The Megyn Kelly Show - America's "Reality Crisis," and Free Speech and Censorship Today, with Spencer Klavan, Will Chamberlain, and Kate Tummarello | Ep. 493

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Spencer Klavan, author of "How to Save the West," to talk about moral truths in today's society, God and spirituality, America's "reality crisis," giving over the power of "true vs. false" to elites, how the decline of religion led to substitutes like wokism or COVID mania, having courage to be patriotic and support America above any single group, the dangers of trusting elites to determine the truth in our society, losing trust in the media and the scientific establishment during the COVID crisis, how we can fight back and "save the West," and more. Then Will Chamberlain, Senior Council for the Internet Accountability Project, and Kate Tummarello, executive director of Engine, join for a discussion and debate about free speech and tech censorship, what Section 230 and why it's important, what it means to be a "common carrier" and whether big tech platforms are, the pros and cons of government regulation of tech platforms, information being censored just because it’s controversial or conservative, how the First Amendment relates to tech censorship, Gonzalez vs. Google being heard before the Supreme Court next week, and more.Klavan's book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Save-West-Ancient-Wisdom/dp/1684513456/Tummarello's organization: https://www.engine.isChamberlain's organization: https://theiap.org Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have an interesting debate for you coming just a bit later about free speech, big tech, and censorship in America. Just how censorious do you want big tech to be? Maybe you're thinking, I want them to be less censorious. I'm the one whose viewpoints always get censored. And therefore, I'm against protecting big tech when it comes to their censoring pen with the big eraser. It's more complicated than that. Because if we take away the things that protect

them, who's going to pay? Big tech or us? Right? It's actually a really interesting debate. We're going to get into it in just a bit. But we begin with the return of one of my favorite guests and quite possibly the smartest man I know. Western civilization is in a state of crisis. Perhaps you've noticed. The virtual and digital are replacing genuine experience, right? The metaverse? What the hell is that? How about just like the universe we're already in? Why do we need a new digital universe? Feelings, too often, are replacing facts. How we navigate all these issues in our society will determine no less than if we can save the Western world. Spencer Clavin is one of the people who can help do that. He could actually save the Western world

all on his own if we would just do what he tells us. He is the host of the Young Heretics podcast and author of the new book out today, which I highly, highly recommend to you, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. Spencer, welcome back. Great to have you. Oh, Megan, it's so great to be here. And I'm going to tattoo Megan Kelly says I'm the smartest man she knows onto my forehead. That's going to be I don't throw that out there loosely. I know a lot of smart people. I've interviewed a lot of smart people. Your brain is special. Oh, thank you. It's so lovely to be back with you.

And you come by it honestly because your dad is Andrew Klavan, who we also love. Sorry to mention your daddy every time you come on, but people know the last name and we're all such fans. I'm proud to be associated with him despite my constant protestations that I'm not related to him. I actually am very proud to call him my dad. So more than happy to hear you mention his name. All right. So let's set it up. Let's set up because what I love about this book is we're all going through these feelings of like, what's happening? Wait a minute. Why isn't, what happened to truth? What happened to God? What's going on with this gender craze? What's going on in our society? You can feel something very different from the way we used to be. And this book diagnoses why that's happening. Yes, it is happening.

Why it's happening. What are the crises we're in the midst of? And then takes a look back at history, ancient history to reassure us, I think, that none of this is new. We've been through virtually all of this before, and there are really great minds to give us some wisdom into how to navigate what's likely to come next, what's winnable, what's not. And you, as a classics expert, know all of that stuff. You've read all of that stuff, and you're living the modern day crises with us all. So you've sort

of been able to mend history with modern day problems to give us some insight and some wisdom. So let's start with the crisis as you see it. Why does the West need saving? What are we going through? Well, I think you really put your finger on it when you described that feeling

like everything we're up against is kind of new and confusing. This sense we have that nobody has ever faced these problems before because our technology is totally new and the digital revolution has just reshaped the way we look at ourselves and see the world. And on one level, of course, it's true. The internet did not exist in ancient Greece. I am reliably informed. And yet, you know, at the same time, the problems that we're being faced with by this new technology, questions like what is a human being and what is our place in the universe? And you mentioned the question of God. Those are

actually fundamental, eternal questions. And what that means is that they've been around for as long as human beings have been around. And there have been is that they've been around for as long as human beings have been around. And there have been deep thinkers throughout the centuries in this Western tradition that we're all inheritors of, who have raised some really beautiful answers to these questions that can help us see our way forward. And what that means is we're not alone. I think when people tell you, you know, oh, it's a brave new world and all the old books are primitive and superstitious. What they're really trying to do is deprive you of the community of the past. And I grew up, as you know, making a house filled with books, old books that

I would pull down off the shelf. And soon I realized that being surrounded with books meant being surrounded by friends. And so I wrote this book, How to Save the West, because I wanted people to have access to some of that stuff, have ownership over this wisdom that comes down to us from Athens and Jerusalem, so that we can answer some of these questions that are being raised. These five questions, is there absolute truth? What do I do with my body? Does the world have meaning? Is there a God? And what's going to happen to America? Those are questions that we can answer or help to answer using the wisdom that comes down from the past and not just using whatever the CDC or the WEF tells us today and tomorrow.

It's funny because during the Trump administration, Kellyanne Conway famously, infamously said, alternative facts. These are alternative facts. And people started to question whether we really are in this post-truth world where one side has its facts and the other side has its alternative facts. And that's only continued. You know, she described it on this show as sort of a flub, you know, it's just she was stepping on her own words and she wasn't really trying to create that narrative. But since then, it's become even worse. I mean, COVID is a great example of how you could take the same issue and find two different experts with diametrically opposed views. And depending on which one is the leftist view versus the more heterodox view, that'll dictate how it's covered in the mainstream media. So people really are in

a place of rejecting what we used to see as truth, what appears on the news, what appears in the paper, what your trusted politicians tell you. That's gone. And a lot of us feel untethered now in trying to figure out truth. So that's one of the crises we're facing is the reality crisis, which is related to truth. So how do you analyze that? Yeah, well, I mentioned that moment with Conway in the book. And what's so funny about that is all of a sudden when bad orange man came along, it was like, we have a crisis of truth in the news and we're having a post-truth politics. And it's like, even I am old enough to remember when Bill Clinton said, it depends on what the meaning of the word is, is like Donald Trump's

team did not invent this problem. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. There's a great example. Sure. And there was the, there were the fake, but accurate memos about George Bush, which Dan Rather put forward. And, you know, as you've said, it's only gotten worse and it's particularly gotten worse because of what you were mentioning earlier, the tech and the fights over censorship that we're having. One of the reasons I think we're having these fights where people want to shut down free speech is because they believe there's this idea that if you can stop people from saying something, it'll stop being true. And if you can take control of the narrative, you can decide which COVID facts get spread and which don't, you know, then you will actually have created reality, like as if it were just some kind of metaverse that we're all living in.

And, you know, an idea that has come up since I wrote the book is the idea of malinformation, not just disinformation or misinformation, but malinformation is where you're saying true facts, but you're using them wrong, right? It's bad to use those facts in those ways to make that point. And so we really are, when it gets down to it, we're in a crisis, which I call the reality crisis. Is there anything which is true or false, whether or not you're allowed to say it, even if everybody, even if all the censors try to shut you up, is it still true that one plus one is two? And what I show in the book is that this is actually the crisis with which Greek philosophy kind of begins. It's the origin story of Western philosophy in some sense, that in Athens, the great democracy, you have this crisis where people are arguing that

whatever you can get voted in, whatever you can argue for and present before the assembly, that's what goes. And so the justice is just the interests of the stronger, the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. And what I'm arguing in this book is that, in fact, if you want to take that pill, you're going to go all the way. It's not going to be a happy, blissful, you know, metaverse kind of universe beyond your world. It's actually going to be a war of all against all. It's going to be power politics, because if there's no such thing as absolute truth, all you're left with is strength and strength amounts essentially to the threat of violence. And I think that a lot of people, as they start to lose their grip on, you know, what, what the quote unquote official narrative is, they feel like there's no way of discovering truth. It's called reason. The Greeks called it logos. And we can recover ownership over our own reason and confidence, which is what a lot of people are beginning to do as they start

to reject the experts, which I think is the right move. I think we should move further in that direction as we form our own opinions and open the discourse as much as we can to seeking the absolute truth, which is the beauty and the goodness with which philosophy begins. How does the rejection of God, of religion, of any sort of higher power factor into this? Right. Well, it's difficult, I think, when you start talking about this, especially in an American context, you start to feel like you're just forcing your religion down people's throats, right? People will say, don't force your God on me. We have separation of church and state.

