The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose The critically acclaimed journalist and bestselling author of The Rage of a Privileged Class explores one of the most essential rights in America—free speech—and reveals how it is crumbling under the combined weight of polarization, technology, money and systematized lying in this concise yet powerful and timely book. Named one of Newsweek’s "25 Must-Read Fall Fiction and Nonfiction Books to Escape the Chaos of 2020" Free speech has long been one of American's most revered freedoms. Yet now, more than ever, free speech is reshaping America’s social and political landscape even as it is coming under attack. Bestselling author and critically acclaimed journalist Ellis Cose wades into the debate to reveal how this Constitutional right has been coopted by the wealthy and politically corrupt. It is no coincidence that historically huge disparities in income have occurred at times when moneyed interests increasingly control political dialogue. Over the past four years, Donald Trump’s accusations of “fake news,” the free use of negative language against minority groups, “cancel culture,” and blatant xenophobia have caused Americans to question how far First Amendment protections can—and should—go. Cose offers an eye-opening wholly original examination of the state of free speech in America today, litigating ideas that touch on every American’s life. Social media meant to bring us closer, has become a widespread disseminator of false information keeping people of differing opinions and political parties at odds. The nation—and world—watches in shock as white nationalism rises, race and gender-based violence spreads, and voter suppression widens. The problem, Cose makes clear, is that ordinary individuals have virtually no voice at all. He looks at the danger of hyper-partisanship and how the discriminatory structures that determine representation in the Senate and the electoral college threaten the very concept of democracy. He argues that the safeguards built into the Constitution to protect free speech and democracy have instead become instruments of suppression by an unfairly empowered political minority. But we can take our rights back, he reminds us. Analyzing the experiences of other countries, weaving landmark court cases together with a critical look at contemporary applications, and invoking the lessons of history, including the Great Migration, Cose sheds much-needed light on this cornerstone of American culture and offers a clarion call for activism and change. Ellis Cose has been a longtime columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, and is the former chairman of the editorial board of the New York Daily News. He began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today. Cose has appeared on the Today show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC World News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, and has won numerous journalism awards including four National Association of Black Journalists first-place awards. Cose is the author of Bone to Pick, The Envy of the World, the bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class, and several other books.

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are over there today we have a most amazing author he's written an incredible book he's written many books actually to, to his credit. This new book that he just has out is called The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America. His name is Ellis Coase, and he is the author of a dozen books on issues of national and international concern, including the best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class. Coase is a widely respected journalist who serves as a columnist and contributor of Newsweek, editorial page chief for the New York Daily News, a fellow at the National Research Council, National Academy of Science, a fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies,

a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, a fellow at the Center for Free Speech and Public Engagement of the University of California, and a contributor and columnist for numerous major publications, including USA Today and Time. Coase has appeared on the Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, PBS Time to Choose, Election Special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talkback Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He lives in New York City. Welcome to the show, Ellis. How are you, my friend? I'm great. I'm delighted to be here with you, and thanks for having me. It's an honor to have you on the show.

You have an extraordinary number of books that you've taken and written. How many total, by the way? It's 12. That's not counting some of my academic treatises, but it's 12 commercially published books. It's wonderful to have a brilliant author on here. I'm still trying to write my first book. So congratulations, sir, on putting this book out in your 12th. So give us your plugs, where people can find you on the interwebs and order of the book. Well, my website is just my name is Ellis, E-L-L-I-S, Coase, C-O-S-E, EllisCoase.com. I'm on Twitter at Ellis Coase. And that's probably all you need to know.

There you go. So, Ellis, what motivated you to want to write this book? This is actually the second book that I've published this year. The first book was a book called Democracy If We Can Keep It, which is a history of the American Civil Liberties Union. And in working on that book, which is a history of the ACLU, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, I inevitably got into a lot of issues of free speech because that's what they're known for. And originally, actually, I thought I would deal with the whole subject of free speech within that book. And that would just have a final chapter that sort of gives the history of free speech and how we got to where we are now. And I

decided that that was really too ambitious, that free speech deserves its own book. And so I finished that narrative history, which is, like I said, a hundred year history of the ACLU, and which becomes a hundred year history of America, basically, and decided to focus just expressly on free speech. And I also happened to be, as you mentioned in the lead-in, I was a fellow at the University of California Center for Free Speech and Public Engagement. And one of my duties there was to give a lecture at the law school. And the lecture at the law school basically became the basis for this book. And it was a sort of deep look into why we have free speech, how it came about, and how it's evolved in America.

So you've detailed that in the book, and that's kind of mostly the scope of the book, would you say, then? Yeah, that's the scope of the book, and with a particular emphasis on some of the modern issues, because part of my theses is that the First Amendment, as crafted by the founders, and it was part of the, it was the First Amendment, so it was ratified in 1791, has taken some interesting turns. And what we have now as free speech is not really what the founders thought they had created. And it's evolved very much, particularly since World War I. So let's talk about that evolvement.

And there's a lot of misunderstanding about free speech, too, which is kind of extraordinary to me, given we should or Americans were supposed to know what free speech is. But maybe it's because of the complicated history that you outlay in your book is part of that. How has it evolved over time? Well, just referencing back one of the questions that you just raised, actually, about our misunderstanding of it, it is very interesting. There's a Harris poll which came out about roughly a year ago, and it was asking about American support of free speech and free press. And in response to that poll, 89% of Americans said they believe in a free press. Ninety one percent of Americans said they believe in free speech.

