In this episode of Australia Censored, leading global free speech advocate, Michael Shellenberger, discusses the wave of censorship sweeping the West, as well as his thoughts on Australia’s proposed ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ (MAD) bill before federal parliament.
Below is a transcript of the show.
Michael Shellenberger:
What we see these guys doing in terms of their censorship and disinformation efforts, it’s at another level. We discovered an early censorship initiative that had been authorised or started. It wasn’t completely cleared by the Department of Homeland Security, and it was incredibly sophisticated. It was also incredibly brutal because it would talk about destroying people’s reputations, destroying their characters, de-platforming them, de-banking them. We have got to draw a line in the sand and say, absolutely not. Parliaments should not be passing legislation to give this level of control to such a small group of people.
John Storey:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Australia Censored. My name is John Storey, Director of Law and Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs. Today we have a very special guest, an absolute crusader in the cause of free speech, Michael Schellenberger. Michael is the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin. He’s an award-winning journalist, author of multiple books, including Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and a former candidate for Governor of California. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Shellenberger:
Thanks for having me.
John Storey:
Michael, you are known as a real champion of free speech, so much so that recently you put your physical wellbeing in harm’s way. You decided to visit Brazil to attend a free speech rally knowing that the Brazilian authorities have you under investigation because of your work on the Twitter Files Brazil, this happened the same day that Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was arrested in France for, let’s just say, reasons that relate to free speech. Michael, why were you in Brazil and what is going on there?
Michael Shellenberger:
Sure. So many people know I did was one of the journalists that was invited to read through and explore the Twitter Files, which were the documents internally to Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company in the latter part, really, I guess it was November of 2022. And one of the many things we discovered is that we saw heavy US government involvement in advocating for censorship, much more censorship on Twitter than anybody had realised. So it wasn’t just an issue of political bias, we found that as well, but we also found Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, other intelligence and security, Department of Defence agencies, inappropriately and illegally, we believe, asking for censorship by Twitter.
We also discovered in that process that there had been what was, I think fair to call, a disinformation operation run by FBI and its allies in the Aspen Institute to basically pre-bunk or discredit the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop was legitimate before it was ever made public, and it knew to do this, the FBI, because it had the laptop in December of 2019, it then ran basically a brainwashing pre-bunking disinformation campaign in the summer of 2020.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook, Instagram, said that FBI had come to him to tell him that this was going to happen and that it would be Russian disinformation. That same thing happened at Twitter and with all of the major news media in the United States. So with the Twitter Files, we were able to pull back the curtain and see the ways in which US government agencies that are tasked with our security had been weaponized to engage in illegal election interference, which is a 100% illegal, contrary to the Constitution, contrary to hundreds of years of democratic norms that you do not want your police and intelligence agencies involved in politics.
You fast-forward to last or earlier this year, I have a relationship with Brazil that pre-exists going down there. I lived in Brazil in the early 1990s. I actually interviewed the current president, Lula, exactly 30 years ago, 1994. My Brazilian friends asked me to take a look at the Twitter Files to see if I found anything on Brazil. I had looked before. I hadn’t been able to find anything. And then really at the last minute before I was going down to Brazil, I discovered a large pattern of the Brazilian judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court demanding very radical censorship measures, most dramatically the censorship of independent journalists and independent politicians and disfavored politicians, essentially for political reasons in a very radical form of censorship, which was basically to de-platform or remove these individuals, not just from Twitter, but from all of the other social media platforms, and in many cases were justifications that were not true.
I mean, in one case, a politician was, that Twitter had demanded that a politician be banned from X for supposed election misinformation, but he had the video in question that he had posted was recorded the day after the election, and it had to do with labour issues and nothing to do with the election. So, it’s one of the characteristics of totalitarianism is that it is also arbitrary and incompetent, and really it’s just about when these people get too much power and then they get political revenge on their opponents.
