TRASHFUTURE - Free Speech Death Ray ft. Jonathan Shainin

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

This week, the original TF crew of Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Milo (@Milo_Edwards) speaks to the Guardian's Jonathan Shainin (@jonathanshainin) on the topic of Niall Ferguson's Bond villain antics, the Evening Standard's recent sale of itself to the app lords, and a robust debate on whether or not free speech is an absolute and abstract thing. Nate (@inthesedeserts) smuggled himself into the Sharia no-go zone of Tower Hamlets to guest on this episode, after which 'Viley' confined him to his flat and forced him to edit this on his extremely unclean laptop. We will only respect people who commodify their dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/ Please keep the Saracen Guards of Bethnal Green in your thoughts, as invaribly they're really hungry enforcing Sharia while fasting.

And we are never we're never screwing up again, actually. We're going to have we're going to we're going to do every show right the first time forever, because we've never fucked up a recording so badly that we had to redo it. It's never happened in the history of our show. And everyone in this room can attest to that fact. Audio geniuses. I think it's it's like a breach of the Geneva convention stat to have to come

into this room in the heat. Twice. I'd like climb up four flights of stairs. Yeah. Go to the go to the famous no, no, the Sharia, no, go zone of Bethnal Green. How much how much do you have to play in like jizzy attacks to get here? It was harsh. No, it's especially because it's because it's Ramadan.

We have to make sure that like it pays a cut every time you come into Bethnal Green and they they they don't even accept British money anymore. Of course, they they only accept supreme branded goods because it's a very cool jihadi group. They don't even accept palace. Palace is like for palaces of pussy. No, they don't accept palace. They accept Dome on the Rock.

Cut to the music. Yeah, cut to the music now. We're done. We're done. Okay. Welcome back, everybody, welcome back. Welcome to the first time I'm so confused to this, the only ever fully reason episode of trash future.

The podcast about how if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communism, the future is and will be trash. I fucking nailed it. I miss the days when like you would record shit audio and the general consensus would just be like, oh, it's fine. Just put it up. Who gives a shit? Uh-huh.

I miss those days. You listen to like the early recordings of trash future, right? Listen to episodes like four or five. Even before I came here, the audio is like so bad. It's so shit. It's like, wow, you really like, I was listening to it before I came on as a guest for the first time. I was like, wow, you guys really don't give a shit about how you sound.

And then like an angel from heaven. Yes, this is Nate. Uh, you may remember me from all the times I've put very frustrated voice over interludes into episodes of trash future because they failed to record something I asked them to, but I'm actually here in the caliphate of tower Hamlet's myself, uh, I was managed to dodge the Saracen guards and I'm in the studio somehow. So, uh, let's just hope we don't have.

Audio crisis number three, because that is on brand for us. Bear in mind that the Saracen guards are pretty hungry right now sleeping at the moment, but once they've eaten at nine PM this evening, you guys are fucked. And for the first time ever, definitely. Yes, I'm Jonathan Shannon, today's guest here of my own will today and last week's guest and earlier this week's guest, um, we, we had, we were, we were our normal audio genius selves, uh, or I was anyway, and, uh, did a bit of an audio fuckup.

So we're doing, we're doing some, some re-records where we, we were recapturing, recapturing some of the magic. And, um, Jonathan is the, uh, long reads editor at the Guardian, uh, who's there editing all of those things that are not 140 characters or 280 characters, but quite of quite a bit more. They're like big tweets, big tweets, ultra tweets, the Guardian, big tweets editor. Um, and sort of what we've been noticing, there's just been this enormous, enormous coincidence, a constellation of issues has emerged around free speech.

And there are a number of, I think very interesting angles on that. And so we're going to kind of be getting into a little more of that today. Um, the first thing I kind of, I kind of want to hit before, before who's saying we'll try to shoehorn in, uh, the reference to me being, uh, what Jordan Peterson's porcelain son from last week. If you let me tell the story, once you've done the point, I'll tell the story because it is an important one. It seems especially cruel to step on his joke like that.

Yeah. I like, I thought about it, I refined it after the first recording fucked up. It's really just interesting watching him like just freak out in real time. We can, we can, we can, we can have a little sign. Nate, can you please edit this out? I'll put it only neon in Arabic as well. Hit a button. Um, yeah.

So free speech. Okay. Always good. We, I mean, let's leave, let's leave porcelain son like the Utah story. Message Alex Keely. If you want to know, I'm going to tell the Utah story. Okay. Fuck, I'm going to tell the, I'm going to tell, no, not the Utah story.

I'm going to tell the porcelain son story now, right? Okay. So because, because we're talking about free speech in the initial recording, I had brought it, I'd segwayed it in really nicely. We were talking about beautiful segway talking about Jordan Peterson being like one of these intellectual dark web goons, defender of free speech. A listener had, a listener had asked me why I left Canada. Ah, yeah.

That's right. I'm remembering this. Okay. So, right. So it's like a dream, actually, kind of this last Friday recording. It's coming back to me in bits and pieces. We've aged like several years since then. It's, it's, it's a David Lynch film because everyone loves it, but I don't

understand why. Okay. So the curious, so the question we were asked was why did Riley leave Canada? And your answer was? My answer was just that I went to university over here. People over here kind of found me more attractive than in Canada. And I got really, really used to saying flat and quid and I didn't want the two weeks of just getting fucking sack tapped in Canada for talking weird.

So the actual story is that Riley did his BA under the tutelage of Dr. Jordan Peterson back before he became famous. And he was Jordan Peterson's star pupil. Jordan Peterson used to look at him with like really admirable, like with admiration, slightly like weird curvature eyes, something that like if you were a parent, you would probably report them to like the headmaster or like the vice chancellor, but you know, he used to refer to Riley as like his, his beautiful porcelain son, a beautiful porcelain son that he never had.

Yeah. Um, because he never busts. Of course. And he also, he doesn't buy porcelain art. He only buys socialist, realist art so that he can be, you know, be ice chewingly furious all the time. When you left to go to England, Jordan Peterson got really mad and he was trying to like lure you back.

