The Bob Zadek Show

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5 Things to Know About Regulating Internet Speech

1. The Powder Keg –  YouTube recently “demonetized” hundreds of controversial channels, after an on-going spat between conservative comedian Steven Crowder and liberal Vox writer Carlos Maza. The host of Louder with Crowder  repeatedly mocked Maza’s flambuoyant personae (aka the “gay wonk”) and ethnicity, and Maza roused a Twitter mob to get YouTube to remove him altogether. YouTube’s kept the videos up, but took Crowder’s ad dollars — pleasing virtually nobody, as Reason’s Robby Soave pointed out.

2. The Legal Issue - Some kinds of speech, such as incitements to violence, are clearly not protected by the 1st amendment, while “hate speech,” or offensive speech, is not clearly defined. Under Section 230 of the Decency in Communications Act (1996), online platforms like YouTube can set their own guidelines for acceptable speech but are continuing to come under scrutiny for alleged bias against conservatives.

3. The Proposed Remedy – Trump is talking about antitrust to break up Big Tech monopolies, but most scholars think this is impractical. Republican Senator Josh Hawley just introduced a law to essentially revive the “Fairness Doctrine,” and stop biased censorship of conservatives. This Sunday, I’ll speak to Frank Buckley about his middle-ground idea for a governmental check on “woke” social media censorship.

4. The Unintended Consequences – Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out that Hawley’s bill would likely make censorship against conservatives worse. The bill would require companies to reapply with the Federal Trade Commission every two years to prove that they are operating in a politically neutral manner. Ultimately, this would mean censoring vastly more political content, Brown notes.

5. A Quote to Ponder :

“There’s always someone we’re laughing at, and that person is going to take offense. If it’s a conservative laughing at a liberal, even a liberal who seems to be asking for it, even someone who dishes it out but can’t take it, like the butt of Crowder’s laughter, that’s when the progressive social media censors step in.” - Frank Buckley, How to stop the 'woke' social media censors, NY Post, June 10, 2019

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Tune in Sunday, 8-9am PACIFIC and call in with your questions: (424) BOB-SHOW

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As for me, you can will always be able to find my videos at Minds.com. I say let YouTube censor.

Learn more, and listen to Frank try to “Change my Mind”.

Other Shows with Frank Buckley:

• The One Book You Must Read to Understand American Politics in 2018, with Frank Buckley

• F.H. Buckley on *The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America* — July 03, 2016

• Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? — October 26, 2014

• F.H. Buckley on *The Republic of Virtue*

Other Shows on Social Media Censorship

• Social Media Censorship with Bill Ottman, April 25, 2019

• Free Your Minds From Social Media Censorship Bill Ottmann, Oct 21, 2018

• Making Peace with the Speech Police — Dispatch from Mizzou, Ian Paris, December 11, 2015

• Whose Free Speech? Our Free Speech! , Marieke Tuthill-Beck Coon, April 16, 2017

• Freedom *From* Speech? The New Face of Censorship, Oct. 2014, with Greg Lukianoff

• Free Speech — There is No America Without It, Greg Lukianoff, December 9, 2012

Links

• The Absolutely Epic Guide For Learning To Use Minds | Minds

• Minds.com/BobZadek

• Minds.com/ottman

• @fbuckley

• How to stop the ‘woke’ social media censors NY POST

• Trump’s fight for campus justice is only beginning

• The Bubble: How Higher Education Abandoned its Mission and Became America’s Most Over-Rated Product — $3 Kindle edition on Amazon

5 Things to Know About Regulating Internet Speech
The Powder Keg – YouTube recently “demonetized” hundreds of controversial channels, after an on-going spat between conservative comedian Steven Crowder and liberal Vox writer Carlos Maza. The host of Louder with Crowder repeatedly mocked Maza’s flambuoyant personae (aka the “gay wonk”) and ethnicity, and Maza roused a Twitter mob to get YouTube to remove him altogether. YouTube’s kept the videos up, but took Crowder’s ad dollars — pleasing virtually nobody, as Reason’s Robby Soave pointed out.

