The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 78 - The War on "Hate Speech" is a War on Conservative Speech

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

The big tech giants have conspired to ban and shutdown Alex Jones. No matter how you feel about Jones, this is chilling. And it's just the beginning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So Alex Jones and InfoWorse have been banned from Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, also Spotify, I think some other platforms as well have gotten in on the action. And this all happened at once. This was within 12 hours, the three big gatekeepers of the internet, Facebook, Google, Apple, all decided to shut down Alex Jones. And there's just no way that that's a coincidence. There's no way that they all got up independently on Monday morning and said, you know what, I'm going to, I think we're going to ban Alex Jones today. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. No, this very much seems to be a conspiracy between the three big tech giants to censor Alex Jones. And listen, it doesn't matter how you personally feel about Alex Jones.

That should not have any bearing on the way you look at this story. Because hate them or love them, there's a precedent being set here that should concern everybody, especially conservatives. And you might say, Alex Jones isn't a conservative. He's a conspiracy theorist. Yada-y-a-y-a-a-data. Doesn't matter. That discussion doesn't matter. Because, you know what, in the minds of Facebook, Apple, Google, we're all the same.

You may draw a distinction between conservatives and Alex Jones. They don't draw that distinction. In their minds, we're all in the same boat. And that is, you know, I don't think that at this point, we can say that this is a First Amendment issue, at least not yet. These are private companies, and I have always affirmed the rights of private companies to do business the way they want, to do business with whoever they want. That's up to them, freedom of association. And I don't buy the argument that Facebook is a monopoly. And so, therefore, this is a First Amendment issue.

Facebook is not a monopoly. There are a million other social media platforms out there, and we could just as easily, this isn't like it's 1857, and somebody's got a monopoly on the railroads, okay? And so if you want to use a railroad, you've got no option. That's not the case here. There are a million social media platforms

that we could just as easily use any of them. We choose to go to Facebook. We could choose to go somewhere else, and it would require no effort. It's just a matter of clicking on a different app. So it's like instead of doing this, we do that. That's the amount of effort required to use a different social media platform. And if we decide that that is too much, like to bring our finger down here to the different

app on our phone, if that's just too much, that's too much effort, well, that's kind of on us. So it's not a monopoly. Facebook has two billion users, I think, because they all choose to use Facebook instead of something else. And so then Facebook can do what they want with their own platform. that we have all chosen to use. Now, that said, this could easily develop into a very serious First Amendment issue. And so let's look at Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, sent out a tweet yesterday in relation to this story.

And this is what he said. He said, Info Wars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it. So if you happen to be a constituent of Senator Chris Murphy, you may want to keep in mind come election time that he thinks the survival of our democracy depends

on the restriction of free speech. Maybe you agree with him. Maybe you're anti-American as well. But if you're not, you may want to keep that in mind. I don't see how any decent American could vote for a senator who would say something like that. Because now this is First Amendment. What he's saying, this is a government official, saying companies must do more to restrict speech that I don't personally like. And if he decided to officially get involved or if the Democrats officially got involved, said you've got to shut down this speech,

which we could very much, which we could certainly be heading in that direction, well, then it is. a straight-up war on the First Amendment. But either way, even if what's happening now is legal, that doesn't mean it's defensible, doesn't mean that it's rights, doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous, it is possible to do something legal yet bad that happens all the time in this country, and I think this is one of those times. Now, the justification for this, the basis that was provided is something we should be really concerned. Because all of these companies have claimed, in unison, that this is part of a crackdown on hate speech. Hate speech.

Let's think about hate speech for a minute. Because when the real war on the First Amendment begins, it will begin on this basis of we have to go after hate speech. And I think there are going to be a lot of, frankly, very stupid Americans who will say, well, I mean, that's okay. If it's hateful speech, I mean, how can I have any problem with that? Of course we got to get rid of hate speech. We have to get rid of all the hate speech and leave only good speech.