So that was the essence of Twitter Files Brazil. I published it right after I arrived at my hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and within a few hours, it was the biggest story in Brazil would remain that for really a couple of weeks becoming a subject of debate the president of the country had to respond to. I was in a very public set of debates. I then testified in front of the Brazilian Senate, and we had heard rumblings that there would be some effort to get revenge on me. But lo and behold, a few weeks later, the Brazilian Federal Police Force published two reports claiming that I had somehow broken Brazilian laws by publishing entirely accurate and true information that showed crimes by the Brazilian government.
And at first I was like, “Well, maybe it’s all bark, no bite.” But then they also did have the Attorney General of Brazil recommend my criminal prosecution. So, I laugh because there’s a way in which, and this sounds mean, but there’s a way in which Brazil is not a serious country, and that’s been its reputation for a long time. It’s always when it has to constantly tell the world that it’s not a Banana Republic that shows its insecurity, that it really might be. So I laugh about it, but it certainly gave me some pause about going down there. Of course, I had good legal counsel. It helped that I was at a major protest in Sao Paulo. I was up on a sound truck with the former president, and I think I was high profile enough that they didn’t mess with me. But I certainly felt that given what’s at stake, which in my view is not just our freedom of speech in any single country, but it’s really global control of all social media platforms is at serious risk.
It’s at risk of being controlled by governments, by what you might call the deep state, by these military intelligence and security agencies. And that’s it. If you lose free speech, you don’t have democracy, you don’t have any of the other freedoms, there’s no way to shine a light into government corruption. It’s a terrifying potential reality, and it’s one that we see happening all over the world. Ireland, Scotland, Europe, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Britain, Canada, the United States, and obviously as you know, also in Australia, which is a country that we’re extremely concerned about. And in all these places, we see a lot of disturbing similarities. And in the case of Brazil, we’ve already been able to connect the censorship industrial complex, really a set of NGOs and government agencies and being able to connect that to US government funding, George Soros funding, and a very similar set of strategies and tactics that we see in other parts of the world, including in Australia.
John Storey:
Well, I’m glad that you made it out of there. Well done on that, there is this real authoritarian streak. I mean, an Australian senator actually has called for the arrest of Elon Musk. We’ve seen arrests in the United Kingdom for things that people are posting online. It just feels like unfathomable things are happening in the West, things that would’ve been unfathomable not long ago.
Our audience would probably be aware that Elon Musk has shut down X in Brazil because he refuses to censor those people that the Supreme Court wants him to censor. And I suspect a lot of our audience would think, “Well, that’s Brazil,” as you said, Banana Republic, but this misinformation bill that’s being proposed, being debated at the moment in Australia, it allows the government to effectively determine what is or isn’t misinformation. And misinformation has become this catchall for things we don’t like. It’s long ago lost any connection to things that are truly false.
And under those rules, the government can impose enormous fines on social media companies if they failed to properly censor misinformation. The fines are so large that it could in effect bankrupt a social media company if the government was inclined to do it. So, it’s fine to mock Brazil. It’s fine to say, “That’s the other side of the world. We’re not worried about it.” But we are currently in the process of introducing legislation that would allow the government to dictate what is or isn’t misinformation and effectively close down social media companies that don’t play along. And it’s very clear which social media company they have in their sites. That’s Twitter, now X. what are your thoughts on Australia’s miss and disinformation bill?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, you’re absolutely, you point to something very interesting because of course, there’s this funny thing that we all do very naturally, which is that when the Australian senator called for arresting Elon Musk, my reaction was like, “Wow, Australians are very, that’s harsh.” It must be some part of Australia, some part of Australia’s national character or something that I wasn’t familiar with that’s actually called, oh gosh, it has a formal name, which is basically as a formal name, as like a psychological mistake to generalise about a country, obviously based on what one person does. But it’s what we all do.
But then you see it happens in the United States and that some politician will similarly say that Elon Musk must be brought to heel or arrested. And so you see this two things happening at once, and they each have their own energy and dynamic, and it’s important to recognise each of them and deal with each of them.
