Tangle - INTERVIEW: Grace Lavery on today's free speech issues

Episode Date: February 13, 2022

On today's episode, we sat down with Grace Lavery to talk about why she left Substack, how platforms should be moderating speech in this moment, and what the state of free speech looks like in America. Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. She is an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. She has a forthcoming memoir called Please Miss, which will be published by Seal Press in 2022.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. My name is Isaac Saul, and I am your host. And on today's episode, I am sitting down with Grace Lavery. Grace is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is an associate professor of English,

critical theory, and gender and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley. And her research explores a lot of interesting things, the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation with focus and interest in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. She has a forthcoming memoir called Please Miss, which will be published by Seal Press in 2022. Grace, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's really good to be here. Forthcoming no longer. It's out this week, I can say. Amazing. All right. Get your orders in. Well, we're definitely going to talk a little bit about that. You know, I always like to start interviews like this with just giving the guests a little bit of space to talk about how they're here. You have such a fascinating story. I think

you are kind of a jack of all trades. I see you writing about so many different things in the political space, things that are tied to trans issues and gender issues and education. So, you know, who are you? Who are people listening to right now? How did you get here? Who am I? That's a great question. So, hey, my name is Grace Laperie. I'm a professor. I'm a trans woman. I'm a transsexual. I am a scholar of 19th century British literature, which means very little for this conversation, except that I have a real interest in the history of liberalism and an interest in the history of free speech. I teach at UC Berkeley, which is how I think a few of these questions really became important to me around freedom of speech and academic freedom,

around freedom of speech and academic freedom, especially around 2017 during the protests that were student-led against the invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos to come and speak on campus that year, protests that were both eventually successful and also in some ways misrepresented and kind of complicated in what they played out politically. So it was that sort of political scene that got me interested in issues of free speech and academic freedom. I taught a class on academic freedom and free speech at UC Berkeley. It's a topic that

people at Berkeley obviously care a great deal about. I find myself taking a very different position to that of many of my, I guess, fellow liberals, although my status as a liberal is, I think, somewhat fraught at this point. And I have recently become especially invested in academic freedom as a distinct rubric from free speech, something that means something quite different, even in certain ways, in contradiction with, or at least intention with, the principle of free speech, something that means something quite different, even in certain ways, in contradiction with, or at least intention with, the principle of free speech, which is a line of thinking that I have developed from the thought of Joan W. Scott, the long-standing

co-chair of the American Association of University Professors' subcommittee on academic freedom. And her work has really been instrumental in crafting a new set of protocols for thinking about academic freedom which I think are totally different to the dominant ways that that idea gets represented in mass media. So there are all kinds of interesting questions for me about how gender and sexuality and specifically I think transness, if that's even a thing or a word, but trans people have become embroiled in a broader of the abstract value of free speech, which in my view, not only profoundly misrepresented their critics, but also profoundly undermined free speech as a virtue in the public sphere. free speech as a virtue in the public sphere. So I decided I could no longer collaborate with the position that they were taking, not because I don't agree with them, but because I think they

are refusing to enforce their own necessary and valuable terms of use. That is a beautiful framing and introduction for the conversation that I want to have. Thank you. So I'm going to set the table a little bit on my end. I think, you know, I've written a lot about Substack. My newsletter, Tangle, which is what started this podcast, we basically summarize the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day. We are, we're originally born on Substack. And I, when a lot of the original controversy that is in some ways tied to you started on Substack, I made a very public proclamation about not leaving. I ended

up leaving more for business reasons than some of the issues that you left over. But to just give people the quick 101, and please add anything if you think I'm misrepresenting what has happened. But the debate around Substack has basically been sort of twofold. It's a debate that's happening in a lot of different spaces. The platform hosts newsletter writers. They have this commitment that they claim is around protecting free speech and not being a platform that censors its users. They want to give their creators a lot of space to write whatever they want. Some of the people on the platform have been profiting off of, say, anti-vax material, you might call it. And some of the people on the platform have been profiting off of newsletters that spend a lot of time focusing on degrading trans people. One of those people

is Graham Linehan, who you have written a good deal about and I think have laid out in pretty clear terms how he has violated the terms of Substack. And they haven't taken any action against him that I know of. They hadn't taken any action against him when I first sort of dug my heels in and said I wasn't leaving Substack, which for me was more about just that I wanted to be independent. I didn't want to associate with anybody else on the platform. I don't know how tenable that position would be today. But, you know, we're seeing this debate everywhere now. It's happening with this whole Joe Rogan and Spotify thing. You know, how does a platform respond to somebody who's doing something if the platform cracks down on them? Is that some

violation of free speech in the cultural sense? Is it censorship? And Substack came out and defended their position and a letter and a note to their readers and users that was what prompted you to leave. I'm going to quote really quickly a paragraph from that letter because you quoted it and you're writing about it and then I'm going to quote you and then I want to dig in and talk a little bit about kind of your response to what they wrote so this is what Substack said about why it was not censoring some of the people or punishing or de-platforming some of the people on its platform including some of the people who you know you including some of the people who you have sort of documented how they violated Substack's terms of service. They said, as we face growing pressure

to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same. We make decisions based on principles, not PR. We will defend free expression and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society. You wrote about this paragraph in particular that the defense made you feel positively nauseated, and you called it shady corporate garbage. Can you tell me about why you feel that way? And you know, what's at the heart of your reaction to that?

