.

Forget the news to get the news. NBC, ABC, and CBS. Three shades of progressivism. And maybe Bill Buckley makes an appearance once in a while to be the right of center guy. Then you had CNN, then you had Fox News. So then there were like five headline news, whatever. MSNBC, six. Now you have YouTube. It's infinite. And they can never get that genie out of the bottle. Before you and I were born, if you and I wanted to censor an author, all we got to do is kill him, round up all the copies of his book, burn them, and it's done. Now, I can take any book, press one button, duplicate it infinitely, send it anywhere on earth at the speed of light, and create a magic spell so that only people who know the counter spell can even read it. It sounds like science fiction, but that's the status quo. Censorship was not stopped as a result of people believing free speech or governments. It stopped as a result of technology, and that cannot be undone.

Well, the government certainly tries, right? Unsuccessfully. I mean, when we saw the Twitter files come out, we saw all the examples of the government trying to jawbone Twitter.

Alex Jones just had to pay, I think, or he's on the hook for, like, the gdp of france. I know, because he said nobody died at Sandy Hook. What alex got that idea from was there is a book with that title that he read. That book is impossible to find because the author was sued correctly. The copies were all destroyed. You can't find it, except if you go to archive.org, it's there for anyone to download for free. So even something as nefarious as that, which is completely inaccurate and kind of malevolent in terms of the parents, still cannot be stopped from people being able to access it somewhat freely and for free.

Yeah. And they tried, believe it, in 20th century, to censor that book. Hitman, do you remember this story? This is a book that was written under a pseudonym. The person who wrote it kind of started it as, like, I believe, a murder mystery kind of novel approach, but it ended up becoming a how to manual to kill someone. And turns out someone did. Someone used the book, and they were able to connect it to a killing that happened. I actually think it was a couple of killings.

Good lord.

And the people who were killed, their families sued the publisher of this book, and the publisher ended up settling. And the publisher wanted to fight the case, but the insurance company. This isn't something people know. Often when lawsuits happen, you, as the person being sued, don't have a choice as to how you can fight. If you're going to use your insurance to help pay for the lawsuit, the insurance companies are just going to force you to settle. In many cases, even in this case, if you feel like you have a strong first amendment claim that your book didn't aid in an abet in this killing, the insurance company in this case made the publisher settle, and they went through this kind of whole process to try and destroy any copy of the book that existed. But I think reason magazine, as I saw online, says there are still something like 20,000 copies out there, and you can find it on the Internet if you want. It turns out that the book was actually written by, I think, a divorced mother of two. Like, not the person you would sort of expect to write a book about how to conduct a hit.

Yeah, I got into it on Twitter with somebody, and then not long after that, they shot up, like, a tattoo parlor, a lot of other places, and they had written a book where they had used the names as characters of people that they actually later did murder. And I'm like, talk about literally dodging a bullet. So that's kind of roman classic, I think was his name. It's kind of creepy when stuff like that happens. Of course.

Well, you find, I mean, this is a story throughout time, right. When the Columbine shooting happened in the. They tried to pin that on Marilyn Manson, because the shooters listened to Marilyn Manson. Right, right. But in this case, I think that in the hitman book case, it was a lot closer. Right. They kind of followed the script.

You go to their house and shoot them. I'm sorry, am I missing something?

It talks about how to identify your mark and to follow them around to learn their patterns. Right. And I guess they had access to this book and that's what they were reading ahead of time. I'd have to look more closely.

I don't think it's that hard. Okay. But maybe. What do I know? I've never killed any. I've never gotten a fight or killed.

Well, I'm sure that's the argument that the publisher of the book would make, right. Were they allowed to continue making those arguments and the insured and forced them to settle. But you also see this argument kind of, speaking of anarchy, and the anarchist cookbook, which makes its rounds on the Internet and I think is banned in some countries.

Not in the US, of course.

Yeah, not in the US, of course. Although some have tried.

Yes.

Right. Some have mean, what is the core right under an anarchist system, right. And what serves as the basis for that? Right. When we look at the Declaration of Independence, right. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that the natural rights theory. Right, sure.

I think that's the base of anarchism. I think that's fair to say. Just this idea that. No, I mean, there's different rationalizations or justifications for anarchism but the idea that no one is in a position to infringe on your freedom.

And so I would imagine then that you don't believe in social contract theory. That would.

No one does. So social contract theory is completely incoherent and insane because it is a contract of which the terms are never made clear, which you implicitly consent to and you cannot ever leave. And it's claimed to be the basis for how governments form, even though no one even pretends that any government has been formed as a result of it. It's a complete fairy tale that makes no sense whatsoever. And it's rape culture, this idea that.