Another question on that poll asked, should President Trump be empowered to shut down news institutions with which he disagreed? And roughly a third said, yes, he should be. So clearly those two ideas are in conflict. You can't both support a free press and also support the president being able to shut things down if he doesn't like what they're writing or what they're publishing. So part of my motivation was the sense that Americans, even though we revere free speech, even though if we ask us, over 90% of us say we support it. In actuality, many of us don't understand what it is historically and don't understand what it is legally. The other thing that I thought is, that I think is worth,

you know, just noting, you know, is that the free, you know, originally the constitution, which the convention met in 1787, when they were considering these issues, they considered having a bill of Rights and then decided they didn't need one. They decided they didn't need one because a Bill of Rights is to guard your rights against protection by an autocrat or by someone who might oppress you. And their reasoning was, well, wait a minute. This is our country. We're putting together this constitution. We don't need a Bill of Rights to protect us against ourselves. So the Bill of Rights came later. And as I said, it's part of the first set of amendments,

largely because James Madison pushed the idea. And so there was never a huge intellectual or political commitment at that time to the Bill of Rights, even though the words were there. And right away in 1788, 1798 rather, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, which basically tossed out free speech. I mean, at that point, you could be prosecuted and jailed for speaking out against the Federalist government. You could be punished for having strong public opinions against officials. And that was all sort of thrown out once Thomas Jefferson came in in 1800. But the idea that we actually did have the right to say what we wanted to, even in political speech, didn't take hold until a century after that. And one of the examples I like to use is that throughout much of the 19th century, it was illegal to advocate against slavery in the South for two reasons.

One, of course, obviously, slaveholding states didn't want that. But two, because the First Amendment as written didn't even apply to the states. I mean, the language of the amendments is Congress shall make no law. And Congress by implication being the federal government. So if states pass laws which say you can't talk about this, you can't speak about that, they were perfectly within their rights. That did not change until the 1920s wow i learned something new today yeah that's just extraordinary i mean just the the more i learn about the south and racism and and a lot of the great authors we have on the show oh my god wow well well there was a very interesting case uh that that case was a a case called gitlo v. New York. And Gitlo was a

communist, self-proclaimed communist. And he had published a sort of communist manifesto in his newspaper and was brought up on state charges against the New York Insurrection Act, as in effect. And the courts upheld his conviction, and it was upheld all the way through the Supreme Court, actually. But at the same time, even as they upheld that conviction, and they came down with the decision, as I mentioned, 1925, they said, well, wait a minute. This is a state law. Does he even have free speech rights under state law? And they said, you know, I think we think he probably should. And they decided at that point that because of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, that states should be covered by the First Amendment. Before that, they weren't. And so it was only then that they made the First Amendment binding on the states.

And we've had that ever since. But all that to say, and that, of course, was after World War I. And there were a whole series of reasons why this became a big issue in the aftermath and during World War I. But until then, it was just a given that you couldn't speak out against, say, the war during World War I. You couldn't speak out against the draft. There was a huge prosecution of a prominent left-leaning union at the time, the IWW,

called the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. I'm sorry. But they were tried in one courtroom. They indicted 166 members of the union, had the largest, physically largest trial up to that time. And I think even up to now, I mean, they didn't get all 166 because some had disappeared and some they couldn't find. But by the time the case came to court, there were still over 100 people crowded in one courtroom and they were charged under the espionage and the Sedition Acts, basically for speaking against the war, speaking against World War One.

And they were all convicted and they were given pretty heavy sentences. So out of that turmoil came this question of, wait a minute, we have a First Amendment. It ought to mean something. It ought to mean, at the very least, you can criticize your government. You can't, you know, organize violence against the government, but you can certainly criticize the government. And if it doesn't mean that, it doesn't mean anything, you know. And through a whole series of cases, which I'll be glad to take you through if you want to, but through a whole series of cases, it was decided that the First Amendment really should be something meaningful. And little by little, decision by decision, we came up with the approach to the First Amendment that we have now and that most people almost you know people thought think that we've had forever but we really haven't this is one of the great things i love about books like yours

and the education that they deliver uh we've had a lot of people on the show and and and talking about history and how as america uh we have this we have this whole like you know zigzag i think as obama would put it uh we have this whole weird of just trying to find out who we really are and what the rules are. Like, for example, the same sort of principle would apply to all men are created equal. When I put that in the constitution was for white landholders, you know, no women, no one of minorities, you know, it, it didn't stand up to the true test. So it's interesting.

The same thing was applying for hundreds of years, I guess, and the 13th and 14th Amendment. from the South. They gave the South additional representation because it had slaves. And they counted, as I'm sure you are aware, they counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for purposes of the census. And then they gave the population count that came from that. They took that into the calculations for apportionment. So until after the Civil War, the South had more power in terms of its population because they counted enslaved people

in terms of their apportionment of Congress people. And that, of course, also dictated the Electoral College, which was based on the apportionment of Congress, you know, and the Senate. So what the irony is that people thought, OK, when we when we end slavery, you know, with the other combination of the Emancipation Proclamation and the various Civil War amendments, then we make things more equal again. But what happened, of course, was you got intense voter suppression and that even though blacks were legally entitled to vote in the South, throughout most of the South, they really couldn't. But at that point, the three fifths rule went out the window. And so they were counted as whole persons for purpose of enforcement.

