Name: Former ACLU Head Ira Glasser on Why You Can't Ban Hate Speech
Uploaded: 2021-01-15T18:53:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former ACLU Head Ira Glasser on Why You Can't Ban Hate Speech' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former ACLU Head Ira Glasser on Why You Can't Ban Hate Speech' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience. You've always been a staunch advocate for free speech
even when that
speech is hate speech and that's a that's a very it's a difficult argument for
people to have in
this day and age because people want to ban hate speech they want to ban people
from talking you've
always been an advocate for free speech and saying that like even though it
seems like it's a good
idea to ban these ideas or to ban people discussing these things in fact it
actually turns out to be a
terrible idea. Well you see when people say they want to ban hate speech what
they mean is they want
to ban the speech that they hate. Yes. But if you allowed something called hate
speech to be banned
then the only important question would be who decides and again if the
government is going to
be the one to decide what hate speech to ban it's not going to be the same
speech as the speech you hate
it's going to be the speech they hate. Think if again for liberals who are very
hot these days about
banning hate speech what they mean is they want to ban speech that is bigoted
against people based on skin
color or based on sex or based on religion that's what they mean by hate speech.
But what I always ask
liberals is well what makes you think you're going to have the power to decide
what's hateful? You're never
the ones who are going to have the power. What would happen if the guy who
decided what speech to hate
and ban was Joe McCarthy? He would have banned your speech. What if it was Giuliani
who tried
unsuccessfully when he was mayor of New York to ban art in the Brooklyn Museum
of Art that he didn't like
because he thought it was disrespectful of his religion. And he hated that
speech. Now the speech he hated
wasn't the same speech that I hated. The speech he hated wasn't the same speech
as liberals or progressives
hated. But he was the one who got to decide, not they. And that's the problem.
That's really why hate speech
cannot be a category that is allowed to ban because it all depends on who's
going to decide and what they
hate is not going to be the same as what you hate. In the 1990s there was a big
move on a lot of college
campuses to ban hate speech. And what they meant by that is they wanted to ban
racist speech. And a lot of
black students were in favor of it. And I was then the head of the ACLU and I
used to go around speaking to
these audiences. And I had a very substantial reputation as being an advocate
for racial justice
and affirmative action and all that. So I was sort of on their side and they
knew that in terms of the
substance. But I didn't preach to them about the first amendment. I used to ask
those black students,
if you succeed in getting your university to ban hate speech, what do you think
is going to happen
next? Do you think you're going to be the ones to decide or do you think the
board of trustees is going
to be the ones to decide? And the board of trustees are white. And the board of
trustees don't share your
politics. And the truth of the matter is, if there had been hate speech codes
on college campuses in the
1960s, their most frequent victim would have been Malcolm X, not David Duke.
And the kids would look
at me like they had never thought of it that way. But that's the problem. The
problem is always who gets
to define what's hateful and who gets to decide what to ban. And it isn't often
going to be the ones who
advocate for these codes. You know, the same thing happened in England in 1973
when the National Student
Union banned hate speech banned racist speech from college campuses in England.
And a group of Zionist kids
who were among the leaders of the National Student Movement at the time were
all for that. And then a
few years later, a very few years later, the students changed. There were
different students deciding,
and they decided to ban a Zionist speaker on the grounds, they said, that Zionism
was a form of racism.
Well, the Zionist kids who had supported those hate speech bans, they didn't
think that Zionism was a form of
racism. But a few years later, a majority of the National Student Union did so
think. And so the very
hate speech bans that these kids supported ended up being used against their
own speakers. There are
hundreds of examples like that. And the reason why these bans don't work is
that nobody can define
what hate speech is. And it all ends up coming down to who decides. And most
often, it ain't you.
Yeah, I mean, I can completely understand the position that a social media
company would have,
where they wouldn't want to have what they consider hate speech on their
platform,
because they think it reflects poorly on them. And they also think that it, it
radicalizes young
people, it gets young people to think along the same lines, if they're very
charismatic, and they're
enticing, they could get young people to grow, join what they believe are hate
groups.
Right.
But what, so is the solution just leave everything up, and let everybody just
kind of duke it out in
the town square of ideas?
Well, I think so. And the reason I think that is that the only alternative is
to give somebody the
power to decide what should be excluded from the town square. And who is that
somebody?
Right.
You know, I don't think you can get out of that dilemma. You know, at the very
beginning of our
history, when the First Amendment was first invented, we all learned in school
that people like James
Madison and Tom Jefferson and the rest of them were all these super advocates
of free speech and First
Amendment. But they weren't. A lot of them believed that the First Amendment
did not protect false speech.
Because the same way that people now about hate speech is, well, what is the
virtue of false speech?