And one of the things I say in the book is I'm not trying to convert everybody to my church. It would be great if everybody went to my church. I would love that. But that's really not the problem that we're up against. The real problem that we're up against is we all actually kind of know that some things are true and some things are false. And it's not just like physical facts that are true and false, like this table is sitting here in front of me right now. There's also moral truths that are true and false. It's wrong to take innocent life without cause, for instance. These moral

truths also have a kind of absolute reality that we can't just wish away. And spiritual truths are part of that universe, the universe beyond just our flesh. And if we want to believe in that, which we all have to in order to form a functioning society, we do have to believe. We don't have to subscribe to this or that faith tomorrow or believe the Nicene Creed right now. But we do have to admit that everybody acts as if there is such a thing as a highest truth and a highest good. Bob Dylan, the great poet and prophet, says you got to serve somebody. And the Bible's version of this is that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. You God. We have this idea that that line just means like, oh, atheists are dumb or something. But that's actually, I don't think that's what the Psalms are saying. When you say the fool has said in his heart, there is no God, what it means is when you tell yourself you're not worshiping, when you tell yourself there's no higher power, you're actually fooling yourself. You're making yourself into a fool because you're deceiving yourself. Everybody

operates as if there's a highest good behind everything he or she does. And if you pretend that's not true, you just end up worshiping without knowing it, which is what we saw in the summer of 2020 when people were kneeling before these Black Lives Matter protesters begging for forgiveness and absolution, or when they were referring to the science, capital S, as a kind of a cult authority that could tell them what to do. And Dr. Fauci represents it. He is his priest. Amen. This is kind of how people are starting to behave. And I think the real thing we need is not so much a conversion as a surrender to realize that what we are doing

already implies a kind of worship. And we should be self-aware about that. And we should look to the great traditions of scripture and the church to help us understand what is worthy of worship. What's the highest good that we could seek that would actually ennoble us rather than making us slaves? Let's start there. One of the aggravating things about that truth you just told us is if we could actually get those beliefs recognized as a religion, then we could stop them from permeating the public square and being pushed on us by government, which isn't allowed to favor one religion over another. And yet we can't. It hasn't been recognized, wokeismism as a religion,

and therefore it can be pernicious in how it gets pushed on us in the schools, in our jobs, at the corporate, at the government level, as we're seeing now with the Biden administration. But you write in the book the following, in the 21st century, political demands often boil down to the assertion that the speaker's point of view or identity should be taken as an absolute authority. The various slogans we chant show this. Believe women. That's my truth. Elevate black voices. And your point is that without God, again, quoting, without some shared, stable, objective basis for understanding what is true, moral and real, we are left only with competing demands for power and competing attempts to control the facts. This is a very smart way of talking about this void. The more

we remove God and the principles that we associate with God and with a higher power, the more we create a vacuum that gets filled with utter banalities, that's to be charitable. Really, the truth is what we fill it with is downright dangerous. Well, sure, that's absolutely right. And I think that, you know, the kind of religious nature of all of these belief systems can really be seen when you start to ask, well, you know, what's the basis for believing, for instance, that, you know, a man can become a woman simply by saying so or, you know, that that men can get pregnant, all these all these kind of abstract ideas that we use to to divide sex and gender and to suggest that they're both kind of infinitely malleable. Well, it's not like, you know, science has discovered that this is true. You get a kind of pseudoscientific language around it. They claim to have proven this in some objective way. But in fact, since notions like gender, which is kind of a purely spiritual concept, those notions don't actually exist anywhere on like a brain scan. They are ideas about the soul. They're really actually closely tied to some very ancient notions like the neoplatonic idea that we're kind of,

there's our body and that's just like flesh or it's a play thing or it's a doll to be molded. And then there is the soul, which kind of lives in this perfect sphere. I mean, nowadays we talk as if it lives kind of online or in the cloud, you know, but that division between body and soul, which is very close to the heart of the sort of trans extremist movement, the post gender third wave feminism, whatever you want to call it, you know, you read like Judith Butler's gender trouble, where she really kind of goes into this stuff. And it's it's totally neoplatonic and Cartesian. It's like I'm dividing my body from my soul. My soul is the true me and everything else. It's like,

well, maybe I get surgery today. Maybe I reconstruct my body tomorrow or I put horns on my head or whatever, because my body is just a kind of appendage or a toy that I'm playing with. Now, whatever else that is, it's definitely an article of faith, right? It's definitely a profession of something that you, some spiritual idea that you believe rather than, you know, some scientific objective facts that everybody has to accept tomorrow or else you're a bigot and you're, you're just ignorant and wrong, right? These are, these are spiritual claims. And one way of measuring a spiritual claim is to see what kind of behavior it produces and what kind of results it produces for people. And that's where the danger that you're talking about comes in, because, you know, you ask, how's it working out for you to be perpetrating these terrible invasive surgeries on kids and whatever. And the answer is it's making us sicker and more depressed and tearing apart the fabric of our of our social life and our society. And since it's simply an article of faith that

this is going to do anything good for us, I don't think it's working out that well. I think it's pretty obvious that the older idea, which is that your body is the language for your soul, that we are in some sense embodied souls, would be a truer religion that we could actually adopt in place of this kind of neo-gnostic trans extremism. So how do we look at some of the ancient philosophers and get an answer to this reality crisis? I know the book mentions Socrates, always some wisdom there. Like, is that just a cautionary tale?

Is that a cautionary tale or is that an answer? I mean, it can definitely start to look like a cautionary tale, especially when you remember they made him kill himself. Right. I mean, it's not like this that the thing which will get you hounded out of town today is the seed that's going to grow into the tree of tomorrow's civilization. And that's what happened with Socrates. Now, nobody would wish Socrates fate on anybody. And I don't think that you're destined to be attacked by an angry mob if you stand up for these realities that we're talking about here. But I do think that we should recognize, you know, that the world being what it is, the world being fallen, you're always going to be facing some opposition when you're seeking the true, the good and the beautiful. Those things are, to say the least, they're inconvenient to the

powers that be. And without developing a persecution complex, we should be realists about knowing that, you know, it's going to be tough out there. But I always think about this moment in Lord of the Rings of all places, which where Frodo says, I wish the ring had never come to me. Gandalf, the wise wizard says, so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we can do is decide what to do with the time that's given us. And I think that's the position that, you know, Socrates was in. It's the position, for instance, that Marcus Cicero was in, another thinker I write about in the book, who lived at the very end of the Roman Republic. And, you know, his ideas didn't win the day, but they carried forward into the future until at last, you know, they helped to build this country. And, you know, when we're talking about the reality crisis,

we're talking about something that these thinkers have been wrestling with again and again. I also mentioned Aristotle in the book. He's an important figure to turn to. But I think really the biggest question when it comes to despair, right, is are we just looking at cautionary tales here? I think what we're really trying to do is to understand ourselves as inheritors of a tradition that will outlast us, because even if things fall apart and I'm not saying they're going to, I'm not a, you know, determinist about this, but even if things fall apart, you want to have been preserving the flame that future generations will be able to pick up. That effortrusting elites, which is something you mentioned just a couple minutes ago. Can you get into that? Yeah, sure. I mean, this is kind of the original virtual reality dystopia is Plato's cave, and we're all already living in it is sort of the idea. Plato famously in the Republic book seven, he talks about this cave where all of humanity is shackled and all they can see is shadows on a wall. There's

a fire and there are kind of puppet masters that manipulate the shadows. So people think that's reality, but the truth is that actually outside the cave, the sun is shining and that's the true light, which is the beautiful and the good, which we only dimly and in a distance see reflected in the sort of day to day experience that we might have. And I think one of the things that is so powerful about that image is that it gives you a third person outsider's view. It lets you see that even though the people in the cave think they're perceiving reality, they're actually at the whim of the powerful people who have just one more degree of information and power than they do. And as we start to play around with the virtual reality idea, as it becomes more and more possible to think about ourselves, quote unquote, in the metaverse or, you know,

uploading our consciousness into some kind of virtual reality cloud. Suddenly this idea, which has been the subject of dystopian horror for centuries, becomes like a sales pitch. It becomes, you know, oh, this is something we should all like and want to do. And I think if we look back to Plato's Cave and if we even look back to stories after that, which have kind of followed on like The Matrix or WALL-E or these other kind of snow crash, these sort of dystopian fiction stories that we've written, they show us our intuition of something which is really true, which is that if you give up the ability to determine true and false, if you give it over,

you're always giving it over to somebody. And that person has interests of his own, which might or might not be entirely salutary. So when somebody comes and says to you, you know, digital tech has made it so there's no need for true and false anymore. You can just have everything you want if you will simply strap on these goggles and live in a virtual reality. The alarm that I'm sounding in this book and that I think Plato is sounding in all of these fiction writers after him is that's always a bum deal because the person that you're handing over your data to, handing over your mind to, handing control over to has his own agenda. And that's the elites that you're that you're talking about.

As people begin to discover that elites are actually not infallible. And in fact, they have all many of the same kind of sins and temptations that just you and I have. I think it's really healthy and salutary that we're realizing, you know, actually, these guys are not gods. They're they're not, you know, beyond the problems that mankind has faced for generations. And maybe we should think twice before we hand over our lives to them. I'm thinking about this exchange I had.

