Shellenberger Explains Government Censorship of Social Media

all right everybody welcome to another episode of the Michael Shermer show I'm your host Michael Shermer we're here live before a studio audience if this is a studio at the Skeptics conference hey here we go [Applause] yay my guest today is Michael shellenberger he's returning Champion he was on uh a few months ago investigative journalist broken many major stories on crime and drug policy homelessness Amazon deforestation Rising climate resilience growing Eco anxiety and on now most recently on free speech and censorship the Twitter files you've probably heard of he's been involved in that he just got back from uh testifying before Congress he flew here from DC just a few days ago you can watch this online if you go to public he's posted the video I watched the whole video on my workout yesterday so many questions on that and uh so let's get started with that I say is a good place to to start let's assume I'm sitting in for the other okay Boomers who don't really understand what social media is you know what's this Twitter thing uh is what Tik Tok I don't know I understand it why is this important what do you mean free speech censorship go it's it's just social media I just read the New York Times that's it why do this matter all right well so social media is a radical uh innovation in the history of of not just the internet but of printing press so if you start with past upheavals you know we have the printing press that is a major event it results in able to print books and read the Bible for themselves it gives rise to the Protestant Reformation the cter Reformation then you have the telegraph the newspapers each television each of these New Media um create political upheavals and the internet was a product really of the US defense department uh arpanet created by DARPA and for a long time I think the security State and the US government felt like it was something that was they able ble to contain control in the same way they had the big newspapers and television and then you have the twin Revolutions of 2016 brexit the election of trump and the establishment in the United States and in the UK and much of the West felt like their Authority was really threatened by a populist nationalist revolt and so what we've been documenting with the Twitter files and and and the Facebook files and now a new batch of of internal documents called the CTI files we've been documenting how people that worked within intelligence and security organizations including FBI CIA Department of Homeland Security the exact same thing is happening in Britain basically responded to 2016 by saying we have got to counter misinformation we've got to undermine we've got to go from counterterrorism to counter populism and we've got to demand censorship of these disfavored views by Twitter by Facebook and Facebook had in reaction to the 2016 uh election you may remember the Democrats blamed Facebook for the election of trump it's not really the case Trump was really elected more by Fox News than by Facebook this is a very uh mainstream idea among political scientists nonetheless there's really big fears that the social media would allow for these populist revolts and so what got created was what we've called the censorship industrial complex whereby the department of homeand security basically created third-party organizations at academic institutions most specifically Stanford to basically start demanding Mass censorship of disfavored views on Twitter and on Facebook and this is when we invited in by Elon Musk a year ago to go into Twitter we discovered that there was a strong left-wing bias on the content moderation for example they deplatformed somebody for saying in response to an issue on trans issues she said but a man can't be a woman though and she was deplatformed woman named Megan Murphy so was very very left-wing I think it's a 98% % of the donations that Twitter had gone to Democrats but then we were reading through the files and we started seeing these requests from the FBI from the Department of Homeland Security and from people at the OG which stood for other government agencies which was code for the CIA and the skin our skin started to crawl and the hair went up on the backs of our necks and we were like we're looking at the US government demanding censorship of disfavored views and we now know that the White House itself demanded that Facebook do much more censorship of of people just talking about the side effects of the covid vaccine resulting in because they were worried that it would make people not want to get the vaccine things that we think are very clearly in violation of the First Amendment and now this is going to the Supreme Court in the form of a lawsuit called Missouri V Biden uh these are things that you may not even read about in the mainstream news media because they've decided really not to cover it very much but it's very alive on X formally known as Twitter and on some YouTube channels and whatnot so we're in the midst of a of an argument which I think is now tending towards our side which has been should the government have any any involvement in trying to stop so-called misinformation online or hate speech which of course was talked about in the previous panel as a subjective issue and and that was what the hearing was about it was about um to what extent does this censorship exist and to what extent do we think it's necessary okay let's unpack some of that let's go back to the 2016 election the fear was that there was Russian interference and then well maybe it was just the bots so one question is to what extent when people see information online does it really change their vote like I I I read that Hillary's running this pedophile ring out of a pizzeria I guess I better vote for Trump did they really do that I mean I think the way you asked the question you have have an idea and I agree um and the evidence doesn't I mean it's very hard to change your mind about anything and those of us that have changed our minds about stuff particularly big things we know that there's really high social consequences to change your minds I've lost most of my Progressive friends because I've changed my mind on some big issues there's a lot of and I had financial problems you know uh lost an institution lost income not something that you intuitively do in your mid-40s when you're already destitute from a divorce um so there's reasons why we don't change our minds but there's just ego reasons it it feels bad you know and so we seek to reinforce our views we think it's dopamine enhancing to have your views enforced your your views reinforced it's dopamine depleting that to be wrong and particularly to have a public commitment for something and then to change your mind it's very uncomfortable so it's very hard for people to change their minds and so you're absolutely right um you know now if I were to take one of the cases I worked on which was the hunter Biden laptop New York Post reports in mid October 2020 that they have Hunter Biden's laptop and that it shows a vast influence pedaling scheme by the Biden family Hunter Biden gets paid by somebody and then he tries to get his dad to change policy and some way or another a large laptop full of a lot of information it comes out Twitter censors it Facebook censors it and um I think a couple dozen former CIA directors and others say that looks like Russian that looks like a Russian Hack and leak operation I being a good Democrat at the time and most of my family and friends all believed that it was Russian disinformation that there was something wrong with the laptop turns out there was nothing wrong with the laptop it was Hunter Biden's laptop he probably was drunk and it fell into his bathtub or pool and there was actually two of them and they were water loged he brought them to a computer store and we actually knew at the time that they were legitimate because we had Hunter bayan's receip on the computer store uh saying he was dropping off his laptop and you had an FBI subpoena for the laptops from December 2019 but because and so the censorship in that case was really part of a disinformation effort to convince people to not be concerned with or take seriously this large body of evidence that the Biden family was involved in an influence pedaling scheme so in that sense I don't know that people um I think it prevented people that might have had some doubts about Biden and his level of corruption uh from considering it so in that case I do think it can have an impact yeah because that would be example what what difference does it make if they censor the hunter Biden laptop if people don't really change their mind but sometimes they do so it's maybe the undecided voters in the middle those 20% that everybody's competing for right something like that okay just clarification that was around October 20 I think it's October 14th October 14th right and wasn't there something weird about the laptop somehow went from the computer store to Rudy Giuliani or something weird like that or what that was part of it so uh I mean that's pretty weird yeah well it's not if you I mean they actually it's I can see why you thought it seemed weird the computer store owner had the laptop he made a he made a backup of the laptops um into a hard drive he then took the laptops to the FBI and he said I think there's something suspicious about this this by the way Hunter Biden had forgotten that he had done this CU you know he was on a full-on bender smoking crack and drinking and hiring underage prostitutes um not there's anything wrong with that there is something wrong with it just joking there is something wrong with that um so but he didn't remember and so so the computer store owner who was a republican you know he was a trump supporter took the laptops to the FBI which was actually in his right to do so because Hunter Biden had abandoned there and then the FBI didn't do anything with it which itself is weird and so uh I think it was like six or eight seven months later he took it to to jul Rudy Giuliani and so and Rudy Giuliani had indeed had some business dealings with Russian and so that was of course then used I think one thing we one thing that's very interesting about disinformation or propaganda is that it's got elements of Truth in it if it's just a straight lie it it's it's going to be it's not people are not going to take it seriously so it's often the best forms of propaganda are sort of an exaggeration or just going one step too far but often using elements of the truth yeah okay so it was censored sort of but the New York Post published it right that's right so we did hear about it that's right so so really what you're talking about is a situation where in my view what's inappropriate was two things the first was the involvement of current and former FBI officials in spreading the disinformation that it was Russian that there was evidence that it