So like he would bought all this like socialist art because he knew that like you had read Marx and he thought that if he bought all this, like all this Soviet art, you would come back because of your natural inquisition and your first for learning and cleaning your room. I'm basically, I'm like a, I'm like, uh, an albatross. I naturally sense direction, but instead of magnetic north, uh, I go to magnetic left, but you never came back. You never came back.

You stayed, you did like more and more degrees. You made your room more and more messy. If Jordan Peterson saw your room right now, boy would he freak out. Yo, he'd be like, Oh my God, you must, you must have such full balls. So Jordan Peterson decided that he needed to travel around the world to go find Riley and this is, this is the reason why he wrote the book. And this is the reason why he's gone on this big international tour. But the problem is that even though he's been in London, I think he's coming back

to London and he knows Riley is in London. He won't go to Bethnal Green. He won't go to Tower Hamlets because it's a no go zone. It's a Sharia zone. Yeah. And he can't do logical. Yeah. So, and by principle, he won't play Vigisius acts.

So he's now just sitting at Trafalgar Square waiting for you to come. Oh, well, he's going to wait a long time by the state of my room. Although, although I actually recently, after two days of having thrown out my old toothbrush, because all the bristles started going in different directions and sort of replaced my three in one combination conditioner, conditioner, shampoo, body wash with like separate things because Laura Tidd on Twitter kept calling me Viley. I am, I am now beginning to get my life in order.

Yeah, you'll be you're fighting. You're beginning to find balance in your life for today. I moisturize tomorrow. I fold and then maybe marriage. Anyway, that was the porcelain son riff that Hussain has transplanted into this episode. I think it's really nice. Jonathan, I'm sorry.

No, I'm, you know, I think I'm stuck thinking about. How good it was on Friday. And maybe, maybe my role for the listener here as a, as an objective observer is, is to say it really was great. It was very funny, especially me. I was, I think I was unusually hilarious. And you're just going to have to take, take my word for it. Hussain and Riley were great.

The whole thing was very smooth. We didn't, nothing needed to be edited. I barely would have had to even touch it. Nobody didn't put the microphone into their face when they were talking. It was, it was, it was, it was absolutely, it was the perfect lost golden episode of El Dorado. Yeah. Um, but it was cool in here.

There was like a breeze. Yes. Uh, everyone was more attractive. More attractive. It wasn't very humid. I don't know. Well, one of the, one, one good thing about re-recording is one of the stories we were following has more details have, have emerged from it.

This is like free speech story number one. Um, who all here is familiar with the academic output of a certain Mr. Niall Ferguson? Oh, I think we all have, uh, found ourselves being educated on the declining story of the West as narrated by Niall Ferguson. It's like, I, I, most of the academic work I read is, is columns in the Sunday times. So, uh, Ferguson is, is a big part of my syllabus. Oh yeah.

He is a, and Rod Little, Ferguson and Rod Little, his Sunday times, uh, you know, stable mate and Melanie Phillips. Is she in the Sunday times? I thought Melanie Phillips, you're London, a Stan, right? Accurately describing. You can find only to the Sunday newspaper. She has to go through the week. Yeah.

I think she, yeah. I think she's like a weekly, weekly columnist because you need like, she's kind of like the Gatwick runway and Rod Little. It's like the Heathrow, the new, the new, the, the, the third runway we're building in order to deport more brown people. Um, you know, so Niall Ferguson, uh, is a professor at Stanford of history. More or less everything he writes is actually white people have never really done anything wrong.

He also, uh, has a book about basically actually the West is superior. And, uh, if you're in New York, you might find people with bank and or hedge fund branded vests reading it on the train, going to and from various, uh, neighborhoods that didn't used to be full of people in vests. Um, so he's definitely a staple because companies buy his books and pay him to talk at their companies, to educate them on the decline of the West. Well, uh, a certain, a certain position held by a certain Mr. Ferguson, um, the, I think he had a, I think a professorship at Stanford, uh,

in the States. And, um, as part of that, he also ran a group called Cardinal Conversations, which is at the center of probably one of the most hilarious free speech incidents that's ever occurred in an American university. I'm not going to go fully on British university cause some weird shit has happened here. Um, basically he runs a sort of a conservative student speech group, more or less, that's a famously basically just a nexus of oppression, uh,

called Cardinal Conversations. Um, and what Cardinal Conversations basically does is they invite some like reactionary psychopath to come like expound their theories of race science. In this case, it was literal. They invited Charles Murray, uh, to come expound more or less a theory of IQ and race science at Stanford. And, um, he found himself slightly protested. Now in one of probably the greatest, um, one of just an ongoing sequence of,

right, of, uh, of right-wing skull called intellectuals, just relentlessly owning themselves through either like misuse of predictive algorithms or technology. A series of emails was forwarded to the wrong person. As, so this is a man who wrote his last book was all about like technology and how, you know, technology was going to change the way that like society and democracy was going to work. So he's, he wrote this book about apps and he wrote about how like technology was going to change democracy and stuff like that.

And he basically, he went around like the speaker circuit, all these banks, all these like hedge funds he talks to, talking about how like, you know, he was the one who understood technology. And yet he's somehow unable to say it's not called, it's called like the tower on the square, the circle in the tower, something like that, something weirdly sexual. So, um, basically here, here are, here's a transcript of emails because it basically, like some people were protesting.

I want to pause one second. So is this, so is this meant to be an explicitly conservative thing? Or is it just like, oh, this is a forum for campus debate? I think there, you know, it's, it's, it's conservative in as much as it's like, well, we're going to talk to a great white man of history without sort of so much saying that it's like, ah, the, it's, it is, well, we'll go into the, uh, into the emails and this will, this will say, okay. But his emails.

So Ferguson, Ferguson in this leaked email writes, um, the original card, cardinal conversation steering committee should be allies against a particular undergraduate student who is protesting them. Whatever your past differences, bury them, unite against the SJWs. A friend of mine is a fellow at Vox Clara, who was, he was especially good and will intimidate them. Basically, uh, Niall Ferguson is trying to muster a street gang of nerds. He did a blade, he did the blade meme.