The Legal Issue - Some kinds of speech, such as incitements to violence, are clearly not protected by the 1st amendment, while “hate speech,” or offensive speech, is not clearly defined. Under Section 230 of the Decency in Communications Act (1996), online platforms like YouTube can set their own guidelines for acceptable speech but are continuing to come under scrutiny for alleged bias against conservatives.

The Proposed Remedy – Trump is talking about antitrust to break up Big Tech monopolies, but most scholars think this is impractical. Republican Senator Josh Hawley just introduced a law to essentially revive the “Fairness Doctrine,” and stop biased censorship of conservatives. This Sunday, I’ll speak to Frank Buckley about his middle-ground idea for a governmental check on “woke” social media censorship.

The Unintended Consequences – Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out that Hawley’s bill would likely make censorship against conservatives worse. The bill would require companies to reapply with the Federal Trade Commission every two years to prove that they are operating in a politically neutral manner. Ultimately, this would mean censoring vastly more political content, Brown notes.

A Quote to Ponder :

“There’s always someone we’re laughing at, and that person is going to take offense. If it’s a conservative laughing at a liberal, even a liberal who seems to be asking for it, even someone who dishes it out but can’t take it, like the butt of Crowder’s laughter, that’s when the progressive social media censors step in.” - Frank Buckley, How to stop the 'woke' social media censors, NY Post, June 10, 2019

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5 Things You Need to Know about Rent Control.
The Politics: Kamala Harris is making a plan for “Holding Corporations Accountable for Pay Inequality in America” a plank of her presidential campaign. She says it’s about #EqualPayforEqualWork, but by calling for pay for the women’s soccer players - who clearly do not perform the same job as men’s soccer players - casts her sincerity into question.

The Data: Even Vox.com admits that the gender pay gap is primarily a “working mother” pay gap. In Vox’s Netflix original series, “Explained,” Veronique explains that the $0.79 number you always hear about tells you almost nothing, and disputes the characterization of the gap as a “penalty” for women who chose to have children rather than working the hours men tend to work.

The Theory: In 1957, Chicago-school economist Gary Becker explained how the market punishes arbitrary discrimination through competition in The Economics of Discrimination.

The Unintended Consequences: Anti-discrimination legislation often has unintended consequences, such as discouraging employers from hiring people around the age when they are likely to have children.

A Quote to ponder:

“In a free market, the owner has the legal right to hire whomever he wants. After all, it’s his restaurant, and the wages he pays are (initially) his property. But if he allows nepotism to influence his hiring decision, he suffers an implicit fine of $1.50 per hour. He makes less money if he makes employment decisions based on factors, such as family relationships, that have nothing to do with the job.”

— The Economics of Discrimination

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Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are in competition to see who can be the

most confounding about the gender pay gap. Veronique de Rugy joins me to

explain the reality of the famous “$0.79” figure.

Socialist Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck once noted that, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing it.”

San Francisco will celebrate the 40th anniversary of rent control policies next week, and is increasingly looking like a bomb went off in some areas of the city.

Homelessness and housing shortages have reached crisis levels.

While some may look at the housing crisis as evidence for the need for more sweeping protections for tenants, those who study the subject say that such policies are in fact responsible for the current crisis.

SF rent control turns 40 | 48 hills

Not Your Grandaddy’s Federalism…
Christian Britschgi covers the rent control beat for Reason Magazine, and has been documenting the slow-motion disaster caused by California’s housing policies. Show producer Charlie Deist joins the show to discuss Christian’s coverage, including various proposals to implement state-wide rent control in places like Oregon, California, and New York.

For now, California appears to be moving towards a 7% per year cap on rent increases, mimicking a recent Oregon law that has been praised by Kamala Harris.

This epitomizes the unfortunate pattern of “bizarro-Federalism,” whereby cities like San Francisco incubate failed policies, which get copied and magnify policy failures at the state level before spreading their devastation to other states across the country. As if Oregon’s 7% cap on rent increases wasn’t bad enough, New York is now considering a state-wide ban on “unconscionable” rent increases of more than 1.5% the rate of inflation.

Yet California still takes the cake for exacerbating its housing shortage with misguided policy. Here’s the LA Times:

Nine of the 15 metropolitan areas with the highest median home values in the country are in California, with those in Silicon Valley topping the list at $1.2 million, according to real estate website Zillow.