was from a Russian Hack and leak operation and then the second was that Twitter and Facebook uh censored it now it only did so briefly but the but the censorship of it by by the by Twitter was part of this creating the sense that there was something wrong with the information so the censorship was actually in service of the disinformation and the and incidentally and this is something I discovered when I did this is my Twitter files is that the internal Twitter staff had evaluated the hunter B and laptop New York New York Post story and decided that it was fine that it had not violated their terms of service they did have something in the terms of service that said that we weren't going to allow hacked materials to be published which I also think is wrong because I think if I think if you have hacked I think if somebody gives you hacked materials and they're in the public interest that you as a journalist should publish them that's the Pentagon papers principle that's how we knew that the war in Vietnam was failing in in 196 in 1969 when Daniel ellsburg provided the Pentagon papers to the Pentagon um I mean sorry to the New York Times um so but the so Twitter evaluates it and they go there's no evidence that this that this was hacked and the reason they they didn't think it was hacked is because they had the computer store repair owner's receipt and they had the FBI subpoena which had been published on their post so they knew it wasn't there was no evidence it could have been hacked but there was no evidence that it was evidence that it was just what it looked like dropped off at the computer store by Hunter Biden so the Twitter staff internally said this is fine and but then there was internal pressure by the former general counsel to the FBI he was the loudest voice inside Twitter saying that's Russian disinformation it looks like a Russian Hack and leak operation based on nothing literally based on nothing I think that is a massive abuse of power by people that traditionally when you talk to people that work in the intelligence Services traditionally Former Intelligence operatives are supposed to go into kind of boring careers when they're truly retired in other words you're not supposed to be engaged in politics you're not supposed to be involved because you want your Law Enforcement Officers whether the local cops or the federal cops to stay out of politics cuz that's that would be electoral interference so you know one of the accusations you heard I listened to the entire testimony you posted on public yesterday there was a Democrat uh congresswoman who said this is all right-wing moral Panic talking points this is not happening what evidence do you have that it is happening and I just remembered my thought when you're going through the Twitter files is there actually like an email from you know soand so from the CIA and it says CIA and we're telling you please do not or you must not or whatever they say post the hunter Biden laptop or something to that effect what's the chain of of causal activities so there was okay so there's a body of evidence uh the first piece of evidence is that Mark Zuckerberg onjo Rogan says that the FBI warned them specifically that there was a coming Russian Hack and leak operation that would involve Hunter Biden and they did that several weeks before that's a pre- buunk they called a pre-b buunk that was uh that so we knew that already then we look in the Twitter files and there was two two things that occurred that were pretty amazing the first is that we discovered that the asman Institute hosted a what they call tabletop exercise which was just a it's actually a word that comes from the intelligence and security communities tabletop exercise to workshop for reporters how to respond to a Russian Hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden when I discovered this and this occurred about 2 months before the New York Post story it was I mean there was a moment where I was like what the hell is this and then it was like this is terrifying because it read as though they knew that there was a hunter Biden laptop being you know that was going to come out now you could say well um maybe they knew maybe they suspected that something would happen because of course Trump had been um talking about Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine already that was the reason remember he was impeached in January of that year or maybe you would say say uh that the Democrats had been hacked and leaked by the Russians John podesta and the DNC in 2016 so maybe that was it but I mean guys when you read these documents preparing for this tabletop exercise it's really weird how similar it is to what actually would happen two months later then you get into the events of October 14th when it's published and the internal Twitter staff is like look uh it was a controversial story when it comes out there was some questions around does it viate our hacked uh materials policy and the internal staff comes back and they said it doesn't violate our our hacked materials policy and then you have the person that is most strenuously arguing that Twitter should censor the information was the former general counsel of the FBI The General Counsel is the top attorney at the FBI which makes him I think the second most powerful person in the agency after the director but if you want to add to it the deputy director from the FBI was also working at at Twitter and so when you see that you're it starts to feel like there's some sort of secret effort going on feels conspiratorial yes and how high up in Twitter did it go all the way to Jack was he aware of these activities that's a really good question I don't want to get this part wrong um I I believe that Jack signed off on the decision he later said he regretted it and when he said he regretted it he didn't throw he didn't suggest that he hadn't approved it he suggested that he had but he was was also in Fiji I believe at the time and the internal internal Twitter staff kind of referred to Jack uh dorsy he's the founder and CEO of Twitter but he's they kind of referred to him as the spirit animal of Twitter because he was off you know doing whatever he was doing in Fiji and it was really being run by his senior Executives who were very very Progressive and very much uh Democrats yeah okay so Elon buys the company and then you and Matt Tab and Barry Weiss get the call I mean this just an astonishing story what was like to get a call from Elon Musk and meet the guy and he goes here I want you to go through 100 million emails or whatever I don't know how did you yeah well the first thing is just just to just to my own history um I I don't really I'm not a big electric car fan and uh I don't really like rockets I don't really care about Rockets I think we got problems on Earth I'm not a big space person um in my in Apocalypse never my 2020 book I opened my chapter criticizing Renewables by criticizing Elon Musk just to give you sense of what my relationship with Elon Musk was I got invited into Twitter because I'm friends with Barry Weiss Barry Weiss is a very famous journalist of the New York Times um and she knew that I was a pretty strong investigative reporter and I live in the Bay Area and we're friends and so I had seen Matt Tai's Twitter file STS of course and of course like any good journalist I was envious and I was and thinking and after my I got over my Envy I was like how do I get in there and get the and then Barry calls and I was like oh let that that be what I think it could be and sure enough she's like I'm flying to San Francisco right now how soon can you be here and I was like as soon as I get done with this interview didn't even take a shower I'm in my car driving to Twitter and it was very exciting because I mean when you a company that is so controversial like Twitter and so influential I think you were saying people don't know why Twitter is so important um it's important remember that like for tw Twitter was it's we the elite journalists you know the Elite opinion makers it's it was kind of the I mean it's also Rowdy and you know whatever but it's like a you know and it's like a half billion people it's much smaller than Facebook but the density of of people and the concentration and the and the speed of the conversation made it so influential so it had already been through these controversies of course where they deplatformed president Trump they censored the hunter Biden laptop we knew they had censored people on covid we knew they had censored people on trans very very so then to then be like the promise was look at anything you want in the files and you're just like I'm not sure that's what it's going to be but you got in there and it was like oh yeah that is what it was very exciting and once in a lifetime you know for a journalist how many files were there total I mean it's Millions I mean I mean I don't know I mean you count all the messages and I mean it must be in the I mean it must be in the billions or something I mean it's you know it's like thousands it was well I guess it would be a couple several I mean not tens of thousands but a couple a few thousands employees over whatever I was founded wanted to go live 2007 so over over you know 13 no like 15 years um I mean and then lots of I mean so just just a huge amount of information you know like when you get big data sets like that you're you're looking for something you know you can't read it all so you're actually looking for the big incidents where we knew something had happened yeah we were earlier talking about signal detection Theory and you got the signal but it's mostly noise so you're going going through emails nothing nothing nothing nothing I mean what would pop out like CIA or whatever yeah well yeah because that was so the first thing they I mean so so Matt goes in he does Hunter Biden laptop first and he and Elon apparently is pressuring him I wasn't in there yet and elon's like let's go let's go let's go that's how Elon is and Matt publishes something was pretty good and it sort of shows some of the internal conversations then then Barry comes in and does a kind of cancel culture series about showing that they were you know putting people on trends blacklists like literally cuz Jay bachari is this really important professor at Stanford who argued that we had the wrong approach to co and that we needed to just protect the vulnerable rather than lock down society and he's a very well resected esteemed at Stanford and he was just like pillared for this he was censored we open up his file and there like is like a little box that says Trends Blacklist you know on the one hand you're like H that's horrible but then as a journalist you're like oh yes you know like it said Trends Blacklist so we're like he was on a black list that was a part of it but then you know Libs of Tik Tok which is a more conservative Twitter hand account was on there and so Barry did that and so we kind of go