It's the, it's, it's the, it's an actual extension of the blade meme, right? Well, you were protest, well, you were protesting Charles Murray. I studied economics to a PhD level at a Christian university. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the, the acolyte that he had planned to sick on these individuals didn't even have an, it wasn't an econ PhD, it was an econ history PhD, but yes, that's still intimidating. The left somehow, because that must involve the absolutely unbiased and completely not subjective science of economics.

Well, they did economics one-on-one. Every leftist weakness. Exactly. If I'm not pointed out simple science supply and demand, I'll never be able to stop making arguments. No, I've never thought it through to be honest. I just keep letting my feelings rule me because I've heard, I try to fight facts with them only they would care.

Yeah. So here's the great thing. Here's the great thing. One of Ferguson's protege is, um, which is actually the son of Obama security advisor, Susan Rice, which is incredible, wrote to Ferguson, quote, slowly we will continue to crush the left will to resist as they will crack under pressure. He sounds like, he sounds like a fucking like one of those, you know, dads

who joins a drama society and then decides they want to play a Nazi. Gorka. Yeah, I was thinking about this sort of guy who like brings his gun to like the neighborhood watch patrol is like, do we have neighborhood watch here? That's only a thing in America. I was going to say that there's a particularly American crazy dad protecting his property kind of vibe.

But I mean, I suppose that's George Zimmerman is that guy. But but this is also like George Zimmerman, but he's obsessed with the idea that there's a mole inside the neighborhood watch who might be, you know, wired up, giving evidence to the FBI about abuses inside the neighborhood watch. He's just tweeting it out to the left. Whoever that is, they're getting all the neighborhood watch minutes. You know, the worry is, is, is here's here's the next quote actually leads me

to realize what I think his worry really is. Now we turn more for more Ferguson to the more subtle game of grinding them down in the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It's the blade meme. It's just another version of the fucking blade meme. It's like, you know, I don't even know like how to even it's cut. Oh, you know what, you know what, it reminds me of when I used to play

Warhammer at games workshop and you always have those guys who would like dictate every move that they would make and they would say it in like these really weird ways. Like, you know, I'm taking my like unit of space marines. I'm going to obliterate you or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. Like they would make it more dramatic.

It reminds me of like, it reminds me of bases. It's like this weird, elaborate form of like eternal cosplay. I was thinking the exact same thing that if your entire life and your concept of struggle between opposing groups is dictated by video game dialogue, this is the way that you would write. I was going to say it's not on your solid. And I hate making the same joke every time I'm on this show. But all I can think of is just like the PTT with Snake's face in the colonel.

It's back and forth. They're talking about the academic left. But then the question is, where did Ferguson pick this up? Has he been? Has he gone so deep in with like the college Republicans? He studied the blade. He studied the blade. Oh, no, it's I think he's too old for this.

But he's also he's like one of those guys who I think is going through like some sort of life crisis. And like, you know, I it's kind of like your worst fear, but it's something that other academics kind of told me, which is that you end up having you end up having like professors or academics who like regress so much that they end up like fraternizing with Steve Wall. They end up like wanting to like hang out with students and be like students again. And I guess for him, it's just like, you know, you know, that's his thing.

He wants to just hang out with students. Third hand video game dialogue. No, it's wants to be like a mentor, right? He wants to kind of be the guy that these like young college Republicans look up to. Which means that he has to talk like a fucking moron to do it. Well, I think what the way I kind of see it is that is that every like conservative academics midlife crisis isn't buying a sports car. It's trying to be it is trying to lead a crusade.

Like in the thirteen hundreds, you could go and sack Venice and say that you were doing it to own the Arabs, which again, that actually happened. I don't know if it was in thirteen hundreds, but the Western crusading force did once get sort of so asked backwards that they sacked Venice to own the Arabs. And just now Ferguson is is now he is he is the same crusader. He is still trying to defend Christendom, except the thing is he's doing it with all the gravitas of a middle-aged neighborhood watch psychopath

who was like brought his everyday carry of like the Devil May Cry guns and a giant sword to the meeting. All and what he's doing is then he's going around and sort of waving bacon in front of everyone's face because he's pretty sure that one of them is like a secret Muslim doing taquia imagining him coming home to his wife and being like honey to protect the West. I have to leave you for Ion Hersey Alley. And so he tried to basically do

OPPO research on a 20 year old student to protect the West. Something I feel like hasn't come up in this whole story is what they actually turned up like what what this this this left wing activist who I think is called Michael O'Conn who who who Ferguson is urging them to do OPPO on. Like what did they think they were going to turn up here, you know, like should he fail, Jim? No, like, yeah, or he smoked one and a half spliffs. I mean, that's probably the only thing that's not where I don't understand

like how at that age, like what would classify as like opposition? Like was he colluding with the Hillary campaign while he was in high school? Which is I'm thinking what like bad. Wrestling memes of a Stalinist sort. What's the like? What are the vices of a of a like 20 year old college leftist that you're going to? I mean, I always think they want rude, potentially vulgar tweets. They can make a way bigger deal out of than a normal person would.

But like, ultimately, I agree with you that there's nothing you can horny on main. Exactly what we're going for. Or maybe one day he said depression was just a mindset thing. And they're like, oh, we can kill him legally now. I just look at it more that I think about what I was into as a college student when I was 20 and it's like it's weird enough when you're in school and you're sort of like, do I really want to be an adult? I mean, I sort of have to imagine that plus apparently Dr.

X, your professor of history, is conspiring to like find you out somehow with a bunch of his acolytes because Dr. Colossus, because if you imagine, imagine how you thought of professors as an undergrad, you're like, and now you've got one of them. The most esteemed one is like, I don't really like that one. He tweeted something rude about me, destroy him and him come to my office hours on skull. Island. Oh, sweet. I thought, no, this is my favorite thing that's ever happened.