One of them is a genuinely organic increase of intolerance and authoritarianism, which is not centralised. It’s in the culture. Consider it, call it cancel culture. It’s just this, I don’t think many of us realise that cancel culture was prelude to the censorship that would be demanded into the energy of the censorship industrial complex. I think the other part of it is a centralised deep state response. I know that word is associated with conspiracy theories, but by deep state, I just mean Department of Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, State Department. Those parts of the government that we have documented, we have written proof and emails and internal documents showing that they were involved in demanding censorship. So a kind of counter populism, it’s certainly more affecting the right than the left, but much of the concern is clearly around popul-
Michael Shellenberger:
… right then the left. But much of the concern is clearly around populism, around wanting to keep political control at higher levels, at higher international levels and not at national levels. That’s a fundamental dynamic that has to be understood and that we see everywhere in the world when we document censorship. So when we look at Australia, there’s so much that’s happening in your country that feels both alarming and familiar. And I think that opens up some possibilities though as well to stop it. I mean, the first thing is, of course, they don’t call it censorship, so they invent these Orwellian justifications, counter disinformation, counter misinformation. Who could possibly defend hate speech? Who could possibly defend misinformation, to distract the attention from the censorship. You work at a think tank, I’m a journalist. I write books that have a quarter of which are footnotes. We’re absolutely obsessed with facts and getting the information accurate.
We spend our waking days fighting misinformation, but we don’t advocate censorship. We fight misinformation with accurate information. It would never occur to us to try to go behind the scenes and get special powers from the government to censor the people that we disagree with or disallow them from expressing their views. We want to express our views. We want them to express their views. That’s called freedom of speech. That is the traditional West. So it’s important to stress that what they’re proposing is censorship of the kind that George Orwell specifically warned against.
When you read 1984 as I read it again recently, it’s eerily prescient to what we’re facing today, which is small committees of experts who decide for the whole public what we’re allowed to say and read online and censor it, and prevent us from seeing it. And that’s exactly what we saw in 1984s, what we’ve seen in totalitarian societies, whether Nazism or communism, and now we’re seeing that being proposed in liberal democratic countries around the world, including Australia.
There’s various mechanisms that they’ll use. In Brazil, they might have a Supreme Court justice. In Europe, there might be a commission. In Australia, they might attempt big fines. But in the United States, we discover an effort by supposedly former CIA people and somebody that is the top CIA. CIA actually has a venture capital firm. Somebody at the CIA is attempting to take control of content moderation at Twitter.
The goal is always the same. They want control. They want to control the social media platforms. They want to decide what can be said, and they also want to control and they want to push out their own propaganda. So it’s actually two sides of the same coin. And so in Australia, the idea is that the state would effectively take control of what the social media companies are doing to expand the censorship of what Orwell calls wrong-think on everything from elections to vaccines to racial issues, gender issues, all these issues that we have debates about.
The voice referendum that Australia had was centrally about these questions. They want to censor the issues that are the top political issues. I mean, that’s what they’re mainly trying to censor. They’re trying to undermine your democracy and naturally in their Orwellian way, they’re saying that they’re doing it in order to support democracy. And then I think the final part of it is that they want to then fund and authorise and empower media that the Australian government can control.
So it’s those two things, censoring the political messages that they don’t want the public to be exposed to as a way to short circuit and undermine democracy, and then also get themselves set up with a funding stream and a mechanism to control propaganda, government information or disinformation aimed at the Australian people. I consider what’s happening in Australia, one of the most urgent cases in the world right up there with what’s happening in Brazil.
And I will just say X was facing a Hobson’s choice in Brazil, which was do we stand on principle and refuse to ban these 10 or 20 individual journalists and politicians who the government is asking us to ban and not provide service to the 20 million Brazilians who used X? Or do we go along with their demands so the 20 million Brazilians can use X and we can live to fight another day and fight the censorship later? They did choose the latter. So X has cut a deal and many of these individuals, we’re still creating a list.