Totally. Well, I mean, the first thing I think I want to say about the kind of emotional dimension of my response there is anytime anyone says that they're making decisions on the basis of principle rather than PR, my hackles rise. And I wonder whether or not the decision that they're making decisions on the basis of principle rather than PR, my hackles rise. And I wonder whether or not the decision that they're making is, in fact, not only made in the interest of PR, but wholly confected for the purposes of PR. In fact, there is nothing more friendly for PR than pretending to have principles. So I think that's where the emotional side comes from. It's just the kind of the cheapness of that. But no, there's a kind of political point that's much more important than the kind of stylistic annoyance that I have, which is that they say in that letter, while we have a terms of service that will allow us to control at the extremes,

we view censorship as a last resort. What that means is that they see the enforcement of their own terms of use as censorship. What that means is that they see the enforcement of their own terms of use as censorship. And to me, that betrays a profound misunderstanding of what terms of use are for. When we use the word censorship, what we are referring to is controls on the amount, on the kinds of opinions that can be expressed and the ways in which they can be expressed. Those are not ideas that are covered by the terms of use. The terms of use do not make any reference to opinions whatsoever. The terms of use make reference to harassment, intimidation, libel, and malicious conduct online, which is, historically speaking, a form of conduct that has not been understood as falling under the rubric of free speech.

So to me, this was a really interesting moment where Substack showed their own ass. They believe that enforcing the rules that are in fact necessary for the effective conduct of free speech as an institutional framework, that they believe enforcing those protocols, it self-constitutes censorship. I disagree with that so profoundly as someone

who is committed to free speech that I could no longer be part of this organization. So I think critical to this conversation is their terms of service, are the rules on the website. And you very clearly, I think you have a screenshot of them in this story that you wrote about why you were leaving. And one of the terms of service that they sort of lay out in Substack is that they will not allow people to use the platform who are producing abusive, harassing, torturous, defamatory, or libelous content. You know, that's a violation of Substack's content guidelines. A, do you think that that is a good term of service? Do you think that's a good content guideline? And B, how do you see that these content guidelines

are being violated on Substack right now? Yeah, great questions both. And they're going to require a little bit of unpacking because they both, I think, require fairly careful and procedural um logic first question is do i think that these are good guidelines and the answer is yes yes i do think they're good guidelines i do think it is reasonable to expect expect that a platform uh will intervene to prevent the abuse of minorities and the harassment of individuals and the reason I think that is because in order to protect a public sphere, in order to protect the principle of free speech,

there is a notion of equality of access. Everybody needs to be able to access the platform in the same way. And historically, legal systems that have established liberal frameworks for upholding freedom of speech have included controls of this kind. One of the most obvious ones is indeed libel, right? The reason why there are libel laws is to ensure equality of access to the public sphere. Now, this is more complicated when the guarantor of the legal framework is no longer a state, but a company. And this is how things work out in a complicated way with Substack. When I first pointed out that Graham Linehan had libeled me, Substack's response was, well, if you can convince a court of that, we will, of course,

take the offending article down, which was a very interesting response for a few reasons. Firstly, it described as a kind of generosity or largesse on their part, something that they would in fact be legally obligated to do by a court under penalty of fines. But secondly, it implied that in order for them to take any action whatsoever, they would need a legal jurisdiction to come to its own conclusion, reasonable enough because they don't want to be making these decisions themselves. The problem is there is no legal framework that is capable of making such an assessment. I live in the United States, Graham Linehan lives in the United Kingdom, which means that neither a court in the United Kingdom nor in the United States

would have any interest in hearing a case of contention between us, which means in practice that in any kind of online dispute, because most online disputes do not concern people who live in the same legal jurisdiction, in any kind of online dispute, there is no legal framework that the company's own bylaws would require in order to produce the effect of free speech. And the reality is that there is no such thing as free speech. There is a set of deferrals to legal protocols and legal systems, which in reality do not bind to the company's substack. So these are good principles, but the company is not legally empowered to actually enact them, which I consider to be challenging. In terms of a second question, I don't know if you wanted to sort of follow up on that.

But the second question you asked me was how are individual accounts breaking these rules? All I can talk about is my own experience, which I do somewhat hesitantly because this experience has been so distressing and has now lasted for a couple of years. years. But for a couple of years, a man named Graham Linehan, who used to be a comedy writer, but has recently decided in the last few years to take up arms against trans women, especially trans women who date other women, which he mistakenly thinks that I do. And I have become one of the sort of focal points of his, of his ire. He has accused me of, among other things, sexually predatory behavior towards my own students at UC Berkeley, pedophilia. He has accused me of rape and sexual violence. None of this has any basis in fact whatsoever. There isn't a court in the land that would determine on his side of this. These are very straightforward claims of facts that he has made without any kind of basis

whatsoever, bringing great distress to me, to my husband, to a number of people in my life. And, you know, there is simply nothing that can be done about it. So I've learned to understand that this man simply gets to say these things. And that's part of, you know, what it means to be alive this, you know, at this moment in time. But they have very, very clear violations of rules against harassment, against hate, against the dissemination of tortious material. His explicit attempt is to try to ruin my career. And, you know, again, it's very easy and intuitive, if anyone looks at his work, to see the ways in which it's very easy and intuitive if anyone looks at his work to see the ways in which it's very clearly motivated by hate and motivated by a personal animus towards trans women for some