You can bind those who are not even born to a sort of system.

This idea that you could take someone's consent when they've never said anything or implied it, and when they're screaming at you in the face, I do not consent. And you tell them, well, yeah, you really did because you're in this geographic location. It's complete rape culture. You should have come back to my house. You consented, right?

Yeah. And I agree with you on this. I don't disagree. The social contract theory, I think it's something that a lot of us have to pretend to believe in because it's the basis.

No, it's the rationalization. It's not the basis. It's the rationalization.

Rationalization, sure. Yeah. It's a rationalization.

I mean, the whole fairy tale. No one believes it. They just like where it leads you to.

Yeah. Which is necessarily going to have to be a government. Right. Can you have a government realistically and practically without a belief or a rationalization or a pretend belief in a social contract theory? Right.

Otherwise, some people have. There's other excuses for it, but it's really kind of this last Gasp where you're trying to pretend that you're not imposing your will through force on other people and doing a might makes. Right.

Yeah. Well, so I want to return a little bit to, you were talking a little bit about Elon Musk and what he did with Twitter, I presume, as like, a normative matter. You think this is a positive thing for society.

Positive community notes is the greatest thing that's happened. I'm dead serious. It's the greatest thing that's happened probably in the last ten years, culturally.

Yeah. It also can be really funny. Yes.

Correct.

In the way that it corrects.

Yes.

So to speak.

Wait, is this show named after Hoppa?

No.

Okay. Because that's his catchphrase.

Oh, really? Yeah, we just thought it was kind of a catchy way. We discuss speech issues, so to speak.

Because that's his little catchphrase.

Oh, really?

Yes, it's a meme. Okay.

Yeah, no, we just thought it was kind of a. Kind of catchy way to subtly reference the topic.

Got it.

And then we put after the colon, the free speech podcast, because that helps with SEO.

Right. Yeah. Smart.

And again, I'm trying to just kind of get a better sense of what you think about free speech in the last ten years. And I apologize if I'm not articulating it very clearly, because I don't talk to anarchists a lot. Right. So a lot of times we're talking about free speech in relationship to the government. Right. But a lot of the bases for free speech, a lot of the philosophical treatment, whether you're going back to John Milton's area or you're going to John Stuart Mills on Liberty, or you're talking about Jonathan Roush as kindly inquisitors. I mean, these aren't arguments for how the government should treat speech. There are arguments for how society should behave.

Look, we've run the experiment. We have enough data. People are not interested. Human beings are not interested in truth. They're interested in narratives, they're interested in stories and the number of things. I would recommend people read Jonathan Height and do some evolutionary psychology. This enlightenment idea that if you have 100 people and you put the facts that matter in front of them like a buffet, that after a little bit of going back and forth, oh, maybe I like navy blue, maybe I like purple, maybe they're all going to come to some kind of consensus that is roughly analogous to the truth is completely false. And I'll give you a very obvious example of this, that for anyone in the political spectrum can see for a long time during COVID we were told to stay 6ft apart from each other, okay? Then when the COVID wave came back, whatever the second wave was, Delta, I don't remember what it was. They didn't bring back social distancing. So if it worked before, why aren't we doing it again? And if it didn't work before, why did we do it in the first place? So this shows that people aren't interested in truth.

They're interested in being told what to do. And it is human beings, especially not particularly intelligent people, and very intelligent, educated people, are interested in consensus and in tribalism, as opposed to being the person who says that. Remember in the fairy tale, the emperor has new clothes? It was a kid who pointed it out because all the adults were too invested and fearful of the power to say what they were seeing. So there is a huge cost in every culture, despite this claim of America as this bastion of free speech, of being a truth teller, because many people who are in power don't like you pointing out that they're bad and they were going to do things to you and your family if you do something about it.

No, I agree with that. And I agree with it, especially in the short term, for lack of a better phrase, like you're in this sort of anarchist period. And often those who are trying to create a poll of orthodoxy or enforce sort of conformist thought win, will win in the short term, particularly when people are scared. Right. But I think in the long run, and I'd be interested to hear your perspective, truth does tend to win. Yes.

But that's not a democratic thing.

In what Sense? But it is a sort of marketplace of ideas thing. It can only win if the ideas are allowed to be put forth. Right.