I've mentioned this to the audience before. At the beginning of COVID, when Trump had that very weird disjointed news conference where he was like, I'm shutting down all travel. And then they're like, no, he's not shutting down all travel. He had like five things he had to correct as soon as the press conference was over. I remember tweeting out something to the effect of, I wish I knew who to trust. I recognize I cannot trust what he is saying, but I also recognize I cannot trust what the media is saying about him and about this virus either, because they have an agenda prior to an election and just getting him out and saying whatever he says is wrong. And it was a great frustration that I recognized

early on in COVID and many people shared. And I love Ann Curry, by the way, she's such a sweet person and I think the world of her. But at the time she tweeted sort of at me, trust the WHO, the CDC, Anthony Fauci. And this was early enough in the pandemic we weren't yet where we are on them you know what i mean like most of us sort of you had to be lied to repeatedly before the light bulb went off of these organizations but i remember being like hmm and to your point like think of that it's the same kind of. There's this group that you're supposed to trust. They're the elites. And supposedly they had a little bit more information than we had in the cave. And yet they didn't. And a healthy distrust was very much warranted. And now, you know, most of our view of these people in these groups has completely changed, at least for most people

on the right and in the center of the country. That's right. And it's been transformative. It's been transformative for me, that's for sure. I mean, I would be it would have been much more sympathetic to somebody saying trust the WHO before the pandemic than I than I would be now. And it's because, you know, the people who the human beings, the fallible human beings who make up those institutions have betrayed our trust. And that's not you know, that's something that has happened in the past. Machiavelli says that when the elites betray the trust of the people, they do two kinds of damage. They damage their own credibility, but they also damage the credibility of the regime, of the country or the nation that they are a part of. And that's why it's so evil is because we don't just lose our faith in

this or that governing body. We also lose our faith in the whole kind of structure of power that we're supposed to be kind of believing in and participating in. And this is, I think, really importantly, why our founding fathers who deserve, as far as I am concerned, to be counted among the great thinkers of the Western tradition. You know, they established a principle that actually, you know, the the nation is sovereign among nations and the individual is sovereign, you know, within his own personal life and personal decisions. And the reason for that is it's not like there's no such thing as as knowledge, right? It's not like there's no such thing as people who know stuff that we don't know and can give us information we don't have. It's that politics and the decision about what to do is actually an ethical decision. We're actually making moral choices, not just about how infectious

is this disease or, you know, how what's the, you know, number of of molecules that are operative before you get infected, whatever, but actually about what we should and should not do. And in those questions, questions of ethics, questions of politics, it's not the same thing as a math problem. It's not something that you can trust a scientist to go away and run the model and do the calculation and tell you, oh, climate change is this deadly. And so unfortunately, we must pass this law. No, no, that is not the idea this country was founded on. We believe that when it comes to ethical decisions, it's not a math problem. It's a soul problem. And we together as the people elect representatives who make these choices for us. And we don't just

outsource, you know, our ethical or moral responsibility to these absolute bodies of total power and control. Now, that whole idea was called into question by the capital P progressives, right? There was this notion that history had moved beyond our system and actually the constitution was kind of outdated. And, you know, we really just need to do is outsource all of this to governing bureaucracies. It's the birth of the modern administrative state, you know, and this whole notion, which is now kind of deep seated among, you know, one portion of our polity. It's got to go if we want to recover the American idea, which is that, yes, there are people who know things. Yes, there are scientists. Indeed, there are even legitimate experts out there. But what they aren't is kings. And they are not, you know, they're not deemed designed by God to rule over us. We are designed to rule over us. And the last analysis, we get to make the decisions.

It's it's so stimulating listening to you. I have to tell you, it's like great for my brain. I love it all. But I'm thinking about right now, just we've never had a stronger executive in this country, and it was never meant to be. You know, we were fleeing a king. We didn't want that. The founders who were brilliant didn't want that at all. They wanted the presidency to be the smallest branch, the least powerful. And yes, the administrative state has grown beyond anything they ever envisioned. But even just the powers that we seed, Look at Joe Biden just over the past whatever year trying to extend the rent abatement program and just all these things that he acknowledged would be struck down by the courts, but he did it anyway because he thought it would help him politically, not to mention the student loan nonsense that he's pulling.

That's what I was thinking, yeah, yeah. politically, not to mention the student loan nonsense that he knows will not be upheld. Why is he doing that? Because he's acting like a king, right? Congress was meant to rein in the excessive president, the excessive executive branch, and they won't. And now I look at Congress, who were supposed to be a bunch of regular folks who decided to serve their country and bring their farmer ideals into the office and sort of keep a realistic pulse, you know, finger on the pulse of the nation. Now they're a bunch of morons. They're a bunch of stupid morons who just want attention for themselves and they're congressional Kardashians. Is it any wonder that our politicians feel like

they've completely failed us and don't relate to us at all? And they've given over, Congress has given over so much of the power that now exists in these bureaucracies and in the executive branch. You're absolutely right. And this is an area where it is really easy to get into a despair cycle real quick. It's happening. Spiraling. Here we are. We're in the spiral at this moment. Let me see if I can like grab a handhold out of here. In the book, what I discuss, describe is the sort of history of political philosophy that got us up to the place where the founders were able to say, you know what, let's have a republic, right?

There's this long tradition of thinking about what's called anticyclosis, the cycle of regimes. And the basic idea is, you know, let me just say, let me just say, this is like the most interesting part of the book to me. Everybody needs to pay attention to this. This is actually really important. Go ahead. Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm glad. I'm glad you like it. Because I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. And so let's go into it. So there's, there's three kinds of basic government of politike in the Greek is the idea of how do you run your society? How does your civilization function? What are the rules and who gets to make these decisions? And the Greek idea of the polis, which is the city state is kind of the petri dish for thinking about this sort of stuff. And Aristotle, who's one of the great thinkers on this topic in his politics, he says,

there's three ways that you can organize this. There's three ways that you can arrange the system. Fundamentally, one is monarchy. One person rules, right? Another is aristocracy. The best, a few people rule and they're the best people. All the best people, as Trump might say, are in charge in an aristocracy. Then you have what we would now call democracy, although Aristotle uses slightly different languages, but rule by the many who collectively make decisions. And Aristotle, crucially, this is so important for us to remember because it relates to what you were saying about the breakdown of our system. There is no system that you can construct that will not suffer decay because human beings are a mess. And over time, we fall victim to our peccadilloes and our flaws and all of these sorts of things. And he says the thing that makes the difference. Yes, hubris is

classic. You're right. That's the classical example, pride, overweening pride. And the thing that makes the difference, and this is also crucial, Aristotle says, between the virtuous version of a government and the evil version of government has to do with love. It has to do with what the point is of doing politics together at all. If the rulers are ruling for the benefit of the ruled out of love for their citizenry, then you have a good state. If the king loves his people and makes decisions with their interests in mind, he's a good king. Let's say his son comes along now and he's a spoiled brat and he decides actually that he's going to rule for his own benefit. He's going to tax the people

heavily so that he can have a more beautiful palace, let's say, or he's going to go to war out of pure spite with somebody, not because he needs to protect the nation. That's what we call a tyrant. And that's the decayed version of monarchy. Now, if you have a monarchy, which is sort of the natural way of living, that somebody rises up like a strong man or something to run society, decays into a tyranny, it's possible that you'll get an aristocratic uprising. The nobles will say, I've had enough of this taxation. I'm going to take over. So the aristocrats are going to be in charge.

The decayed version of this, when they start dealing for their own benefit, for their own self-love, that's called an oligarchy. We're very familiar with this kind of decay. It's when the elite become corrupt and they rule for themselves and their cronies. When that happens, it's very possible you get a democratic uprising. The people take control. They take back that power of the system. If the democratic regime decays, then it becomes one of my favorite

classical words. We've totally lost an oclocracy, which is the rule by the ocloss or the mob. It's mob rule. And in mob rule, of course, it's very easy for a strong man to come in and take over. And the cycle of regimes begins again. So you get this kind of theory of history that it just goes over and over again. And the whole cycle begins anew. The whole point of a republic, which is what our system is, is to create a perpetual motion machine, take all these different forms of government, these different kinds of parts of the government, like an executive branch that has kind of, you know, unitary power, but then also, you know, everybody's accountable to the people. So you have that democratic power, but you also have a legislative elite that's supposed to sort of serve as the aristocratic branch and they work together, play off against one another. How is it possible that this beautifully designed system has fallen apart into

the decay that you described earlier on, right? The answer Machiavelli tells us, and Plato kind of hints at this as well, is class warfare. Once you get to a point where the different parts of the society, the aristocratic parts, the popular parts, the populists and the elites, don't think of themselves as fellow citizens, but think of themselves as members of a tribe. You're a white person. So you're inherently racist. You're a man. So you're inherently sexist. You're straight. So you're inherently homophobic, right? Once you get people thinking that way, you have poisoned the mechanism of the Republic and you have destroyed going back to that very crucial thing that

Aristotle talks about. You've destroyed civic love. It's love and friendship and neighborliness that makes a civilization what it is. These sort of small daily acts of marrying and being given in marriage, of forming rituals together, going to ball games together. These things sound so simple, but they are the stuff that the that the community is made out of. And this finally is the foothold that I think we can get out of our despair cycle, because we're not going to rewrite the system so that it all gets fixed overnight. But what we can do and what in some places we already are doing is reinvest in that philia, that local love and neighborly friendship that makes a civilization what it is.

You're starting to see this in states, I think, like Florida out here in Tennessee and Nashville. I see it happening every day. These local societies, associations that, you know, go to the school board and fight for what they believe in and talk it out with their neighbors, figure out how we're going to rule ourselves. It's bottom up, not top down. And I think that's the way to kind of reclaim some ownership and start to move in the direction of fixing the problems that ail the country. Of course, it's going to take many years. And of course, you know, there's still national elections to worry about and all of that. But unless we get a sense that actually we have ownership over our communities, we won't even get started. It's philia, political love, civic friendship that really needs recovering in this hour.

