Joe Rogan and Bari Weiss on Free Speech and Online Radicalization

When you think about these social media sites, GAB was one where this guy who shot up the Tree of Life was a member of. And is this... Like, I'm not a... I'm clearly not a proponent of censorship, but do people... Do you think they get radicalized in these... When you get to a forum where there's no restrictions whatsoever on language or ideology or behavior, you can say whatever you want as long as you're not saying something... I mean, GAB has rules like you can't do things that are illegal, you can't threaten someone, you can't put up their address, you can't... But you could say a lot of really fucked up shit and they're not gonna police you. Do you think that these places that do allow free speech, that there's a catch-22 to it, in some ways it's great to be able to express yourself freely, but in other ways you can get radicalized and it can lead to a lot of people forming these groups where they support each other in these fucked up ideas? Yeah, I'll say two things. One of the reasons that I feel so strongly about keeping the spectrum of acceptable opinions as wide as possible is because I think that the narrower it shrinks, like we're talking about normal ideas being closeted, then people go into these underground layers online and they become radicalized, right? Because they're like, the elites or in the mainstream media or whoever, they're not telling the truth, they're lying to me. So there's this secret world and this secret world has all of these actually bigoted ideas. Do you know what I mean? Yes. So do I think that it is a catch-22? Yes. The whole thing about the world we're living in is that you no longer have to find a KKK meeting. You don't have to find a jihadist preacher. You don't have to find... Right. Go down the line. You just have to find a Reddit chat or a 4chan chat or something on gab.com and you find your little online village. It no longer requires a real person or real interaction. Right. And there's no stakes because there's no shame because you can just be totally anonymous in these forums. Right. So I think that social media is supercharging this in a way that we can't even grasp. And it's very hard for those of us like me and you who want to protect free speech and liberty to think about how to deal with it. You're right. How do you deal with that? When you have someone like the Christchurch shooter who was live streaming this and making references to... I think he referenced the Tree of Life. I don't remember. Did he reference PewDiePie as well? Like yeah, I mean he was like... It's like all in elaborate troll. Right. That's what's crazy. It's like he's shit posting and murdering at the same time. And what is the... I mean there's no, in my eyes, there's no clear solution to that. I don't want to restrict free speech. I certainly don't want radicalized people to... But you also don't want someone to be free to live stream killing people on a platform. Right, but how could you... I mean they're managing at scale. How could you possibly know when someone's live streaming that they're about to go and kill people, right? When the guys never killed anybody before. And then all of a sudden he's got this camera on and he walks in the synagogue and he starts shooting people. No, I thought it was a mosque with him. Oh, that's right. It was a mosque with him. It was two mosques. He killed like 52 people. Yeah, I mean it's all insane. How do you... How do we manage that? I mean what do we do? I mean there's no, in my mind, there's no clear answer here. There's not a clear answer, but I think that, look, the idea that a private company should be obligated to stream someone, killing someone, or let's even go like take it less stakes than that, call Jews kikes. Why should a private company say yes to that? It's degrading what the platform is. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. The question is where does that line get drawn? I know. Yes. This is the real problem. I mean there's people that get kicked off of certain social media sites for just not representing... Well, culturally, for instance, Megan Markle... What is her name? Megan Murphy. Megan Murphy, that woman who got kicked off of Twitter because she said a man is never a woman and she got kicked off for life. Totally. That's what I mean about when reasonable opinions, when the spectrum of what is reasonable becomes so narrow, people radicalize and they go to these bigoted ideas. It's an enormous... It's like, why do we need a healthy conversation about immigration? The conversation about immigration is, I think, very, very limited in what people say and what is acceptable. It's like open borders or xenophobia. And there has to be kind of reasonable middle and way to talk about it. Because if not, people self-radicalize. I just see that happening again and again and again on so many different topics. The immigration angle is a perfect example of that. It should be absolutely possible for hardworking people to make it to America and do better. It also should be possible for us to keep gang members and cartel members from crossing the border freely and shooting people and killing people and selling drugs in our communities and all the things that we're scared of when it comes to the open border policy idea. The thing about the social media thing in a lot of ways, it's this new experiment. There's something that we've never had before. Like you're saying about a KKK meeting, you used to have to go to one. And now you don't. Now you just have to go to Stormfront or whatever website you can find that supports your ideas. And this is a new challenge. And this is a new challenge that hasn't really been mapped out nor has it been, I don't know if it's been rationally dissected in terms of like if we do this, this could happen. If we don't do this, this could happen, which is A or B better. How do we stop A or B from happening? How do we somehow or another educate and improve? How do we reach out to a lot of these people that are going to get radicalized and offer them some sort of a positive community as a possible alternative? Because this is what a lot of this stuff is. A lot of these people that get radicalized, one of the things that happens is you don't have anyone that cares about you or supports you, but you find people that very strongly believe in an idea. They believe in an idea, an awful idea, so much so that they're willing to kill people for that idea. And then you find a bunch of them and then they reinforce each other's beliefs with these positive affirmations and essentially they're signaling to them, they're virtue signaling to these horrible people that they also agree with a lot of these ideas. And then you go out and you do something, you act like the guy in Charlottesville that ran over that girl. These horrific acts are almost, they're encouraged and supported by these tight knit groups of people that all, they're all fucked up and fucked up people find each other and hurt people hurt people, right? So they find this category of people, this group of people, whether it's online or whether they actually have to go to a KKK meeting and they find support. This is a group that somehow or another gets them.