If I am running, let's suppose you're the government. You have a bridge, a tall bridge, and I'm a private organization. I have a toll bridge as well. And your bridge is going to be not only more expensive, it's going to have potholes, and it's going to be open less. As the consumer, I don't need to know the intricacies of free market versus the state or economics, things like that. All I see is cheaper, more efficient, more expensive and more of a pain. So people will come to the right conclusion. They're not going to understand or need to understand what's going on in the background. It's usually above their pay grade, and in any case, it's usually not of interest to them.

Yeah. The book you referenced, I think, are referencing from Jonathan Height is the righteous mind.

Correct.

And his kind of elephant rider theory of how people get to their political beliefs. But I do think the marketplace of ideas theory of freedom of expression, I think, has always been oversold. Yes, but I do think, and one of the things that our president Greg Lukianov often talks about as being a more compelling argument for free speech is what he calls the lab and the looking glass theory, but is also elsewhere referred to as the informational theory, which is, it's just always important to know the world as it is now.

The world as to whom?

To us.

Who's us?

Me. Right.

Okay.

For anyone. Right. Your outputs are only as good as the data that is input.

Do you have lawyers at fire?

Yeah.

Yes. So when it comes to the law, what I think is completely irrelevant. I'm going to shut my mouth and do what my lawyer tells me, and I might ask some questions, but in any case, I don't have to be a legal scholar or a lawyer. I will defer to them. And it's appropriate in many cases for me as the layman, not to know what the hell is going on and to be deferential. Now, this is something that is weaponized in terms of trust the experts, trust the science, but it's not at all the case that it's useful for everyone to have an understanding of everything.

Perhaps not and in every case, but I think the best way to understand the world is to learn as much about the world as possible and not just learn what people believe, or that might end up being true, but what people believe that is false. Like, you can't fix a problem unless you know that problem exists. Right? So the analogy we've used before is like, you can censor, but then you don't know what those people believed. So you either don't know the truth that they might have spoken or you don't know the falsehood that they might have spoken. That also is a signal that also tells you something that's important to know, perhaps that there's a problem to fix or a mind that needs to be changed. So censorship, in that sense, is like breaking the thermometer, right? You don't know what the temperature is anymore, but it's still 45 degrees out.

That's all true. But the point is, not only do most people not want to understand the world, they don't even want to understand themselves. The number of people who are even interested in empathy, let alone practice it, by which I mean the ability to see issues through other people's perspectives is astonishingly low. And the number of people on social media, and people, by the way, on social media, are going to be smarter than average because the written medium. So right away, it's going to take a little bit of intelligence to even be step your foot in the door. They just want to divide everything into in group and out group. And you see this all the time. Oh, you sound like a liberal. Oh, you sound like a Trump voter. And once you're slotted into that box, in their minds, there's nothing further for them to hear from you. So they're not interested in understanding things at all. They're interested in perceiving things, whether it's in group or out group, and that's enough for them.

I want to talk about some stories now, stories that you've told in some of your writings because we've been talking a little bit about theory here. But Emma Goldman.

Yeah.

Who?

She's right.

Yeah, I can't see who those people are on it.

She's all the way on the left is where she belongs.

Michael's pointing to a big, it looks like poster sized picture of his book the White Pill, if you're listening in the podcast version. But Emma Goldman was persecuted here in the United States. Oh, yes, was exiled. Right. I mean, she has a free speech story to tell, not just here in the United States, but also she took the free speech argument to Lenin too personally and called him out for what she thought was an abandonment of the ideals of the revolution.

Yep.

To which Lenin said, well, there can't be any free speech in the revolutionary period. Right.

Yeah, it's a bourgeois extravagance.

Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about her story?

Well, sure. Again, conservatives really have a very bad idea of history and they think, well, we've always fall for free speech. Again, the first free speech groups were organized to fight for the rights of radicals, by which I mean like communists, this is before 1917, to promote their ideas, which were heavily censored, either through the market, which I don't really regard to censorship obviously, or through governments. And at a certain point after Leon Shalgosh, who said he was inspired by Emma Goldman, killed President McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt became president, they basically made it a law that if you were a leper or syphilis or anarchist, we don't want you here. And Teddy Roosevelt said, anarchism is worse than slavery. And at the time there were actual slaves still alive in the United States. Point being, they went and they retroactively removed the citizenship of the man she had married so he wasn't a citizen and therefore she was no longer a citizen. And then it's like, all right, and there was something called the Red Ark, which a very young J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of. And they rounded up a bunch of radicals, put them on this ship and they said, all right, you guys like free speech?