I mean, you know, that's what the First Amendment meant to protect is good speech, not hate speech. Well, hate speech is a nonsensical, ambiguous phrase by design. It's ambiguous because the people who use it want to be able to apply it to whatever. So it's a lot like a hate crime in that case. In fact, let's step to the side for a minute because I think it helps us to understand hate speech. Let's think about hate crime, okay, first of all. The whole problem with a hate crime, with the category of hate crime, is that any crime could be motivated by hate. It doesn't make any sense to say, well, we have this special category of crime that's motivated by hate,

that any, almost any crime that's ever been committed in the history of mankind could have had some hatred involved in, right? Or maybe not. And you can't really know whether there was hatred behind the crime or not. Because hatred is an emotion, it's a passion, it's a feeling. How can you prove what emotions went into a crime? And more importantly, why does it matter? What difference does it make? If I were, look, if I were to key your car or slash your tires, because I hate you or because I hate the demographic that you belong to. And then I'm on a crime spree here. So then I go to your neighbor's house and I kill him because I want to steal his TV.

I'm sure that you would agree that you got the better end of the bargain, even though you were the victim of the hate crime. My crime against you was motivated by hate. My crime against your neighbor was motivated by greed. But in that case, the greed crime is worse. So there are motivations that can lead us to do worse things. If anything, even take two crimes that are the same. Let's take two murders.

Okay. Let's say I kill you because I hate you. And then let's say I kill your neighbor because I want to steal his TV. Well, I would say even then, the crime against you is bad, and I should go to jail for it, obviously. but it's actually slightly less bad. It's evil. It's not even, it's not quite as evil as my crime against your neighbor,

I would say. Because you, I was angry, I hate you, I kill you. Terrible. I should go to jail forever. But your neighbor,

I just was totally indifferent to his life. I just, I wanted his TV and his life meant nothing to me. Total indifference. And in that case, when you kill somebody because of total indifference, and so you're willing to kill them over their shoes or the TV, I think that makes you a bigger threat to society.

That makes you a more dangerous person. And the possibility of reforming a person like that is probably less likely than reforming someone who commits a, quote, hate crime. So treating hate crime as the worst possible thing just doesn't make sense. I think a similar thing is the case. with hate speech. Hate speech is not an objective category of speech. Hatred is a motivation. It's a feeling. It's a passion that can motivate speech. But you can't prove it. Hate speech, when you say hate speech, that is an accusation. You're accusing somebody. It's an assertion,

an accusation. It is not in itself a proof. When you call something hate speech, you are in based on your own subjective analysis that hatred was the motivation behind the speech. When you say, let's ban hate speech, what you mean is let's ban speech that, in my opinion, nobody could possibly express unless they're hateful. But that's obviously arbitrary and subjective and impossible to prove. And when you try to enforce something like that, it is going to be enforced on a partisan, uneven basis. There's no way around it. And we know that the left has already determined that nobody could ever, for instance, critique transgenderism or gay marriage or abortion or feminism or affirmative action, et cetera, et cetera, unless they're hateful.

So just like that, all non-liberal speech is hate speech. But the problem is... Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference.

Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. when you call something hate speech, especially if you're using that phrase to describe a political opinion that somebody expressed, all you're really revealing is that you don't understand. You can't sympathize with that point of view. I think most of the time when someone says, that's hate speech. What they're really saying is, I can't sympathize with that because they don't understand. Using the gay marriage example, leftist belief, that any opposition to gay marriage is hateful. It's all hate speech because they just can't wrap their head around. They cannot sympathize with the opinion that gay marriage is not a legitimate form of marriage. They can't sympathize with that opinion. However, those of us who hold that opinion, we know that it's got nothing to do with hate.

We don't have any hate in our hearts about it. This is just a matter of observing. and defining what marriage inherently is. You can disagree, you could say that that opinion is wrong, but you don't get to sit there and declare that's hateful. There is hate in your heart. You're not the one who gets to decide that. I can tell you what's going on inside my heart,

and you have no choice but to believe me, because I am the only authority on earth when it comes to what's happening inside my heart and what motivations are behind the things that I say and do. I am the only authority on this planet. And so you have to listen to me and you have to believe me. It's the only way this works. So just because you can't sympathize with a point of view does not make it hateful.

It may be wrong. It may be many things, but not necessarily hateful. I mean, I don't understand. Let's take an opinion or a point of view that I can't sympathize with. I cannot sympathize with the opinion. that Marvel movies are good. I don't understand why people love Marvel movies so much. I think that they're stupid and pointless,

and I just wish they would stop already. I don't get it. And it feels to me like there's some kind of conspiracy to annoy me, and that's why they keep coming out with these stupid movies. It feels hateful. It feels like hateful. When somebody says,

oh, I can't wait for the new Avengers movie, to me, it feels like hate speech. It's hate because I, it just, it makes me, annoyed and angry when I hear that. Feels like hate speech. But I can't prove that. I can't prove that your opinion that you like, that Marvel movies are good. I can't prove that that opinion is based on a hatred for me.