I love when people are arch. But what now has happened? You mentioned that since our original rendition of this bit on Friday, which was so good. More news has come out. Yeah, he what he basically had to like own up to this and write some columns. Yeah, but it was like one of the funniest things. It was like an every everyone that sort of dunked on him for this because he he based Riley, I think Riley's bringing up.

But his basic thing was like, yeah, what I did was wrong, but now I'm going to focus on what I'm really good at, which is writing apologia for war criminals. The art is called a hard lesson on student politics after a Pyrrhic victory for free speech, I'm going back to what I do best time trying to take over the world. Huge win for the battle of ideas. Fuck no, he's stimpy. You know, like, you know, no, not stimpy. What was it? What's the cartoon of the two with the two mice?

It's not running stimpy. It's the other one. It's pinky in the brain. He's the brain. He's the brain. He's the brain. Yeah, he's stimpy. No, he's he's the brain.

I like that we did it again and you still fucked it up. Look, I only watch Evangelion. That's the only thing I watch. It's the only cartoon like everybody knows that that Stimpy and the brain are all along the same characters. Like we've all read Jordan Peterson's early work where he basically just complains about cartoons and he says that every there are two personality types. There's the stimpy slash brain personality type in the rent slash pinky

personality type that you guys ever read. Haven't you ever like done logic like this is this is formal logic actually like you only watch when you when you only watch Rick and Morty. Yeah, your brain becomes so good, but you forget everything else. You get the best brain. So now Ferguson says that the only thing that came of the emails. They didn't even do any opposition research. The only thing came of their emails was that their circulation led to my

stepping down from my post. So the big the whole black ops. Nothing. Yeah. It's what he did was he had a very careful coordinated mission to machine gun himself in the leg. Insert that drill tweet here. Oh, so he says from all this I draw two conclusions. First it might have been avoided if conservatives at universities did not

feel so beleaguered. There's a debate about whether free speech has been so restricted on American campuses in recent years. I've no doubt it has middle of the road. Students live in fear that a casual mark will be deemed offensive or triggering or supervillain like their social media. Well, I added the last bit and their social media will be unleashed to shame them conservative students have to keep quiet or fight a culture war in

which they are hopelessly outnumbered. A couple of things. So before I became an esteemed podcast producer, I used to teach college English. So I know all about syllabi and potential trigger warnings and things along those lines and I would say that for one, a lot of that is like the province of people at extremely expensive elite schools because most state institutions like students fuck like they just don't like it's not a thing. So the idea of the trigger warning as this like buzzword for the conservative

right for the online right as like evidence of, you know, weakness and oppression of conservatives on campus, it's kind of horseshit. I mean, does it exist in the sense that people are going to push back against you if you're like walking around, you know, carrying signs saying go Trump with a red hat on where you're making shitty memes of yourself wearing diapers. Like people are going to make fun of you. But I think the thing here is they have equated the idea of disagreement or making light of someone with the idea of them being oppressed.

And it's like what they're basically saying is we want a world in which no one is allowed to make fun of us. Yeah. No one is allowed to say we're wrong ever. It should be a crime. What I think is particularly telling about that Ferguson paragraph. And this goes with something maybe we will return to later about the way that power can never be spoken of in these arguments about free speech is that

what he's not mentioning in this like ominous description of how conservatives live in fear is the idea that you're like millionaire tenured professor who has a column in the Sunday times is going to threaten you privately in exchange for, you know, as a result of you speaking out. I mean, the idea that Ferguson himself is abusing his power as a tenured academic to, you know, threaten some 20 year old leftist or, or, you know, suggest that we should gather opposition research against some kid doesn't even

register to him. It's to him it's he's so afraid of someone gathering there. So gathering people's social media history on them to shame them that he's going to do the same thing, except he's going to talk like he's building a moon laser, which is the difference. So I for one am excited for for Nile Ferguson to take over the US government to fly to the moon to just drive it into into America to destroy the entire world because of this exact segment of us being mean to Nile Ferguson.

But I do have one thing to add. Hussain has to answer for this as the one person in the room currently with the with an English accent, because Americans admittedly are so weird and so insecure in their place in the world that we love English accents so much. And we are willing to tolerate literal moon raker villain bullshit from someone if they speak charmingly and have those wonderful vowels like Nile Ferguson does. I don't get it, but we do. Apologize.

No, no, because there's a lot of power that comes with it. And this is why when I go to America later this year, I'm going to use this British accent that was kicked into me by the colonizers to convince all the Americans that coffee is in fact a soup. And you were my persecuted like Majid Nawaz. When when the what is it like the SPLC or like some, you know, anti-hate groups put you on watch lists. I mean, like, I feel Majid's pain whenever people tweet things at me

basically saying that I'm wrong or I should log off or my tweets are bad. But coffee isn't a soup. It's not a fucking soup. That to me is violent. So I completely understand where Majid's coming from. And that's why I, this is my exclusive on trash feature. I will be writing to the SS, PLC to tell them, but I too will be suing them for people saying mean things to me online.

I have, I have a quite a good, quite a good cold open thing that happened to me called middle. So me and and friends slash former host of the show Charlie Palmer were with some friends of mine getting, getting a succulent Georgian meal in Moscow. And who should walk in? But Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov and sit at the table next to us who I managed to get a very surreptitious selfie with in the background. And he's got like a mouthful of food and I'm pulling a sort of awkward face.

It's pretty tight. Do you want to send that out to listeners of the show? Maybe included with this list description. What was his what what kind what did he order? What kind of plov was he eating? I don't know. So Georgians don't, don't do plov. You've gone Central Asian there.

So as Bex, you Kazak, perhaps even your Tajiks. Georgian, you're talking a hatchery, lots of cheesy breads, dumplings, that kind of shit. I didn't get, they were, they were drinking. I bet he got them with whiskey with dinner, which I thought was quite bold. It's not really a like washing down salty food drink. I mean, based on, I mean, based on catch up, based on Kachapuri, I definitely would want some whiskey with that to just cut through the sort of mountains of Greece. Maybe, yeah.