reason that makes no sense to me. However, there isn't a court in which the case can be heard, and because there isn't a court in which the case can be heard, the platform has no interest in hearing it. And again, in some ways, I was okay with that deal up until the point when they started claiming to be upholding free speech, when in fact their conduct, Substag's conduct, suggests the exact opposite. They are doing everything within their power to protect bullies as they work to exclude minority voices from the public sphere. Yeah, it's, I mean, that part of it seems pretty clear to me. And I guess I'm interested in, you know, I've seen the public correspondence about this, you know, and I don't mean to make this, you know, I know we're talking about Substack specifically, and I think it's it's just really good to have a tangible example. I think this is such an important conversation because every platform is facing challenges that are similar to this or in a similar vein right now. So I don't mean to pick on Substack, but I also am sort of dumbfounded at how they're defending the position here. I mean, are they saying that those examples that you're citing don't rise to the level

of libel or harassment as so long as a court doesn't say so? It's like they won't judge that as harassment? That seems pretty clear cut. I absolutely agree with you. But the answer that they gave, and again, this is the answer they gave me a year ago, is that until a court makes that determination, they will not make that determination on their own behalf. So in other words, the only thing that I think they need to make their position consistent is to remove the terms of use, because it is eminently clear that they have no interest in establishing that their work isn't tortious or libelous or harassing or hateful. They have no

ability to do that. They only have an interest in deferring to courts doing that. And there are no courts who are capable of actually doing that kind of work. So, you know, the defense is absolutely incoherent. The only legally consistent way forward for them is to admit that in fact, they neither enforce nor have any intention of enforcing their terms of use. One of the questions I have asked of the Substack leadership many times, has any article ever been removed on the basis of a violation of the terms of use? I have not received an answer to that. They have published zero information regarding the number of complaints they get,

the way those complaints are handled, the results of those complaints, and the basis on which those complaints are adjudicated. So again, it is profoundly misleading for them to put out these high-minded statements about the absolute value of free speech when they are themselves refusing to disclose the basic mechanisms by which these complaints are being handled. If a court, if a jurisdiction is attempting to establish the grounds for free speech, one of the ways in which you or I or any member of the public could assess whether or not it was doing so successfully would be by tracing the records of complaints made against other individuals. And if we could see, for example, that a particular court had never found a libel case to be meritorious,

we would ask why, and we would understand, and perhaps there are questions to be asked there. But we would be able to track it. Substack won't publish any details about this. And again, what I'm describing with this kind of animated and slightly silly outrage is actually just a very basic legal reality, which is that they believe, rightly or wrongly, and I'm not a lawyer, I don't know, but they very clearly believe that were they to make any kind of adjudication on these bases, they would be on the hook for all of them. That is to say, if they decide that Graham Linehan has been harassing me, they then have to decide in every other case of harassment whether or not harassment has taken place. And they don't want to do that. Partly they don't

want to do that because it takes work, but mostly they don't want to do that because it raises questions of whether or not they are involved in editorial control of their individual authors. And if it turns out that they are doing anything that looks like editorial control of their individual authors, then they lose their protection under Section 230 and they become more analogous to a newspaper than a shop where one buys paper. And that is, again, just a kind of legal reality. But I would have far more respect for them if they would just admit that they are, like everybody else online, trying to make a buck by deregulating as much as possible, and the deregulation is not the same as freedom. Yeah, that I think that makes a lot of sense to me, I guess. So what's interesting here is, you know, so to put your case aside for a moment,

because it sounds like there's pretty much no friction between our positions there. What I think sort of gets out of really, or scratches at a really interesting question is take something like harassment and how a platform, any platform, Substack, Spotify, whatever, adjudicates it. There is this element of it that I struggle with, like literally just struggle to understand that part you know, part of a harassment challenge, if a court is not involved, part of a harassment allegation is based on like the feeling of the victim, the perception that they're being harassed. So how do we, how does a platform or how can or should a platform go about determining that in any other

way that's, you know, other than just like a gut check? Really? I mean, I don't know what the answer is there. Yeah, no, I understand that that that is a tricky question and it raises philosophical issues that that is certainly worth debating. And also, you know, one of the things that the Internet makes especially difficult is that it can be really difficult to know who counts as a public figure. That is to say, if someone has 500 Twitter followers, they're probably not a public figure. If someone has 500 million Twitter followers, they probably are a public figure. But at what point does one exactly draw the line? draw the line and um is it the reason why that's important is because we usually understand that you know referring to a public figure in a derogatory way make maybe more legitimate than

harassing a random member of the public in a particular kind of way so there are all kinds of questions that are raised here and i don't have a good answer to them except to say we have legal frameworks that can form the basis for these kinds of policies. One of them is to look at whether or not there is sustained and continuous abuse of individuals on the basis of a protected characteristic. And in the United States, we refer to a protected characteristic under Title IX. These characteristics work differently in UK legal frameworks. And of you know as I've been saying the whole problem here is that there isn't a single legal framework which would allow us to make these adjudications but the Equality Act 2010 in the UK is the relevant legal rubric

there but you know what we're talking about here is targeted attacks on individuals, which is very different to sort of generalizing hate against groups of people, which usually is much more difficult to cens to religious hatred. But in the US, you know, expressions of hatred towards groups of people is usually a fairly straightforward First Amendment defense. But against individuals in the US, for whatever reason, it usually isn't, especially if there is a protected characteristic at stake. And those protected characteristics certainly include experience of gender transition, according to the decision in Bostock versus Clayton County and Neil Gorsuch's decision. That was actually an interesting decision

from the perspective of trans civil rights activists because it argued that the framework of sex and gender that was established by Title IX applied to trans people because there was simply no way to refer to prejudice against transgender expressions, either transgender presentations of self, transgender identifications, that did not violate an expectation of conduct on the basis of a protected characteristic um so you know that was kind of interesting but the broader question you know how does one know who's being harassed and who is merely just sort of like a bit butthurt i you know i um i have sympathy i have sympathy