But again again the voting power of that was given to the whites who could vote and so we have this you know this strange sort of thing that has followed us through a lot of american history and that accounted actually for a lot of their the precedents we had up until the civil war i'm glad i wasn't born back in that time but i often really wish the way i dream and think of things from a John Lennon imagined point of view that I really would like to maybe have been born 100 years later than this. But I don't know if it could be worse. So one of the things I think you start on your book is you draw on several examples of different legal things with the ACLU and protection of free speech. And I think it starts with Charlottesville, doesn't it? The book begins, you know, it's framed by Charlottesville, which was what,

three years ago now, I guess. And that was interesting for a lot of reasons. Part of why it was interesting, you know, to me is that having written the history of the ACLU, I'm well aware of a previous case that almost destroyed the ACLU. You know, in 1978, there were a group of neo-Nazis who decided that they wanted to march in Skokie, which is a suburb of Chicago. And at that time, Skokie was heavily populated by survivors of the Holocaust. And so once these Nazis decided that they were going to march there, the city responded by passing a bunch of ordinances, which prohibited the kind of march they wanted to have, prohibited the wearing of certain types of regalia and certain other things

that would have barred them from marching. Well, the ACLU going back actually to the 1930s had a record of defending hate groups. And I'll explain why they had that in a second. So the Nazi group went to the ACLU and they said, well, you defend our right to have this march in Skokie. And the ACLU did. And when I say it almost destroyed the organization, it got intense criticism, actually unanticipated because they had done that before, but're not going to support the ACLU if you're supporting these idiots walking around saying these hateful things. And out of that, the ACLU essentially, and their contributions dropped off, their membership dropped off.

And the ACLU basically said, OK, we're in a crisis. How do we deal with this? And they decided, in effect, to double down. And the guy who had led the defense effort of the Nazis was a guy named David Goldberger, a Jewish guy, who had faced criticism in his own synagogue for doing so and who had been under a lot of heavy pressure. And they basically came up with this idea. They said, well, David, why don't you write a letter explaining why, despite the fact that you're Jewish and you have antecedents who were destroyed in the Holocaust, why you decided to take this case. And he did. And his defense in brief was essentially this.

He said, look, I'm defending civil rights workers all over the country. I'm defending the marshers in Selma. I'm defending all of these people. And Selma would love to do what Skolke is doing. They would love to pass these laws that are prohibiting people from speaking out and people from marching. But I can't defend them there and not defend it here. I can't defend government cracking down on free speech in Selma, but think it's OK if they crack down on Nazi speech in Skolke. And people bought it.

It became, that letter became the most successful fundraising letter that the ACLU had ever done up to the time. And so it's been sort of bedrock ACLU philosophy since then that, you know, that they support hate speech. So you flash forward to Charlottesville in 2017, and this guy, David Kessler was his name, decided he was going to have a big rally, what you call Unite the Right rally. And at that point, Charlottesville was already tired of these. I mean, it had become sort of a lightning rod because Robert E. Lee Park, named for the Confederate general, of course, had been renamed.

They were renamed the Emancipation Park and they were talking about taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. And this really enraged these guys who really like Confederate statues and like Confederate heroes. And so they have been a march already by another sort of neo-Nazi type group. And they have been a march even before that by another sort of white supremacist group. And so this is going to be the third march in a fairly short period of time in Skokie and Skokie, not Skokie, rather in Charlottesville. And Charlottesville said, look, we realize there's a First Amendment. So you guys can have your march, but you have to have it in this park. You can have it like at a park not so centrally located that's easier to police, that has more space, and that'll make life just easier for everybody.

They said, no, we need to have it here. Otherwise, you're violating our free speech rights. And they went to the local ACLU, the legal director of which happened to be a young black woman. And they said, you know, we want to have our speech. Will the ACLU defend us? And of course, just relying on a ACLU president, she said, sure, we will. And so they did. And because of that, they got the right to march, held the demonstration in the park they wanted to. In point of fact, that march never took place. I mean, these four people, not only were they Nazis and she was shouting pretty weird, disruptive stuff. They also, many of them were armed. I mean, Virginia is a right to carry state. So a lot of them came up, came armed, seemingly prepared for violence. The morning of the supposed rally, there was so much confusion, so much portents of violence that basically the city just shut the thing down. They said, this is just too dangerous.

We're not going to go ahead with that. So they called off the march or the demonstration before it actually took place. But there was a young man who had come down who was an admirer of Hitler. And he decided he was going to have his say. And his say was to plow his automobile into a crowd. There was a young woman um who got killed as a result um and it was a tragedy and so it created a whole new crisis for the aclu um and particularly young people particularly um people of color were saying why in the world are

we defending these idiots you This makes no sense. And I went through a period of soul searching again to dealing with that big question. Is hate speech worth defending? And they decided, again, on the principle that it was, even though they put some in some restrictions as to when they would consider these kinds of cases and made it perfectly clear they would not defend groups that seemed to be intending to engage in violence. But it's one of these perennial issues. And it's an issue that goes to the heart of the whole free speech debate, which is, you know, if you do believe in free speech,

then where do you draw the line? And there are always lines being drawn, but the question of where you draw the line is never clear. At the Republican convention, you had one speaker after another, for instance, declare the Republican party, you know, the party of free speech. And it was very interesting because what they were responding to, and they were talking and they were speaking against cancel culture, you know, which is obviously piling on somebody because of what they have written or said and basically sort of writing them out of the human race, so to speak. And they were upset because a lot of far right wing speakers had been disinvited on various

college campuses or they had been met with protests. And they said, see, we support free speech. You guys should not be opposing this stuff. So what should be permitted, what should be allowed, obviously, is very much dependent on how you come to the issue and where you stand. But part of what it says is that even now, we aren't in agreement on how we regulate speech. And speech always is regulated. You can't scream fire in a crowded theater. Yeah.

You can't show child pornography. There are, there are kinds of speech which everyone agrees in effect should be prohibited. And I think the big question raised by internet culture and by modern times is okay, where are the lines drawn now? How do we decide what should be permitted, what shouldn't be permitted? And if things shouldn't be permitted, who makes that decision? Is it made by government or is it made by somebody else? And so I think we have a whole series of issues that we didn't used to have before and that we, as we sort of rethink what we are in the question of speech. So your book talks about all these different elements. Now, it says the death of free speech in your research and what you've gone into in the book.