We have to talk about that more. I want to talk more about how we can make that happen if we don't feel like it's happening in our community. But I will say, just listening to you, I was reminded of just the other night I was watching the Super Bowl with my kids. And of course, we had to have the black national anthem before we had the actual national anthem which in this context is divisive it is there's you know the kids are sitting there like why is there what is that what's what is there's a there's a special anthem just for black

people and not for the white people it's like i don't you know how are you supposed to explain this right so it's like yes it is divisive it is divisive not in this context it's divisive um absolutely you know and then they played we're just i'll just finish but then they played the national anthem the actual national anthem and of course i made my kids even sitting in my kitchen stand up put your hand on your heart and they did it and why did i need to do that nobody could see us nobody it didn't so count for anything it counted because of the principles you're talking about right now because i bet there were kids and adults all over the country doing the same thing. Love of country, love of the ideals that this country was built upon and stands for still, and that many of us are still trying to live by. That's what we salute. That's what's important.

Listen to the words of that song. Listen to the principles that have been handed down, not dividing us based on race. There's something so much bigger that ties us all together. We need to get back to that. Go ahead. Oh, no. Amen. I'm glad that you finished there because I had a sort of similar experience recently where I think it was in Orange County.

Somebody was saying, I can't believe that they voted to take down the pride flag outside of this public building. And it's just a sign of hatred and more of the right wing campaign to yada, you know, people who love whatever, who have a gay person in their life that they love, they feel like, you know, if I don't go along with this political movement, with this other flag outside of my public buildings, then, you know, I'm betray, but my flag is the American flag. And the flag that flies outside my public building should be the American flag. And I will not be used as a prop in somebody else's kind of neo-Marxist campaign. You know, they do this in a million different ways. They just find the thing that you care about. You know, oh, you're bad because you hate women if you think that, like, you know, men can't magically become women. Or you're bad, right, because you don't want to sing the black national anthem before the, you know, before the Super Bowl. The other one that really got to me was the pandemic of the unvaccinated, which President Biden said at one point, it's like, okay, so there's a whole portion of the population that

is tantamount to a disease. That's really what our political rhetoric is going to be. And this is the kind of hope and change and transformation and the return to normalcy. I'm sorry, but, you know, first and foremost, before anything else, when it comes to politics, I am an American. If we can't say that, then we're in trouble. But I think there's a lot of people out there that are ready to say that if if we have courage and sort of lead in that regard. I saw you had a great comment on the in connection with that flag controversy. Who's saying, quoting Inez Fletcher of the Claremont Institute, saying she must surely be right that no actual homosexual can possibly have been involved in the design of something so grotesquely tacky as the LGBTQ flag. These day, every day now they put some new color on it. It's like they can't even you can't even get a gay person to hang drapes that don't match the carpet. And you're trying to convince me that there's some, you know,

coalition of like all the gay people out there are building. I don't buy it for a second. I think it's the Borg flag. I think it's like they've sort of weird amalgamation of everything that they want to use to destroy the country. I had never considered that before, but it is absolutely true. I'll never look at the, but it is absolutely true. I'll never look at the flag the same again. Spencer, thank you. Stand by much, much more on the opposite side of this break with Spencer Clavin. Spencer Clavin is my guest today. He's the author of the new must must read book, How to Save the West, which is out today. I'm telling you, I don't say this about

every book. You must buy this. It is short. He actually makes it an easy read, even for those of us who are dummies when it comes to classics. Another thing I love about his podcast. So buy the book. You won't be sorry. How to Save the West. I blurbed it for a reason, not just because Spencer is a friend, but I truly want everybody to read this. And people write in Spencer all the time saying, is there anything I can read to help me make sense of the craziness happening in our world right now? And I've been recommending this, so I'm glad it's finally out because I had the pleasure of the advanced read and now everybody gets to have it. All right. I want to follow up on the cycle. So monarchy into aristocracy slash oligarchy into democracy, into mob rule? And then does it

go again back to monarchy? And where are we in the cycle? Where is America right now? Obviously, we're technically a republic, but I would imagine we're in the democracy into mob rule phase. But is monarchy coming our way if this all fails? What's happening next? Well, it's really interesting. The way I think about this theory, this theory of the cycle of regimes is it's not a prescription and, you know, it's not a prediction of what's going to happen tomorrow. It's like a template. And once you have it in your mind, you can see pieces of it playing out sort of like snatches from a familiar tune, you know, like when, for instance, the barons rise up against King

John because of his oppressive taxation. You start to see that force of, you know, the aristocratic rebellion against a tyrannical king. And that, you know, idea is really what we're looking at is dynamics that are always at play. They're eternal because they're part of human nature, so they never go away. And we can use them to understand each new thing that comes up. So what I say in the book is what I think we're in is kind of an interesting position

where at home, we're sort of looking like a decaying republic. And when republics decay, they turn into oligarchies. They get seized by an elite and you start to get that war between the different classes, the social classes. And by the way, a lot of this was done on purpose by the new left, by Marxists who figured out that there wasn't going to be an economic revolution in America. So the way to bring about revolution here was to foment different kinds of classes, you know, to make them hate one another. And this is where you get ideas like white privilege, you know, people like Noel Ignatieff and some of his colleagues talking about white skin privilege. That's that's where this stuff comes from. And it's how we decay from a republic at home into this kind of oligarchic, you know, weird court state.

But overseas, you know, we have this similarly strange thing going on where we're kind of almost an empire, right? We've extended our power across the world so enormously. And we've done so kind of informally in all of these ways, you know, through NGOs and with all of these, you know, many different ways that we exert influence over other nations. Sometimes the influence is good. Sometimes it's not so good. But the truth is that we have this kind of global network of influence that lands us in all sorts of trouble and complications. But I think the real issue is not so much that, you know, those networks are falling apart, but that they're falling apart because we are falling apart at home. And as I said, the way we're falling apart is that class warfare. Machiavelli,

who's somebody that not maybe not everybody will be familiar with as, you know, the great theorist of republics. They think of him as the kind of realpolitik scheming, you know, author of The Prince. But he has a book, The Discourses on Livy, who told us the story of the transition from republic into or from from monarchy into republic among the Romans. And Machiavelli has this amazing passage where he sits around and he basically tries to figure out whether the elites or the people are worse. Like which one is, you know, is it the populists or the elites that are that are worse? And it's a very relevant passage for our times because we, of course, and we've been talking here on the show about how terrible our elites are and our experts. And I believe all of that stuff. But I also see how people could say, yeah, but the populists can be just as bad, right? They could be what about January 6th? What about these, you know, kind of excesses of populism that we flirted with and all of this. And what Machiavelli ultimately concludes is that although both of these things are a danger, elite decay, elite corruption is the most dangerous thing because it destroys faith in the system. It destroys, betrays the trust, not just of the people in the elites, but of the people in the country that elevated those people to positions of power. And so you start to get that despair cycle again.

It's like, how do we, you know, even operate in this country when the systems that elevate people into positions of power are so broken? And so, you know, there's a couple of ways out of that, not all of them very pretty. And as I say in the book, we do not want to head into another civil war, into another form of secession. These are all things that I at least very deep, fervently pray will not come to pass. And so we ought to think about what's the remedy to elite capture that doesn't involve all those terrible outcomes. And the one that I pull out of these classical texts is that investment in the local community. You know, when this country was founded, there was a big debate going on about whether you could even do a republic over such a large extended space. Many of the European theorists, especially Baron de Montesquieu in France, had this idea that, you know, republics kind of been tried. Rome did it pretty well, but then they got too big. And that's when you start to see all these problems kind of

fell apart. And our founding fathers, especially James Madison, had this argument that actually a big country is an advantage for a republic because there's room to breathe. He said, if you extend the sphere of your of your country, you're going to end up with all these little pockets of community where people can do things in ways that maybe they don't approve of back in Washington. You know, maybe you get like little Amish communities or you get places like Florida where, you know, they're not going to lock down for the covid mandates or at least, you know, they're going to be a lot less intense about it. And I think even though that system has been

attacked a lot, it remains our best hope. And it remains where I see the most exciting action going on because it's in those communities and it's in those local neighborhoods and then up to the state level that the problems become human sized and they become at a level where people can talk to one another. They can see each other face to face. We don't reduce one another into these kind of abstract concepts like you're a whatever, a blue haired lib and I'm a fascist Republican or whatever. We can actually talk at a human level about particular solutions to the particular problems

that face us. And I think that's why you're seeing so much movement, say, on the school boards. You're seeing a lot of hope coming out of states like Florida where people are flocking to, you know, they can't move there fast enough. It's because in those local communities, those little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them, you can actually establish philia. You can establish love, civic friendship. And if there's one thing I draw out of Aristotle in this book, it's that civilization building for all that it's political, for all that it involves voting and fighting and

whatever. At the bottom, civilization building is an act of love. And we've got to recover that. We can't be ashamed about that. We have to reimagine ourselves as neighbors and citizens in a community built on love. I love everything you just said. I also think it's a good reminder that doing all of that is not an online activity. It does not happen on Twitter. It does happen in your actual neighborhood. I always say that all my friends in my Upper West Side neighborhood, who are still my best friends, they're all liberals. I love them. I see how our love for each other can be the foundation for the renewal of our society. I couldn't care less what their politics are. I care about who they are as women. So it's just a reminder. It's not the metaverse. It's not Twitter. It's not Facebook. It's the people within