with this question i think it's a it's a conversation that requires a lot of a lot of debate and it requires acknowledgement that like some of us may be public figures when we didn't really mean to be or some of us may be public figures in such a way that you know being attacked in public is you know fair game in some way but I do think that in the extreme case these things are fairly easy to identify. And the real problem that we have from a regulatory perspective is that companies like Substack are treating controls on harassment as themselves acts of censorship. That was, again, in the document they used themselves. And when they make that elision, when they conflate those two very, very, very different kinds of things,

then it makes it much more difficult to have a conversation. And just to sort of give you a sense of what I mean, right? Some views that people online have about trans women that I don't agree with, that I find offensive, you know, trans women are men, whatever. I mean, you know, we can name these and I don't feel a special need to kind of recite them. Those are not any kind of a basis for a harassment claim in my view. And I've been fairly consistent in arguing that people who uphold those generalizable views, even if those generalizable views are motivated by hostility or personal animosity towards a group of people like trans people, those people are not properly dealt with under the harassment or abuse rubric,

until and unless they attack particular individuals. But again, so which is why I say, for example, that a person like Jesse Singel, who is a anti-trans activist, who, you know, I disagree with about everything. I've criticized him. He's criticized me. We don't like each other. We're not going to be friends. We don't go to the clubhouse at the end of the day. But I have no interest in trying to prevent him from writing and doing his work. But the active facilitation and monetization of hateful attacks on particular individuals is profoundly dangerous. It's dangerous for

individuals. It's dangerous for individuals. It's dangerous for me as a person. I get death threats, which are being directed towards me by people like Graham Linehan, which are often based on bizarre misconceptions about how I live my life and the ways that I conduct myself online and also theories that people have about me

that Graham Linehan and those like him have kind of circulated. So it's dangerous to me as an individual and those around me, but it's more profoundly dangerous to the public sphere as such, because what is being affected here, what's being effectuated, and I think more or less that deliberately, is the exclusion of a minority from public space. Yeah, I want to talk about that. That's a great segue because it tees up my next question perfectly. I'm going to read this little brief segment from what you wrote because it's tied directly to this. You said people often think about this kind of online abuse only from the perspective of the abuser, someone who says cruel things, but who should

be allowed to run his mouth off anyway because of his right to free speech. That's fair enough at the scale of the individual, but it doesn't work at the scale of the system. If abuse of a minority is allowed to continue unchecked, members of that minority will be excluded from the system. Historically, this is why jurisdictions place controls on defamation and libel to ensure equitable access to the public sphere. So I want to like sort of unpack this. So I guess the fundamental argument is that if a trans person can't enter the public sphere without being exposed to harassment, then it's their free speech rights that are being infringed upon. That's like the core argument, right? Well, I wouldn't frame it in those terms, because it's not that there is an

individual who is deciding not to participate. But let me put it this way, if one is trying to build a culture of free speech, in which a multiplicity of views are represented, in which a multiplicity of perspectives are welcome, and which a multiplicity of perspectives are welcome and different kinds of people are prepared to have powerful disagreements with each other, if that's the case, then people who are entering those kinds of conversations require ideally totally minimal protections that will enable them to do so without risk to their life and livelihood. Again, that's why we have prohibitions against tortious interference. That's why we have prohibitions against libel, in order to protect people who are

participating in a conversation. But again, I would rather think about it from the perspective of the system than from the perspective of the individual, because I think it is absolutely the case. In fact, I know 100% that it is the case that trans people are being excluded from Substack by Substack's inability to take action or refusal to take action against Graham Linden in the case of me, because that materially makes people less safe on the platform. If they are people who are considering publishing on Substack and therefore drawing the attention of a person who is on a deranged crusade against transgender writers, they're not going to do that. And that means it kind of sucks for them, but they'll find another platform. But it really sucks for the

platform because the platform has an interest in inviting as many people as possible and as many perspectives as possible to enter its sort of public sphere so that's that's how i would think about it the individuals you know will usually find compensatory outlets and in fact you know one of the things that is another kind of tricky structural element of this is that we live in a world where opinion is so increasingly siloed and we live increasingly in feedback loops where one group of people can become convinced that ivermectin is an effective treatment against COVID and another group of people become convinced that ivermectin is a kind of ridiculous poisonous nonsense that you know that has no utility at all and you know I'm not making any observation about that. I'm not qualified in any sense to talk about medicine. But it is an example of how information flows become reinforced

by social networks. And so that points to the necessity of a platform taking seriously the protection of minority opinion. Because otherwise otherwise Substack will become the platform that one goes to if one wants to hear about how trans people are evil, and Ghost will become the platform that one goes to if one wants to hear that, you know, trans people are virtuous or something. And it has no, there's no benefit to either party

to remaining in such splendid isolation, which is why, again again the responsibility is to those designing the system to make sure the minority opinions are respected and actually the individuals are protected as well So let me ask you, I mean, this is, I guess, maybe stepping, you know, putting one foot out of this kind of free speech lane. award-winning book. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. In an ideal world, I mean, take somebody like Graham Linehan.