Of course, rent control isn’t the only reason for this. The failure to build new housing is the primary culprit.

Tech companies are taking the blame for attracting high-earning outsiders, who then push up rents in poor and working class neighborhoods. Noah Smith, a liberal writer for Bloomberg, notes that there is some truth to this. However, he says that the answer is to build more market-rate housing in the center of SF to accommodate the influx of tech workers, so that they aren’t competing for a scarce supply in neighborhoods where people are most likely to complain about gentrification.

[Rent control] epitomizes the unfortunate pattern of “bizarro-Federalism,” whereby cities like San Francisco incubate failed policies, which get copied and magnify policy failures at the state level before spreading their devastation to other states across the country.

Britschgi concurs, saying that the best way to solve the housing crisis is through de-regulation of zoning laws in urban areas. In other words, we need a free market for housing.

The Public Choice of Rent Control
Why do politicians continue to push policies that have failed so miserably when a ready solution exists? One reason might be that it’s harder to take credit for deregulating the housing market, which only produces benefits several years down the road — after new housing projects have been completed, and the market achieves equilibrium.

Rent control, is economists point out, does create some upfront benefits for existing renters — until landlords begin to neglect their properties (unable to recoup the costs of maintenance) or convert apartments into condominiums and further restrict housing supply.

It’s Episode #5,247 of “The Seen and immediate versus the unseen, long-run consequences.” This show always ends the same way: demagoguery and disappointment, followed by more calls for regulation to solve the problem created by regulation in the first place.

There is also the persistent myth in American politics that landlords are always rich and powerful while renters are always poor and disenfranchised. The reality is that rent control abrogates property rights and coerces landlords into becoming serfs for their tenants.

The Bob Zadek Affordable Housing Program:
Here’s my take: let developers build non-rent-controlled market-rate housing to satisfy demand. It’s really that simple.

We shouldn’t be celebrating 40 years of rent control in San Francisco — we should be lamenting it and saying “good riddance.” There’s no rent control in Tokyo, and prices haven’t gone up for two decades thanks to limited restrictions on height and density.

It’s not too late to fight the NIMBYs and the opportunists. Stop demagogues like Kamala Harris by spreading the word:

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The latest policy trend that is destroying Blue States from within

Chris Preble makes the case for military restraint as a de-escalation

strategy in the Middle East.

In his State of the Union address in February, President Trump sounded like a non-interventionist when he said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” Since then, he has begun to draw down America’s military presence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Due to the growing unpopularity of drawn-out wars in the Middle East, and Trump’s focus on reelection in 2020, he probably does not want to start another endless war with Iran. However, much of his rhetoric has been hawkish — perhaps influenced by his national security advisor, arch-hawk neocon John Bolton.

The latest news is that he is growing disenchanted with Bolton, who helped design the Iraq War and has even called for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

It was reported that Trump teased Bolton last year — shortly after his appointment — asking, “You’re not going to bring me into a war, are you?” But we can detect a seriousness beneath Trump’s remarks, signaling an insecurity about his ability to resist outside pressures to exercise America’s immense military might.

Bolton is Trump’s fourth national security advisor, and some worry that his reluctance to fire yet another cabinet member could lead him into the same kind of trap that led George W. Bush into Iraq in 2003. Sketchy intelligence, an idle standing army, and a convenient enemy in an oil-rich region… this story sounds familiar.

The difference this time around is that the public adamantly does not want war. As Cato’s Trevor Thrall documented back in 2016, a growing number of Americans — and especially young people — are part of a “restraining constituency” that does not want the U.S. to serve as the world’s policeman.

Sign Up for the Cato Foreign Policy Newsletter

The tensions between the U.S. and Iran have a complex history, but the latest escalation stems from intelligence linking the Iranian regime to an attack earlier this month on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s tough talk has included calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group,” to which they responded in kind by labelling our own military in the Middle East as terrorists as well.