Sure. Do you think we're at a dying position of free speech or are we just at that place where we need to refigure out what this is and how it works or how it should work for us? Well, I use the phrase intentionally, but I also admittedly, it's a little bit hyperbolic. I mean, we still have the right to free speech. But part of what I argue is that that right doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't exercise it. And that today, particularly since the what's called Citizens United decision of 2010, which that is open to the money class. Because I'm not in a position

to take out big TV ads advocating something, but big corporations are. People who have PACs behind them are. And so, and there's been a lot of research on this. What we now know is that politicians as a group, it makes perfect common sense though, but they as a group are much more likely to listen and to make policy on the basis of who funds them than on the basis of who votes for them. And so in that sense,

part of the argument is our speech has been eroded because we can't use it. We also have an epidemic of voter suppression in this country. And I make the argument, which is a little bit controversial, but I make the argument that voting is a form of speech, you know, and that if you are not allowed to vote,

uh, then your right to speak in this democracy, or at least this democratic Republic, uh, republic, is curtailed in a way that just shouldn't be. The other way that I think that the right of speech has been infringed upon, and it really goes back to the rationale of why free speech is important. And that theory sort of was hammered out in a series of decisions through the 1920s and 1940s, sort of led by Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, you know, who basically argued we only have free speech or we have free speech because we want a healthy democracy. And in a healthy democracy, what do what is the function of speech? Well, the function of speech is to allow the hearing of all relevant ideas. And in this way, you have good ideas drive out bad ideas and you have truth that drives out lies. And ultimately, because of this, you have a more perfect union because you have a

union that has more integrity and that has heard the arguments and made its decisions. Well, we have something new now, partly because of political decisions and that have taken us to the era of Trump, though it didn't begin with Trump. We have endless lying. And the public is hard pressed to decide what's true and what's not true, particularly when the whole apparatus of government itself is serving in the interest of bolstering these lies. And so, again, you know, if the underlying philosophy that good speech drives out bad, that true speech drives out untrue speech, well, that's proving to be kind of naive. And then we also have Internet culture and social media culture in general, where people can have different facts than other people have. And the consequence of that is that, you know, people who are speaking untruths, who are basically just using propaganda or conspiracy

theories or what have you, have as big a voice as anybody. And so when I say that free speech is dead, what I mean is that the ideal articulated by Louis Brandeis, by Alvaro Wendell Holmes, this ideal that the truth will set you free, so to speak, it's just proven to be awfully naive. And we're having the death of that idea, which in some sense to me represents the death of the beauty of speech. So these are some really excellent points and brilliant discussion research that you brought up with us. How can we improve this situation? Is there something the Senate or law creating bodies can take and do for us? Yeah, I mean, part of the argument that I make is that the whole point of our democracy is to have a representative

form of government where all the voices are heard, or at least the voices of all the citizens are heard. That's funny, man. You are funny, dude. Well, that's the ideal. And we are far from that. And some of those are for reasons that just a political polarization and and what and what have you.

But part of a structural and I say that they argue that there are several structural things that make it very difficult for us to function as a democracy. course, is the Electoral College. And we just went through an election, of course. And it looks like Biden will have won by over 5 million votes by the time they're all counted. But it seemed for time very likely that Trump might actually win, even if he lost by 5 million votes. That's an obscenity that someone can, know and well hillary clinton lost by roughly three million votes or won by roughly three million votes and she lost why are we stuck with such a system which which fundamentally is a denial of the one man one person one vote rule and which is fundamental um denial of democracy well we're left with it because the founding fathers didn't trust us to directly elect our own presidents. And we're also left with it because of a system that gave disproportionate influence to smaller states.

But that also gets into the Senate. I mean, the Senate, of course, you know, 50 states, all of whom have two representatives, which might have made perfectly good sense back in 1890 when the largest state, which was Virginia, if you exclude the enslaved population, was only seven times larger than the smallest state, which was Delaware. But we now have a situation where the largest state, which is California, is close to 70 times the size of Wyoming. And yet they have the exact same representation in the Senate. So that means that the votes of a person living in California are worth a fraction of the votes of a person living in smaller states. And if you just do the math, we have a situation where one-sixth of the population controls the Senate. That one-sixth of the population is disproportionately rural, disproportionately

small states, and it's a lot less diverse than the other parts. But yet that part of the population controls what judges get approved, what cabinet officials get approved, and legal policy in general. That's just nuts in a democracy to allow one sixth to dictate to the other five sixths what you are allowed to do legally. And part of what I argue in my new book is that we ought to change that. I mean, we ought to change it by amendment. But if we can't change it by amendment, and again, it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek,

we ought to start moving people around. I mean, we ought to have the public agencies or nonprofits which say, OK, there was once a great migration which had a huge impact on the South. You had millions of African-Americans who moved from the South to the North and they fundamentally affected politics and a lot of other things in those cities that they moved to. Why not have another great migration to even out representation in the Senate and make it more representative? If you move like 2 million young people into Wyoming, that would be huge. It becomes a very different state. Why not give them incentives?

Why not have nonprofits that want young workers or that want minority workers in their states to provide an incentive for that. I mean, I make the argument, it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but probably to make a very serious point, which is that we have a system that on one level we say we really believe in one man, one vote, and on one level we really say that all votes should count and all voices should count in the society. But we have a system that structurally makes that impossible and that creates just the opposite. And the practical

result of that is that we've just seen it. I mean, we now have a Supreme Court that's totally out of whack with the American society. And the reason we have that Supreme Court is because we have a Senate that's totally out of whack with American society. And the reason we have that Supreme Court is because we have a Senate that's totally out of whack with American society and was willing to approve that court and sanction that court. So the question is,

do we really force the next generation? Because a lot of these new justices are very young, relatively speaking. Do we really force the next generation to be ruled by a court that has views totally unrepresentative of that generation, of that America? It's a big question. And I think it's one that goes to the heart of speech and to the heart of our democracy and one that we sure as hell need to figure out.