and and we knew there was like 98% of all donations from Twitter staff had gone to Democrats but then we we and then we did January uh January 6th 7th and 8th January 6th was of course the the the capital Riot and then the eth is when Trump gets deplatformed and since I was the since I was the least famous and important of the Three Twitter files journalists they gave me the seventh you know they like they took the good stuff you know like you know like your old it's like I was the littlest kid even though I'm not the youngest um so they give me January 7th but of course that turned out to be a stroke of luck because that was when all the decisions were made to actually deplatform Trump similar story they they looked at Trump's tweets and they were like they don't violate our terms of service it was not immediate incitement to violence we talked about this but um uh he did not you know he did not say go and break the law you know so they said he didn't but then they had to make up a new justification so they just basically changed the terms of service to deplatform Trump that was January 7th and then somewhere around there I just start seeing more weird stuff and I still remember being in the room you guys you're reading reading reading reading reading and I was like I was like hey Matt I was like are you seeing like these emails from people at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and he was like oh uh yeah Mike uh lot of federal government involvement you know I was like well this doesn't seem right I mean I'm not a First Amendment expert but federal government employees asking to Twitter to censor stuff online doesn't seem consistent with what I know about the First Amendment and then I I then I had come across I think that as Institute thing around the hunter Biden laptop and I thought this is really weird and so I went back and did a hunter Biden laptop thread that kind of even though Matt had already done it I was like there's some more stuff that we needed to report out and that was when I was like we're looking at something much more sophisticated than just you know an angry White House staffer and so when you when I say the censorship industrial complex at this point we are at about 200 non-governmental organizations most with government's funding that are involved in efforts to demand censorship by social media platforms of views that they don't like it's amazing you know plus the Department of Homeland Security the FBI the counter the counter disinformation agency of the British government plus we're seeing activities by Australians and new zealands and others very sophisticated operations both to demand censorship but also in our view to spread disinformation basically cuz you know you can spread disinformation a lot of ways this false debunkings is a very interesting one where somebody goes um oh that's been debunked you know and it's like well but it hasn't been debunked you know it's true and so you get into a kind of Hall a mirror situation which makes it very hard to figure out what's going on so these social media platforms are powerful so our security agencies are concerned about them do they do the same thing to the New York Times The Wall Street Journal ABC NBC CBS they're just they're still powerful yes they well so so the relationship between the historical relation between intelligence and security agencies and the major media is like that could take a whole panel but um my view is pretty similar to n chomsky's uh n Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote a book called manufacturing consent I think it's 19 it's old now it's like 1987 but they argue that uh Elites in the United States starting with Edward bernes who was Freud's you know son-in-law or something and who was an advertising and PR guy and but also kind of for the elites also Walter Litman that the Elites in the United States had always said look we have to we have to manage public opinion this is I mean this is maki okay so this is not super new this is something that rulers have always tried to control how people think the media was much more Rowdy before World War II it was much more what we call yellow journalism think Citizen Cane you know much more tabloid much more many more different kinds of newspapers after World War II particularly with radio and newspapers you get a kind of concentration in much greater control by the government we know from the church committee hearings of the 1970s that the CIA had a bunch of journalists on payroll um in the New York Times at other newspapers it's very shocking it's called Mockingbird operation Mockingbird that supposedly got shut down but we think there's a lot of evidence that the intelligence agency have continued to pay journalists particularly abroad to engage in this kind of activity but there's also just a kind of affinity you're you you go to the same cocktail parties in Georgetown you know it's state department and CIA people and then you get and then and then one way you control the journalist is by leaking information to them which is why you should always be skeptical when people are giving you information as a journalist so um the big break though of course is with the Pentagon papers in the late 60s if you see the film The Post the merlet Steven Spielberg Tom Hanks movie Merill Streep who plays Katherine Graham the publisher of the Washington Post she gets the Pentagon papers and is considering publishing them but she's friends with Robert mcnamer who's the defense secretary and of course he says don't publish the Pentagon papers this will undermine the war effort and anyway I'm not going to spoil you know the ending uh she publishes them um and you know that was sort of the high point and then if you read bangar sargon's history which I highly recommend it's one of the best but also Ashley reinbergs um he wrote She Wrote bad news and he wrote the greaty lady wink they both do this kind of history of the US media including us intelligence Security Services they basically argue that journalism became a more elitist profession after Watergate and that the Watergate made journalism kind of cool among among Elites it would have been a workingclass profession before that you know you don't have to have a a degree to be a journalism people don't know this like there's no certificate like sometimes we we first testified in March they were kind of like well you know you're so cold what makes you a journalist it's like Mak you a journalist if you do journalism like that's it it's just a completely there's no you know test or something but then it became much more elitist and much more um and then I think I think the idea their argument has been that it became much Cozier with the ruling establishment so you kind of get to this period of the most you know independent press kind of early mid '70s and from there on you've had a much more complacent and complicit news media with the establishment how did the social media companies get so powerful so big I'm just thinking you know newspapers you got the Wall Street Journal New York Times and there's half a dozen other fairly big ones you got ABC NBC CBS CNN Fox PBS you know why aren't there at least like six twitters such that no one has too much power uh or six phase whatever happened to my space you know yeah so the the short answer is uh Network effects and so Network effects are it's like why don't we have more than one electrical Grid or why don't we have more than one uh sewage system um because it doesn't make any sense at a physical level and so it's a utility and it's an information utility social media is an information utility so if you go visit Trump's truth social or you go to Instagram's threads or even Blue Sky Jack dorsey's attempt at a new one or mastedon whatever the the user interface or UI of those social media platforms it looks the same as as Twitter and you can sort of say Well they're not creative or they're just ripping them off or something but I mean there's kind of one form if you want to get what you get with Twitter is a lot of information density so you can go through a huge quantity of information contrast this to the printing press you can't go printing press for books was a revolution then you get to newspapers you know which already newspapers are amazing because you do get a lot of information density you open it up and there's all this information but then you get to the next level with your Twitter feed and it's just it's infinite information you couldn't there's not enough hours in a day for you to read all the information on the Twitter feed so it's the the it's the efficiency and the advantage and the network effects I you know um the you know if anybody would have been able to challenge Twitter it would have been when Mark Zuckerberg at meta started threads in the summer threads is a Twitter clone it looks exact almost exactly like Twitter and and what he had going with me he had what look like Network effects because you immediately ported from Instagram to threads and so I mean and Elon was worried I mean every you know everybody was they like worried that suddenly threads would replace Twitter and it just had this big kind of first week effect and everybody was like looking at it and then I went there and I was like looking at I was like okay so I don't know what I get out of this I don't get back on Twitter and you actually didn't have the same kind of energy and network effects and so you just ended up going back to Twitter and now I haven't been to threads for weeks and I think that the traffic is down and it's not going to come back up yeah I did the same thing and I realized no one's over here they're all over in Twitter if I want to communicate with people I got to go to TW so you get this kind of snowballing effect that leads to monopolies or duopolies or whatever there just aren't that many options in almost any industry and this is certainly the case evid bour yeah so here so what are your thoughts on to what extent the government should regulate this so there's more competition even you could even be a pro- free market libertarian go oh yeah competition is great but it just happens or it doesn't and it's just not happening in social media so then what that's a great question um and it's a question I spent a lot of time on recently so I think it's a natural monopoly consistent with natural monopoly Theory uh electrical grids are a natural monopoly and we have a you know we have a policy solution which is that you know we said all right the electrical utility can be a monopoly but you can't but you have to be regulated so it's a regulated Monopoly you can't that way you can't G you can't raise prices and gouge consumers and like let's say um let's say the Monopoly is owned by a republican uh he can't deny electrical service to Democrats um you can't deny electoral service to Nazis or Communists or pedophiles like you know I mean I mean convicted pet files who serve their