15 feet, the family, the neighborhood, the friends, where we cultivate the solutions on how to save the West. Read the book, listen to Young Heretics, and aren't we also lucky to have Spencer Clavin available to us? Thank you so much for being here. Oh, Megan, I'm the lucky one. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure. Hope to see you soon. And up next, we have more goodness for you as we take a deep dive. It's going to be a fair and balanced debate on tech censorship. You've heard about Section 230. You don't know what it is. You're going to know, and you're going to know about the debate going underway right now. That's underway right now at the Supreme Court and beyond when it comes to big tech and free speech in America. Are you concerned at all about censorship on tech platforms and free speech in America? Do you feel like you've been targeted? You feel like what you can see

online has been targeted in a way that makes certain viewpoints unavailable to you? This affects everyone, but what is the right solution? It sounds kind of wonky, but the topic of section 230 is important and it's affecting your daily life, whether you know it or not. And it's also being kicked around right now by the U.S. Supreme Court. Section 230 is a landmark U.S. law that shields social media companies from liability over content their users post. So if I go online on the YouTube comments section and I see something totally defamatory, that's not true about somebody, I could get sued potentially, but YouTube can't. YouTube, they're not responsible to police my thoughts because they're not considered really like a publisher. The way, let's say, remember when Amber Heard

got sued by Johnny Depp for defamation? She posted something in the Washington Post. See, it's more dicey when you're the newspaper than when you are a social media company. So like newspapers are held to a higher level. Social media companies are held to a lower level. Some people think that should change and many people do not. All right, So now the Supreme Court's going to hear next week a case

involving this and Google. And today we decided to get together two true experts on this issue who have vastly different opinions on these very important topics. We're going to have a good, respectful debate between Kate Tamarello, executive director of InGen, and Will Chamberlain, senior counsel for the Internet Accountability Project. Kate and Will, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, great to have you both. All right, so let's just, we're going to keep it simple so people who don't follow this anywhere nearly as closely as you guys do can follow it.

So, Kate, I'll start with you on briefly describe what is 230. We throw this term around 230, 230. Should it be repealed? Should it not be repealed? Josh Hawley doesn't like it. Elizabeth Warren doesn't like it. Very weird bedfellows. But we know that the big tech platforms do like it. So we don't know what side to be on, right? Because it's like, wait, even conservatives are like, I don't want to side with Elizabeth Warren. But right, so they get confused. What is 230? Yeah, so very simply, Section 230 is a 1996 law that essentially says, whoever created the content should be legally responsible for it, not the platform that's hosting the content. And it often gets talked about in the context of social media, that makes a lot of sense. That's how most of us deal with the internet these days. But it's actually much

broader than that. It applies to all internet platforms of all sizes, whether you're hosting social media posts like tweets or YouTube videos or Facebook posts or Instagram photos. But it's also things like reviews and ratings and photos and videos that you may be sharing on a smaller scale. So while the debate is often about kind of 230 and big tech, Engine is a nonprofit that works with startups and internet creators, and we're coming at it from the perspective of kind of the whole ecosystem

and why the law and the liability shield really empowers users to speak and share content and information online. So, Will, what most people say, and I've listened to Ben Shapiro, who of course created and helped run The Daily Wire, he says, you know, he's got his reservations, but he likes 230 because he's got The Daily Wire and he doesn't want to be held liable if somebody posts a comment on The Daily Wire that turns out not to be true.

And then, OK, that person gets sued for defamation. But now Ben's getting sued for defamation. What's Ben going to do? He's going to say, forget the comment section. Forget forget all of this. I'm not going to engage in this business if I'm liable for what my users post. So most tech platforms, whether it's the Daily Wire, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, they like this shield because they don't really view themselves as in the business of endorsing the content that their users post. Right. And it's important to realize that the immunity in 230 is bigger than nearly what our users post we're not responsible for. They also have an

immunity protection for anything that these companies remove. And that's granted at the federal level. And so one of the big issues with 230 is that this federal grant of immunity for any type of removal of content that can be even otherwise objectionable. That ability to remove it has thwarted state laws at the state level that have been trying to protect individuals' right to speak freely online. So I think we actually might be in an agreement to the extent that, yeah, your average message forum or even social media platform shouldn't be held responsible for every single thing its users post.

I mean, the scale is enormous. But at the same time, I don't think they should be given carte blanche to censor people based for political reasons. All right. So let me stay with you for a minute. So you're going to explain to us why 230 is problematic in your view in its current form. And it sounds like you're focusing in on this ability to remove with impunity. Is this what they use to censor? And I

realize it can be any viewpoint, but it's oftentimes the conservative one. Is this, is this problematic because the right so often is the brunt of it? Right. So there's two major sections of section 230, two subsections. The first one is the one that you and Kate have been talking about first one is the one that you and Kate have been talking about, which is the one that says that just if you are the platform hosting the content, you are not the speaker of the content

that is created by your users. And that is sort of there to insulate you from defamation liability. Like just because somebody posts something defamatory on Facebook, doesn't mean Facebook should be getting sued by the person who was lied about. But then there's the second part, subsection C2. And that part says that all of these tech

companies and platforms basically are immunized from liability for removing any content that's lewd, lascivious, and a whole bunch of other negative words or otherwise objectionable. And so that does give them some protection to remove things like pornography, for example. But it's so broad that it means that the companies can say, no, we just want to kick you off the platform and remove your ability to speak. And not only do you have no recourse just generally, but if a state or even the federal government tries to create a law and give you some recourse against these companies doing that, it would be, if you were a state, it would be what's called preempted by the federal law. And so that... Let me jump in. Let me jump in and ask you, what does... Give me a real life example of how this has been used in a way you find problematic.

Oh, for a good example is... So Florida passed a law. This was in the news, I think about a year ago. Florida passed a law that said that their citizens shouldn't be censored on social media for no good reason. And that if they are being censored for political reasons, they should have the right to, I believe this was the Florida law, they should have the right to sue the big tech companies. That might've been Texas actually. I'm pretty sure, one of those two. But in any event, at least for the Florida law, the Florida law was found to be unconstitutional in the courts and and and I'm sorry, invalid in the courts. And part of the reason was it was just preempted by Section 230. And the way our federal system works is that if a federal law speaks to an issue and it's a power within the federal government's power, it trumps any state law that would contradict that.

So having this broad grant of federal power really hurts the ability for states to protect their citizens from censorship. Okay. But wait, but let me, let me follow. Cause what I, what I would like is like a specific example,

you know, let's take, I don't know, Steven Crowder. He got demonetized by YouTube. Is that, is that in this lane or what? Like,

give me an example of somebody we would know or some kind of incident we would know where they exercise the power to remove in a way that you don't want them to be shielded for. Oh, sure. OK. Laura Loomer was removed from Twitter, for example, and she was actually the plaintiff in a major lawsuit against Twitter. She was represented by a lawyer, Ron Coleman, who actually wrote the right with the white paper talking about 230 reform. And she was essentially suing Twitter to get her account reinstated, saying she was censored for political reasons. And that suit was thrown out of court on and on among other grounds, the idea that Section 230 precluded

any sort of remedy. All right, what about that case? So now we've sort of discussed some of the virtues of 230. But we'll zero in on c2 the removal and how it was used laura loomer's a controversial person uh but this is always going to be used against for the most part people who you could dub controversial i mean half the time people call me controversial it's like okay fine um so this is the problem because in america we don't tend to censor controversial speech we tend to believe that the answer to controversial speech or speech you don't like is more speech not less not to censor controversial speech. We tend to believe that the answer to controversial speech or speech you don't like is more speech, not less, not to censor the original offending comment. Yeah, I think there's a lot to dig into here. And one of the most important pieces of context is

to see to write as part of Section 230, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum. All platforms, all businesses, all people are protected by the First Amendment. And that includes, right, the government can't censor speech, but the government also can't compel speech. No government, federal or state governments can compel anyone to host speech or to make speech. And that's actually the main reason that the Texas and Florida laws are having so much trouble and what the courts have been looking at. You know, 230 obviously is involved. But the real question at the heart of those cases is, do those laws bite the First Amendment? And some courts have said yes. Some courts have said no. It's likely the Supreme Court.

They're looking at it right now. They will decide whether to speak it up. They just asked for the Solicitor General to weigh in. And so I think that there's kind of this idea that C2 is what enables platforms to take down speech. But in kind of in practice, it's really the First Amendment. And that's that's pretty in line with a lot. Wait, wait, just to stop you. It's, it's the social media company's First

Amendment right to take away- Yes, yes. The same way, the same way that, you know, the court has found that a bakery has a First Amendment right to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake. The social media companies have their own First Amendment rights to not be censored and to not be compelled to host speech. So C2 really is a modifier to C1. This dates back to pre-internet laws about kind of like bookstores and in courts looking at, you know, how does someone who distributes someone else's speech, when can we hold them responsible? And in the 1990s, the courts were looking at different cases and said, if you moderate heavily and you miss something that should be illegal, then you're held responsible. And Congress stepped in and

said, whoa, we don't want a world where you have a disincentive against moderation. We want platforms to be able to appeal to niche audiences, to be able to cater to specific people, to be able to provide safe spaces without things like porn or harassment or spam. And so that's why they put C2 in the law. And so while it is certainly put C2 in the law. And so while it is certainly an important part of the law, the First Amendment underlies kind of all content moderation. So I think that's just worth calling out. In addition to the First Amendment, when you sign up to a social media service, you sign a terms of use, you know, terms of service agreement that usually bans lots of things. And it's really up to the platform what they include in that.