Is the solution in your eyes just like pull the plug on him, like remove him from the platform and then Substack can say, we're upholding the rules of our platform and that's that and close the book? Or is there another path forward in handling that? I mean, what did you want? Or what do you see as like a positive outcome there, I guess? So, you know, I mean, I'm going to speak like an English professor for a bit. Having spoken like a kind of like, political science person, I'm going to speak like an English professor. I try whenever I can to differentiate between the need for healing and

the need for justice. And I think that whenever we refer to a desirable outcome, it's important for us to recognize, do we want the right thing to happen, even if it really hurts everyone? Or do we want the thing to happen, which will minimize pain and suffering in the world? From a perspective of healing, I think this is a person who is very profoundly broken. I think that he is isolated from his social networks. I think he is professionally derelict. I think that he has lost his marriage over this. He's lost his family. I think he's lost most of his friends. I have a great deal of interpersonal compassion for this person. And I wish him a long period of convalescence and reflection on the damage that he's done to himself and those around him. So in terms of what do I

think is valuable, I do think that for him, I think he needs to sit down and he needs to chill out and he maybe needs to check himself into a sanitarium and he maybe needs to think about the choices that he's making, but in a way that prioritizes how to feel safe and sane rather than how to feel righteous and vindicated. And in terms of what justice looks like, I mean, this is a human being who has endangered my life and my livelihood. This is a person who has endangered other trans people, countless trans people. I mean, you know, the reason why I'm on this podcast right now is because I'm an English professor, and I have a certain degree of standing that allows me to talk about this stuff in public. He does this to dozens, if not hundreds of people, most of whom have absolutely no standing, many of whom are teenagers. You know, he comes after very, very young people, the man has done innumerable damage.

And I think that what he needs from that perspective is I think that, you know, I think in an ideal system, the man would lose a lot of money. I think he would lose a lot of money. And he would give that money to people that he has had, which Yeah, sure would include me, but I don't need any money from the man, I would just give it all to LGBT organizations in the UK. I think about this far less in terms of what Substack should do. Of course, Substack should kick him off. It's not even a question. From a kind of compassionate point of view as well, they are just facilitating this man's nervous breakdown. And I think it's cruel apart from anything else. I think it's very cruel to him. But the damage that he's done will require some kind of recompense at some point.

And, you know, I don't know where that'll come from. But at some point, there's going to have to be a reckoning of some kind there. You mentioned at the top of the show how some of your interest in this sort of spawned out of one of the campus battles over Milo, which is, you know, such an interesting kind of root story to a lot of the conversations that were happening now. You know, I've operated often under the opinion, and I've written about this a little

bit that, you know, because that because of just the kind of Streisand effect of giving these people attention by deplatforming them or taking them away, that someone like Milo is one of the rare examples where I think deplatforming him actually worked in the sense that his platform really was removed. And I saw him doing some infomercial for some pottery show or something a few months ago. And I was like, wow, like I remember this guy was like the face of Breitbart. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so oftentimes though, you know, you know, I think of somebody like Alex Jones, who has been removed from just about everywhere. And I think, you know, I've gotten into arguments

with a lot of my readers who view a deep platforming like that as a success. And I think, you know, I've gotten into arguments with a lot of my readers who view deplatforming like that as a success. And I think in a lot of reasons, Alex Jones left, you know, these platforms he was on with no choice when you're like posting images of the homes of the Sandy Hook parents. It's like, OK, the game's over. But I also don't think he's lost that much influence. You know, you look at like he was at the January 6th riots in the Capitol standing there with a megaphone talking to people. I mean, he's just moved into these kind of crevices of

the internet where his reach may be smaller in aggregate, but his influence to me almost appears stronger because there's no dissent. There's nobody in the comment section or replying to his tweets talking about what a lunatic he is. And so I'm curious, like, you know, just again, this is sort of outside this question of the legality of it. Does de-platforming work? Is this a good solution to remove people from these platforms? I know it's hard to talk about this in general terms, but, you know, i guess somebody like milo

might be viewed as a success i just sometimes i feel like we are martyring people rather than just you know defeating them in the in the marketplace of ideas well to be honest with you i mean i'm sort of in two minds about milo myself because on the one hand, it's somewhat gratifying to see this menacing charlatan reduced to hawking gold shares in pottery and commercials. But I honestly think the reason why the bottom fell out of his career was just because of homophobia. I think he just made jokes about sucking a priest's dick, and it made people suddenly absolutely recoil. And, you know, a joke that would have gone down fine in a different crowd, suddenly revealed the kind

of profound aversion to gayness and gay men in the people among whom he'd been courting. And, you know, so there's a certain kind of ruefulness there it's like on the one hand i'm really glad that this fascist is is deplatformed on the other hand i think the grounds for his deplatforming are probably not as it probably it probably wasn't us that did it but just to walk through what happened in the milo situation because i think you're right it was a really important um it was a really important occasion and one that was very widely misreported, I think. I wish I could remember the dates now. Let's say, I think it was like November 2016, in any case, just after the election.