I love the word fraction that you took and used. You know, I've argued against the argued against the uh college since uh the electoral college since uh gore versus bush um and you know this is that trump was the second time i think our election has been basically stolen from the popular vote and uh but i love that word fraction because it really it really goes back to what we talked about earlier where in the constitution or in the following years they only gave minorities uh a three-fifths of the vote which when you say all men it's not equal one versus three-fifths is not equality um but uh but fraction definitely you know i i feel so much especially from being california nevada like we're just like uh death

held by the you know different parts of this country that are, have huge amounts of racism and racist issues. And, you know, it's, it's interesting when you look at the map of the U S especially with the most recent vote, you see the cities and you also see the education and you are actually, if you overly the education quality of the America versus the cities, they almost match in their colors and stuff. And most times in big cities, you see that. Also, what's interesting, you're talking about how people move in geography. There's a lot of people that are suggesting that because of Arizona kind of maybe flipping blue from what we're seeing is because so many Californians left

California and exodus from there into Arizona, Georgia. I've been seeing the maps on Georgia and their Metro areas have just been expanding. And as they expand, they become more. I'm glad you mentioned that because I find that fascinating. I mean, they actually, I just have a column which was published in USA Today yesterday, and looks at this whole phenomena of the Senate and the Electoral College in terms of where we're moving and where we came from. And what's happening with Arizona, what's happening with Nevada, and what may be happening with Georgia may be an indication of where we're headed. And it's not, even though I think the system is bankrupt, it may end up working very differently if we keep this system than the people who put it in place intended, which is to say

the states who decided to adopt winner-take-all electoral systems. And I'll just go through a very brief explanation of what that means. What it means, in essence, is that in terms of how electoral votes are counted, in all but two states, it's a winner-take-all system. So if the majority of Mississippi, the majority of Louisiana vote for a candidate, that candidate, whether he's Republican, gets all the votes, that candidate, if they're Democrat, gets all the votes. Well, how that's played out, particularly in the South, is that in terms of race, the voting is very racialized in the South. Blacks tend to vote Democratic, whites tend to vote Republican, and have since the 70s when there was, you know, as a result of the so-called

Southern deal, you know. And up until now, what that has meant is, well, let me just even get another layer of just factual information. Most Blacks in America live in the South. Close to 60% of Blacks in America live in the South.

Of the 106 counties, which are majority Black in this country, 105 are in the South. So you have this huge Black population, but yet at the same time, the Black population is not a majority in any states in the South. So you have the Black population voting Democratic, the white population voting Republican. So in state after state, once the votes come in, the states go Republican. And the blacks get totally not counted because they're not in the majority. What's interesting about how the South is evolving now is that because of the growing population of young progressive people, larger population of Latinos,

that's changing. And what you are likely to happen, what's already happened in Virginia, what's likely to happen in Georgia, what you're seeing elsewhere, you know, is that the combination of that minority population with progressive and younger whites ends up flipping these states blue that used to be red. So all these states that adopted winner-take-all systems because they thought they were going to lock the old way into place may be in for a surprise over the next few generations. But that's, I just, I think I find that sort of fascinating. We'll see how that develops and we'll see how it plays out in the Senate races in Georgia in January. But bottom line, the system we have now is insane in terms of how we are electing people,

because it's just not representative. And it just should not be that if one candidate loses more than 5 million votes, that candidate has a shot at becoming president because three states voted differently. And it didn't used to happen that way. I mean, before this current century. It only happened twice. It happened in 1886 and it happened in 1888 and it happened in 1876. And since

then, you know, in 1876, of course, brought us a compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction in the South and ended all hopes of Black equality in the South. It was a backroom deal that brought us to that. So it's never been a good thing to have these deals going on.

But yet in this century, we're barely one-fifth into this century. It's already happened twice and could have happened again with this time around. And that has a lot to do with how population is moving around. But the bottom line is that this is a crazy system. Yeah. And gerrymandering probably something contributes to that as well. You know, how they pick their voters. Sure.

They stick with areas where they know they can concentrate. And then they end up controlling. I'd read something. I don't know. I can't remember who put it out. It was one of the big newspapers. and then they end up controlling. I'd read something, I don't know, I can't remember who put it out. It was one of the big newspapers. But, you know, they basically said we're totally controlled right now,

especially in the Senate, by just maybe three or four states and three or four electoral things, and this whole thing is rigged. And we're seeing this dying power of the GOP that, you know, I forget the name of the gentleman who was the GOP. He was an African-American. I see him on MSNBC and he's part of Michael Steele. Michael Steele. And, you know, he really had to come to Jesus moment that he tried to get the GOP come to Jesus.

Yeah, that's really what they real Jesus. Let's put it that way. And and and come to Jesus moment that they need to open up to minorities. They need to quit being this racist party. Instead, they just double down and triple down, quadruple down. I mean, they have a problem structurally in terms of what they decided, because the Republican Party used to be the party of emancipation. It was the party of Lincoln. And up until even Eisenhower, the Republican Party got a very large share of Black votes. But the Nixon era brought in a change, and they decided

that they were going to get the segregationist vote. And the trade-off for that was that they adopted a lot of policies that alienated African Americans and other minorities. And that worked very well for them, and it continued to work, particularly because of the racialized voting patterns I talked about and the winner-take-all system in the electoral college. They were able to pick off all of these southern states. So they had every incentive to follow policies that were racially polarizing.