time or whatever you you they have to have electoral service it's a universal entitlement um you can't deprive somebody electrical service you can send them to prison if they break the law but you can't deprive them electrical services because you disagree with them now in the case of speech unlike electricity we have a First Amendment that says that the that the that the government says Congress but it means the government shall take no action to abridge which means limit freedom of speech so the government cannot limit freedom of speech it's really not absolute okay so we do limit freedom of speech in very limited circumstances you can't lie to somebody to steal their money that's fraud you can't deliberately lie about somebody to destroy their reputation in ways that cost them money that's defamation very high bar for defamation by the way though very high um people can lie about you and mostly like there's a new book called liar in a crowded theater about all the ways which is a great title which about all the ways in which the Supreme Court has allowed people to lie and if you think about it for a minute you can see why you cannot criminalize lying because everybody does it all the time um and uh and then also you cannot immediately incite violence for which the bar is extremely high just remember the supreme court allows Naes to March through neighborhoods of Holocaust Survivors that's the bar at which we set it in the United States that's different than Europe they don't allow that but we do so it's very very few limits on freedom of speech um also you cannot make somebody say something they disagree with you might remember the guy that didn't want to make the wedding cake for the gay couple you can't make somebody say something they don't agree with compelled speech compelled speech that's against the First Amendment so where are you left with in my view where you're left with is I i' I've evolved my views of evolved a little bit but at first I thought you can mandate transparency in exchange for having section 230 section 230 is the sweeping liability protections if you're a social media company section 230 is a part of the law the legal code that distinguishes Publishers like public or skeptic magazine or New York Times from Twitter from Facebook Twitter and Facebook have this really sweeping liability protection if somebody breaks the law on their platform they have to take it down but they can't be sued for it if they did so if they took action when they needed to my view is if we're going to give if if if citizens are going to give these these powerful companies this sweeping liability protection section 230 then the companies should agree both to some transparency but also to allow adult users to moderate their own legal content meaning me Michael SCH you Michael shmer we should choose when we sign up for the platforms the how to filter our own content maybe I want Greta tunberg filter maybe I want Michael schomberg's filter maybe I want adl's filter maybe I want Elon musk's filter but you should be able to choose that um the things that are still illegal I mean I have no problem with FBI uh asking Elon Musk to take down illegal speech child pornography you know horrible CH trafficking that stuff it's illegal take it down I the government should not be involved at all in asking people to asking platforms to censor um legal speech and so I would say transparent my order of priorities now they they they haven't changed they've just grown I want transparency I want user control adult user control of legal content moderation and I want governments to either be prohibited from demanding censorship explicitly or if they're going to request some which I still think is a violation the First Amendment but if they're going to if they're going to ask platforms to take down information that they have to do so publicly because I think when a White House official is demanding that Facebook censor speech around say covid vaccines that they should have to immediately report publicly that I'm asking Facebook to do this if I liel you on Twitter and it damages your reputation you lose income you could sue me personally but you can't sue Twitter because they let me on there as long as they took action um based on reasonable evidence as soon as it was drawn to their attention I see I see but if I publish an oped in the New York Times liing you you could sue the New York Times because they fact checked it presumably edited it and said yeah we're on board with public in this it's okay that's correct and the only thing I'll add is that the bar is still very high for lioling and there was a decision uh called Sullivan versus New York Times uh where the a southern a Southern state I can't remember which one they sued the New York Times for running an ad for the Civil Rights Movement it was like Martin Luther King or somebody and they got some facts wrong like in the ad you know but it was kind of ticky tacky stuff you know and they sued and they said it was it was it was it hurt us and it was wrong and the Supreme Court said uh that's uh too low of a bar that's right the Dominion voting machine case against Fox News because those Fox News hosts saying that they were complicit in the fraud said so on the air so Fox News is liable or maybe I forget that that's right and also you had text from Fox staffers to each other being like we know this is wrong yeah that's right and then I think Dominion lost some money so I mean I think you have to have but that's that was I mean that was a terrible case I mean that was I mean Fox's reputation was yeah hugely damaged by that would a solution be for Elon to implement say rules in Twitter to the employees if you get an email from the CIA send it to me and I'm going to post it to my 50 million whatever it is now followers and then everybody could see is kind of an exposure of what the government's do which is essentially what you're trying to do through public is look what we found yeah I was was with I just interviewed Senator Rand Paul yesterday we sat down with him for for about 20 minutes he has legislation that would ban the federal government from making these demands um it's not moving in the Senate unfortunately it doesn't have quite enough support from his supporters I suggested that he do a more moderate approach which is just requiring that they report their demands when they make them publicly like you just tweet out I asked Facebook to you know censor this and then I think also you could you could do that you could require that the social media companies in exchange for Section 230 require their employees to publicly report if a government employee asks them to censor something I think that's a very reasonable thing to ask and yes could Elon do it on his own absolutely you know when when I uh I I think I'm comfortable saying I've made my views of this clear to Elon if I'm going to testify about it publicly I'll tell him what I think and and he sort of says that they're moving in that direction and to be to be fair I think they are I mean they you know Turkey he complied with a request from the turkey Turkish government it was in court so um I mean they were being pressured by the Turkish courts to do that to censor some people to his credit and this was already underway when he took the company over um but to his credit he actually published the Turkish government's takedown requests and censorship requests and the names of everybody who was censored so that's uh that's that's a little it might seem a little bit in the weeds but I think that sort of transparency is important because information wants to be free wants to get out and so if it gets out that way then maybe it can get out to the Turkish people in some other format let's try to see it from the government's perspective let's do a Pete bosi and you know what what are they thinking you know if your test Homeland Security CIA FBI especially Homeland and you think there are threats there are bad people and they're out there they're doing stuff I'm being paid I am being held responsible for finding these people and doing something about it they're on Twitter and I need to do something about this and then you push back well no you can't and you know there's the rules or whatever but just from their perspective they're thinking they're really causing a harm they're a threat to the Homeland they're using social media this is literally our job to do something about it is that what they're thinking yes that's uh and and we know what they're thinking because they're having to defend the censorship in Missouri V Biden and sometimes you'll get some confusion where they'll say things like we have to be able to talk to the social media platforms to stop crime but that's not even a legitimate argument because that's already illegal no one's proposing that they'd not be allowed to stop criminal like illegal speech we're simply talking about legal speech now so then the the big case would be Co um so you would say uh people are promoting ior mechon would be a good example they're promoting ior mechon as a cure for co uh I agree with people who say that um I mean look icon's pretty harmless as a as an herbal remedy um and has a lot of benefits on other uh diseases uh but it's not proven that it it prevented covid and and and might create some complacency might result in people getting the disease that wouldn't normally get the disease and so you would say we need to take down these posts that Advocate icon claiming that iveron works when it doesn't work um I think that's inappropriate and I just think that um you know that you get to that's an abuse of the idea that you're protecting people from harm um you know there's a lot of examples you can give like you can kind of tell you can give really horrible examples I'll give one that I gave two days ago they they said the member of Congress said do you agree this say to Matt taibe who was with me that um that Twitter should not allow terrorist atrocities to be on its platform and terrorist propaganda now she made a mistake because she included terrorist atrocities and terrorist propaganda which are two separate things I think we all strong I would strongly defend the right of Twitter and indeed the necessity of Twitter to have terrorist propaganda on its platform um I think terrorist atrocities I think there is a case for privacy if you have a loved one who's being beheaded on Twitter I think that there's a a reasonable case to be made that it's a violation of the Privacy rights of the family to have your loved one being you know raped or beheaded or killed or anything on Twitter and there is a case to have that taken down I think somebody's saying from The River To The Sea Palestine shall be free or saying you know death to Israel I I think that is protected speech I think that's legal speech now remember the standard is very very high the pre speech in the United States is very very high you can have Nazis