Why does false speech contribute anything to a rational discussion? How does
false speech enhance democracy?
So there was largely a consensus at the beginning of the 18th, at the end of
the 18th century, when the
country began. There was largely a consensus, even among the fiercest advocates
of free speech, that false
speech was not protected by the First Amendment. Then, under John Adams'
presidency, the second
president of the United States, they passed something called the Alien and Sedition
Acts. And this was a
federal statute that Congress passed. And it made it a crime to say false
things, critically false things,
about the president. And the problem was, is that it was the president who
decided to whom that law should
apply. So it ended up that people who were critical of John Adams, including a
member of Congress, including
several editors of newspapers, including lots of people who were arrested and
convicted and sent to jail under
this. And why did that happen? It happened because the people in charge said
that their speech was
false, the speech of the people that they prosecuted. And when people think of
true or false, they think of
things like, well, if you say two plus two is five, we know that two plus two
is four, so two plus two is
five is false. But in the world of politics, almost everything can be
interpreted as true or false,
depending on who the speaker and who the listener is. Look at what just
happened with our elections.
Seventy percent of people among Republicans believed that the election was
fraudulent. Now, you can argue
about whether that's true or whether that's false, but do you really want to
make it a crime for people
to say that the election was fraudulent? You have to fight it out. You have to
duke it out. Otherwise,
you're going to end up using these bans as weapons to use against people you
don't agree with by simply
claiming that what they said was false. That was the history in the early part
of the American
experiment. And the same thing is true today about hate speech or bigoted
speech or any other kind of
speech. The price we pay for having the freedom to speak and listen and argue
is that some of the stuff
we have to hear is ugly. And it's like an insurance policy. And what we're insuring
against is if we
don't want to hear the ugly speech, if we want to ban ugly speech, we give the
government the power to
decide what's ugly enough to be banned. And then we'll lose our own rights to
free speech for sure.
And I don't think there's any way out of that. It's not intuitive. You know, I
used to say I was a kid
who grew up in the streets of Brooklyn. If somebody called me a dirty Jew or
insulted my mother or
anything else, I mean, there were two responses. You didn't argue with… I
didn't know about free speech
when I was 11 years old on the streets in Brooklyn. If somebody insulted you or
said something bigoted to
you, you had two choices. You punched them out or you ran if they were bigger
than you or there was more
of them than you. Free speech is an acquired taste. It's something you learn
about later. It's something I
didn't understand really until I got to the ACLU and began to come to grips
with these kinds of
problems we're discussing now. Was it an easy thing to come to grips with or
did you go back and forth
with it? Like, was this like a… No, it's not an easy thing to come to grips
with because it's not
intuitive. I mean, you know, the first time I saw people from the Klan talking
or neo-Nazis talking,
my first instinct was I wanted to take a club and beat them over the head. I
mean, how could your first
instinct not be that? But I began to see that the consequences of that was to
give the government,
which was often going to be in the hands of people that didn't like what I
believed,
to give the government the power to decide who to beat over the head and for
what speech.
And I began to see pretty quickly, as you come to grips with these in real life
cases,
that if you give the government the power to decide what speech is ugly enough
to be banned,
it will as often be your speech as it will be the speech that you don't like.
And that powerless people,
people who are discriminated against, black people, women, gay people, Jews,
Muslim, political minorities,
socialists, communists, whatever, those are never the people who get to decide
what speech to ban.
They are the victims of the speech bans because the people who get to decide
are more often, as I keep
saying, more often going to be people like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon and
Trump. And why would we
want to trust, why would Black Lives Matter protesters want to trust their
speech rights to somebody like
Donald Trump? Why would right-wing people want to trust their speech rights to
Bernie Sanders, say?
And you know, this doesn't often just break down on liberal conservative lines.
I mean,
remember that in one of the worst atrocities of civil liberties that this
country has ever seen,
Americans, American citizens of Japanese descent, these were not aliens, these
were not immigrants,
these were, you know, these were American citizens of Japanese descent. Not one
of whom was ever charged
with anything criminal, or with anything treasonous, or with anything traitorous.
120,000 of them were plucked from
from their jobs and their homes and their businesses and sent off to camps for
the duration of the war for
no other reason than descended from Japanese people. And this was done by
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
So the fact is you can never trust the powerful with your civil liberties. That's
true about speech, and it's true
about all civil liberties. Power is the antagonist. Not Republicans, not
Democrats. Power is the antagonist. And
whoever has it is a danger to civil liberties if they're not restrained. And
one of the restraints
is in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which says, "Congress shall make
no law that abridges speech."
Now, you know, no law means no law. It doesn't mean some laws. And it doesn't
mean, oh, well, bad laws they can abridge,
but not good laws, because you can't trust what they decide is good and what
they decide is bad.