You guys like socialism? You all can fuck off back to Russia. And they deported them and shipped them away. And the reason she's on the COVID of the white Pill and the reason I talk about her and her partner in literal crime, Alexander Berkman, as much as possible. They were hard, hardcore lefties, as hard as it gets. Emma Goldman gave a speech in Union Square in the early 20th century and she said, go to the capitalists. I don't remember what word she used. And ask for work. And if they don't give you work, ask for bread. And if they don't give you bread, take bread. Her point being you don't have a duty to starve and it's perfectly appropriate to take what you want to feed your family in the era where few have so much and so many have so little. Then she goes, so her lefty credentials could not be beat. They tried to kill Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's right hand man. Shot him, didn't succeed in murdering him. Berkman did a long time in jail as a consequence for this. So these were in many ways the godparents of Antifa right, and Antifa love Emma Goldman.

They go to the Soviet Union, they see what's going on there, horrified. And Goldman explicitly says, look, I'm for violence. I'm for revolution. I'm for slitting throats. But you slit throats for the sake of the workers. You do it to bring about this era where you have freedom association, freedom of speech, where everyone's working together for the sake of a society. And when she fled Russia with Berkman, he wrote a book called Bolshevik Myth. She wrote a book called my disillusionment in Russia, which was later, there's a secret split in half called my further disillusionment in Russia. And she goes to England and all the lefties are there. Oh, red Emma, yay. They're applauding because she's so out there and she's so, such a radical. And she goes, this isn't what we're for. This is worse than the czar. And when she started her speech, it was a standing ovation. And when she was finished you could hear a pin drop because they didn't want to hear it because all they wanted to hear was, this is the society of the future. Like, we're the smart ones, we're the good ones. And people who had never stepped foot outside the United States felt comfortable lecturing to her that she didn't understand what was going on in the newfound Soviet Union or what became the Soviet Union.

Did you ever see that movie? It's the epic I think, by just.

No, I haven't. I saw the clip with her in.

Yeah, well, yeah, she's in it. And some of her disillusionment with the Soviet Union is featured in that film. But one of the interesting things about the film just kind of as an aside is Roger Baldwin, who is one of the founders of the ACLU is in that. And it kind of shows just how close the kind of anarchist, socialist, communist community was.

And Margaret Sanger, too, is in there. She used to write. Yeah.

And the reason I watched it is because Ira Glasser, who used to run the ACLU, is on our advisory council. He said, if you kind of want to understand that community at that time, Red's got it just perfectly right.

There was a woman named Mabel Dodge Luhan who had an apartment, and the building is torn down, and now it's the building that was like, I believe, the apartment building in France. Mad about you. Point being, she had a salon. Not a hair salon, like a salon in the old sense, where people got together, meet once a week, I think it was Thursdays. And John Reed, who I think Warren Beatty plays in Reds, described her as a complete simpleton, dumb girl because she went there and she never talked. Mabel Dodge Luhan. And the point is, she was one of these. You see, there's contemporary people nowadays. I can't think of any off top of my head, but these rich ladies, like a real housewife, who think they're just so badass because they're friends with these radicals, and, you know, there's no one at home, but they think it's cool that Ibrahim Kemdi's at their house. Something like that. It's like, oh, my God, I'm so out there. So she had these salons, and Bill Haywood, head of the big union guy Sanger's there, Emma Goldman, Jack Reed, who she had Mabel Dutch Luhan had a long affair with.

They're all in there together, cross pollinating. So this New York City village era of that period really was this kind of punching above its weight scene and where modernism really was born. And maybe Dodge Luhan, who I just mentioned to you, she also was helpful in bringing in what was called the Armory show, which was a show in the armory in New York City, where it was the first time that european modern art was displayed in the states, including, very famously, Duchamp's new descending a staircase, which is not representational. So all the newspaper cartoonists had a fun time making fun of it. But she was really this very important, although personally, highly unoppressive figure. And it was a lot of cross pollination. And I gotta tell you, that's one of the reasons I'm very excited that I currently live in Austin, because maybe it's not the same exact thing, but there is a lot of cross pollination here between the crypto people, the podcasters, the comedians, the biohackers, like, the white people stuff like whole foods and cold plunges. Like everyone's here and they're interacting and it's really punching bubbit's weight.

I think it's overstated often, but people talked about the rise of Silicon Valley being somewhat like the rise of Florence during the. Just there's. There's value, I guess, of people who are creative and innovative just being in the same place. Right. And it does seem like people are moving to Austin and it's getting some of the same network effects that you get from everyone being in the same place. You see a little bit of it with Miami as well. And Silicon Valley is still, the place in tech hasn't been eclipsed yet, I don't think. But I was going to ask you about kind of your thoughts on Austin. So I'm glad I got them, but I wanted to ask you just kind of for your concluding thoughts on Emma Goldman, because we started the podcast talking about the red scare. Right. Do you think America's decision, the second.