They're also doing this thing that like kind of like blokey Russian blokes do, which is there was like a table. They were all huge, but there were no like bodyguards. They were all just, it was like him and his mates, the bodyguards are outside in a car. And they were all like referring to each other by their like patronymic, which is sort of blokey, a bit like kind of English guys sometimes refer to each other by their surname, sort of similar kind of thing. They're like, so gay, just see it away, mate.

And they're like making each other drink. And I was like, is this, is this how politics gets decided here? I guess it might be. Another normal day in Russia. Regular day. So I want to set up the back on the free speech bandwagon. I'd like to sort of set up the next segment a bit by asking everybody to cast their minds back to, I don't know, because politics moves so bewilderingly quickly.

I don't know if this happened two weeks ago or a year ago to Charlottesville in Virginia, where they unite the right protest there. There is a fantastic article that's been recently put out on Guardian Long Reads, or huge tweets, as we've been calling them. The big tweet, the big tweet, the Guardian big tweet. Very big tweet. Sort of the way in which the ACLU, or the American Civil Liberties Union, responded to the pressures created on them by this event.

Because, I'll read a passage from the article on the 10th of August. Oh, it was the 10th of August last year. The ACLU's Virginia chapter sued to prevent the city of Charlottesville from relocating a white nationalist rally to a safer location outside the city center. The ACLU claimed the move would violate the organizer's constitutional rights to freedom of speech in public assembly. Two days later, when a white supremacist injured 19 people and killed anti-racist protester Heather Haier in a car attack during the rally, many people, including Virginia's governor, actually blamed the ACLU. One response in particular became a symbol of a larger backlash.

I can't facilitate Nazis murdering people, an ACLU of Virginia board member declared, in a series of viral tweets announcing his resignation. So, this is a piece that's been in the works for a long time. It's by an American writer called Alex Blaisdell, who was interested in the idea that this post Charlottesville, and I think post Trump, whatever, debate meant that inside the ACLU, which is the kind of temple of American free speech absolutism, whatever you would call it, this sort of, you know, the staunchest defender of the First Amendment, that even within the ACLU, the kind of new resurgence, whatever, recurring, bigger than ever,

white supremacy was sparking debates that I think everyone agrees would have been seen as kind of heretical, I don't know, even like five years ago. And the piece largely narrates this fight inside the ACLU, in which a lot of ACLU lawyers, especially younger lawyers, and non-white lawyers, and staff, I'm assuming there are people who aren't all lawyers who work there, kind of basically started to question the priorities of the organization in terms of look what, you know, historically, part of what the ACLU has done lots of different things and, you know, does lots of wonderful meritorious things like suing the government to release data and get information on drone strikes or detentions or whatever, the ACLU represents

Edward Snowden, you know, it's the, you know, they're not messing around, I guess, when they say that, you know, they're the resistance, whatever, however silly that phrase is. Yeah. So, you know, lawyers basically saying, look, the ACLU has made a virtue of standing up for the worst cases. So, you know, this very famous incident, I remembered this on Friday, but I'll forget it today in the 60s or the 70s, when the ACLU went to court to defend the rights of either neo-Nazis or Klansmen or both to march through Skokie, Illinois, which was a community that included like elderly Holocaust survivors. And this, you know, in the kind of, I hate Illinois Nazis. Yeah. See, you thought that that was something that was just pulled out of thin air, but

no, there actually are Illinois Nazis, apparently, and there have been since the first Blues Brothers movie. There you go. That film checks out questioning the priorities inside the ACLU, and the piece narrates this whole debate between the ACLU board and the executives. But essentially, I think what it does is to paint a picture of a moment in America, which has always had, I think, a very absolutist vision of what free speech is and the idea that, you know, when it comes to free speech, that it's always, in any circumstance, it is always the highest and most important principle, that this is kind of under debate or it's being like reconsidered right now in the United States. And the kind of parable or whatever the microcosm of what's happening inside the ACLU

reflects a kind of broader question about whether our priorities are a little bit out of whack. Yet the piece actually sort of states this explicitly. I think it narrows this down quite well. It says, Charlottesville inflamed two of the most urgent free speech questions in the U.S. Should the law tolerate extreme forms of hate speech which seek to deny people human dignity on the basis of characteristics such as race, sex or sexual orientation or religion? And who in the U.S., given its legacies of oppression and its growing inequality, is really free to speak? I think raises raises the question, is there such a thing as free speech? Is this conceptually useful? Yeah, I think and now here I have to

to claim that I'm speaking with my editor hat on because we're actually I'm speaking without any hats on at all. Maybe that's the more solemn point. I think this is a question that has been seen as like a dangerous one in America and it seems to me that the usefulness of free speech as a kind of blanket category of analysis, this kind of you know that essentially when we talk about free speech what we are saying is that in any situation in which expression of any sort is being discussed or debated we are asserting that its freedom is the paramount virtue and that nothing else is discussable until we sort of have established that that's the case. And to me it seems I don't know this is

like a slightly nonsensical claim. Well it's because this idea that sort of there is this thing called speech and there's this thing called politics and there's this thing called power and these three things sort of exist maybe next to one another but they're separate you know that there is I can be like I guess well I have my it's like like like Nile Ferguson and the kid that he's trying to dock. You know it's like his claim is oh well my free speech as a tenured professor at Stanford with a lot of publications and columns was being threatened by someone who was objecting to what I had to say. Yeah I think that this version of the discussion maybe doesn't happen enough. I think that you know typically we're very familiar now