It's possible that it isn't. It's possible that that's just your opinion and you're expressing it. I don't know, but this is how hate speech works. When someone calls something hate speech, it is simply a statement about how they, the listener, feel about this opinion. So it reminds me of that scene in the office when somebody defecates on Michael's carpet and he says it's hate speech and then Stanley says it's not hate speech. And Michael goes, well, I hated it. And that's essentially how this works.

Of course, there are exceptions, right? I mean, there are things that people say that are clearly hateful. Like if I say, I hate you, well, then I think it's safe. assume that there's hatred behind what I just said. Or anytime you say something abusive, insulting to another person, there's very likely to be hatred behind it. But the problem, first of all, is that that describes like 85% of the speech on the internet. And so if Facebook was really going to shut down hate speech, they would have to shut down almost every profile on their site. But often that's exactly the kind of speech that is not called hate speech. Or if it is

called hate speech, it's called hate speech very selectively. People insult me on the internet literally hundreds of times a day. If I were to actually read all my comments, which I don't, and read all my emails and messages, which I don't. But if I were, I would be insulted hundreds of times a day. If you don't believe me, just go look at the comments under anything I ever write or do or anything. Any content of mine that I post, there's going to be plenty of comments that are just ripping me to shreds, right? And to me, that seems hateful, right? But if I were to call that hate speech and complain to Facebook or Google about it or whatever, I'm being victimized by hate speech. If I were to do that, I would be told that, no, that's not really hate speech.

Really? This guy just told me to kill myself. That's not hate speech. You're not going to ban him? How is that not? If that's not hate speech, then I don't know what hate speech means. And that's the point, that oftentimes the most clearly hateful things are not considered hate speech. because hate speech is just a broad, ambiguous term that it's just a vessel for controlling speech. That's all it is. And you know what? Even in cases where hate is clearly the motivation behind the speech, even in cases where you have clear cut, cut and dry hate speech. Okay.

Is that really the worst kind of speech? Even in that case? Is hate speech really the worst kind of speech that you can find? on the internet or anywhere in life? I don't think it is. I mean, what about dishonest speech? What about manipulative speech? What about propaganda?

What about the speech of somebody in the outrage mob who isn't really hateful and isn't really angry, but is just kind of indifferent and emotionally dead and is just saying what they're saying in order to whip up hysteria for fun? Yeah, what about emotionally dead speech, let's call it? What about that? I would say that all those forms of speech are more dangerous than hate speech, much of the time.

So just as a hate crime is not necessarily the worst kind of crime, and it's not the worst motivation for a crime, although it's bad, it's not the worst. I think the same thing is the case with hate speech. And I would say in general, we have in our culture a very off-balance focus on hatred. We act like hatred is the biggest problem in our culture. It's the worst thing is hatred. But I don't think that's the case. Hatred is bad.

But I don't even think that everyone's always so worried about, oh, hatred is the disease that's infecting our culture. I don't think that's the case. I think the worst thing in our culture, and I made this point before, the worst thing is not hatred. The worst thing is indifference, is just this kind of moral, indifference. And that explains a lot of what you see online are people who, you know, they don't really hate each other. They just don't recognize the humanity of other people and

they don't care. And they're kind of morally dead to the world. That's the worst thing. Hatred isn't even half as bad as that. And that's the thing that is going to propel people to do the worst sorts of things. As I've said in the past, most of of these school shooters, mass killers, serial killers, and so on, most of them, they're not hateful. They don't feel anything inside. They have nothing going on inside. They're totally empty. And that's why they're doing what they're doing. It's just they're trying to feel something. They're just doing it for entertainment because they have no, because they just don't recognize humanity anymore. So those are some things to keep in mind about the dreaded hate speech.

And it's important to keep this in mind because when the crackdown on the First Amendment really begins, and maybe we're seeing it in its gestational phase right now, but when it really kicks in a full gear, it's going to be under the guise of cracking down on hate speech. Thanks for watching, everybody. Godspeed.