We don’t even know how many it is. They are still banned in Brazil, and so the struggle there continues. But you can see that the Brazilian model is one that basically every major western country wants, including your country of Australia.
John Storey:
What did the other platforms do? Is Facebook and other platforms complied and they just block those users?
Michael Shellenberger:
Yes. I mean, basically Facebook was captured a couple years ago. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg came out recently complaining about the censorship, expressing some regret. But this model of having government favoured fact-checkers decide what’s true and false, and then tell Facebook who to censor, that’s been in place for years. I mean, I personally was censored on Facebook for sharing accurate information in 2020. So this was already going on for four years, and that’s certainly the case in Brazil.
We see Instagram, we see TikTok, we see YouTube. We let Google off the hook because we think it’s not social media, we think of it as search, but YouTube is really arguably the most powerful social media engine in the world because people watch videos so much more than they read. And we see YouTube just ban accurate videos from top immunologists on COVID just a week ago. We saw TikTok is banning people saying that biological sex is a reality and that it’s not something that you can change with drugs and surgery, which is factual.
And so the censorship that we’re seeing from the other platforms is pervasive. The only reason that there has been this controversy over X and Elon Musk, and Australia, and Brazil and all the other places where Elon Musk is in is a controversy is because he’s the only major social media owner who’s pushing back on the censorship demands. Basically, everybody else has gone along with it. I should say Rumble has resisted as well, and it should be applauded for that, but it’s just not at the size or importance of X.
I’ll just add that the elites are absolutely obsessed with getting control of X. They can’t stand that they control and that they drive censorship on all these other platforms. They must have control of X. They want total control. What is the meaning of totalitarianism? It’s the demand for, and it’s the creation of total state control over the society, over the culture, over the conversation. That is what totalitarianism is. So when we say they are totalitarian elites demanding a totalitarian system, that’s what we’re referring to.
They can’t seem to let it go. They have to have control over X and they have made clear that they will not rest, that it is a must have for them, not a nice to have.
John Storey:
One of the themes of Australia censored has been to try to look at the… I think you’ve described the current state of play with censorship in scary detail, but what are some of the root causes, and I’ll set that up with a couple of comments. Firstly, I listened to you on Joe Rogan’s podcast and made the interesting point that this isn’t necessarily a left right thing. If Bernie Sanders had been the nominee in 2016 and had won, probably a similar immune response from the establishment would’ve kicked in, even though he’s obviously very different policies to Donald Trump.
But he is just a populist of the left. Another thing I just want to touch on, you mentioned 1984. Great book, so prescient, but I do feel the motivations behind Big Brother, the literal Big Brother in that book, were very much militaristic and authoritarian. Whereas the censorship today, it’s much more Aldous Huxley. It is much more, we are doing it for your good. We are doing it for therapeutic reasons. You’re not allowed to say this because people won’t take a vaccine. You’re not allowed to say that because this minority group will be… Their feelings will be hurt.
And so anyway, they’re just a couple of thoughts. I’ve had to try to as teasers to maybe get your thoughts. What is driving this at root? Why has this outbreak of censorship rippled across the West?
Michael Shellenberger:
I do think it is fundamentally counter-populism coming from the deep state institutions. The thought experiment that I suggested on Rogan that you referred to was what if it had been the left that had embraced populism and come to power in 2016? Maybe just in the United States or in other countries around the world, would we have seen the deep state organisations side with the right in doing counter-populism against the left?
I think there’s a good case to be made that we would be seeing that, that what the deep state wants, what they seem really motivated over is actually to do two, maybe three things. First, it is the ability to wage wars that they want to wage. The most dramatic one is Ukraine, and that is a primary concern for them. I don’t even want to make it sound malevolent because I think that at some level, it’s coming from a place to maintain the post-World War II global order of Pax Americana, and I’m sympathetic to that.