I think with a kind of free speech anti-free speech whatever kind of discussion in which someone says their feelings are heard whether on a college campus or somewhere else and then someone else says well no it's free speech you can't you know facts don't care about your feelings. I've heard that. Yeah. I was wearing a diaper though. And I think this like broader question of whether there is anything philosophically or kind of logically meaningful about this category of free speech which we insist on applying in a very political way to all sorts of very contested political statements. That's not a discussion that anyone wants to have maybe because it seems like too weird and you know postmodern or whatever. Well I was also thinking

too that that that genre of discussion of free speech absolutism of the idea that speech is a thing that must be protected that the goal is to allow the speech to take place doesn't take in any consideration the power dynamics at work with regard to somebody exercising their right to practice hate speech is and the observer saying well we let it happen we accomplish the thing that the society is supposed to do by letting it happen isn't considering that people with less power with less protection under the state might then become victims of something that's exacerbated by hate speech and no one that that that seems like the easiest thing to parry with like well it's a slippery slope but the idea that this argument being made in this purest

sort of academic form seems to me the kind of like the province of people who will not be affected by the consequences and that's the thing that makes it ring so hollow to me not that I think free speech it should be a bridge and not that I think that the goal should be to restrict speech because I mean if the goal is to restrict speech then we're kind of fucked when you think about what we do all day but the idea that there's never once a consideration of the second and third order effects of something that it's a purely academic exercise that bothers me about it. Well it's it's there it's the paradox right which is which is you can't restrict speech because it's the most important thing but you also can't restrict speech because nothing I say means anything

and doesn't have an effect and so you can't think of it in terms of its consequences. It's completely the primary important primarily important element of society but it's also utterly ineffectual. That's actually my lifestyle. This ACLU piece has a good little bit where an ACLU one of the things that often comes up I think especially in America is the notion that the cure for hate speech is more speech or the cure for bad speech is more speech and this very kind of marketplace of ideas sort of notion in which again I think you conjure the sense that bits of speech are like items on a shelf that have no bearing that are that are devoid of action they're not intended to move people to you know I think like we all agree for

example that like there there's going to be an exception for speech that's meant to incite violence right. I think the Supreme Court has held that in in various ways. Fire in a crowded theater. You can't shout coffee as a soup in public. Don't go to America. Pouring coffee soup on Brendan O'Neill. Yeah I think that the as Nate was just saying I think it's not so much that it's I think the slippery slope argument in some ways works in reverse which is to say rather than being like oh my god it's a slippery slope if you start regulating some speech where will it stop. I feel like the reality is that we already regulate speech in various ways some social some legal some political and so the first step to having a

grown up conversation about it is to accept that that's the case because in many ways a voter ID law is a restriction on free speech or at least it's a restriction on your ability to express yourself and have that expression be politically meaningful. Well I think one of the things the piece you know I recommend everyone googles and then goes and reads this Stanley Fish essay called there's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too which you can find like PDFs of on the internet. We'll link it in the description. It's hard to summarize but I think one of the points oh man I've totally lost my train of thought. Stanley Fish no such thing as 12 easy sections. There were 12 rules for free speech. I think one

of the points that he makes man I really I just can't remember some you really are going to have to edit this it's terribly embarrassing. I can't remember now what Riley was saying. Oh yeah okay sorry so one of the points that he makes is that we would never say that the government didn't have a right to regulate action or conduct but we like to imagine that there is a thing called speech or expression that like literally is not embodied in the world in any way. I mean it's like this idea that like the whole world consists of some like 17th century pamphlets that are just kind of like floating in the ether and speaking to one another with like no impact ever on any actual human being in the world. And so once you know when you talk about like you know felon voting

rights or voter ID laws or you know the flip side of this which is the Supreme Court holding that freedom of speech means that corporations can give as much money as they want to political campaigns that like the attempt to draw a kind of barrier between pure speech and ideas and then like effects and consequences in the real world is destined to fail and we should grow up about it. Yeah and I think one thing is the article okay there are a couple of things. Number one is that I think one thing that sort of tends to get pointed out is that sort of fascistic free speech tends to get protected more often than others when that's freedom to actually say something or freedom to demonstrate is because fascists at base are fucking nerds who follow the rules.

Well also they believe in using the rules against the people they're opposed to. The perfect example is in fact in this borough of London in the Taliphate of Cout Tower Hamlets in 30 I think 36 or 38 you had Oswald Mosley attempting to march down Cable Street with the British Union of Fascists Cable Street being a primarily immigrant primarily Jewish neighborhood very sort of an old working class neighborhood that was sort of the Ujjeno or whatever I'd lived there doing weaving and the issue is whenever those sort of it came to an application question of the application of law the police sided with the fascists because the fascists had meticulously obtained the proper permits and it was only a fucking

rock and roll badass. Say what you like about crystal knocks they had a permit. Well that's the thing they did and say what you and you know the good and it was a perfectly legitimate knocked and the thing is they had to and the force that came out to resist them was a collection of immigrants and communists and trade unionists and even anarchists who were just basically saying we're fuck you we're going to deny you the street we're going to deny your right to speak here and if the police are here with you we'll fuck them too. Well and I think the outcome of the sort of debate that this ACLU piece reports on is lawyers I think have successfully the ACLU I think maintains that look you know we're not really changing how we do

things and our commitment to free speech remains unchanged but I think what has happened is that this imperative that you know the First Amendment means that when fascists want to have a protest we have to help them file their paperwork and argue on their behalf I think that the assumption that that's always going to be the right thing to do is is going away it seems to me even within an organization like the ACLU. I was interested in the point that you made that it seems like there's a generational divide between the old guard ACLU people who'd be like well we might we might not like the fact that we're going to defend Oliver North in court but we're still going to do it because that's the way that it works versus people who are looking at this and

saying I mean I think rightly that when you see an organization of multiple white supremacist white nationalist groups joining to specifically intimidate Jewish and black organizations in the Charlottesville area joining to specifically you know render a kind of service to a statue of the head of the Confederacy this isn't a semantic exercise yeah I think there's a weird current that runs through a lot of what I want to call sort of liberal epistemology in which what Nate is saying is like it's viewed as bad if you take power relations into account like all of like that judging things situationally is seen as a betrayal of some sort of high liberal principle and the way that you demonstrate your high liberal principles is by defending