can March through skoi Illinois the Nazis cannot say burn down the house or kill those Jews because that's immediate incitement to violence um so you know now if you say on Twitter let's go marching skoi and Burn Down The House of the Jews I think that's a violation I think that's illegal speech because for me that would look like immediate incitement to violence if you say let's go March rogi for the cause of Nazism I don't think that's immed FS so for me I just I'm not trying to uh I'm a very simple person like I'm not trying to develop new case law um I'm trying to look at how the Supreme Court has ruled on this with a great amount of wisdom and again read the new Jeff kosf book liar in a crowded theater a beautiful book describing I mean when you read the book you realize how special the United States is and how special the first amendment is you know CU remember in Europe Free Speech was just what the king would give you you you know it was like cuz they evolve from a monarchy to a democracy and you know sir could I could I please criticize the king and this one regard you know and the king would like okay but just that little thing and then it' be like for hundreds of years that would go on you we started America and the guys that start the people that started the United States they felt so strongly about the First Amendment not all of them but most of them F felt strongly about free speech that they said first of all it's an inalienable right it's not something that the government gives you it's something that you have from as a human being both the right to speak and the right to hear other people's views and that that shall come before everything else it comes before government government doesn't give you freedom of speech you have freedom of speech in America and then you can decide whether to constitute a new government or not that's why it's the first amendment and notably when you like all these exceptions we've been describing to free speech those are not in the First Amendment like you read the first amendment it's a radical little Amendment government shall take no action to limit freedom of speech it's literally overstated we've we have we have qualified the First Amendment over a couple about a 100 really since the early 20th centuries when it started to get challenged we have qualified the First Amendment as it's dealt with practical realities but the document itself is very radical and you read it and you're just like this country is amazing you know and and it's a check on the kind of bluntly on the woke snowflakes that want to censor people for saying things that hurt my feelings you know it's like saying no you don't get to make other people shut up because they make you feel bad that you don't get to do that in the United States yeah some of the censorship like uh during covid and other periods there a sense of elitism like of course I don't believe these [ __ ] conspiracy theories but you know the little people we need to protect them from these dangerous why can't I hear Robert Malone on Rogan talking about myocarditis I I can look up what the problem is with his arguments I mean it'd be nice if Joe had somebody else sitting there but you know he doesn't always do that he invites them sometimes they don't come on um who was the guy hotz that he uh invited on to debate RFK J for $100,000 and he turned it down that's astonishing you know why why why is that what is is it that kind of that shift in journalism to this kind of aism we're going to filter for the masses what they can hear I think that's right by the way it just reminds me that another there's I'm I'm only a year into my study of free speech um um I'm really still learning a lot but one of the most important reasons for free speech is that you want bad ideas expressed publicly you want bad ideas expressed absolutely you want them expressed so that you can attack them so that you can debunk them if you don't let people Express their terrible ideas there is the risk that they will continue to believe them yeah and that includes racist ideas that includes anti-semitic ideas it includes hateful ideas you know and there's all some we all know these stories of people that were full of hatred for some group and over time and you always ends up with a marrying somebody right but but you know it's like like you want people to they get over their hatred by having interactions with other human beings not by being shut down that's the opposite of what works so just a practical reason again I'm a I'm an inalienable right I think it's a human right I defend it on principle but there's also a practical reason for it the the paternalism I mean you just I mean you said it I mean that's but what that's what we find all the time and and and I mean I run in very Progressive liberal circles families and friends absolutely there's a there's an idea that the masses can't be trusted with this there's this it's just just what you said I mean it's it's it's amazing but people will come out they'll just say it you know oh God people could fall for it you know and oh well I mean like well welcome to reality people believe all sorts of crazy things you think I think crazy things um you know I think you think some crazy things and here we are having it out I mean that's what you want you know and these issues were by the way this this was all argued about under Hobbs and lock hundreds of years ago they had they already figured all this out we're having to relearn these essential I think our instincts are very primitive very reptilian very tribal and that the that that the commitment to freedom and free speech and free thought it's a very new it's a very prefrontal cortex you know it's it's the evolved part of the brain it's not the dumb reptilian part of the brain and in fact I even found because I I interview people now I do a little bit what Peter does and interview people I interview people in Ireland I interview people in New York about free speech and these issues and it makes it slowing people down a little bit you know cuz if you go well do you think we should stop this online hatred and and censor people oh yeah no absolutely we should not allow that that and you're like okay okay could you think of some you know how could that go wrong and a few minutes people start to think about it and they become much more strongly supportive of free speech yeah I liked uh when Trump was on Twitter at 3: in the morning because I want to know what he's thinking CU there's all those calls you for Jack to take him off and it's like but I you know when Melania calls him in to the bedroom at 3:00 a.m. and he goes no I got one more tweet I got to get out it's like I want to know what he's thinking you know and uh that's always been my Approach you know the Holocaust irons creationist yeah just have your say publish whatever you want tell me what are your 10 best arguments here they are okay I'm going to publish them in skeptic and then we'll have the rebuttal and then everybody can see what it is if you don't do that then The Outsiders say oh they must be on to something if they're censoring these people and what is it I'm not being allowed to hear so it has the opposite effect it actually Fe yeah what you said it feeds conspiracy theories yeah okay so um restrictions on speech not from government but just you know there's this argument that we all self-censor you know I don't walk around telling everybody what I think of them just you know just you want to be polite you want to be nice I'll call you whatever name or pronoun you want privately just I don't want to offend people I'm not going to use the n-word you know there's certain things like that um that we just do naturally what's wrong with that oh no I mean nothing's wrong with it everything's right about it I mean I think we I I'm a um I have uh I'm become a new I'm a new come to civility it's probably cuz I'm old but I do um I try now when I travel a lot and when I when I'm and you engage a lot of people in the service sector I always try to say hi I try to look at them in human eyes in that little instant Hi how are you how's your day going so far you know it's good to meet you I call people sir you know often nice to meet you sir thank you for picking me up and my you know Uber driver good day to you um everything's right about that we need more of that I would love to see a free a civil Free Speech culture I mean that's what we're after cuz right I mean I I live in Berkeley and I mean there's a way in which like really on the radical left because conservatives tend to be much more polite um there's always been a kind of rudess and so you're actually getting kind of the worse of Both Worlds a kind of rudeness combined with a sensorial culture and um I think it needs to go the other way let's try to be let's try to maintain some Civic virtues and values while also allowing for a really robust debate about big topics okay before I turn it over to the audience the lightning round okay a couple quick things what is your sense since you're old enough now the difference between leftism liberalism and maybe ill liberalism on that side and then you know conservatives of the old school you know Bob Dole John McCain you know just kind of classic conservatives of the Buran type versus the mega conservatives or the there's the Rhinos as the mega people call them and then the whatever they are Y what what what's got what's happening here I mean it's definitely gotten more confusing so I mean the traditional Left Right Spectrum still has some explanatory power the traditional division of course on the French Parliament was between the Defenders of tradition and the people that want to change um really until 10 years ago the people that wanted change which was the left were the Guardians of free speech and the conservatives were more wanted to put more restrictions on it and then that follows from what we were talking about how the Kings would allow a little bit more free speech over time gradually as a kind of conservative position I think the left um for when I I'm a gen xer and so in the 80s and 90s where the radical left and liberals where we had common ground was on free speech and so I was a radical left young man and I was very much in favor of free speech um and uh so we're liberals so it was the Warren court and and Main Mainline Democrats it was conservative Democrats like Al Gore and tior who were on board with the kind of religious right in terms of constraining speech now the left has as I mentioned or maybe I didn't mention it uh Democrats went from being in 2018 40% of Democrats agreed that the government should take efforts to reduce misinformation online today 70% of Democrats agree with that I have I am dedicated to making that 70% number go back down among Democrats um I think it's a hugely PRI huge priority I think it's an existential risk to the United States to have that high of support for censorship among Democrats it's too