I’m not somebody that is a reflexive anti-imperialist in the same way that maybe I was in my more radical left wing days. I do think that the West is a defender of Western civilization. I think that the United States has been more just in many ways than previous empires, but nonetheless, it is an empire and it has a group of institutions that maintain it out of the US government, and they are behaving in ways that are, we believe self-defeating and undermining of free speech and democracy.
So I think that is one of them. They also seem absolutely obsessed with mass migration, and some of that is increasing in recent years. There’s some political motives for it in the United States. There’s some political motives for it in Europe. There’s obviously economic motives and getting cheaper labour. I do think it’s also part of able to create regional conflicts and be able to manage the flow of people and be able to move them out of countries when you need to particular groups that maybe are on the losing end of particular country battles.
I then think that a lot of the wokeism… Okay, so then the woke stuff, we have to censor people that deny that you can change somebody’s sex or that would deny that we should discriminate on behalf of historically marginalised groups, whether indigenous or people of colour or anybody else. There is one part of it that’s just genuine grassroots dogmatism, that’s a very similar kind of Stalinist, authoritarian leftism that’s always been there. It was there and then you had the ’60s in the United States, but I think across the western world where the ’60s had a counterculture that was actually quite libertarian and that embraced free speech. Most famously in my hometown, Berkeley, California…
Michael Shellenberger:
[inaudible 00:26:01] that embraced free speech, most famously in my hometown, Berkeley, California Free Speech Movement, 1962. So you did have a libertarian left that I think then as that sort of liberalism evolved into wokeism kind of political correctness on a kind of hard wokeism, genuine demand for censorship. And then I just think there was a real marriage of the deep state and the woke NGO sector, so that if you want to find a particular institution that’s marrying those two things together, it is George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. And without suggesting any ulterior motives at all, Soros is clearly very interested in undermining Russia and supporting NATO expansion. There’s a kind of expansionist agenda, of course, he’s very famous for having supported the end of communism and some of that stuff was great, but then also then his whole young staff and son bring in this kind of political correctness and wokeism.
So there does seem to be a genuine marriage there, which then kind of goes back to the original question of then, is it conceivable that there could have been a counter populist right against a populist left, had the Bernie Sanders won? It is conceivably, but I also do think that in general it made sense that it was conservatives that re-embraced populism because it’s been conservatives that have tended to represent the anti-mass migration view has certainly with the turn towards populism, but even before that, the kind of conservative defence of national identity, national communities. That was there before the populist turn. In some ways the populist turn of 2016, because it was not just Trump, it was Brexit and Duterte. And then 2018 it was Bolsonaro and Brazil.
That populist turn was almost a kind of a realignment of an anti-mass migration, anti-globalist agenda with conservatism that had up until then, at least for several decades, been dominated by Neoconservatism, which was much more focused on a kind of expansionist, some would say imperialist or liberal humanitarian agenda abroad. That was actually quite anathema to what has been more traditionally defined as sort of place-based national conservatism.
John Storey:
And mass immigration the way we’ve been doing it recently, Australia as well has enormous immigration since the election of a labour government. It brings with it new groups that have different cultures, and the way you deal with this, having effectively open borders. Anyone can come in almost, and then this group of people who aren’t assimilated, don’t necessarily speak English, have different cultural backgrounds, is to silence criticism of it, to silence anyone hurting their feelings. I definitely haven’t fully worked out the thesis yet, but feel that the rise of … I mean immigration, Australia’s been a pro-immigrant society for well over half a century, but the way it’s done now, which is zero expectation of integration of the people coming in, the only way a society like that can function is if you effectively silence any criticism of those new cultures. I do feel that you have hit on something there that it’s almost the only way we can make a society work where there is no expectation of integration is to silence any criticism of it.