Red scare, the first red scare was what rounded up.

You know, you kind of took issue with how I described the red scare. Do you think what happened to Emma Goldman in the first red scare was appropriate in the sense of her connections to communism and revolutionary politics or whatever?

I don't know what you mean by appropriate. She was not a member of any organization taking orders from a foreign power, which is, I don't know if that's called treason or sedition, whatever it is. So that is one major difference. The other big difference is, again, the government never, under the McCarthyism, no one to jail like these people got fired, right? So they're advocating genocide, and their cost is you might not be able to be a screenwriter anymore. I have very little sympathy for that. And the fact of the matter is they just changed their names and they became heroic in terms of Hollywood. And they were lying. I mean, Al Jay Hiss was this big example of this where he was very high up under FDR and he was exposed for being a member of a stalinist party giving us government secrets to a country that had just recently starved millions of Ukrainians to death for no reason. So this Hollywood version of the McCarthy era, that these people were just innocent victims who just had different point of view, is a complete lie. Now, it is possible, and I would actually lean toward this, that the government has no place investigating something like this.

And there's certainly an argument you have for that, but to act like these people are all innocent lambs who know had their lives ruined because they flicked the wrong lever at the voting booth is completely untrue. And I'm not saying that you said that, but I'm just saying that's the popular perspective.

So I imagine you're critical.

And I'm just going to say one more thing.

Sure.

It just speaks to how dishonest it is, because the McCarthy era, which is the one time in America where lefties were canceled, is regarded the second worst thing to ever happen, except for slavery. And if you think about in those terms, it's just like. That's like the worst thing that a bunch of screenwriters lost their jobs.

Yeah. I wanted to ask you in that sense, you mentioned canceled. What do you make of this whole cancel culture debate currently?

I don't like that term because everyone listening to this, there are people that they wouldn't hire because of their views. Right. The thing with cancer culture is that a lot of times it's giant media outlets are demonizing someone for like, a tweet that they made in high school, which is completely disingenuous, is the problem. But if it turns out that someone is secretly a rapist or a murderer, and you find out and then you don't want to have them on your network anymore, I think that's perfectly appropriate. It's being framed, I think, as a false alternative. Either anyone can say and do anything they want, or, oh, my God, this is horrible. There are times when it's appropriate to cancel someone, but the times that are presented as appropriate by the corporate press are almost always inaccurate. And I'll just say one more thing, just to pull back the curtain for people listening to this, and this is kind of a dirty little secret that conservatives, not the singer conservative, don't like to talk about. A lot of these people who were canceled weren't canceled for the ostensible reason. They were canceled because they're dicks and just assholes behind the scenes.

And when the shit hit the fan, no one had their back. Alex Jones is like a really nice guy. I'm pals with him. And the reason he got uncanceled is because he's a nice person. There's other people who are canceled and remain canceled. It's not because of what they said or did. It's because no one wants to take a bullet for them or run interference for them because they're nasty.

Yeah, well, I mean, you need to look at any individual case, of course.

But you're not going to know on the publicly, like, which is which. So I'm saying a lot of people who are canceled unfairly. Yes, the ostensible reason is unfair, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is everyone's glad to be divested of them.

Let's say that the real reason is more or less the truth, right? I mean, how do you look at, again, getting back to the normative question, the canvas should. Right. Of course, all these private enterprises, these private institutions, can and have the free association right to fire whoever they want. But should they? And how should we think about whether they should or should not? For example, I'm going to interrupt you.

Because I don't believe in democracy. So I don't believe the idea that every one of us is in a position to tell someone I've never met how they should run their company. That is crazy to me. So if you're telling me you shouldn't fire this athlete because they said something offensive, you don't have access to my budget sheet. You don't have access to my investors. You don't know what I'm seeing on the back end. Because maybe my big funder is telling me, if you don't fire this guy, I'm pulling the plug on the whole organization. If I have that gun to my head, maybe. I don't think what he did said was that bad, but I don't have a choice. We saw this during black lives matter where the head of. What's that gay exercise organization, CrossFit. When the head of CrossFit was like, we're a gay exercise organization. We have nothing to do with this. And he lost his job as a result of this point being because he was sticking out among everyone else like a sore thumb. So some of these companies may not even be a fan of whatever's going on, but as soon as you stick your head up, you become a target.