Milo Yiannopoulos gave a talk at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he deadnamed and attacked a transgender student whose name was Adelaide Kramer, whose photograph he projected on a wall. She was a student at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He projected a photo of her and encouraged the students to kind of mock her and make fun of her appearance and he referred to her um by her former name and using masculine pronouns that was very very very clearly and we knew this before bostock versus clayton county very very clearly a violation of Title IX, except that Title IX requires repeated violations in order to be actionable. So in other words, when Milo Yiannopoulos treated Adelaide Kramer in that way, it became not merely possible, but legally necessary for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos

from speaking on that campus again. When he went on this tour, he went around the country doing the same thing to trans women in different places. But as long as he only did it a single time through this crazy loophole, there was nothing that could be done under Title IX. So the agitation was around, night. So the agitation was around, we do not want this person to come to our campus and violate the personhood and dignity of one of our own students, as he has done in every other case. And we think it is crazy that we have to let him do it one time in order to prevent him doing it a second time. Now, to me, that was a strong case. And it was a case that the university could have used to require or to request controls on his conduct when he came to campus and we also think it was a request that the Berkeley campus

Republicans, Berkeley College Republicans could have honored if they wanted to without violating their commitment to free speech and in fact I believe that I persuaded a couple of the Berkeley College Republicans of that position in negotiation with them. But of course, it wasn't them pulling the strings. They didn't. At one point, I said, you know, to one of the Berkeley College Republicans, I was in conversation with them every day during that time. I said to one of them at one point, you know, could you just make sure that Milo's handlers understand the campus code of conduct regarding the proper address of transgender students and to make sure that he abides by community standards while he's on campus. If you can do that, I will call my tanks off this lawn. And his response immediately was,

we don't know how to get hold of him. And I thought that was absolutely staggering. The Berkeley College Republicans who were supposedly organizing this event didn't know how to get hold of him. They were just taking phone calls from whomever, from whatever unmarked number would call them and tell them Milo Yiannopoulos is going to come to town and this is what's going to happen.

Staggering. And it really gives the lie to the sense that this was like an organic conservative student group that was inviting people no they were an excuse for a militant band of far-right militias who were attempting to exploit conservative undergraduate students who are being scapegoated on all sides by the way I have you know I do not agree with the conduct of the Berkeley College Republicans in any sense but they were being made solely legally liable for situations that they should never have been legally liable for. And they allowed themselves to go along with it because, you know, they thought that the revolution was coming and the revolution just looked like the proud boys marching into town

and, you know, kicking the trans students and the immigrants out of Berkeley. I mean, it was reprehensible, but that was what was going on. Anyway, my point being, they didn't know what was happening. And what was really happening was a conversation about whether or not people had a right to misgender and deadname trans people on the campus. There was no ambiguity about that before the Bostock decision, but the Bostock decision makes very, very clear that they do not. So in other words, to see so many liberal academics, you know, writing long opinion pieces about how the best thing to do for free speech would just be to let my Leonopolis compete in the marketplace of ideas, blah, blah, blah, absolute bullshit. It had nothing to do with

ideas whatsoever. It had to do with conduct and it had to do with forms of address of transgender people. And it was another situation where questions around conduct and harassment were being conspicuously elided with questions around free speech. And it was profoundly dangerous. And part of the mess that we've gotten into now with Graham Linehan is a result of people thinking that the right to harass other people is somehow protected by free speech when it absolutely categorically historically has not been. stand against the conduct. I think that's a great way to separate it, like the conduct of somebody and sort of, you know, I haven't done this often, but I have taken these positions where I'm like, it seems to me like the right outcome here is that this person needs to be kicked off the platform. They're violating the terms of service, whatever. And the response that I get so often

from people is it's, you know, this isn't the government censoring speech. It's so it's not a free speech issue. And it seems like there is this binary now that has happened, which a lot of liberals are buying into a and also is like the go to defense, I think, on the right, which is like, you know, unless Joe Biden writes an executive order that Joe Rogan should be kicked off of Spotify, then it's not a, you know, we're not, this isn't like a free speech issue. It's just, it's getting so convoluted. And I'm wondering how to, you know, how to navigate or thread that needle of, you know, it doesn't matter. It doesn't always matter whether the government is involved in sort of limiting the speech of somebody. That might make it easier about whether this is a free speech question, but it's like this culture of free speech, I think, is also really important, which is something that

I'm sort of worried about is, you know, I don't want there to be a culture where the knee jerk reaction, the go to reaction is like suspend, de-platform, silence. But I also understand that sometimes like that's a necessary way to protect people. And it feels like this, I don't know, that tension just seems to be rising so much. It feels like we're hitting this point where everybody's almost talking past each other. And I don't know. I mean, I don't know how that plays out, but I definitely get the sense that there is a really solid, tangible image in a lot of people's minds that in order for someone's free

speech rights to be infringed upon, it must be coming from the government. And to be clear, I sort of mixed it up earlier. That is a position that a lot of liberals are taking now, which is like, you know, this person is not being silenced. The government isn't silencing them. And, you know, it's like, well, these platforms have a lot of power in the same way the government does. And there are all these questions about, you know, where those things meet. Well, in the case of UC Berkeley, you know, we are a public organization, when we make decisions to our obligations are absolutely enumerated by the First Amendment, like, you Amendment. What we were calling for was the extension of protection to our community.

It is perfectly reasonable. In fact, it is legally obligatory for the campus to ensure the protection of students and workers on the basis of Title IX. So we have a legal obligation to protect each other from harassment. obligation to protect each other from harassment. And it strikes me that that obligation should have extended to the case of Milo Yiannopoulos. Now, legally, it was complicated, and I acknowledge that. I heard a number of different opinions on how that would work. But it's very clear that the broader issue on the conservative side is to insist that harassment itself is protected by the doctrine of free speech. And that is such a profoundly damaging proposition for free speech. And if you care about building cultures of free speech,

then being able to distinguish between harassment and free speech and libel and free speech, it's very, very, very important. And the problem with the whole thing at the moment has been, you know, the erasure of those distinctions and the assumption that, you know, people have an indelible ability to refer to their trans students by whatever name and pronouns they most prefer to. No, we don't have a right to choose our students' name for them. That's got nothing to do with free speech. That has to do with the workplace protections against harassment and abuse. And again, to me, I hear what you're saying, right? So that there is a kind of broad question that we are defaulting to the perspective that it's okay to de-platform people on private platforms because these platforms are not

governmental organizations. And I understand what you mean because, in fact, of course, these organizations like Substack or like Twitter or like Spotify are in some ways acting like they are governmental organizations and have a power which in the past has been underwritten by governmental organizations. But this gets back to the problem that I was identifying before in the case of Substack, which is there is no legal authority to which they can possibly defer. So in other words, you know, Spotify and Substack and Twitter can say they're simply going to defer to legal authority in case of harassment and abuse.