But if you violate that terms of service, you're totally uh allowed to be kicked off the platform you violated a contract with with the company and so um it's not as if absent 230 twitter or whoever has a legal obligation to host your speech um it's just absent 230 they don't have to worry about fighting out in court which can cost millions of dollars versus getting it dismissed under 230, which only costs somewhere between a couple of 10, maybe $100,000. What about that, Will? So if Laura Loomer, if there were no Section 230, what would be her grounds for a lawsuit against Twitter for bouncing her off? Because as a private company, they're like, we don't like you. We don't like the color of your hair. You're booted. Right. Well, I mean, there's regulations on private companies and there have been serious ones going back to the teens when it comes to common carrier type regulations or the 1960s with civil rights and public accommodation. Slews of private companies are under various regulations that say you're compelled to provide service to people and you're not allowed to arbitrarily terminate it. That's not true in every aspect of the American economy, but it's true in many of them. And we don't see those necessarily as First Amendment violations of freedom of association. And another point,

I mean, we were just talking about subsection C1, the point that because these platforms aren't speaking, because they're just hosting tons of user-generated content, well, they're obviously not the speaker, so they should be insulated from liability. But then all of a sudden, when you want to say, okay, well, you're not the speaker, so you should still be forced to host this other people's speech because your platform is so huge, it's the public square. And then these companies all of a sudden say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're violating our First Amendment rights to speech. I think it's unfair for these companies to have it both ways. If they want liability protection for hosting user-generated content, then they should concede that they are not the speaker of that user-generated content and that their speech rights aren't being violated when a state in their decision, in their wisdom, decides to give their citizens the right to speak on that platform. How about that, Kate?

How can they argue out of one side of their mouths, we are not in control of the content and out of the other side. Oh, we are very much in control of the content. I don't think any platform would ever say that they're in control of the content. I don't think that's a fight anyone thinks they can win. And I think this really kind of comes. Well, that's what C2 is. That's C2. The reason they are able to remove porn and Laura Loomer is C2. They are in control ultimately of the content. I mean, they're in control of kind of the environment they create. But, you know, we live in a world because of the internet and because of 230, where anybody can create and share content on the internet instantaneously and not have to worry about, you know, like,

like YouTube, for instance, it used to be if you wanted to distribute a TV show, you had to hope that a cable channel and a TV studio and all the people necessary to participate in that process would agree to host you and to do that. You don't need that now anybody can upload anything to YouTube. And if YouTube, of course, has rules around what you can upload, they don't want things like terrorist content, which is at the heart of Gonzalez. They don't want porn, but that's not the business they're in. So they're able to make those decisions. That doesn't make them ultimately liable for the speech, though. And I think if we lived in a world where they were liable for the speech, you would either have so much money and time spent on content moderation to the point

where the internet stopped working the way we're used to it, where somebody, some human had to review every YouTube video before it's shared, which is crazy and not feasible considering how much content is shared, or companies would err on the side of not hosting things. And so to your point earlier, Megan, if someone's deemed controversial, maybe it just automatically gets taken down. Maybe they just don't host any of that person. There's no platform at all. YouTube's like, you're out. Yeah, you're out. Forget monitoring your contents and your content and your comments. You're done. You're not worth the risk. What about that, Will? I mean, I basically agree that there would be a parade of horribles in a

world where there wasn't some liability protection from user-generated content and that these companies would have a very difficult time doing business. But what are we concerned about at the Internet Accountability Project and those of us on the right who want to regulate big tech? Well, we're concerned about censorship. We're concerned about major big tech monopolies using their monopoly power to censor political opinions they don't like. And we want to change the law to make it so to constrain their ability to censor us. We see it as a sort of collective regime of private discrimination. And the remedy to that is state and federal law.

And so from my perspective, you know, I think the First Amendment debate will ultimately shake down in our favor, because there are a variety of precedents that suggest that, you know, if you're not seen as the speaker, that states can protect the right of people to speak on your property, and essentially compel you to allow them to speak on your property. And that's pretty analogous here. So the 230 problem is that there's a federal law that stops states from protecting the rights of their own citizens. And so I'm willing to effectively concede the idea that these companies should have liability protection from user-generated content. And then you can use that to say, you're not the speaker. We should have the right to constrain your ability to censor people

if your platform is large. So how would it work? If you could revise 230, Will, you'd leave number one, C1, in place where it says you're immune. You're not going to be liable for a comment. In other words, one of the good examples was Yelp. If you write a negative review of a restaurant on Yelp, the restaurant can sue you as the commentator, but they can't sue Yelp. And you guys are both in agreement that under C-1, Yelp cannot get sued, and we don't want to mess with that. So how would you like to see C-2, the one that lets them remove certain things like terrorist content, pornography, and so on, how would you like to see it changed to pull back on some of what many of us believe is political censorship for the most part of one particular viewpoint?

Sure. So one simple idea would be to remove the catch all term that says that they companies can remove content that is otherwise objectionable. That gives them a huge amount of leeway to remove content and preempt laws that would protect against political censorship. And another tweet to the law would just say that their good faith belief that the content is violative of their terms of service would have to be objectively reasonable rather than subjective. That would be another tweet to that law that would make it so that states could write their own laws protecting their citizens from censorship that also go along with an objectively reasonable good faith standard. And I think the ultimate world we're trying to lead to is one where people have a meaningful remedy and meaningful predictability about what content will get

them kicked off platforms and what won't. And if they are arbitrarily censored, they'll have a remedy. They can go to court. The thing that's attractive about that, Kate, is what Will was saying a moment ago, the public square, right? That these social media companies have become these behemoths that we never envisioned 20 years ago. I was just thinking about this because I talked to my old pal from Fox News, Rick Leventhal, the other day, and I was talking about how the coverage I saw on 9-11, 2001 was the reason I left the law and got into news. Well, that same time, I remember I was in Chicago, 2001 to 2002, and a friend of mine was dating a guy and she said, oh, I Googled him. And I was like, what does that mean? This is 2002, right? What does it mean to

Google somebody? That's 20 years ago. That's when, even before that, these laws were being passed to govern a body, the Internet, the social media companies that the lawmakers had no clue what they would look like, what they would be like, how important they, this is the public square. And shouldn't we be revising the regulations that govern them, understanding now what the pros and cons of this whole thing are? And I would say to that, if you like the way Twitter or Google or Meta is moderating content, and you want more of that, then yeah, revise 230. Because that will ensure that those are the only companies that can continue to exist since the framework of 230 is created. There's a reason we are the global leader in Internet companies that host content. There's a reason that U.S. policy has led to the kind of the vibrant Internet world we have today. And changing it will ensure that only the largest companies that can afford to fight lawsuits, can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on content moderation technology, can afford to hire tens of thousands of content moderators. There's a reason that those companies

will be fine if you change 230. And in fact, several large companies probably would be okay with you changing 230. We come at it from the perspective of what about the next generation of innovative and novel social media, but also other companies. And I think it's really easy, especially in political circles, to think that the internet is Twitter and the internet is Facebook. But it's not. There's a lot more than that. We talk to companies every day that are doing really cool, unique, new things, including in the social media space. And if they don't have 230, they won't make it to be the next Facebook. And even looking at 10 years from now, let's say, I don't think there's a guarantee that Facebook or Twitter or Google will be the size they are anymore. I think there's been so much innovation

in the social media space. It can feel again, because we're kind of in this like echo chamber that we're just all on Twitter. But you know, discord is being used in new and innovative ways to essentially mimic social media. I wouldn't have predicted the rise of TikTok. And that's such a big platform for a lot of people. So I think it's dangerous to think that we're in this moment. We need to regulate specifically for this moment. When doing so, we'll tip the scales to ensure that only the largest companies can stick around. And I would like to see different companies in place in the next 10 years, but that they need 230 to grow because they will be sued out of existence before they get a chance to really take off. That's a good point.

Well, you can take one thing to the bank. It's the litigiousness of the American people. Well, yeah, I mean, that's there's a reason I said that I don't really want to touch C1. I take Kate's point, and I've believed for a long time that small startups especially need liability protection from user generated content. That's not at all what my argument is. And I think my argument is indeed focused on the major tech platforms and the laws I advocate that protect people's right to speak, like essentially a private right of action for individual individuals so they could walk into

court and sue. You know, those laws would require that the defendant company have something like 100 million users or something more like that. I think it's not impossible to modify our laws in such a way that protects the immunity protections that startups and smaller tech companies have while also protecting Americans' right to speak on these huge monopoly social media platforms. And whether those monopoly social media platforms change, it does seem to be the case that even if a new platform takes the place of an old one, most speech at any one given time is happening on one or two or three major social media platforms.