Now, that's not something that's positive. But the point being, it's really easy for us sitting here on our asses to be like, well, you shouldn't have put up that BLM square. But it's like, if I hadn't, I'd be fired. And it's really easy to say someone, well, fine, you should be fired. Maybe I've got a wife and kids to take care of. So this is a moral calculus that I think everyone has to engage with on their own. And it's really unfair, in my view, for us to sit here and judge someone else when we don't have all the facts.

Did you judge the old regime of Twitter? I mean, did you have a perspective on that? When it was deplatforming people or twisting itself into pretzels to justify, for example, deplatforming Donald Trump. And as we saw in the Twitter.

Files, I was judging what they ostensibly said was the reason. Because if their argument was, this guy is dangerous and what he's saying can foment violence, Twitter is not a monopoly. So that reasoning I had issue with. Because it's false. Because if you have a president, in their view, who is fomenting violence, it is extremely important for all of us to hear what he has to say, because if this is done secretly, that's a bigger problem than knowing what he's saying publicly so we could prepare for it.

Yeah, and I think I agree with you on that. And I think when we're trying to judge whether public or private institutions are living up to ostensibly what they claim to. So, for example, Twitter, right, claims to be the public square. Well, if you're eliminating portion of the public because they engage in wrongthink, as you judge it, well, you're not living up to what you claim to be. Right.

Correct.

The local community group that doesn't want the person who kind of shit posts on the neighborhood community group every day and shares information that is irrelevant to most of the community members, that's different than Twitter. Right. And posting for anyone who might want to come to your feed or for whom your post comes up in the algorithm. So it sounds like I have a better understanding now of kind of how you look at that issue is it just depends on the association. It depends what they hold themselves out to be. It depends what they promise or contractually promise in their terms of service, for example. But even Elon Musk doesn't always enforce his policies.

That's right.

Consistently right. Particularly in the early days when there were the journalists getting deplatformed, seems to have started to work itself out a little bit. But I want to ask, kind of as a way to close up about the Soviet Union. You've written a lot about it and tie it back to the conversation we were having about Emma Goldman. In a way, Emma Goldman delivered that speech that you referenced in 1924 in London, where she describes the nature of the new soviet workers. Paradise falls on deaf ears. But Solja Nitsin, 1973, right, publishes Gulag archipelago, and it makes waves like, what happened? What changed? Were people just ready to hear that argument, hear those stories now?

Well, this is a very long answer, and I talk about at length in the white pill. One of the big things that changed is that Stalin died. And then I think it was 1956, Khrushchev, who was Stalin's successor, delivered what he called the secret speech. And the secret speech said, well, first of all, even before that, Stalin made a pact with Hitler, and Hitler back then was Hitler. Right? So if I'm a lefty, and all my life I've been like, all right, maybe I have issues with the. But, you know, they're basically the direction I want us to blah, blah, blah. That's a much better model than the United States. You're shaking hands with Hitler. Okay. For a lot of people, it's a not. I was completely wrong. I'm out. So that was a very big moment for lots of hardcore lefties, and even moderate lefties were like, this is so beyond anything I'm comfortable with that. I'm not hearing anything else you have to say. Right. So it was like a whittler winning process. But again, in 56, I think it was 56, Khrushchev gave a secret speech. It's called secret speech, because there was, like, no foreigners allowed, and it was just the party cadres.

And I think it was like three to 6 hours. 3 hours, 6 hours. It was some very long period. It was the middle of the night. And he's like, all this stuff they were saying about Stalin is true. All these people that were forced to confess in these trials were innocent, and they were tortured, and the orders came directly from Stalin. This cult, personality cult, is completely incompatible with Marxism Leninism. And he just went down and they're sitting there and they can't say, oh, this is western capitalist propaganda. He's sitting in Stalin's seat, literally. So that was also a big moment. They're like, oh, shit. We can't just hand wave this away as the bourgeoisie or the capitalists try to make us look bad. They're like, okay, this actually was true. And that was a very big reckoning point. And the thing is, when Stalin died, they closed down the gulags to enormous extent. So a lot of these former prisoners, I think there was sword to secrecy, largely. Well, good luck with that. Now were reintegrated into soviet society. And they had families, they had friends, and you had thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who saw it firsthand, who lived in it, who came back a complete wreck from when they had been vanished for absolutely no reason.