Michael Shellenberger:
That’s really interesting, John. Yeah, I think I agree with you. It’s sort of, I’m not sure. I think the only thing is I think they would like to see integration, but they don’t know how to do it. If you’re doing mass migration, it’s very hard to figure out how to have that integration. So it seems like they’ve decided to the extent to which there’s any centralised decision-maker, but at least the centre-left linked deep state or the uniparty, they call it in Britain, because of course their conservative party has divided now in between their populists and nationalists and the more neoconservative wing.
But I think you’re right. I mean, there’s a way in which you only have to resort to censorship if you are so insecure about your ability to have the argument. It’s a sign of weakness that you would have to have censorship. And so the agenda is obviously unpopular. Mass migration is unpopular. Everywhere in the world it’s unpopular. It’s not just in the United States and Australia. I think there’s other parts of this agenda that are very unpopular. I think all the whole trans agenda is very unpopular even in California and New York. The public is against using drugs and surgeries on minors in an attempt to change their sex. The public is against racial preferences, whether for anybody, they’re against it for white people, for indigenous people, for Black people, for Latinos, and the majorities are against it, including in liberal California.
And in some ways that gives me hope because when you kind of go on these three big issues, immigration, gender, race, the public is in a pretty healthy place, which is in the tradition of the enlightenment where we have equal treatment of individuals regardless of race, that we have some immigration, but we take care to have assimilation and integration and that we don’t want to create Balkanized ghettos and slums in our cities that we know that that’s dysfunctional and destructive, and we don’t want to engage in pseudoscientific medical experiments in the name of a bizarre, truly bizarre aetiology.
So in some ways that’s heartening and yeah, I think it shows that they’re weak and they know that they’re weak and unpopular, and that’s why they’re resorting to censorship. Now, what’s terrifying about it is that … I worked for many years, I was on the political left and I did a lot of publicity efforts and media and grassroots organising and social change activities, and we were disorganised. I mean, it was like the left for me meant not having much resources, not being very sophisticated, not being disciplined in terms of message, kind of making things up as you go along, always under-resourced, always late, on a shoestring.
That’s what that meant to be on the left and progressive in the late ’90s and early 2000s. What we see these guys doing in terms of their censorship and disinformation efforts, and I gave the example of the Hunter Biden laptop, that’s so sophisticated. I can’t even begin to tell you. It’s at another level. And at one point we had a leak of a trove of documents. It was one of, because we did many censorship stories, and some of them got more attention than others, but we discovered an early censorship initiative that had been authorised or started, it wasn’t completely clear, by the Department of Homeland security, and they had a little handbook they created for people to wage information warfare. And it clearly came from, well, it did come from a military contractor, and so it felt as though it came out of really what the CIA had done in places like Arab Spring, the colour revolutions, and it was incredibly sophisticated.
It was also incredibly brutal because it would talk about destroying people’s reputations, destroying their characters, deplatforming them, debanking them, which of course we then saw Justin Trudeau do with these trucker protests against COVID in Canada. And so you see these really hard-line tactics that clearly had been used in rougher parts of the world, the Middle East, North Africa, Arab Spring, Eastern Europe, and seeing them turned against their own domestic populations. I mean, it really does.
Many moments, I get chills up my spine thinking about military intelligence, security officials, officers, agents, experts, whatever. And some of these people are cognitive scientists. So the level of sophistication, people’s known as lavish psychological operations, PsyOps, it’s next level. I mean, PsyOps is like an old-fashioned thing. What these guys are doing is so next level. The Hunter Biden laptop story I told you about, they’re trying to figure out how to programme people before things become a story. It’s almost like pre-crime. It’s so sophisticated.
John Storey:
Pre-bunking really.
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah, the pre-bunking that is cutting edge. They also talk about media literacy, which is basically teaching kids in schools to accept as Gospel whatever the mainstream corporate news media or in Australia ABC, your state media or the government sources say. So instead of critical thinking, which comes out of the University of Chicago 100 years ago, it’s John Dewey. It’s this global movement to teach kids how to be critical thinkers, including asking hard questions of the government, that the government has an interest potentially in lying to the public. They want to replace that with something they call media literacy, which is basically teaching brainwashing and thought control and obedience and authoritarianism to students. We have got to draw a line in the sand and say, absolutely not. The government should not be involved in that. Parliaments should not be passing legislation. They give this level of control to such a small group of people with pecuniary and often financial, but also just special interests. These are issues that need to be hashed out in public.