And I think there is a genuine public interest in ensuring that whatever those social media platforms are, if they're Twitter today or TikTok today or something else tomorrow, whatever those platforms are, that Americans have a right to speak on them. Okay, I like this case. So now he's, to take it to an analogy

from when I was growing up, he's not gonna go after Ma Bell for the conversations you're having on the phone, but he is going to go after them. He's going to make them subject to liability, but he's not going to get the two kids with the Campbell soup cans and the string attaching them having their conversation. How about that? Does that assuage your concerns about the small startups? No, I think, yes, we have the startup perspective. We talk to startup founders all the time. But we also are increasingly talking to internet creators who are also

small business owners. I think it's really easy to dismiss internet creators as like dances on TikTok. But right, these are advocates and educators and comedians and musicians and artists. So it's a whole community, again, that I think only exists because of Section 230. And these people use these large platforms to run their businesses. And they don't, by and large, want to live in a world where their content is served next to hate speech or where their content is served next to harassment. The ability of even large platforms to remove speech that they feel like make their platform a dangerous and unwelcoming and irrelevant place to be is still really dangerous. And maybe the startups will be fine. Although, of course,

every startup wants to be big enough to kind of trigger some of these concerns and have that market power. But even taking the smaller platforms out of it, so many people, and you can disagree that the platforms are doing a good job. I actually don't think anybody thinks the platforms are doing a great job. So that's like a conversation that's worth having. But the legal framework that underlies the ability for a platform to say, no, actually, we're trying to be something specific. And we don't want this hate speech. We don't want this racism. We don't want this harassment, this bullying. We don't want it on our platform. That's really important and keeps the internet, to the extent the internet is healthy and working, it's because platforms can make those decisions. Oh, boy. I know that you were I was kind of with you until that last sentence. But you know, the problem is, what they think is hate

speech is, it's absurd. I mean, truly, it could be, it is not possible to change your sex. If you are born a biological man, you're a man, like that has been labeled hate speech on Twitter. So the those of us who are in the camp of sanity are sick and tired of getting our factual based conversations shut down. COVID was probably even even better example, right? Where people are tweeting out like the vaccines do not prevent the spread of COVID. Censored, censored, right? Like that's what Will is trying to fight back against. And that's why these companies invest so much in technological tools and human beings, both inside and outside the company, to try to review content. No, no, no. I got to jump in. No, no, no, no, no. I don't

care how much they invest. And I'm not taking a side on this, but on this point, I don't care how much. You know what they need to invest in ideological diversity amongst the people making these calls, because nine times out of 10, these calls go against conservatives or people who are pushing back against liberal dogma. and then had to run it up the Facebook authoritarian chain because they labeled it something like disinformation. And he got real live people. It was amazing to explain why they labeled it this. And even when he had proven to them that they were wrong and he wasn't, they wouldn't stand down. Like that's completely aggravating.

And I can speak to this personally. I went out to Facebook. I went to Google. I sat with the executives at YouTube. All of these social media back in 2016, they all invited me out to speak. So I did it. And they asked me as I was like their favorite, uh, possible conservative. So I was at Fox at the time, but they love me because I challenged Trump, right? This is back another day, another day. What should we do? What should we do to solve some of these bias issues? And I

said, for the love of God, get more conservatives on your editorial boards or who's ever making these censorship decisions. Real conservatives, not fake Lincoln, whatever project conservatives. And they didn't do it, Kate. It's not about money. It's about an ideological bent that they refuse to get off of because they share in it. And listen, I don't work for the large companies. I don't need to defend them. They have their own time and resources to do that. But I do think this just kind of speaks to the fact that there's no perfect answer because all of the problems that you and Will have highlighted, those are pros to some members of Congress. You might say that Dox Holly and Elizabeth Warren are united in hating 230. That is true,

but they want very different things. And for every time Facebook doesn't label something that is, you know, allegedly misinformation is misinformation, you have Democratic members of Congress writing to them, asking them why. And so the path on 230 reform

isn't straight because for every complaint you have, there's someone with the opposite complaint and that pulls these companies in impossible directions um and which is why i'm so worried about 230 but my complaint is real and i think elizabeth warren would say her complaint's real too so well i i realize elizabeth warren she's not worried about um left a right-wing bias amongst the social media companies at all she's she a little odd, but she's not dumb. Elizabeth Warren is a smart lady. She's worried about this hate speech and quote unquote hate

speech and all that stuff. So what do you make of the exchange that Kate and I just had on what the real problem is inside of these companies and how we get at it? Well, I think, I mean, Kate makes the point that social media moderation is very difficult because there's pressure coming from all sorts of ways and you don't know exactly what speech you should remove. And I sympathize with that. These companies are vulnerable to both external and internal pressure campaigns from activists, employees, and also pressures from federal government agencies, as we saw with the Twitter files when they go at these companies and say, hey, you should be doing this or that. And so part of why I think my proposals and the proposals for these private rights of action are so useful and would be very good for these companies is that it would say, no, no, no, all this is against the law, right? If we do what you say, activist, if we remove this person from their account, or we ban this COVID misinformation, whatever you say,

if we did that, we would be sued and we would lose. So we're not going to do that. It would allow them to fire a slew of all these people who are essentially interacting with all these activists and really liberate them to just focus on, OK, what are the core elements of moderation? We need to focus on child sexual abuse material. Good. Yeah, let's get rid of that porn, et cetera. But in terms of they would be completely out of the political censorship debates, which is, I think, where they should be. And I think, I mean, you're absolutely right that these companies have a liberal bias, I mean, in general. But I think really, a good analogy is actually you go back to the civil rights era. A lot of small businesses that were enforcing Jim Crow didn't necessarily want to be they weren't making money hand over fist. But they were faced with a collective regime of private discrimination in the South.

And it was federal civil rights law that created the environment in which they could say to, say, a racist customer, guess what? No, we're not discriminating because if we did so, it would be against the law. These are essentially liberating constraints for these companies that would allow them to get out of the business of censorship entirely and focus on what matters. Okay. But you're talking about the non-racist shop owner who wanted to be liberated. And what I'm telling you is there is not the non-liberal shop owner amongst if that's the case, then you should be looking for laws that constrain you from having to engage in these muddy censorship debates in the first place and just say the whole category of this censorship would be against the law and would get you sued. You're basically saying I'm going to get Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren off your backs here.

I'm here to save the day. By the way, I should say there are some conservatives inside of YouTube and Facebook and so on. It's just obviously not at the top, top in control and deciding all the editorial direction. Go ahead, Kate. This falls back onto the First Amendment problem, right? Like we and it's even more complicated because these companies are in the business of hosting speech and they can't be compelled to host speech under the first amendment that they don't want to. I know there's like the shopping mall analogy and there's past cases that look at like similar sounding things. But, you know, the courts that are examining the Florida and Texas laws feel differently. And ultimately, maybe the Supreme Court will weigh in. Can I jump in there just to just to so I'm want to make sure I'm in the right

space mentally. So like AT&T, I mentioned them before, right? It was a private company and they wouldn't have been allowed to jump in on my private phone conversation and say, you can't say that and cut the line, right? It's a public utility. Like you can't, even though it was a private company. And there was a piece by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School in the Wall Street Journal a year plus ago, arguing that the social media companies should be treated as such, that they, you know, they crossed over public square. Again, they're so big and they're so vital to the national conversation now, they should be treated more like a public entity that doesn't have the liberties they once had. Are we on the same page about like the difference? Because

you're saying a private company, they should be able to moderate the speech however they feel and there is an argument that they're they're not just this little private company anymore well and will mentioned earlier the idea of a common carrier right and a common carrier legally is something very specific uh it is a company usually that's much more highly regulated um and holds itself out as a neutral conduit so the phone company right like anybody can't just go launch their own phone company. You have to dig up a million miles of land and put in cell towers and all this stuff, right? So it's not as if that's something

that anybody can just get up and do. And it is very highly regulated. Phone companies are very highly regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. And there is a lot of government interplay with how phone companies work and what they need from the government. So they are common carriers and they can't step in. They don't pretend to, right? When you sign

up for a phone, you don't sign an agreement saying, I won't use certain words or I won't say certain things or I won't talk about certain topics. So they are a common carrier. Social media platforms have never made that promise. That's not what they're out here to do. And in fact, something I think is worth talking about, we talk about moderation. Curation and moderation can be really valuable. For instance, like, you know, if there's an example we always come back to in this space around Reddit, there's a subreddit of cats standing on their hind legs. It is literally just people posting pictures of cats on their hind legs. And if you upload a picture of a dog on its hind leg, it will get removed because that's not the purpose of that forum. And Twitter or YouTube or Facebook or anyone can say, and the purpose of our forum

is not parade of horribles that we're worried about. And so I don't think, I don't know that legally there's a pathway forward for these companies to be considered common carriers, but they certainly, that's not how they hold themselves out to be. And all of the startups we work with who want to compete with these companies, they don't want to be competing to get one day essentially taken over by government regulation. They don't want to live in a world where if they get big enough, they become a public utility and they get regulated as such. And it would be a very hard time attracting investors if you had to

know that at the end of the successful road was government intervention because you've been deemed too big. The crackdown. Will, can I ask you, and then we'll take a quick break. Right now, am I correct that if Twitter or let's say Facebook wanted to say. All conservative viewpoint is censored. We don't want any conservative viewpoint. Get out. It's all going to be pulled. It would be a bad business decision, but legally they can do that.