So you had generation after generation now where they have played more and more to that base. And so their base has increasingly been people who are anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti, you know, these other things. And it's hard for them to now suddenly adapt and say we're going to represent something else because it's not clear what they represent other than these marginalized values so should the aclu um do we really need to look at free speech because i know in germany i have friends that are german and you know they they have a lot of rules they put down after world war ii to regulate nazi speech and they recognize that there are certain speech that gives a penchant to towards violence uh we've seen

that of course like with you mentioned with charlottesville, where there's danger or where, you know, it just doesn't the Holocaust again or I'm doing Holocaust denial, which I think is a wink and a nod towards that without having to say it. You know, do we need to decide that that's bad, that things that lead to violence or destruction of other people is something we need to stop doing? Or what do you think in your research? I think it's something that we need to really think about a whole lot. We, of course, do have restrictions on speech. It is illegal to directly incite the violence, for instance. It is illegal, as I mentioned, to have child pornography. Going back all the way to 1942 when there was the so-called Fighting Words case.

I mean, that was a case coming out of New Hampshire, where a Jehovah's Witness was attacked by crowds as he was proselytizing, and the local constable didn't defend him. So he got angry at the local constable and called him a fascist and a few other names. And then the local constable arrested the guy and said, yeah, that's a form of assault. So he was convicted. The case goes to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided that the cop was right to arrest him. And they came up with a doctrine called fighting words is that there are certain words that are so offensive that if you say them, you can expect somebody to fight. You know, and therefore, you know, this conviction stands. That case is no longer really paid much attention to.

But, you know, but but it does underscore that there have always been limits on speech. And I think that what we need to do as a society is decide where those limits are going to be and who's going to make those decisions. I mean, ideally, the big problem in terms of some of this speech is really on social media, where you have this wild west, this unregulated, largely unregulated speech going on. And every now and again, they will make some token efforts to regulate it. But there's nothing in U.S. law or in the Constitution which says that a social media company has to allow all kinds of offensive speech on its site. In fact, they can say this is just not adhered to the rules of our site. If you want to be in our site, you need to be a little bit more respectful of other people and other groups.

And I definitely have no problems with social media doing that. I have no problem with social media regulating ads so that they're not just blatant lies about people. I mean, I criticized Zuckerberg early in the book because he took the position that it was quite okay for political campaigns to just tell blatant lies about their opponents. And the reason I criticize him, not just because I think that stance is kind of ridiculous,

but also because he cited Sullivan v. New York, which was a classic free speech decision in defense of his effort. He says that, well, I'm just following what they said in Sullivan v. New York. Well, Sullivan v. New York was a case that goes back to the 1960s and it grew out of the civil rights movement. And it involved police officials in Alabama who were criticized in an ad by associates of Dr. Martin Luther King. And in their ad, they explained what was going on in the South, that people were being beaten, that King's house had been bombed, that he had been arrested himself numerous times. And they appealed to the country to help them intervene. Well, public officials in Alabama didn't like that.

So they sued these people for libel and they sued the New York Times and ran the ad for libel. And that was the basis of the Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan was a police official who was behind the suit. And in Alabama State Court, the state awarded record judgments. They awarded half a million dollars to the police official. And then there were several other officials

also filing state. So these poor ministers who were sued along with with the new york times were facing debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars i mean some of them had to sell their cars you know to pay part of their their debt uh and they took so well and and of course the reason that the officials sued the newspaper is because they didn't want the Yankee press reporting on the outrageous things they were doing. And their case totally rested on some small errors of fact. I mean, the ad misstated, instead of being arrested seven times, as the ad stated, King had been arrested six times. There were small things

like that that they fixed on to call it libel. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided, yeah, you had to have, in order for this libel case to win, you have to have actual malice, which in legal terms meant you had to know this stuff was false and it had to be material and you had to print it anyway. And you had to have a reckless disregard for the facts. Well, that's very different than a political ad accusing Biden of being enthralled to Russia for this reason and that reason and the other reason, which are just blatant lies. So I thought it just offensive that Zuckerberg used his decision to not want to monitor that kind of speech simply because he wants to make money, you know, and try to hide behind a landmark free speech slash civil rights decision to do so. And interestingly enough, I mean, they're now modified their rules a little bit so that they are not quite as wild west as they used to be.

But I but I think there's a lot that needs to be done in that arena. And I think we don't quite know how best to regulate it yet. And it's probably not best done by government. But I think we need to sort of figure out how it is best done. You know, every time Mark Zuckerberg makes a post, I make it a point to jump on in his comments and call for his resignation like every time. You know, I mean, Peter Thiel and a lot of other conservative right-wing nutjobs, I'm going to call them, in my opinion. I'll probably get sued by Peter Thiel now or something. I've already bashed him as much as I possibly can. He's a public figure.

He can't really sue you. Anyway, go ahead. You never know. You saw what you did with Gawker, right? So there's that. But that was a little bit different. But anyway. I worry a little. But no, I call for his resignation. I mean, I think what we really haven't addressed is these social media networks.

And, you know, it's extraordinary to me, and I think this is something you talk in your book about how we need to resolve this as a people. Because clearly we're not, the Senate isn't getting it. But we need to resolve this as a people. We need to be educated better. We need to understand what's going on. It's just been amazing to me how many Americans don't understand the difference between private property and public property and how that derides towards free speech in its ability to constitutionally. People have no idea that there's actually a difference. Well, I think we, and part of what I say in the new book is that we really need to do a much better job at how we teach critical thinking. Because it's just too easy for blatant nonsense to be spread on the web and for people to view it uncritically.

There was a Stanford, there was a group of researchers at Stanford who had some students, some college students and also high school students. And they gave them various scenarios and information on the web. And they just saw how they would treat them as a factual matter. And they also gave them the resources to investigate some of these things. Most of the kids, young people, didn't investigate it. They took just ridiculous statements as fact because they were on the web. Even though they had the wherewithal with making a few extra clicks to ascertain that this was totally generated and falsified information. They didn't do that.