people who have loathed some views that you don't agree with it's like playing a chess game or you checkmate yourself out of respect for your opponent in the rules yeah I don't know it's sort of free speech is a weird it's a weird thing in this country it's like a mule with a spinning wheel no it's just kind of like you know what I feel like it's sort of weird because the interactions that we have with it tends to be online right so so much of like American cultural garbage tends to be like thrown into these conversations in the UK when and the conversations UK are really different because like we act we have like a legal system that you know there isn't free speech isn't like constitutionalized in the same way that it is in the US um there are you know

this is a country where libel lawyers get paid a lot of money so we have like very strange and restrictions when it comes to free speech and it's been very strict especially like we spoke about the whole Tommy Robinson thing on the last one of the one of the previous episodes and still if you kind of look online the people who are like piling on are like Americans right they're Americans who are like applying this kind of weird these weird kind of notions of like free speech identitarianism into you know a fairly boring mundane practice of British legislation Tommy Robinson's only in jail because we don't have guns no he got kidnapped by the League of Shadows well I think what and he's got to like work it's definitely the case that every American

thinks secretly that any country that does not have the exact same constitutional arrangements as America is effectively living under Sharia law it's all right I mean if you have to pay high taxes Sharia law well I mean to be fair they're not wrong about here you know I mean I don't mind I don't I don't mind it because it's a very cool Sharia law it's very trendy and very sort of very hype beast that's actually when you when you go on this version of Hajj it's actually instead of camping out near Mecca you camp out outside a giant supreme store um but I think the one of the key points here I think and especially this is true with the online thing is you will never ever find a way to make this argument based on pure process you're always going to make yourself look stupid

so like Facebook's new guidelines are that you can you can't say white supremacy but you can say white nationalism and white separatism right like one of these is okay one of them isn't because we have to say well we apply the same rules to everyone and it's based on an abstract principle that applies equally to everyone as though we are all just sort of thrown into the world on a daily basis sort of born again you know ready to try and rack up as high of a score we can because apparently we all either live in memento world or edge of tomorrow world because nothing ever changes and history didn't happen I personally live in Kevin Costner's water world okay I don't I don't really know well I don't know I don't know what else I can say to that other than like you know

the rules are different in the digimon world where you need the talisman of free speech and then and you get the talisman of free speech and then it's just war graymon turns around and says actually honky is a slur I do think that okay here's a question if the digimon were real would Tommy Robinson be campaigning for them to be deported that's where it's like in the hussain wheelhouse right there oh yeah it's a softball that's a softball right to you bud oh shit I think just the ones that have like arab sounding names like what gaboom like scarab mon or something like that god why do we know so much about digimon I haven't watched this show in like over two decades watched the movie last week it's still good it still holds up it still holds up yo um speaking

of digi um I also kind of wanted to I think we've spoken about two hell of a segue yeah from nile Ferguson it was a a bit too much of an oaf to be a threat to free genuinely a threat to free speech but who tried to be to the ACLU who are doing some serious soul searching in the wake of charlottesville I think we come on for our final segment if you still have time yeah um to I think the actual clear and present danger to free speech that exists in our society which is that George Osborne's the former chancellor of the UK basically are the guy in charge of the money the more or less the economy minister for the american listeners George Osborne's london evening standard sells its editorial independence to uber the economy

to uber google and others for about three million pounds this is essentially Osborne who is a absolute fucking ghoul and we can get into this um got sacked because um because the UK voted to leave the the european union and he was like well I'll resign if we do and then we did and then he ate his book and then George Osborne had to resign in shame from government to take up like seven incredibly highly paid positions at like various mutual funds and became the editor of a paper and his paper because he's a he's a Tory promised six commercial giants quote money can't buy news coverage in a lucrative deal this is I think the real threat to free speech well okay basically it's that we are I think we're basically living and more and more of an age of PR

um where I think now we're saying let's say um with with uber uh or google or whatever these companies that are investing in the evening a quote unquote investing in the evening standard for sort of in return for positive coverage is not labeled as advertisements are basically engaging in you know advertising via print journalism that is supposed to be oppositional like we're not hung up on the idea that it's absolutely objective but there is this notion that if they've already bought coverage there's no way the coverage could be critical even if you have something absurd like uber's you know like the the revelations that uber had if i'm not mistaken didn't they have like a room in one of their corporate offices that was used like unofficially

the sex room like they they were they were they were literally encouraging with sex nerds yeah yeah i mean uber uber when you when you have a lot of nerds with a lot of power and money and way too many drugs like that kind of thing happens well i think the the coverage that we're getting because we um there was because uber is one of the named parties in this investigation that was done by open democracy um and when sort of uber was getting its license challenged just simply for failing to comply with employment regulations um the evening standards coverage said that uber was ruled not fit and proper but emphasized that 40 000 jobs were at risk and three and a half million customers were affected so the coverage was basically spun yeah p and people have alleged

that um one of osborne's many lucrative jobs is he gets paid like 600 000 pounds to be an advisor one day a week to black rock which is an investment fund which is a major shareholder in uber setting up an example of so i think everyone in the country you might say that a newspaper edited by george osborne is not likely to uh apply real intense scrutiny to uber no matter what well it's the but the the i i mean without i mean i don't know this story that we're talking about you know seems to be like fairly contested um in that the evening standard claims and maybe this is more damning that like this is just a sort of business as usual thing and we are trying to like raise money to do these sort of like sponsored campaigns and so what we'll do is like

we're gonna have a campaign about how like it was a sort of like weird like charity whitewashing like oh we're gonna we're gonna have a campaign to like urge londoners to use less plastic and like starbucks if you give us a half million pounds we'll say that this campaign is sponsored by you um you know a notable example of this can be found in the existing evening standard in which the football coverage is sponsored by betfair and so i think they must have other versions of this i mean i to me the connection between this anyway i mean one thing that's i had it printed out the other day there was like an amazing quote from uh the like head of business at the evening standard where he says like you know the reason why we would never do this it's in prescasette is like the

