In this episode, I'm joined by Andy Ngo, host of Unmasked, an anti-fast-food restaurant and independent journalist, to discuss the UK government's attempts to censor online speech, including the controversial Online Safety Act.
00:00:46.000It just reminds me part of what's great about British culture is that tradition of debate and speech
00:00:54.000that unfortunately you're losing as your populations change.
00:01:00.000And not just the population change either, since the government imposes ever more strict and tight rules.
00:01:06.000What do you make of the speech rules that Keir Starmer has been employing, such as the Online Safety Act?
00:01:13.000I actually have mixed thoughts on this, so I think it's a serious issue that it is so easy for children to be able to access explicit material online.
00:01:29.000And I'm not of the view that there should be no restrictions on anybody being able to access that.
00:01:41.000I think that, you know, minors and children, there needs to be some type of safeguards in place.
00:01:47.000And clicking, I am over 18, is, in my opinion, not enough.
00:01:53.000So, the backlash against the Online Safety Bill, I think, that has come from people who care about free speech,
00:02:01.000I feel like they've kind of overlooked that particular part, which I believe was part of the intention of it.
00:02:06.000I'm concerned that, however, the concerns that they do have, I understand that.
00:02:13.000I've been impacted by it. I think on the first day that it went into effect, immediately on X, a whole bunch of content,
00:02:24.000sometimes like a whole page of scrolling, it's not available to you.
00:02:28.000And that's, I mean, that's moving in, that's now in the direction of where Australia has been,
00:02:36.000where a whole swathes of content is just blocked based on your IP.
00:02:41.000And for me as an American, like all this is very anathema to me.
00:02:44.000I know that outside of the US, there's people who are more used to censorship and big government control.
00:02:55.000If it helps, as an Englishman, I feel this is horrific as well.
00:02:58.000So, the thing about the Online Safety Act is, you are right that there is a genuine problem with children being able to access explicit material on the internet.
00:03:07.000But if you actually look at the framing of the Online Safety Act, it does say children and adults.
00:03:14.000And the content that it lists is also not only explicit content, but also quote-unquote hate speech and content related to illegal immigration.
00:03:25.000So, actually, it is not just implicit in the Act, but explicit in the Act, that it's designed to censor adults from seeing political content.
00:03:59.000I don't know if the legal framework here doesn't exist for more protections of free speech.
00:04:05.000But I feel, as this American immigrant here, like, not just myself helpless, but I look at the people around me.
00:04:15.000It's kind of like all these laws that are just passed, one after the other, another related to a number of issues that you and I care about.
00:04:23.000And it's like, there's nothing we can do.
00:04:28.000Have you got no faith in Nigel Farage and reform to fix this?
00:04:38.000You need a huge shake-up in your political system, and I think you can do that.
00:04:44.000However, without the existence of some equivalent of, like, the First Amendment in America, it just, it seems really tenuous what can be done, you know?
00:04:55.000It's like, okay, a government maybe at best can roll back something, and then five, ten years down the line, a different government in power could easily implement those, you know, those type of restrictions again.
00:05:14.000We've got a governmental system from a previous era, where we had a much more sort of socially joined-up country, and modernist, and a far greater level of not only social trust, but political dialogue.
00:05:29.000Because, I mean, I kind of noticed that in America, you've got these two very powerful streams of content that come from the mainstream and the online media.
00:05:39.000That is almost entirely segregated between the left and the right.
00:05:45.000And for some reason, there is just very rarely any point at which they actually ever converge, and have a conversation with one another.
00:05:52.000And that's always the most interesting thing in the world to see, actually, a devout right-winger and a devout left-winger actually talking about the same topic is a fascinating thing to watch.
00:06:01.000And so we come from an era where you would always have both sides represented in the discussion.
00:06:08.000But we've lost that completely, and now we have the domination of one side over the rest.
00:06:13.000And so the sort of organic nature of the British Constitution was never such a problem, because there was always a kind of implicit understanding that actually this is for all of us, and we're just trying to do the right thing.
00:06:26.000Now it's ideological, and it's one-sided, and I think that's the real problem.
00:06:31.000And I think there's no real solution in a sort of First Amendment position, because, A, I don't think we can get stuck.
00:06:39.000But it changes the nature of the political system entirely, rather than being an organic thing that we possess.
00:06:45.000It becomes like the dead hand of a treaty on top of the civilization that imposes from long into the past, even if the thing doesn't fit the current moment.
00:06:55.000It's my understanding that the British political tradition is that you don't actually have a ton of laws written down as laws.
00:07:04.000Like things are just sort of inherited as sort of common law, right?
00:13:42.000Neither side seems to want to share a country with the other.
00:13:45.000And that's, I mean, I view America as undergoing a kind of cold civil war,
00:13:49.000where it's, like, Donald Trump is basically going to try and clean out the institutions of left-wingers.
00:13:54.000Well, okay, the next Democrat president, he's going to have to clean out the institutions of right-wingers.
00:13:58.000And so you just have this continual changing of the guard until one culture is dominant over the other.
00:14:04.000I mean, this is a bit worrying, isn't it?
00:14:09.000I appreciate the clarity you speak when you say, like, civil war, how you say that a cold civil war,
00:14:15.000because there are some commentators who say things like they think that imminent arms,
00:14:21.000violence between different factions in the U.S. is likely. I don't think so.
00:14:26.000But this cold civil war is describing is more accurate, I think, much more accurate.
00:14:33.000We, I mean, I'm from Portland, Oregon.
00:14:38.000I see the hatred that the people have there for conservatives and Republicans.
00:14:43.000Like, they don't, it's not that you don't want them as neighbors.
00:14:46.000They view them as, like, a lot of them as subhuman, actually.
00:14:49.000It's, now that I'm out of the U.S., away, I can look, I have a distance where I can look at it.
00:14:58.000And it's, now that I feel black-pilled.
00:15:01.000It's like, how do you solve these issues? I don't know.
00:15:05.000You have the lying media, you have institutions that are captured, and you have, sort of like a corner dog,
00:15:12.000referring to those on the left, and Democrats who are now lashing out violently, either directly or indirectly, or calling for violence.
00:15:22.000And people, many liberals don't, don't see that as a problem.
00:15:30.000I mean, we're developing sort of a, a culture of assassins, celebrating them.
00:15:35.000You know, like, everybody knows about Luigi Mangione, who killed, allegedly murdered the United HealthShare CEO.
00:15:45.000And there was another one the other day, wasn't there?
00:15:47.000Recently, there was a random shooting, not random, there was a black shooter in Manhattan who wanted, allegedly, to go after people associated with the NFL.
00:15:57.000But there was a CEO of a different company, corporation that was killed, a woman.
00:16:03.000And just because she happened to be CEO, there was all the celebrations on social media from the left.
00:16:08.000And that's this mainstreaming of, I mean, it's all, it's also linked to Antifa in the sense that the radicals on the left so believe that their cause is righteous,
00:16:20.000that anything and everything that needs to be done, killing people, killing families, maiming people should be justified,
00:16:26.000imprisoning political targets, killing political targets.
00:16:30.000And that's, that's the America I live in, it's...
00:16:33.000I don't, I hate to say it though, but I don't think it's confined only to the left.
00:16:38.000The right, the right is not the right of 2016 anymore.
00:18:10.000And I'm not, you know, you can't, I think one of the main problems is generals always fight the last war.
00:18:15.000And so I think that the internet and the general ideological nature of what's happening makes the future a bit less predictable than it was in the past.
00:18:23.000And it could be something we just can't predict.
00:18:25.000Anyway, thanks so much for joining me.