I think we need to do a much better job at teaching people to be skeptical because it used to be in the old days, you know, before the internet came along, whether you liked your local newspaper or not, and whether you like networks or not, at least there was a vetting process there. And they did not just let blatant falsehoods stand in those publications because they stood for it. They had a particular idea of journalistic integrity. That doesn't exist on the web. And if it doesn't exist we need to somehow figure out

what should exist so that people are not just subject to crazy theories crazy non-facts and then acting on them as if that's actually reality i think you're completely right um you know when when you're when i think what we need to realize what what you're saying is that the power of these social networks, especially with their AI-driven that's meant to manipulate, take people's emotions or whatever they're spewing out, and then help them find support groups to amplify that and other things, just takes it to another level of extraordinary uneditorial management uh you know one of the things i'm seeing right now a lot of my friends on facebook we're seeing uh people that they claim they're leaving facebook they're not but they're going to parlor if you're familiar with that app right website and i mean just conservative after conservative is just going to parlor and we're already having discussions of reconciliation with our fellow americans we're like okay we won do we reach out to them and how how do we start this discussion of trying to become americans again and settle back into some modicum of decency

um and respect for one another and non-bullying and and you know all this toxic stuff that trump has brought to the table um but instead they're they're going to parlor and they're doubling down. Like I've seen people saying, I'm not racist, but I'm going to parlor. And you're just like, I don't know, man, that doesn't sound like you're moving up the ladder. It sounds like you're going someplace. And we've seen, you know, what's come out of Gab AI, 4chan and 8chan. I mean, people are killed um this doesn't this doesn't go well i have a hidden account on parlor and i go on there

and i can only handle about five minutes to that place i mean it's just extraordinary not only the fiction and stuff like that but uh what what goes into uh how much hate there is i mean there's been i've seen a few screenshots of people, you know, calling for violence against liberals and people. PC, is that something you talk about in your book? Because that was something, you know, a lot of these folks are into. They hate PC, politically correct, because they have the hates in their hearts and they really don't like having to express it and they want to exert it and they feel that there's free speech right, if you will.

I don't go into it as such, but I go into it in the sense that I talk a lot, write a lot in the short life about the atmosphere on college campuses because that's what gets criticized so much. And when the Republicans were talking about how they're the free speech party, what they're really saying is that their message needs to dominate on college campuses as opposed to the message of these liberals. Because at the end of the day, PC is just a derogative term for describing stuff you don't want to hear and things you don't want to deal with, because one could say, well, so it's not PC when you insist that, you know, Democrats are radicals and violent, but it is PC when you have to say that they are something else. I mean, it's all a matter of opinion. And the Republican Party was particularly upset because, you know, say, you know, the event in the University of California

where Milo Yiannopoulos had a big event, and it ended up becoming violent because there were people from the community who came in and created an uproar. It was ultimately canceled. And even though the University of California had paid a few million dollars for security, he goes out and says they're not supporting free speech because they didn't allow him to make his speech. Well, they did invite him back, and he did have a chance to do his speech.

Nobody much attended and it was it was a flop. And so you didn't hear much about that. So I think that I think the whole PC objection is a manufactured argument. I mean, it's basically people saying we don't want to have to deal with these people talking about Black Lives Matter. We don't want to deal with people saying that diversity is important. But we do want to deal with them saying that. But we're perfectly happy saying that we ought to worship Confederate heroes. I mean, it's all a matter of what they want to hear. And to defend that as being an advocate of free speech is a little bit absurd, but that's what you have now.

And I think, I mean, I'm interested in your research or your opinion on this, but for me, being in the white folk country club, what I hear when I hear my fellow white people saying, you know, PC is bad and everything else. What they're afraid of is they want to say the hate that's in their hearts, but they're afraid of cancel culture. They're afraid that if they say the N-word, then, you know, they're going to lose their job and their life and, you know, their kids are going to lose their education, you know, and they're going to pay a price for it. And they don't want to have that.

They want to be able to say the hate that's in their heart. And that's kind of some of, on top of what you said about PC, the combination of that, I think, is really the thing. Because that's what I hear them saying. And that's why they love Trump is because Trump is the enunciator. He gives them license of that. But if you think about it just as a logical reality, I mean, society always has rules of behavior. And it's not called PC, for instance, if someone in a particular social situation is told,

you just can't stand up and call women the B word all the time. That's just being polite. That's just being considerate. If you have some point of view about women that you want to express and you can express it in a non-polemical way then sure you're free to express that and at the bottom line

you think that women are worse than men in some way well no one's going to prevent you from saying that because of some PC but there are just certain things that they don't like about, you know, I think you named it. I mean, they want to, certain people at least, you know, want to be free to express contempt for other groups and even hatred for other groups and then define that as a matter of free speech or as a matter of the PC police shutting them down, because there have always been consequences in society for people who say things that society has great disapproval of. It's just the particular things that are said.