high among Republicans too but not nearly that high it's around I think it's around 35% and so that for me is a big change the ways in which the left and really you know progressives and Democrats have become illiberal in their views on freedom of speech and that the right I think almost strictly as a result of the persecution that they felt in the sensor they felt have become more free speech we saw some backsliding with it with a number of Republicans and conservatives calling for censorship of pro Hamas Pro Palestinian voices huge mistake I had hoped that some of the people on the left would see the rights call for censorship of of pramas and prop Palestinian voices as a as a reminder that it's not a good idea to get on the censorship train that's right there was that list of the Harvard students and those groups uh promoting Hamas and amongst Wall Street people don't hire these people there's the list who a list yeah and you know to be fair that's a tricky one because of course on the one hand it's a blacklist and it's ugly on the other hand that's a form of speech yeah right you know and so I um that's not a it's not a and you know even saying um you shouldn't hire somebody like that you know it's it's a tricky one because of course cancel culture comes before formal censorship I mean that was what was going on you get to cancel culture kind of growing in power and then it bleeds into once you go from basically you have cancel culture coming from within the culture to cancel people and prevent them from having jobs or working places and then you get the intelligence and security agencies using cancel culture techniques to demand censorship online and then you suddenly it's a clear line has been crossed but arguably cancel culture is using your free speech to try to change institutions um it's a little bit more in the gray area I would say okay last question I wasn't going to bring this up on UFOs and uaps because we already talked about that in the previous episode but in Pete's uh Street epistemology here he was asking what would it take you to go from skeptical of UFOs uaps to be a stronger believer he said if Michael shellenberger told me he talked to somebody not somebody like you but actually you a and you have talked to people that said they saw whatever they saw has that changed since you that's a couple months ago when you were interviewing people what's the update on that okay so the big update for me on uaps is that in part because I love you and I love Skeptics um I am working on a major piece that is going to make a full-throated case that the UAP phenomenon on is can be entirely explained by a combination of disinformation and social contagion oh nice and I spend 5 hours interviewing the author of what I think is maybe the best book ever written on UAP it's a book called miragen I highly recommend it it's a a beautiful book um by Mark Pilkington uh 2010 maybe 20 2009 uh British folklorist um and I interviewed him about two and a half hours over zoom and two and a half hours in person in London I really like him he's genuinely one of the most interesting people I've ever talked to and he actually gave me a he has a little press That's tied to MIT press and he gave me a really interesting book about the first case of somebody who thought that his thoughts were being controlled by machinery and it was actually during the French Revolution it's an amazing book and that helped me to see that uh and we sort of knew this but that you that some and the person who thought this was sayane in every other way and they just had this he had this one delusion that there was this pneumatic machine underneath the British Parliament that was you know there were these like people controlling his thought with these machines so I do think it's possible um so I'm going to make the a a full-throated case that it can be explained by a combination of of Air Force disinformation a very famous case of Air Force disinformation around the Kirtland Air Force Base and um in Social contagion now there's a great twist in the story which is that Mark Pilkington opens his book having seen very dramatic UFO actually saw them twice and they were the orbs for those of you that are UFO Watchers or at least UFO observers or whatever that would be the famous orbs um which is one category of UFO I know you know what those are um probably ball lightning but the Foo Fighters in world wars well yeah so he I well so it's funny because we're interview I'm interviewing him and he's the skeptic and I'm you know more agnostic I guess and and I was like well it's probably a balloon and he was like nope went it flew over the lake and then it ran in then it goes up against a cliff and then it goes above the cliff like that and I was like well maybe it was a drone he was like it was before drones and so you know there's anomalous phenomena and I don't think we know what it is and so I think there's some I think there's just genuinely where I'm at is and I've talked to more sources by the way since those stories and there's been other reporting that says there's just a lot of people that are reporting this um there's some chance that the standard story is true I think there's some chance that it's all disinformation of folkloric contagion and just natural phenomena that we don't understand and then it could be something that we don't understand at all yeah well there's this problem of anomalies no no theory in science explains everything so you always have this residue of unexplained anomalies what do you do with them you don't have to do anything with them you just assign it to a grad student to go figure it out that's what they're for I just have to live with that uncertainty okay Alexander let's turn over the mic here to the audience and um can you distinguish between censorship and promotion is someone might say something others consider bad but it's given low promotion it's not it's a really good question and and and it's not an academic question it's actually this is a it's such an amazing topic I love the I love um this new topic for me like I'm really bored with homelessness and climate change and like I've done my books on that I can't write any more articles on it I love this topic because even my own thinking is challenged on it um and I learn from the people that I'm very critical of so I just did we just did a series of pieces called the ctil files and it's about an early censorship initiative by UK and US military and intelligence contractors some some of them not not even former one of them was working for the Navy at the time and they introduced a framework that includes censorship but also includes psychological operations disinformation debank it's basically a counterterrorism manual that was adapted to counterop populism in the United States and they are not thinking about this they don't think like if you're like waging an information War let's say in Egypt around Arab Spring or something or in Iraq or fighting Isis they don't think about it as just censoring Isis they're thinking about delegitimizing Isis that's how you think about it right so you follow from Max vber um that states have a legitimate uh uh use of Monopoly IL legitimate use of the Monopoly of violence and so you're actually if you're attacking state power which you're really trying to attack for vber but also for people like gromi or makavelli is you're trying to attack the legitimacy of that state so they're often talking about that is how do you restore the legitimacy of the State against these uh populist the threats and they would include Tucker Carlson they would include Joe Rogan you know they'd probably include Michael schenberg in some cases and so they're thinking about in this broader sense and so what you see in places like Canada right now is the government subsidizing state sympathetic or state sponsored organizations not just Canadian Broadcasting Corporation but other outlets that are basically sympathetic to State the state to I mean broadly the government The Establishment and um and so it gets to your question you may get the same result of censorship but without having to be so crude because of course the big problem with censorship for people that are engaged in it is that you can it can backfire very easily with what's known as the strian effect in fact my book apocalypse never would probably not have been a bestseller had they not censored it on Facebook uh so it comes out there's this violent reaction to it the the Facebook does a [ __ ] fact check on it they lie about a very factual thing which is this natural disaster is becoming better not worse over time and I'm very upset about it so I'm going crazy they're censoring me and I think a lot of people bought the book because they were just like you know this is outrageous I'm going to support shellenberger just because he was censored it's know as the strien effect because Barbara strien tried to stop the photos of her house from being shown so everybody went and looked at the photos of her house so but but so the propaganda is is very powerful now now and so and the most the most powerful forms of propaganda of course are ones that you don't think of as propaganda and so you so it's a it's a subtle art form but I guess it all gets back to um you know it gets back to authenticity and like well was interesting cuz you know I you know Tucker Carlson has gone full UFO alien like he doesn't he's not like I'm more like it's I'm like you know I don't know you know and Tucker's like well there's space aliens we know you know and like and Joe Rogan like one week is like I think they're space aliens or I think it's all a scop and it's you know it's like but I think people trust those guys not because they're consistent or because they agree with them on everything but because they actually they think that they're representing what they really think rather than what um they think somebody wants to hear or what they're being paid to promote and so I do think authenticity is still something that people are able to sense and integrity something able to sense and it's very hard to to to fake it and so um any was a long way to answer your question but hopefully got at some of the what you're getting at okay two questions um what do you think of Jack Smith's use of Trump's Twitter information and secondly what do you think elon's real reason for buying tar was also the last one it's obviously the B getting the Babylon B back on Twitter I mean what else could it be uh I'm just kidding um we that was one of the first questions we asked him and it was a funny one if I remember correctly we were sort of like did you buy Twitter just to get the Babylon B back on Twitter and he was a little bit like I I feel like I was watching him think about it and it was like that was the reason and then but he didn't want it was kind of like oh well no to defend Free Speech platform I mean I think it was the you know you may know there some of