But the reality is these organizations are transnational, and we simply don't know how to do that. So, you know, again, like, Berkeley left winger coming out here, and I guess, you know, my claims on liberalism are really falling apart at this point. But I think that the actual answer to this has very little to do with the current presentation of the problem. The actual answer is public ownership of media companies, because public ownership of media companies would in fact allow us to make public the grievance procedures, which would enable people to have faith that there were legitimate protections against harassment and abuse. And then we're sort of opening the can of worms of the government deciding, you know, or the government's legal system deciding what constitutes, you know, harassment or... The government does decide that.

Yeah, the government already decides that. It is simply that there is no government that can enforce those standards on social media platforms. standards on social media platforms. So it would in fact be a way of enforcing standards, which we supposedly uphold, but which in fact, you know, there is no jurisdiction in which these cases can be heard. It's so funny. I'm seeing like this, I'm seeing this bait in the water that I want to chase on this public ownership thing. But before we go down that route, I do really want to ask you about sort of this other element of, you know, how we want to build our platforms. Because, you know, to me, you are many things in this world and in this conversation. I've sort of been seeing a lot of your writing, the lens I've been seeing it through is like, you are somebody who has had these really sharp perspectives on how platforms should be conducting themselves. And it's a question that I am really interested in right now. And, you know, I guess

I'm curious, like, from your perspective, tear everything down about a platform like Substack, which I think you and I would both be able to agree has done a lot of good in the sense that it's giving writers livings. And, you know, I saw in your piece, even at the end of it, you sort of said, like, if you're on Substack, this is not me asking you to leave, like make that bread if you can make it. I, that's really important to my decision. I mean, writers are workers and I want to, I want to emphasize that too it's like i don't um i don't think that there was any possible grounds at this point for a kind of union

action because there's no collective interest there's no uh there should be and if there were public ownership there would be but but i can't see that working right now so we tear down the the content rules of substack and we're building them back up like you were grace is writing them do they look similar to how substack drew them up and your gripe is like we just need to enforce these rules is that i mean like is that close to the world that you would build i mean basically yeah i mean like thinking about it, there are a couple of things where I think that's kind of odd. Like they define hatred as threatening violence, which I think is threatening violence against an individual, which I think is an excessively narrow and in some ways misleading definition of hatred. since I think you can threaten violence against someone that you don't hate, and you can hate someone that you don't threaten violence against.

So I think that I have a little bit of a problem with that. But I also am aware, I mean, again, it's like, you know, why is Substack making rules about this? Because in fact, threatening violence against other people is very often a criminal offense. So the question is whether or not Substack have a legal obligation to refer such things to the cops. Another thing that I should say in this context, because of course, once one starts talking about this, one starts talking about everything, but I have made many public commitments to abolition. I do

not believe in the criminal code. I do not believe that people should be sent to prison for threatening violence against each other. I don't believe people should be sent to prison at all, under any circumstances. But again, it's like, why is this company trying to make this claim about hate and how it won't tolerate threatening violence against another individual? I think the answer is probably because it has a legal obligation to prevent threats of violence against individuals anyway, and it's trying to make it look like it's a freebie. And it't it isn't a freebie it's just simply what they're obliged to do anyway but but to answer your question directly yes no i do i do think i think that i think the terms and terms are fine yeah it's interesting i mean the i guess the question that is sort of

coming up now as well as apart from harassment a kind of, you know, parallel thing that's happening in the public sphere is this debate about misinformation or disinformation and how to limit it. I'm interested, you know, I assume you're familiar with the contours of a lot of those conversations. The big one this past week was around Joe Rogan and Spotify and whether Spotify should be removing or labeling his content where he's bringing people on to talk about ivermectin or that the COVID vaccines are bad or whatever. I mean, platforms have that question in front of them too is like, okay, now we're talking about a public health crisis where somebody whose podcast episodes get 10 million listens every time

they post something do we need to be as a platform do we need to be regulating that or should we sort of step back and say it's okay for you know these far fringe ideas to be broadcast on this platform my position over the Joe Rogan Spotify thing was mainly that I preferred they stayed out of it because, you know, I don't listen to Joe Rogan a lot. But from my understanding is he has had a huge wide range of people on his show for everyone from like Sanjay Gupta all the way to the, you know, Dr. Malone, who's like this guy that's saying the vaccines are this really insidious, you know, big pharma scam, basically. And, you know, I guess I'm interested where you land on a question like that, because I think that is a, you know, a free speech censorship ish question.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess it is. And I'll say a couple of things about it. But I think the first thing I want to say is like, you know, when it comes to Joe Rogan, what I'm really struck by is that this is a person who had 57 episodes of his podcast pulled because he'd been using the N-word and other racial slurs in them. And to me, that is, again,