And they had their testimony. You're not going to say these are all, like, foreign saboteurs. So that was also a big moment internally where people were. And also in 1953, when Hungary tried to have a rebellion and the Soviet Union sent in the tanks. 1968, the Prague Spring, and the Russians and several other countries invaded Czechoslovakia. These were moments where you can't hand wave it away and be like, okay, it's just crazy Emma Goldman. Or, okay, this is dictatorship, but it's just temporary. It'll be over soon. This was 50, 60 years after the russian revolution and the Bolsheviks.

I've got a poster here in my office says they coined the term politically correct 50 years before the west caught on. And it's from the museum of communism.

That's in Prague. I have magnets from that place on my fridge. They said you couldn't get detergent in the store, but you could get.

I mean, that's something you're an expert on, right? Is just the suppression of thought and belief and speech in authoritarian countries, in the Soviet Union, in North Korea, can you just kind of walk our listeners through what it's like to be a person living in those societies? I think it's hard for us Americans to really understand. And you visited North Korea.

I mean, it's like having an affair versus being analogous.

Yeah, of course, of course.

But I guess what I'm trying to.

Say is you have a Yomi park who's come out of. She knows. She would know it better than you. But most people don't get into Korea like, they don't see what it's like.

I didn't see what it's like, really, because, again, I'm a tourist. Right. The reason I wrote the white pill, or one of the reasons the back cover is an Ayn Rand quote where she says, when she was testifying from the House on american activities committee in the 40s before McCarthy was in the Senate. And she goes, it's almost impossible to convey to your free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. Now, I'm sure lots of people, or if not everyone listening to this is sick of woke stuff and woke this and woke that. And you turn on Netflix. I was just watching Master universe, which was a cartoon I grew up with he man, the characters named he man. And now instead of it being about He man and skeletor, it's about Teela, her black girlfriend, and Evelyn are the protagonists. So even a show called he man has now become about a strong female who don't need no man. Point being, you and I can sit and laugh about this, right? Or we can write articles complaining about it. I'm sure I haven't looked at the message board, the he man fandom.

There's a lot of people who are like, this is bullshit, blah, blah, blah. A lot of people like, despite this, it's good. A lot of people like, whatever. We can have discussion. We cannot wrap our heads around what it's like if literally everything was in the vein of politics and a certain specific politics. We cannot wrap our heads around the idea that if we're sitting at home talking to our friends, the Ods are quite high one. The people in the group are going to be a spy for the government and they're going to turn us wrap. We don't have no idea what this is like when people in the states are complaining like, oh, it's just like Soviet Russia. Sure, there are aspects. We cannot imagine what it's like for it to be that thing. 24 7365, every song, every tv show, every magazine, every newspaper, every public conversation has to be through this very specific vein. We cannot imagine what that's possibly like. And writing the book made me so much more grateful for my family taking me out of Soviet Union Ukraine when I was so young, because I still cannot wrap my head around what it was like for them having to live through this for decades.

I had a friend growing up and his grandfather. We would visit his farm. It's not the same thing, but it makes me think of. He fought in World War II, and he said, you just can't know the horrors of war unless you've lived it, right? There's no movie. I mean, movies can give you perhaps.

A sense, but it's not the smells alone.

Sure. Yeah. I was listening to Dan Carlin's hardcore history. I don't know if you've ever listened to that podcast.

I know. I didn't know.

Yeah. And he did one on the ghost of the OS front, which is the eastern front, and he talks about the smells in there and then just walking in fields where you just see dead bodies under ice, like, as far as the eye can see. It's gripping in audio format and horrifying, but to just actually live it and see it, I don't know. I just don't know how. You hope no one ever has that experience. At the same time, one of the ways to ensure they never has that experience is for them to understand the experience through the eyes of people who've been there, I guess, but it's not the same. Do you think that North Korea is as close to Orwell's 1984 as any society in human history?

Not at all, because they don't have electricity. So the thing with 1984 is everything's under surveillance. There's cameras everywhere. You have a radio in your house that you can't turn off all this other stuff. They don't have electricity in North Korea, so it's not orwellian in that. I mean, this is where Rand comes in, because Rand's big point about. There's a joke about what do the socialists use before they used candles, light bulbs. So when you have these in North Korea during the 90s, when Kim Jong II took over from his father, the great leader Kim Il sung. Kim II sung, excuse me. They had polio come back. So you can't advance if everything's under the thumb of the state. So it's not orwellian in that sense at all, although it's much more medieval in terms of just the brutality and the kind of serfdom of the populace as opposed to this kind of. Because in 1984, they're, like, living in cities and things are pretty clean.

Sure. How does the surveillance happen in North Korea?