Yeah. And I think you're right that we need to be better educated. My educated. I sound like I'm from public school. I am actually uh trump university and betsy devos public school uh the uh we need to be better educated my mom was a teacher for 20 years and she used to call me up and go the legislature's doing this they're taking money you know sometimes i would call her up and she'd be like yeah i just spent 250 bucks at the store to buy craft supplies and i'm like do you get reimbursed for that? She's like, no. And, and, and she would just keep telling me, you know, as they took away civics and sometimes history and band and all these different things from school curriculums,

she goes, we're, we're building a dumber society. And sometimes I watch the movie idiocracy and I'm just like, that's where we're going. In fact, I see a lot of Trump voters that are giving that, uh, turning that movie into a documentary on TikTok right now. So it sounds like, you know, somehow we have to fix the education problem. We have to fix this problem here that we have before us. I mean, one of the most alarming things of this election was not only how close we were, but how right I have been for four years that what Donald Trump has been really trying to do is drag us into being a racist nation. I mean, even worse than where we are, because there's no denying we have been that for 400 years or whatever. But trying to drag us into just a full on fascist sort of racist sort of persecution. I mean, I don't think there's any

limit to how far that man would go. Well, I guess I would not, I don't think there's any limit to how far that man would go. Well, I guess I would not say I don't think that's exactly what he's trying to do. But I think what he is trying to do is to make his career on the basis of white resentment. And that's the easiest thing for him to do. We're now in this period where a lot of people are worried and have been ever since the Obama presidency that other groups are taking over and are unsettled by that. And so as opposed to what a healer would do, which is to sort of explain this in rational terms to people and help people deal with a nation that's more diverse and that's not so totally dominated by, you know,

by one ethnic group. Donald Trump, of course, it's all political opportunity. And it began with the beginning of his political career, which was based on the so-called birtherism movement of painting, you know, Barack Obama as someone who wasn't an American citizen and therefore had an illegitimate presidency. And he's built on that. But that's part of the dilemma of the Republican Party at this point. I mean, since the 1970s, they have sold themselves as the party of white resentment. And there comes a point at which that becomes extremely not only just harmful to the country,

but counterproductive to them as a party. And I think they are reaching that point now where it's just counterproductive. And I think they don't know how to make a change. And part of why they don't know how to make a change is that they're now headed by an individual whose whole career is based on that. Yeah, I would agree with you. Every fascist leader has done that. I mean, they just find what the hot button is they can and they bring the crap out of it and unfortunately it it through groups it becomes this uh spiral down of where uh you end up sometimes with just sad destruction of people um but it would alarm me that more people voted for him uh which to me signals that

yeah we're we're good with the racism let's keep doing that thing let's do let's go all in you know they definitely support and I'm just like wow man I I thought we would be repulsed as a nation instead we've got more people who are like yeah let's do that well I think it's a little bit more complicated but I but I but I I think that there are a lot of people who are just republican and they consider themselves Republican and they're going to vote for the Republican candidate because they think that the Democrats are a bunch of socialists't move themselves to vote in another direction. But I also think that there is a much larger component of our population than we'd like to often admit that is comfortable with Trump's xenophobia, with his racism and with his dividing us. And I think we just have to sort of figure out how we deal with that in our society.

My hope is, I was looking at some maps and nothing's really finalized now because they're still counting votes, but I was looking at some maps evidently that show what the country look at in terms of black and red, or not black and red, red and um and and it shows the vote of if under 30 just control this country and voted and it was mostly blue and so you know the the like what you say with the gop my favorite line from no country for old men is uh you can't stop what's coming that's vanity and you know i've seen a lot of this sort of uh white uh you know loss of population as as minority groups grow in size and population of course to attain more voting power that we're will be a minority um and it's just it's just extraordinary to see

what's going on instead of just being better people to each other it's like well let's be let's double down and be even worse. Yeah. I think, I think that's irrational fear, but it's, but it's a fear that goes to the founding of this country. That's been around for a long time.

I mean, there's no reason to fear a country becoming less white. And there's no, there's no law that says it can't be a greater country than it's ever been. And it can't be a country that has better opportunities for all people than it's ever had. But we have politicians, and Trump is one of them, who get political advantage from basically saying we live in a zero-sum society. And if other groups gain something, we're losing something. So therefore, we have to fight these other groups and we have to be against them and we have to do these policies that try to keep them locked out. And you end up, as I said, with the situation that I think the Republican Party is in now, where it has to sort of remake itself if it's going to survive into the next generation. Yeah. And I think they see that they're at the edge of the precipice.

I mean, even Lindsey Graham recently said that, you know, they'll never be another GOP president if he concedes. But, yeah, they need to reinvent themselves. You know, the politics of scarcity, and like you say, instead of, you of – for me, a rising tide lifts all boats. We're a melting pot, and if we raise everybody up, there's so much of the contribution that comes from that. But if we always think in terms of scarcity, which people like Trump and the GOP play on, that, well, if you want something, you have to take it from the other guy and blah, blah, blah. Anything more we need to know about your book as we go out? No, I think we've done a pretty good job examining it.

And I think that for those who are looking for a good introduction to the whole arc of history in terms of our First Amendment and free speech and the issues that are important now and have been important historically. It's a short book. It doesn't take you very long to read, but it covers a lot of history and a lot of current events. And I think these books like this are so important. People need to educate themselves, and they need to be self-actualized. Like I've been in a lot of arguments recently with people like, well, the media is the problem. No, no, no, no. The problem is self-actualized like i've been a lot of arguments recently with people like well the media is the problem it's no no no no the me the problem is self-actualization

people need to read books like yours they need to educate themselves they need to empower themselves and then share it with other people and uh all that good stuff so i it's been wonderful to have you on the show else to share these wonderful topics with us and educate us more so we know better that's been great talking with you, Chris. Thank you very much, sir. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs and check out your book. Yeah, at Ellis Coast, Ellis Twitter. And EllisCoast.com is the website.

That's L-E-L-L-I-S-C-O-S-E, EllisCoast.com. There you go, guys. Check it out, The the short life and curious death of free speech in america take an order up at your local bookstores or amazon etc etc uh you can see the video version of this at youtube.com fortune is chris voss hit that bell notification button it's free for an unlimited time you can hit the bell notification i'll give you a very special warm feeling inside i guarantee it uh just don't call me for a refund. Anyway, go to thecvpn.com. You can start an online podcast.

You can go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See all the books we're reading over there and reviewing. And you can also go to facebook.com forward slash thechrisvossshow. Thanks to my guests for being with us. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. And we'll see you guys next time.