It’s easy to imagine this tit-for-tat spiraling out of control, unless calmer minds in the military and cabinet can influence the President to step back from the brink. Many retired admirals, generals, ambassadors, and senior government executives comprising the American College of National Security Leaders have attempted to do just that — writing an open letter to the Presidentwarning against escalation in the Persian Gulf.

Tweet to the President showing your support for ending America’s endless wars.

As George Washington noted over two hundred years ago, the protected geography of the U.S. ought to insulate us from foreign intervention. He thought we should go to war only when absolutely necessary for national defense, and even then, engage only in short, strategic actions.

So why have we so found ourselves in so many endless wars?
Chris Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and is now vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He recently released a video that explains the incentives behind America’s infamous military industrial complex — the hybrid beast of a bloated weapons industry and military establishment that perpetuates itself at the expense of the taxpayer and global peace.

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Chris’s new book Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policyshows how the emergence of this complex cuts against the non-interventionist intentions of the Founders, and why the United States gains strength from the limits on war-making imposed by the Constitution.

Let’s hope that Trump will make good on his promise in the State of the Union. It’s a modest expectation when compared to George Washington’s skepticism of standing armies altogether.

Chris joined me to explain why war with Iran is still a risk despite the unpopularity. It’s everything you need to know about 21st century foreign policy, but were too afraid to ask. Don’t miss it.

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What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Is it the “Illegal” part,

or the “Immigrant”?

Conservative blogs are fond of spreading statistics like, “Most Federal Crimes Involve Immigration, Drugs and are Executed by Hispanics” [Judicial Watch].

This is highly misleading. In most cases, the crime in question is the illegal immigration itself, which says little about immigrants rates of other kinds of crime. In fact, if there is a link between immigration and crime, it seems to be inverse — i.e., immigrants are on average less likely to commit crimes.

Articles like the one linked above perfectly illustrate a point I often make with the Socratic method in the immigration debate. I ask opponents of illegal immigration which part they oppose — the “illegal” part, or the “immigrant.”

After watching their bizarre contortions for a minute or so, I usually declare victory.

… But what about terrorists?
1 in 3.8 million.

That is the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack committed by an illegal immigrant to the United States based on numbers compiled by Alex Nowrasteh from 1975 through 2017.

Alex has been on my show many times to debunk the many myths around immigration, including the argument that “this time it’s different” — that this wave of immigrants will not assimilate, or that these immigrants are only here for welfare benefits or are suppressing the wages of native workers.

Alex joins me this Sunday to review these myths, but more importantly, to go on the offensive against the biggest myth of all: that being pro-America requires a person to be anti-immigrant.

The GOP wants to be known as the party of freedom and opportunity, but they continue to confuse their facts, as both parties deny immigrants a legal status that would promote voluntary exchange and the rule of law.

As it stands, we set up cruel incentives for immigrants to live and work here illegally — in the shadow of the law — making them criminals in name only. People scapegoat them as lawless parasites, when something closer to the opposite is true.

… But what about disease?
There have been justified concerns from both sides about the uptick in deaths at detention centers, where thousands of immigrants have been quarantined for mumps and influenza. Children dying in custody at ICE centers is a humanitarian crisis, but it shouldn’t distract from the greater travesty that is preventing immigrants from pursuing a better life in the U.S.

That’s what America was supposed to be all about. We naturalized just as many immigrants as today in absolute numbers in 1910 as we do today:

“About one million legal immigrants come annually, the same number as in 1910, when the United States had about 71 percent fewer people. Adjusting for the size of the U.S. population, annual immigrant flows today are only about one-fourth the per capita annual flow in 1910.”

— Myths and Facts of Immigration Policy, January/February 2019 Cato Institute Policy Report

The great scandal should not be that so many people are coming across the border, but that the Federal Government has abdicated its responsibility to naturalize them.

The result is a deeply immoral system, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, which wreaks havoc on the rule of law by creating an unenforceable set of laws and turning masses of innocent people into criminals. The fact that we allow people who show up at the border to come through illegally and remain “illegals” is a travesty, but the answer is not to send them back to where they came from.

We need to break out of the stale debate over immigration and return to the great American tradition of open immigration. Wall or no wall, we should welcome more immigrants.

Tune into the show of ideas, not attitude, and call in at any time to join my conversation with Alex:

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