So yeah, I think, I do think you got to duke it out with words. And the line
between what's permissible and what's not permissible
needs to be between speech and conduct. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan
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Former ACLU Head Ira Glasser on Why You Can't Ban Hate Speech

the Joe Rogan experience. You've always been a staunch advocate for free speech
even when that
speech is hate speech and that's a that's a very it's a difficult argument for
people to have in
this day and age because people want to ban hate speech they want to ban people
from talking you've
always been an advocate for free speech and saying that like even though it
seems like it's a good
idea to ban these ideas or to ban people discussing these things in fact it
actually turns out to be a
terrible idea. Well you see when people say they want to ban hate speech what
they mean is they want
to ban the speech that they hate. Yes. But if you allowed something called hate
speech to be banned
then the only important question would be who decides and again if the
government is going to
be the one to decide what hate speech to ban it's not going to be the same
speech as the speech you hate
it's going to be the speech they hate. Think if again for liberals who are very
hot these days about
banning hate speech what they mean is they want to ban speech that is bigoted
against people based on skin
color or based on sex or based on religion that's what they mean by hate speech.
But what I always ask
liberals is well what makes you think you're going to have the power to decide
what's hateful? You're never
the ones who are going to have the power. What would happen if the guy who
decided what speech to hate
and ban was Joe McCarthy? He would have banned your speech. What if it was Giuliani
who tried
unsuccessfully when he was mayor of New York to ban art in the Brooklyn Museum
of Art that he didn't like
because he thought it was disrespectful of his religion. And he hated that
speech. Now the speech he hated
wasn't the same speech that I hated. The speech he hated wasn't the same speech
as liberals or progressives
hated. But he was the one who got to decide, not they. And that's the problem.
That's really why hate speech
cannot be a category that is allowed to ban because it all depends on who's
going to decide and what they
hate is not going to be the same as what you hate. In the 1990s there was a big
move on a lot of college
campuses to ban hate speech. And what they meant by that is they wanted to ban
racist speech. And a lot of
black students were in favor of it. And I was then the head of the ACLU and I
used to go around speaking to
these audiences. And I had a very substantial reputation as being an advocate
for racial justice
and affirmative action and all that. So I was sort of on their side and they
knew that in terms of the
substance. But I didn't preach to them about the first amendment. I used to ask
those black students,
if you succeed in getting your university to ban hate speech, what do you think
is going to happen
next? Do you think you're going to be the ones to decide or do you think the
board of trustees is going
to be the ones to decide? And the board of trustees are white. And the board of
trustees don't share your
politics. And the truth of the matter is, if there had been hate speech codes
on college campuses in the
1960s, their most frequent victim would have been Malcolm X, not David Duke.
And the kids would look
at me like they had never thought of it that way. But that's the problem. The
problem is always who gets
to define what's hateful and who gets to decide what to ban. And it isn't often
going to be the ones who
advocate for these codes. You know, the same thing happened in England in 1973
when the National Student
Union banned hate speech banned racist speech from college campuses in England.
And a group of Zionist kids
who were among the leaders of the National Student Movement at the time were
all for that. And then a
few years later, a very few years later, the students changed. There were
different students deciding,
and they decided to ban a Zionist speaker on the grounds, they said, that Zionism
was a form of racism.
Well, the Zionist kids who had supported those hate speech bans, they didn't
think that Zionism was a form of
racism. But a few years later, a majority of the National Student Union did so
think. And so the very
hate speech bans that these kids supported ended up being used against their
own speakers. There are
hundreds of examples like that. And the reason why these bans don't work is
that nobody can define
what hate speech is. And it all ends up coming down to who decides. And most
often, it ain't you.
Yeah, I mean, I can completely understand the position that a social media
company would have,
where they wouldn't want to have what they consider hate speech on their
platform,
because they think it reflects poorly on them. And they also think that it, it
radicalizes young
people, it gets young people to think along the same lines, if they're very
charismatic, and they're
enticing, they could get young people to grow, join what they believe are hate
groups.
Right.
But what, so is the solution just leave everything up, and let everybody just
kind of duke it out in
the town square of ideas?
Well, I think so. And the reason I think that is that the only alternative is
to give somebody the
power to decide what should be excluded from the town square. And who is that
somebody?
Right.
You know, I don't think you can get out of that dilemma. You know, at the very
beginning of our
history, when the First Amendment was first invented, we all learned in school
that people like James
Madison and Tom Jefferson and the rest of them were all these super advocates
of free speech and First
Amendment. But they weren't. A lot of them believed that the First Amendment
did not protect false speech.
Because the same way that people now about hate speech is, well, what is the
virtue of false speech?
Why does false speech contribute anything to a rational discussion? How does
false speech enhance democracy?