John Storey:
Michael, you’ve been generous with your time. We will wrap up shortly, but I’ll just finish with a couple of things. Firstly, in sort of defence of the Centre-right, and our more principled stance on free speech, I’m not sure how across you are, this sort of debate that flared up with Tucker Carlson having Darryl Cooper, who’s a sort of popular historian who made some questionable comments about Winston Churchill. He called him the great villain of the Second World War story and seemed to downplay the role of the Nazis and whatever. That generated a lot of negative pushback against Darryl and indirectly Tucker for platforming him. Neil Ferguson, the Hoover institution historian, said that it’s a failure of his career that’s such a nasty Nazi apologist would get platformed in this way. But what I see is that this is a fight on the centre right.
It’s an argument between, I guess, some sort of revisionist historians and some historians who want to defend Churchill and Western values and that sort of thing. So even though it got a little nasty at times, the one thing you did not see in this debate is anyone on the right say Daryl Cooper’s podcast should be banned. Tucker Carlson should be taken off the air. Allegedly bad ideas was met with allegedly better ideas, which I think is always the way to play this. And for no other reason than I think a lot of people have probably looked at this Daryl Cooper guy and thought, “Oh yeah, he’s a bit fringe or whatever.” Whereas if he had been banned.
John Storey:
He’s a bit fringe or whatever, whereas if he had been banned, if his opinions had been banned and I’ve argued in an article in The Spectator Australia, that I think under Australia’s misinformation laws, that episode would be banned under Australia’s proposed new laws. In which case he would be a martyr and his opinions would be elevated.
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah, brilliant point. I don’t know if I have much to add to it other than of course, I agree with you. There’s a lot of different reasons for free speech and sometimes we say it’s just this moral value and it’s sacrosanct, and to some extent I believe in that. I think it’s an inalienable right. You’re not fully human if you can’t express yourself. And you also can’t be fully human if you can’t hear a range of views, including ugly views, including hateful views, including lies. You’re not really an adult if you can’t handle hearing both unpleasant information but also false information, you’re not really able to be a full human being if you’re not able to handle that. I think then there’s a more instrumental reason for free speech, which is that if you are against Nazism or historical revisionism or just something bad, you should want to defeat those ideas in the public realm.
That is what your instinct should be. If your instinct is not that, if your instinct is to silence those people, I would suggest that you have not evolved to where you need to be. In the history of the Western Enlightenment, we saw this in a very lovely court ruling, happily that actually in California that just struck down or ruled unconstitutional or rather unlikely to be considered constitutional, a ban of so-called deep fake AI. That was a parody video of Kamala Harris. The judge points out that we have had Supreme Court rulings here, and again, it’s in the US context, but I think that the principles are universal, at least in the West. And he said the Supreme Court has historically allowed a significant amount of lying, a lot, a lot of lying, particularly in political contests. Imagine a political contest where there’s no lying.
It’s inconceivable. So they’ve allowed a lot of lying, and the idea is that it is better that the lie occur and then you can say that’s a lie. You can say that’s not true, that’s not what happened. There really was a Holocaust, Hitler remains the bad actor there. Whatever the argument might be, allow that to occur. And I think that if you don’t hold that view, then you are outside the Western tradition. You’re outside the tradition of democracy and free speech, and you should be honest about that. You went to totalitarianism. And I was glad to see that the right hadn’t call for censorship. I have seen the right call for censorship of pro-Hamas activists in the United States. I think it’s very unwise if you despise Hamas and you loathe these mostly dummy college kids that are embracing Hamas and who will grow up to become more conservative. But you should want to argue against Hamas.