So everyone in North Korea is slotted into some group. So it could be your apartment building, your class, your factory, and once a week they have something called, like, sessions for something. Life. I forget what it's called. Point being, I have to get up once a week in front of my colleagues or neighbors, and I have to say what I did wrong, and I have to say what someone else did wrong, too. So I have to say, I saw Nico was chewing on a pen, and he ruined the pen, and that pen was something that we could all use. And then you are all berated, and then everyone has to have something to say every week. So not only does everyone have to self confess, they have to have something to snitch on their colleagues or friends or neighbors in front of everybody else. So that's why there's no possibility of kind of getting together and trying to plot over to the government, because this is taken even more seriously. It's not like in America, where the rules don't apply to the elites. This is taken even more seriously at the top. So they're even more ruthless in watching each other and having something on each other to try to undermine one another.

I guess I have to ask, as we've talked about Soviet Union and Ukraine, what do you make of the whole current situation?

I think we have very little useful information, and the only thing I am sure of, and that's by design, everyone has access to the same newspapers, so you don't want your opponents to know what your lines are and where you stand. I said this at a time. I don't have any particular insight into this region? I said this at a time, and now I think it's become. Not that this was a great insight, but I think now it's become kind of understood that it seemed very clear that there was a gun pointed at the back of Ziensky's head telling him not to take any kind of deal. And now it's coming around where they're like, all right, we're going to have to take some kind of. So. And I understand, because you don't want to validate foreign invasion and aggression. This was the lesson of the Falklands that Thatcher had to fight. But point being, I'm scared in some ways it's going to be analogous to the korean war, where basically you have this big loss of life and everything. For what?

Yeah. And then you just get this line drawn, an armistice that lasts what, in case the korean war, over half a century.

And I was talking to Constant Kissen, who runs the trigonometry podcast, and he was much more pro Ukraine and escalating things. And I go, maybe I'm being naive, but is it your view that if Putin literally conquers all of Ukraine, that he's going to have some kind of genocide and start killing? And he's like, no. I'm like, okay, if that's not the case, this completely takes it out of the realm of Saddam and Kuwait, where Saddam killed so many of his own iraqi citizens, or a Hitler situation or a pole pot situation, if we're talking about resources and what language they speak, know, whatever, so on and so forth. That, to me, although it's not nice, is really night and day compared to we're going to start maybe the balkans, something like that. We're going to start exterminating people by the thousands or hundreds of thousands for literally no reason. But I don't know that I speak for. I'm not here to speak on behalf of anarchism, because I think many anarchists would disagree with much of what I've said. I just want to be clear about that.

Oh, really?

Yes. I think anarchists as a rule, are much bigger fans of democracy, not in the political sense, but in the sense of everyone having their two cent and contributing together. I'm much more elitist in many ways than the typical anarchists, and they would regard that as antithetical to anarchism.

So these are the people who would build collectives, the anarcho communists.

Yeah, but also just think a lot of ancaps. I think I would kind of split company with them on some things as well. So I just want that to be clear that this is my perspective and not like the. Or a anarchist perspective per se.

Gotcha.

It's just an anarchist's perspective. Sure.

An anarchist's perspective. Well, Michael Malice, I appreciate an anarchist's perspective. That was Michael Malice. He is the host of the podcast, you're welcome. And is the author of several books, including, most recently, the White Pill, a tale of good and evil. Before we sign off, I want to thank everyone for filling out the recent, so to speak listener survey. Producer Sam Niederholzer and I are reviewing the feedback and we hope that you'll start seeing some of your guest and topic recommendations appear on the show here in short order. If you have any additional feedback beyond the survey, we're always available via email at our email address, so to speak@thefire.org. Also, I wanted to flag an exciting new development. On the day that we recorded this episode, which was January 19, we broke the top 50 on Apple podcast's overall podcast charge, peaking, I believe, at number 43, right behind this american life. We even reached number seven in the news category, just behind Megyn Kelly and Pod Save America. Pretty cool stuff. I want to thank you all for making this podcast what it is and for keeping me going for seven years now. It's amazing to think that we've been going for that long.

Almost eight years, actually, now that I think about it. We started the podcast in April of 2016. So yeah, we're almost at eight years. Holy cow. This podcast is hosted by me and Nico Perino and was produced by Sam Niederholzer and myself. It was edited by my colleague Chris Malpey. To learn more about, so to speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is linked in the show notes most of our episodes, including this one feature video of the conversation. You can follow us on Twitter, instagram, or Facebook, and if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play reviews help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.