reason you know we would never do anything like this the reason why we're read by 900 000 londoners is because of our reputation for trust and integrity it's because their reputation has been given away for free at the tube and they hand it to you as you go on to the tube that's like saying like a busker plays to like crowds of 5 000 people because he just stands at the tube at rush hour and everyone walks past i think it's a bit like sort of you know tereza may being like or sat at con like the reason why 10 million people walk on london sidewalks every day pavements yeah uh is because you know we have an unparalleled record of of quality paving well it's the reason why up to 5 000 tramps sleep under copies of the evening standard every day it's because of housing

policies i introduced well it's i mean i think that like to me the connection between you know neil ferguson and maybe the acou story and this thing is that like we're all stuck there there's a way in which this like we have this 18th century conception of freedom of speech in which it's about like you know riley writes a pamphlet on like day one advocating for eating irish babies and then on day i do be like that though yeah um on day two hussein writes his rival pamphlet about how will enslave the irish babies under hipster sharia law and then on day three i write my third pamphlet that's like a pox on both your houses uh you know whatever whatever convenient you're the one who doesn't advocate for eating babies exactly i love babies that's what my pamphlet says instead of

writing pamphlets well i just think it's making zines we just do tweets there's a sort of sense in which there's a kind of like you know you want to all of these visions imagine a kind of like analog system of you know paper moving slowly and government making laws and very much sort of here's one idea comes forth into the marketplace of ideas and then another idea comes and enters and they meet on equal terms and i think what we now have is this like toxic cloud of non-stop bullshit fog in which it's not like oh here's my argument like patiently meets your argument it's very much about like what crowds out other stuff who has the like bigger megaphone it's you know without sounding like one of these like corny we have more of a hunger games of ideas than a

marketplace of ideas yeah that's a good way to think about it so it's like you know i think the problem here is not that like the truth about uber is being suppressed by george osbourne but that you know it's possible to like buy a big megaphone yeah and that this then sort of pollutes you know whatever the like ocean of public discourse that everyone is pissing in whatever this is why i'm going to get a big megaphone next week and i'm going to stand outside of west minster station shouting coffee is a soup until i get tased i'll be there tasing you and i'll be here i'll be i'll be a free speech master and then i'll be invited on the stephan whereas i think this is pretty clear if you had a half million pounds you could give it to the evening standard and they would run a

coffee as a soup for london campaign well because maybe you should crowdfund that the important the important thing about holy shit yeah is that like these deals weren't just like hey give us 500 thousand pounds and we'll kind of print whatever you want it's like no you're going to be it's like uber is our clean air partner because they're doing priases and and and and we're like helping people carpool and whatever and to be fair they do have mad priests and the and then you you were we're sort of all asked to be like well no don't worry we're still going to be sort of an oppositional research trusted source for what you think because well we're just not going to let that kind of color color what we think this idea that sort of all of these things that every speech act exists

independently of sort of of power and money and all this and it's just meaningless is complete sort of obfuscatory mist of mystification well also let's be perfectly honest here like outside of power and money great that's a nice concept but what's the big important detail here money a shitload of it people have a lot of it and they're able to influence speech in a way that we can't say it's unprecedented because clearly like there's been periods of time in recent history where they had more but i feel like with regard to the norms that sort of post war liberal order the idea of of of speech being purchased in you know with the imprimatur of like a famous publication to this degree i think is making people uncomfortable i mean you can look

at examples and we can segue to my look because he'd probably comment on this better about places like russia where there literally are no media organs that are outside of the influence of somebody with money but here in in yeah i mean i pay people to say that friend but i mean in the uk and in the united states it basically you you when you see this happening i think that there is a concern that it's not necessarily that that it's going to be like we're in a banned speech that's critical of the government it's more that speech is drowned out by other speech with people with a shitload of money who can pay people who have nothing better to do to drown it out well that's my concern i also think that what's happened is that there was an idea beloved of a lot of

people in the 2000s that the internet was going to kind of level the playing field for everyone and that you wouldn't you know that the likes of it was a very sort of like nonsense like jeffersonian you know ben franklin at his printing press kind of nonsense that like you know everyone will be able to have their say now uh and wow they're all sharing nudes and racism who would have thought sometimes at the same time the internet is truly the customer is never any first centuries kite with a key tied to it yeah i mean he's got the point like the custom yeah like customer the customer is never wrong when it comes to kind of when it comes to newspapers and especially like place like the evening standard which basically is basically just like

a bunch of paper advertising right with like maybe a bit of like court-reforcing wedged in between sure um you know that's when the customer does really become king because yeah they might be able to give their shit away for free but they still need i they still need a certain amount of eyeballs right to make the product worthwhile but it's that we're we're utterly passive and it's sort of and the instead of instead of us being able to be kind of active subjects and it's like no you're not anymore uh there are there are people who decide what goes on yeah and then you can kind of between this pr and that pr you can pick kind of which pr you go for more or less well and it's interesting that the evening standard has managed to retain

this influence in an internet aid you know it's it's adapted very well if there was if there was wi-fi on the tube they would not have retained anything boom good point and maybe that's why maybe that's that's the sedeek vest a real sedeek khan conspiracy but he won't put wi-fi on the tube sedeek khan and george osborne are working together to maintain the evening standards readership by keeping really good well functioning wi-fi off the tube stay holy shit stay on covered it yeah he's afraid that muslims on the tube will discover the work of jordan peterson conspiracy to stop people sexting on the tube anyway i feel that leaves uh that's as good a place as any to leave it lads lads are that's pretty good even good well a goodbye lads lads on hajj

well hang on lads i didn't even mention my favorite new story of the week the guy in virginia running for congress who admitted that he's a pedophile no no lads lads on tour it which that's we know what it is it's amma on amra jonathan thank you very much for coming round for time number two yeah it was great nothing i just want it to be known that that i was nothing i said reflected my own beliefs or what oh you're so you were doing free speech yeah pointless valueless directionless free speech yeah well he did it to own valibs yeah you might have heard him say that but he did not say that all right uh i'm gonna say jonathan thank you very much for coming on uh commodify your descent with a shirt from lil comrade um

and thank you to jin sang for our theme song here we go you can find it on spotify follow us on at trash future pod and we will talk to you soon