You should want to have the argument and defeat the Hamas arguments in public, not call for them to be censored. I think at bottom it’s fundamentally irrational to want to censor your fellow citizen. It comes from a bad place, a small insecure place, and we should be able to get substantive, significant majorities in Western countries to repudiate and reject that tradition. And I just think we’ve been out of practise. I thought free speech was something that I always held and I’ve recently remembered that I had to be taught the importance of free speech by my parents, by my schools, by the politics I was involved in. That it’s not intuitive. We humans we have an irrational animal side and a rational spiritual side, and they’re often a tug of war. And it’s that really base irrational side that just says, “Oh, I don’t want to hear that.” And that person must be silenced.
There’s a war between those two energies in us, in our civilization. And I do think the free speech side will ultimately triumph, but I think it has required this moment historically for it to be tested. And I think hypothetically, there’s a possibility if you have the right that becomes free speech since it had historically been the right that was more sensorial than the left. If the right is now free speech and the left still has a tradition of liberalism and part of it, that should be a recipe for creating something like a substantial lasting governing majority in support of freedom of speech.
John Storey:
Yeah, I love the idea of free speech is like a muscle that needs to be exercised or it’ll atrophy. Michael, I’ll finish with two very quick questions. Who will win the US presidential election and secondly, do UFOs exist?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, the second one’s much easier, which is simply that there’s definitely UFOs in the sense that there’s things that we don’t know what they are. They’re unidentified. They’ve changed the name now to say unidentified anomalous phenomena to even say that we don’t even know if they’re objects. So in some cases they appear to be objects and there’s just a tonne of mystery around them. It’s a truly delightful topic. There is a serious side though in that, I think the evidence is now overwhelming that governments, including both of our governments working together. Historically, this has been one of the best reporters on this issue as Australian. And so I’m concerned by the continued government cover-up, which is not a conspiracy theory. We’ve had Donald Trump now say the government is hiding information. Some former defence secretaries, navy pilots, credible people say the government has more information than they’re sharing.
So even if it’s a secret weapons programme, which is what Elon Musk told Tucker Carlson it was last week or earlier this week, we still need to have Congress providing an oversight to those programmes and that doesn’t appear to be happening. So I think that’s the main issue is whether or not you think there’s anything there, or we have a government abuse of power issue really around secrecy and disinformation. But also to some extent not around censorship of the public, but certainly censorship of people in the government that want to reveal the information. The elections, truly it’s chaos. The betting market is like 54% Trump, but Harris is like, I think she’s 52 or 53% in the national polls. Looks like it’s coming down to Pennsylvania once again,
If I had to make a call, I think… And I’m a neutral by the way, I’m not even voting for president. I’m just being a journalist right now in my life and I’m enjoying it. I think Trump will win. And that’s in part because I think Kamala got herself in a place where she wasn’t good at being spontaneous and being on the spot. And she tried to stay away from the media as long as she could, but that became untenable. She’s now had to go back in front of the media. It hasn’t gone well, and now we’re in the midst of yet another controversy where we see that 60 minutes, which is something you guys have in Australia as well, 60 minutes on CBS here, they edited her interview to make her sound more articulate. So now you’ve got another full day of stories that’s just about that editing, that all stem from the fact that she’s not prepared and she’s not, I’m not saying qualified.
It’s more like she’s clearly not somebody who’s prepared to be Commander-in-Chief. If you’re struggling to articulate an answer to a late-night talk show host, how are you going to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war with Vladimir Putin or stand up to President Xi of China? I think those are the questions that the American people are asking for themselves, and I think that she hasn’t closed the deal with those voters in the way that she needed to I think in order to win. And we may end up then seeing a vote for Trump, but it’s just basically 50 50 at this point.
John Storey:
Yeah, time will tell. Michael, thank you so much for your time. Keep up the fantastic work on the free speech front. Any help we can get here in Australia dealing with our misinformation bill we’ll be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time.
Michael Shellenberger:
Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure.