Right. We might have a remedy in Texas and we might have a remedy in Florida, depending on whether or not those laws have gotten through the courts yet. I mean, there's some tweaking, but as a general rule, I don't know that we would have a legal remedy under current law. I think that's obviously why that law needs to change. I mean, and I think one of the things in general is that conservatives have relied on the fact that it seems obviously in the entrepreneurial interests of these companies not to mistreat conservatives. And so we don't need to regulate them. But it's pretty apparent after the last four years that that entrepreneurial interest is not enough to defeat the behavior of these

monopolists. And the fact that they have a monopoly is the reason why they feel so comfortable censoring in the first place, why they have the freedom to censor, if you will. And just to be clear, they cannot say no blacks on the platform, no disabled people, no women. That's not lawful, right? Because those are protected classes. But political thought, your ideology as a conservative or otherwise, that's not protected. And then more and more, even though conservatives on the internet, at least, are kind of treated like they're other, they're not in the country, and therefore they don't have protected status. And it's sort of this tension because the libs do control most of these platforms. They control Hollywood, they control sports, they control media. And so the conservatives are actually a minority, but they're not recognized as a protected class.

Right. And I think we don't have to get into detail about which classes need to be protected to say that everybody should have the right to be able to speak on social media and that your First Amendment right to speak is not particularly meaningful. If you can't speak on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the major social media platforms of the day, because that's where political debate is. Yeah, but it's not a government company. I mean, right, this is one of the things. If this were run by Joe Biden, it would be fine. Like, it would be a First Amendment issue, but it's run by a private company who can say, you have red hair and I won't serve you. Right. Well, I mean, that's why we need to regulate private companies. And I think, contrary to Kate, the idea that these companies can't be regulated as common carriers because they are not currently heavily regulated, well, that's a circular argument. You're saying we can't regulate them because they're not currently regulated. Historically, common carrier regulation has been

imposed upon companies that didn't want to be common carriers, that didn't want the obligation to serve everybody equally imposed on them. That was the trains, I think, in the 1880s was the first time that this came about because you had, you had monopoly train lines in the very first days of train tracks going across the country. And they had the ability to discriminate and price discriminate against different customers. And the customers were just SOL if they had a problem with that. So, you know, the federal government said in their wisdom, yeah, federal government said in their wisdom, these are private companies.

Yes. But for the good of all, they need to be regulated and we're going to make you serve everybody. This is so interesting. I'm really enjoying this. All right, let me take a quick break and then we'll come back. We'll talk about what's happening to the Supreme Court and how it relates to everything we've just discussed. So the audience is going getting involved in this in a case called Gonzalez, Gonzalez versus Google. And I understand you're involved in this case. So give us Gonzalez for dummies. What is this? Yeah, absolutely. And to be clear, not involved personally, but we have filed an amicus brief and helped another group file an amicus brief as well. So Gonzalez is essentially asking the question, who should be responsible for terrorist content online? And is it the platform that hosts it? And what if the

platform might allegedly recommend the content? Then at what point does the platform become responsible in addition to obviously the terrorist group posting the content? Okay, and so is Google alleging that it should not be responsible if terrorist content gets posted on, say, YouTube? there was an ISIS terrorist attack and there were unfortunately victims and the victim, one of the victims family is suing. And Google has told the court that it's hosting and recommendations are both protected by 230. And lots of other people have weighed in, including us. We feel strongly that recommendations should be protected by 230. Lots of startups use recommendations to kind of as their competitive advantage. That's how they appeal to their users by being able to recommend and curate specific content. And then additionally, we worked with several internet creators, so YouTube creators, creators on TikTok and other platforms, to explain why recommendations are so

important as people are trying to build out an audience. Does Google acknowledge that this was a mistake, that this was not a good thing to do? So Google certainly, and to their credit, all of our large companies invest heavily in finding and removing terrorist content. This is one of the most collaborative and aggressive places that content moderation exists on the internet today is around terrorist content. So nobody is saying terrorist content online is a good thing. Nobody's arguing that. I'm not sure that it is even true that YouTube did host this content. I think that's something that would be discussed in court if we were talking about a kind of full jury trial, or we're looking at the facts of the case. But because we're talking about the legal mechanisms

here, that's like not even a question. It's just should they be able to get sued if they did host and recommend content? And where is the case coming up to the Supreme Court from? What circuit was it decided in? And how did it go at the lower court level? So Google did win at the lower court level. I'm not sure exactly which circuit it came from. But I think kind of this follows traditional 230 jurisprudence. Normally, when it comes to content somebody else created, platforms are able to assert 230 and they're able to win. And so this is the victim's family trying to challenge that ruling. So is this a C-1 case? Like somebody else posted the controversial stuff and we don't have any liability for it?

Yes, this is C-1. The Supreme Court is also thinking about taking up these two Texas and Florida cases, which, again, are being challenged in the First Amendment, but are part of the C-2 conversation. But that would be separate and likely next year at this point. This is, like you said, happening next week, and it's just about C1 and liability for hosting and recommending the content. Usually, Will, it's not a good sign if you won at the lower court level and the Supreme Court takes the case. So I'm sure Google's not feeling too great about the fact that they're being forced to argue this in front of SCOTUS, but this isn't necessarily something that divides along ideological lines perfectly. So I don't know. How do you think this is likely to go? And what's unique about it if C1 is kind of not as controversial?

So I think it's probably going to get reversed. I think that Google's probably going to lose because I don't think, as you suggest, I don't think the Supreme Court would have taken it if they weren't leaning in that direction. I think it's really a question about the breadth of the C1 immunity grant. And I think, you know, in other cases, courts have interpreted that really broadly to protect almost everything that these companies are doing with relation to user generated content on the internet. And so I think the Supreme Court sees this as an opportunity to narrow that grant of immunity to merely like, you're not liable, you're not the publisher of the speech we get that um but that doesn't necessarily insulate you from liability for using for act of overtly recommend recommending the content to others um let's not

say we couldn't have other laws if we deemed it in their wisdom it was smart to do that but i think you know from i'm not super familiar with this case because i'm not you know i'm not a google i'm not i'm not involved in the case i didn, we didn't file an amicus or anything like that. But I lean towards the side of saying, the courts have probably interpreted the C1 grant of immunity too broadly, beyond its text, and that this is a good opportunity to constrain it and say that, you know, companies actually are ultimately responsible for things they overtly do. And that ultimately, there is somebody harmed at the end of the day here. So it's not a bad idea to say that,

to constrain, to interpret liability grants somewhat narrowly. Yeah, because Kate, correct me if I'm wrong, but the thing here is that promotion is not the same as just hosting the content. I think in a lot of ways it is the same. And I actually really worry about the ability of the Supreme Court from like a technological level to distinguish. But I mean, every time you search something, whether it's on Google or Bing or anywhere else, right, like that's, that's an algorithm telling you what it thinks you want to

see. So so it's not just kind of like the YouTube recommendations that we're worried about. Although I also think YouTube recommendations play a large role in a lot of content discovery. There's a lot of YouTube out there, there's a lot of internet out there. And recommendations are really what enable platforms to try to give their users an experience they think the user wants to see. And absent those recommendations, because if they remove 230,

why would anybody recommend anything ever again? You would be taking full responsibility for it. Absent 230 and absent recommendations, I worry the internet becomes kind of like a needle in a haystack, a phone book that's on alphabetized hodgepodge trying to figure out what you actually want to see and how to find it online. Wait, so let me ask you something. So that's a valid concern. So if, let's say they lose this case, Google owns YouTube. So let's say they lose this case and just the mere promotion. I mean, when I hear promotion, I think, hey, look at this ISIS video.

But it could just be the algorithm returning a result to searching people who are searching for something. So it could be less pernicious than that. So could it be the case that, you know, as a result in the opposite side of a negative ruling for them, you've got Google and YouTube saying, we're not going to promote. Like, here's a list of a thousand people who are considered controversial, who we're not going to promote at all. Like YouTube is no longer going to promote, Hey, check in again. Some people say I'm controversial. No sane person says it, but like Megan Kelly's on the list. Don't promote her show. Or let's take somebody more realistic, like Steven Crowder, who is controversial. Um, it could just be like, don't even touch it. Don't promote it. Don't don't allow YouTube to promote it. That could

be an outcome of this. Absolutely. I mean, I have no idea what YouTube is thinking. Again, I don't work there. I'm not sure what they're talking about internally, although I'm sure they're talking about something. But it's not it's even broader than that. Right. It could be politics is controversial. Medicine is controversial. We're just not going to recommend anything in that space. And I think that that gets really scary and really dangerous. And it's something we told the court, we think that this could have much broader impacts than just algorithmic recommendations and terrorist content. But I think lots of people have weighed in with concerns about the impact this will have on free expression. Oh, all right. Well, I'll give you the last word on this because

we had to wrap it up. But how do you think people should be looking at this issue? I mean, fair minded people who don't want these catastrophic outcomes that Kate is talking about, but are allowed to write new laws to solve new problems. 230 was designed to solve a problem of the early 90s. Internet forums being unable to moderate any sort of content at all without getting liable for defamation. We just need to write a new law that says here's a way to solve social media censorship on political grounds. And are you an Elizabeth Warren supporter now? Huh? No. No, I didn't think so. You guys, great debate. Really super appreciate all of your, your information and thoughtful exchanges. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to the Megyn Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.