the backstory was you know he's he's got he's he's friendly with one of his Ex-Wives who I think texted him at one point and when Twitter was getting really crazy and was like can you buy Twitter and delete it was what she said but no I do think he was genuinely committed to free speech um there's always concerns that he would use it to advance his businesses you know he just tweeted you know like I mean he doesn't have to do a lot of advertising for the Cyber the truck uh is it called the Cyber truck the Tesla truck uh because he's got 160 million Twitter followers um but I mean I think it creates as many problems as it solves for him I mean you may know they just launched like the biggest rocket I think in in like human history and it happened right at the same time being accused of being of of promoting antia content and it was kind of sad because I'm not even a rocket guy like I don't care about Rockets but it was like that seems like a pretty big deal you just did the biggest rocket in history but it's so overshadowed by all the stuff around Twitter um sorry what was the first one first one is what do you think Jack oh it's inappropriate I mean look I just I'm a explain that well in one of the lawsuits against Trump which is really dcal Pur yeah the DC suit Jack Smith and it's related to January 6th right um it's the stuff around him instigating January 6th I mean look my view of January 6th is and we've written about it a lot is that um uh that was uh failure of security that there should have been better security that um we still don't know why Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell did not approve now National Guard uh troops to be called out for January 6th because they were specifically requested by the chief of of the capol police we know that there were hundreds of federal agents um at the January 6th protests and that security failed and that that is a security failure um and security failures are bad and we should prevent security failures I spent a fair amount of time in Latin America and Africa where they have real coups uh that does not look like a coup to me that like a bunch of dudes I mean I saw kind of thought was stupid I mean there's like you know the guy with the horns I was like there's a there's a qanon shaman like I don't that doesn't look like CZ I've seen CZ I've seen that there's tanks like blowing up the Parliament building so I think it's a pretty big abuse of power um I think that Trump is somebody that does not respect liberal Democratic institutions I don't think that's how he thinks about his I don't think that's how he thinks about the world I think he thinks about the world like in business terms which is I'm going to be as aggressive as possible in every situation and that there needs and that I will encounter the limits to that and I think that we actually I think that the system was resilient to dealing with his anti-democratic urges uh which I think are I disagree with and uh but I think that Prosecuting him for things he said is bad because it's a violation of the First Amendment and that these these efforts to uh I think these are all politically motivated uh persecutions of of trump I mean I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the idea that that maybe Biden's abuse of the confidential records wasn't as bad as Trump's cuz Trump always is kind of worse than everybody you know we're pointing out that like like Trump like his election denialism was kind of worse than anybody's election denialism has ever been but it's still like Stacy uh Abrams the Georgia gubinatorial candidate engaged in election denialism and was his yeah but of a of a degree not of kind and I just I go look every you know if you start to undermine your your system of law Equal justice under the law and a neutral politically neutral justice system in the name of preventing somebody from undermining that system you've really lost the plot and I think that these guys have really lost the plot and it's obviously helped Trump to secure the Republican nomination and so it's backfired but I yeah I think it's these are politically motiv motivated persecutions I want to apologize in advantage of this question because you already said we tired to talk about homeless it's okay um I wanted to ask if um I know that once you write a book that's obviously not the end of it if there certain back and all of that I'm with respect 10 ago um if you have any F thoughts on that and you know have any kind oftion I mean not a lot uh since San Francisco I did um I'm also politically engaged I think that it's not enough to just WR I think you have to do things in the world so I've co-founded two coalitions one's called California Peace Coalition the other one is called North America recovers I also ran for governor um I did not win um you may have noticed um but I I do think that you I I do think that the problem is ultimately that you need a new governor because you know the Public's pretty close to where we are I mentioned the big Labowski attitudes that's there but when you ask in polling questions do you think that people who use drugs publicly defecate publicly Camp publicly breaking the law should be given drug rehab or mental health care as an alternative to jail or prison 75% of Voters in San Francisco agree with that which is basically the same Nationwide so there's clearly a disconnect from the voter position and what the politicians are doing Gavin has moved a bit in our Direction um it did help to kind of surface these issues in The Campaign which is why I'm proud of the campaign even though we didn't succeed he's done something called care courts and now he's trying to get more money for mental health we have plenty of money so it's really not that but the care courts are basically trying to reestablish some coercion for mentally ill people and and people suffering from addiction to get the care they need as an alternative to prison since people if you're just like I mean addicts are you know like they've lost control in some ways of their behaviors and so if you're just like would you like to quit drugs and live in a shelter people are like hard pass but you're breaking the laws that's an opportunity I think also for the big Labowski guys you know when you're break it's one thing to be like harmless and doing and being an addict I don't think addiction should be criminalized I think that the law when you're breaking laws to service your addiction that's a chance to get you the help that you need so we've been advocating this um you know you may have seen Gavin debated Ron de santis a few nights ago on Fox and Dan santis held up a picture of the famous poop map of San Francisco so I mean it's it's the albatross around Gavin's neck and because of a lack of coward a lack of courage and a lack of heart because I do think in a certain way he is a heartless person um not trying to be mean I just think I mean I don't know how you I don't know how you amputate the legs off of mentally ill people and then go around talking about how we're doing it right in California I don't know how you do that I just think that's [ __ ] immoral so um I think that um somebody needs to run for governor against him again or not against him someone needs to run for governor in California and surfaces issues so hopefully somebody that has a lot as a billionaire and can pay for their campaign but that's ultimately the level at which the problem needs to get solved D because the Mayors can't do it for a variety of reasons and then I don't think it's the role of the feds I do think that you need a Statewide psychiatric care system that uses more coercion to get people the care that they need um in Britain in the leadup brexit campaign there was a lot of false information put out reped and once the brexit very sadly went through there was a rise not only verbal violence against immigrants and British people who have white skin but actually physical attacks as well about three times more Grose by and I feel by normalizing language As Trump has done with sexism racism and as is happening with Muslim and Jewish people Moment by normalizing violent language it does lead to not immediate and unlawful violence but more violence in the longer run can you think of any good ways of trying to combat that through more speech yeah I mean we should be we should be arguing against the hate speech you know we should be humanizing all groups and and uh we're all human beings we all have children we all love our families we all have a right to exist um that's the only right response I think I think censorship makes it worse and and it also is just wrong at a at a basic moral level um we have started my my team has started tracking hate incidents uh in response to the October 7th Hamas attacks in part because uh my friend Barry Weiss uh was a victim of anti-Semitism her her office was vandalized and that upset me and I don't want to see my friends uh suffer like that so I want to get a good Baseline on it in part because I also don't trust first of all I don't think that law enforcement should be tracking speech I think law enforcement should be focusing on crimes and hate speech is not a crime um at least not in the United States but we have started tracking it and and the vast majority of hate incidents are speech still um and there's been real abuses without to Min without I mean I'm not suggesting that there's no relationship between the increased hate speech and some real world violence but the case has been overstated and I'll give you I'll give you two examples we looked at a rise of attacks on Jewish people um in New York and um the people that were committing these these attacks on Jews were not white supremacists they were mostly African-Americans in places like Crown Heights a much more inconvenient story and their anti-Semitism was is complicated I'm not saying it's not anti-Semitism but it has to do with things like class resentment and envy and misunderstandings as well of what it means to be Jewish or even who is Jewish um my colleague Alex guten who's not only Jewish but also the daughter of Israeli immigrant has written very well on this topic at public the other case is the anti-asian violence I saw a lot of anti-asian violence get ascribed to Trump saying the China virus or whatever and there was a group called anti-asian Hay in fact actually my colleague Leon Woodhouse who's half asian also wrote about this and um you know some of it was like like there was a lot of Asian like when we basically legalized shoplifting in California there was a lot lot of violence against Asians like in places like San Francisco and it was motiv like when you interviewed the perpetrators they were like well yeah because Asians carry more cash with them you know or I'm not this is what they say you know Asians are more passive and we're less likely to fight back you know so there was often is that is that discriminatory yeah but it's not quite it's not like