So there was largely a consensus at the beginning of the 18th, at the end of
the 18th century, when the
country began. There was largely a consensus, even among the fiercest advocates
of free speech, that false
speech was not protected by the First Amendment. Then, under John Adams'
presidency, the second
president of the United States, they passed something called the Alien and Sedition
Acts. And this was a
federal statute that Congress passed. And it made it a crime to say false
things, critically false things,
about the president. And the problem was, is that it was the president who
decided to whom that law should
apply. So it ended up that people who were critical of John Adams, including a
member of Congress, including
several editors of newspapers, including lots of people who were arrested and
convicted and sent to jail under
this. And why did that happen? It happened because the people in charge said
that their speech was
false, the speech of the people that they prosecuted. And when people think of
true or false, they think of
things like, well, if you say two plus two is five, we know that two plus two
is four, so two plus two is
five is false. But in the world of politics, almost everything can be
interpreted as true or false,
depending on who the speaker and who the listener is. Look at what just
happened with our elections.
Seventy percent of people among Republicans believed that the election was
fraudulent. Now, you can argue
about whether that's true or whether that's false, but do you really want to
make it a crime for people
to say that the election was fraudulent? You have to fight it out. You have to
duke it out. Otherwise,
you're going to end up using these bans as weapons to use against people you
don't agree with by simply
claiming that what they said was false. That was the history in the early part
of the American
experiment. And the same thing is true today about hate speech or bigoted
speech or any other kind of
speech. The price we pay for having the freedom to speak and listen and argue
is that some of the stuff
we have to hear is ugly. And it's like an insurance policy. And what we're insuring
against is if we
don't want to hear the ugly speech, if we want to ban ugly speech, we give the
government the power to
decide what's ugly enough to be banned. And then we'll lose our own rights to
free speech for sure.
And I don't think there's any way out of that. It's not intuitive. You know, I
used to say I was a kid
who grew up in the streets of Brooklyn. If somebody called me a dirty Jew or
insulted my mother or
anything else, I mean, there were two responses. You didn't argue with… I
didn't know about free speech
when I was 11 years old on the streets in Brooklyn. If somebody insulted you or
said something bigoted to
you, you had two choices. You punched them out or you ran if they were bigger
than you or there was more
of them than you. Free speech is an acquired taste. It's something you learn
about later. It's something I
didn't understand really until I got to the ACLU and began to come to grips
with these kinds of
problems we're discussing now. Was it an easy thing to come to grips with or
did you go back and forth
with it? Like, was this like a… No, it's not an easy thing to come to grips
with because it's not
intuitive. I mean, you know, the first time I saw people from the Klan talking
or neo-Nazis talking,
my first instinct was I wanted to take a club and beat them over the head. I
mean, how could your first
instinct not be that? But I began to see that the consequences of that was to
give the government,
which was often going to be in the hands of people that didn't like what I
believed,
to give the government the power to decide who to beat over the head and for
what speech.
And I began to see pretty quickly, as you come to grips with these in real life
cases,
that if you give the government the power to decide what speech is ugly enough
to be banned,
it will as often be your speech as it will be the speech that you don't like.
And that powerless people,
people who are discriminated against, black people, women, gay people, Jews,
Muslim, political minorities,
socialists, communists, whatever, those are never the people who get to decide
what speech to ban.
They are the victims of the speech bans because the people who get to decide
are more often, as I keep
saying, more often going to be people like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon and
Trump. And why would we
want to trust, why would Black Lives Matter protesters want to trust their
speech rights to somebody like
Donald Trump? Why would right-wing people want to trust their speech rights to
Bernie Sanders, say?
And you know, this doesn't often just break down on liberal conservative lines.
I mean,
remember that in one of the worst atrocities of civil liberties that this
country has ever seen,
Americans, American citizens of Japanese descent, these were not aliens, these
were not immigrants,
these were, you know, these were American citizens of Japanese descent. Not one
of whom was ever charged
with anything criminal, or with anything treasonous, or with anything traitorous.
120,000 of them were plucked from
from their jobs and their homes and their businesses and sent off to camps for
the duration of the war for
no other reason than descended from Japanese people. And this was done by
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
So the fact is you can never trust the powerful with your civil liberties. That's
true about speech, and it's true
about all civil liberties. Power is the antagonist. Not Republicans, not
Democrats. Power is the antagonist. And
whoever has it is a danger to civil liberties if they're not restrained. And
one of the restraints
is in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which says, "Congress shall make
no law that abridges speech."
Now, you know, no law means no law. It doesn't mean some laws. And it doesn't
mean, oh, well, bad laws they can abridge,
but not good laws, because you can't trust what they decide is good and what
they decide is bad.
So yeah, I think, I do think you got to duke it out with words. And the line
between what's permissible and what'