a straightforward situation where it's possible to talk about harassment and abuse and hateful conduct in ways that are a little bit different to questions of censorship. So, you know, I mean, I'm also like slightly more annoyed than usual about all of this today because there's been, you know, on the trans Internet over the last couple of days, it's kind of absurd, ridiculous drama over Adele, the singer Adele saying at the Brit Awards that she enjoyed being a woman. And for some reason, you know, a group of like anti-trans activists online, seemingly jokingly said, oh, I bet trans people hate this because you're not allowed to say that

anymore. And so they all started saying to each other, oh my God, you can't say anything anymore. I bet they hate Adele. And then all of a sudden the news started reporting that trans people were angry with Adele, which nobody was at all. Everybody was, you know, it's delightful, but Adele feels happy to be a woman. And the reason why this comes back to Joe Rogan

is because Joe Rogan did 15 minutes today, or maybe yesterday, but I think it was today, explaining that, you it was it was wrong of trans people to get angry at adele and in fact again nobody had gotten angry at adele it was simply this kind of bizarre information mix-up and you know it was weird but i spent the entire time thinking i hope adele doesn't think anyone's mad at her like no one's mad at her but anyway that's my that's my like first thought about joe rogan you know i have to say and i realize this is a kind of um a dodge in some ways because there

are political issues too but you know when it comes to stuff around vaccine treatment i'll say what i'll say two very basic and i hope fairly banal things one of them is that i'm not qualified to comment on any of the scientific questions i try to be really careful as a scholar about what I am entering into and especially when I engage in sort of public discussions which go a little bit further away from my research than is always advisable you know I feel on safe ground so far but were I to start talking about vaccine safety I would feel like I would be making a mockery of my colleagues who really uh do that work and do it so well so um you know I will simply say uh I'm not qualified to judge on the science in a kind of broad uh intellectual

sense uh as a kind of believer in academic freedom I would tend towards uh a kind of more um left libertarian perspective on these kinds of things. I would say that I wouldn't want perspectives to be shut down on the basis of a kind of scientific disreputability. However, I don't want to make that a hard claim or to say that there are no exceptions to it. I can imagine public health exceptions to it. I can imagine the exceptions to it on any number of bases. So that's a kind of general tendency, but it's, it's sort of, it's the sort of thing where I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about the particulars of this case. So I, I feel like I probably shouldn't. So we started this conversation pretty narrow and we've kind of been zooming out. And so, uh, you know, we're,

we're coming up on time here a little bit. So I'm going to zoom out really big here, which is I'm just curious about your read or your feeling about the state of free speech in America, because, you know, I think a lot of people obviously on the right seem like this is a really critical inflection point and that we are headed into a really dangerous territory where censorship and free speech limits are building and building and building. And in having this conversation with you, I'm getting this sort of like a really fascinating kind of opposite perspective of like, no, actually, we're like, not enforcing some of the very basic things that we need to do in order to make free speech what you know, like the best version of

itself. And so I guess I'm interested, you know, just, I guess how you react to that general question, like, not just the legality stuff, but also just the culture, you know? No, I mean, I totally, I'm grateful for an opportunity to answer that. You know, the biggest threat to cultures of free speech in the United States today is an attempt to blur lines between freedom of expression and targeted harassment of individuals. That has been a deliberate and strategic policy that the Republican Party under Donald Trump has been prosecuting since 2015, when he's, you know, as a very successful political campaign strategy, you know, targeted individuals on the basis of often wild and outrageous personal libels, and which is now being normalized up and down the

line, such that, especially in relation to trans people and especially in relation to issues around critical race theory, somehow rights to speak abusively to and about other people in ways that would otherwise be considered tortious or harassing or libelous are being included under the rubric of speech that should be protected. Now, the reason why that is bad is because it actually makes us all collectively less free to speak our minds. And what I would just urgently, what I would urge people to do is really reflect on the important differences that exist between the expression of views in a way that is forthright, powerful, perhaps slightly obnoxious. I'm capable of all of these things, and I very much enjoy being obnoxious from time to time, and the targeted harassment of individuals. And if we can just get that straight in our head,

then there's no reason why we can't experience the internet as a space of deregulated freedom. But at the moment, things seem to be going very strongly in the other direction. And that was why it was time for me to leave Substack because it seemed to me that they were conspicuously blurring that distinction on the basis of a shady legal and commercial interest. And it's just too dangerous. It's just too dangerous to go along with. It's vital that we understand these differences and that we protect them. I love it. Okay.

So before we let you go, I promise I'd give you a moment to plug your book that's coming out, your memoir, Please Miss. I know we basically probably, I think, actually, I don't know this, but we just talked about a lot of stuff that I assume is not the topic of your book but maybe it is let me say something about that which is that you know I'm a trans woman and I'm talking about my transition in my memoir and as a trans woman who has like gone through the bizarre and disorienting experience of saying to everyone in my life I think I'm like gonna have to use a new name. And like, I am going to take feminizing hormones, I've come to this totally different understanding myself. You know, I have a really profound investment in the notion that language could

be a vehicle for freedom. And so in fact, you know, although this is a story about a person undergoing a sex change, and the story about someone getting sober from alcohol and drug addiction, it's also a story about people using language freely and learning how to communicate and practice freedom in speech. And so that's not, it's not an argument. It's not a, it's not a theory of free speech, but I think it is a practice of free speech. And it, it is a text that is not possible without free speech. free speech. And it is a text that is not possible without free speech. I love it. Grace Lavery, Please Miss is the name of the book. You can find it online. It's officially available, which has produced a crazy week for her. And I'm so glad that we were able

to reschedule this interview and make this conversation happen. Grace, thank you so much for the time and for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. happen. Grace, thank you so much for the time and for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal

web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.