I thought they were bringing the virus into the country um you know there's one famous video of a Chinese uh immigrant woman in San Francisco had been assaulted by a homeless guy and and I remember well we didn't know he was homeless by the time but they were like oh it's an anti-asian assault and was being wrapped up in that story of this is because of trump or whatever and I just remember looking at the guy who was being arrested he was clearly a homeless drug addict out of his mind you know and it was I was just like I don't think that guy was watching Trump on television and then assaulting her cuz he thought that she brought covid in he wanted her money so he could support his drug habit so I just think we should take care and and um you know I think that we do need you know Alex in her article talks about when she was a school teacher in New York and her Mo you know her mostly black students you know expressed anti-Semitism publicly in class and she when she told them that when she told the kids that she was Jewish they were shocked cuz they just didn't think that they knew anybody Jewish and they there when they thought Jewish that they were thinking of the landlords you know and and so there was some education there that occurred and I think it made a difference in the same way that people became more accepting of gay and lesbian couples by knowing them I think it helps you know for Jews to be proudly Jewish and and um and talk about what that means to them and and why it's bad to generalize about Jews in the same way that it is about black people and we don't want to do those kinds of stereotypes and generalizations anymore and we certainly don't want to support that kind of hatred against people so I do hope we see this increase of hate incidents which is a a genuine increase since October 7th as an opportunity for that kind of dialogue and conversation and and and not the like you know what Peter is doing if I lost him what he does in that street epistemology is so powerful because it opens you up to changing your mind in a way and it's the opposite of the media literacy that they're now pushing in schools they're literally the governments this is to your question California Canada Australia I think the department of home Security in New York they're pushing the so-called media literacy programs on kids in schools but it's not about media literacy it's not about critical thinking the way that you guys do it it's about telling kids to listen only to establishment corporate news media it's just saying look to make sure it's the New York Times The Washington Post or Wikipedia or whatever and make sure you don't it's not a substack publication heaven forbid you know or skeptic magazine you know it has to be you should just learn to obey the mainstream media I mean that's just the oppos opposite of that you know question authority critical thinking maybe your opponent is right about something maybe you should change your mind what are your assumptions critical thinking is we have hundred years you know John Dewey um I mean that's what it was that's what the lab school of Chicago was all about was critical thinking so I hopefully we bring that back and in ways that I think also make people more resilient against the kind of anti-Semitism racism and other forms of hatred here here all right last question a theme of this conference is truth and how do we know it in journalism this uh seems to be a difficult problem at times I'll tee this up with two examples and then you just give me your thoughts on this the first you know we've all seen the videos of the capital Insurrection and you know the door slamming in the cop's face and the violence the broken windows and the and all that stuff okay and those guys have been tried and convicted s prison time I watched Alexandra Pelosi's film The insurrection cist next door you can see it on HBO and these guys yeah we did this absolutely CU I believed what the boss said it was you fraud I was going to get in there and you know stop the steel and all that stuff and I still believe it you know Go drum it's like wow okay so you see that and then you see like Hannity and and Tucker showing these videos of other protesters just walking down the hallway high-fiving with the police there's like a guard guide showing them where to go and it's like what what am I looking at here I mean is there like 14 hours of footage and and this side shows the horrible stuff and this side shows the how do I think about that I mean how do you okay second example there's a new film out called the fall of Minneapolis have you seen this yet I haven't seen it but I've heard I about it all right so this is about the George Floyd story so this is the other side of what really happened all right we all know what happened okay so and I've seen those video all right so you start watching this it goes here's the body body camera footage you can clearly see that chauvin's knee is on his shoulder not his neck and that it's an optical illusion of the angle looks like the neck but it's not the shoulder here's another angle oh yeah that's right it's the shoulder so then I go back on YouTube Here's the video yeah it's the shoulder it's the neck it's the shoulder it's the neck he's moving around Chin's moving around you so you're seeing one from one source and this other and then this film has an autopsy report here's the real autopsy report the other autopsy report said had no preconditions he died of assciation pressure on the neck from the knee the other autopsy report they show it you know oh no he had all these preconditions super high blood pressure cardio issues overweight he had Fentanyl and on and on it's like okay which autopsy you know so the defense has their autopsy guy and the prosecution has their autopsy guy what is the truth about that you know and it's just so frustrating uh and then it's like hey who is this woman she comes out it's totally credible Collins I think is her name and so I look her up oh she's a a regular um news uh uh journalist at this local station in Minneapolis okay well that that's good she's not there anymore huh wonder why now she's with this conservative sort of right-wing media okay all right well she has a book about based on the film well maybe I'll have her on the podcast let's see who the publisher is you know one of the main no self-published like okay this is not husband is a police officer right and and the husb is yeah the husband head of the union or something yeah he's head of the her husband's head of the union for the police and it's like oh come on so you know what am I what's the right and on and on and on and how do we think about those are great cases um I know a lot more about January 6 and George Floyd but I mean the January 61 so we so multiple things are true we know there's multiple federal agents that were involved uh we know that they that pisan McConnell did did not approve of the National Guard troops even though there was good reason to think that they needed them including just the fact that the Capitol Police Chief asked for them I think it's very suspicious um there were definitely riers that were probably not Feds that were just you know jackasses rioting um I considered a riot not an Insurrection by the way um you know and um there's probably other instances where the cops are kind of like all right let's just try to have people in here peacefully and whatever I mean it's a Hall of Mirrors in some ways but I think that um the big point though is that it was it was a riot due to a lack of security and perhaps some instigation and a failure and maybe a deliberate withdrawing of security I think you I think it would be good to have a 911 type bipartisan commission to get to the bottom of January 6th because I do think people like my parents and my family I mean they just think it was like a coup I mean they think it was really like and I just go that that's not what it was and if it was a coup I would have a different view of it on the George Floyd one I also I'm not sure I mean you know listen do the police holds you know um there when you when they first started restricting these police holds you would think well that's good because those police holds seem barbaric like I would like to see for example the treatment of mentally ill people get rid of the use of restraints altogether because when people with schizophrenia describe being Shackled it's just a nightmare I mean it's already a nightmare to be schizophrenic but whatever being Shackled whatever all these holds are really bad people you know they break they things or people die and whatever but now in California they've restricted what the police can do so much that you end up with more violent situations you can actually end up with more death because you're having to resort to using your gun rather than using a more hold so sometimes you know things seem obvious oh we're going to be more humanitarian but actually you have unintended consequences I haven't stud the George Floyd uh material yet though I pull back there again too and I'm like like you know um first of all did he need to you know was it absolutely necessary uh to make the intervention there there is a liberal or Progressive case that you have a problematic individual but they might be high or they might be psychotic or whatever and that might not be the best they might be you know just that may not be the best time and they may not be a threat to others or they might be a threat and you do need to intervene I mean these are complicated things um we have a drug problem it's just unbelievable I mean when I was in the 9s and I worked on drug decriminalization in the '90s in the year 2000 um I believe it was uh 19,000 uh people died of drug overdoses and Drug poisonings every year this year it's 15,000 people I mean to put that number in perspective on climate change natural disasters that might be weather related kill between 3 to 500 people total in the United States every year it's a joke like nobody dies of natural disasters basically and yet we're letting all these young people get hooked on Fentanyl and meth and people's lives get lost to it they need an intervention George Floyd needed an intervention long before that time he was arrested so you know you can get to the Roshon kind of quality of those events but I think you pull back a little bit and you get to some Basics and that's I think the San Francisco case is like there needed to be an intervention with George Floyd Long beforehand Michael shellenberger thank you so much for coming thank you you everybody all right

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 69,196

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, Michael Shellenberger, censorship, journalism, opioid epidemic, Science Salon, social media, The Michael Shermer Show, UFOs, unidentified aerial phenomena

Id: pACk5iCxlT0

Length: 86min 28sec (5188 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024