a new york law professor and former president of the american civil liberties union she's also the author of the book hate why we should resist it with free speech and not censorship she joins me from new york and to be here and david katz a criminal defense attorney and a former assistant u.s. attorney in los angeles which is where he joins us now great to be here great to have you both so let me start with this question is there more hate being expressed in the u.s. now than say twenty years ago and if so what's driving it needing it's impossible to answer that question because we simply don't have adequate statistics even about hate crimes let let alone about hate speech there is no doubt that there is so much of it and so what if there it is more or less than it's been in the past we are hearing it every day and moreover we are hearing accusations every day that

even serious speech about important political issues is being denounced as hate speech and there are calls to censor it david. well i think we are certainly perceiving it more because there's so much of it on the internet and it's very hard to control the internet and you know what gets cast on there and you know we do have the first amendment and you know our framers decided that what we need in this country is more speech that we counter hate speech with less hateful speech pointing out that there's no basis for the hate speech and as i think it was all over wendell holmes said the grandeur of our constitution is not that we protect the speech of people we agree with but that we protect the speech of people that we don't agree with so we start with that premise which makes it very difficult in the united states to go after let's say holocaust deniers or people who use certain symbols that other people find very offensive now if it rises to the level of

a threat that's a whole different kettle of fish and we do actually go after threats and we can go after threats including threats on the internet much more aggressively than we do with painstaking research and prosecute people who make threats you're not allowed to make threats there's no first amendment right to threaten people let's talk about technology companies for a second they've been historically very reluctant to take responsibility for the content that's generated on their platforms and they've justified this by the same things that we've been talking about the need for freedom of expression but they're practically monopolies right now and there are enormous amounts of advertising dollars that are spent on targeting certain types of speech to certain demographics what responsibility if any do these companies bear. well first of all it's important to point out that the companies have legal protection through a federal statute they are essentially immunized for are any third party content

that is posted on their sites and that was really important when the internet was new to foster it as a free forum where all ideas could flourish now we kind of had the worst of both worlds because all of these platforms enforce their own so-called community standards including against hate speech and not surprisingly they enforce them in ways that are arbitrary at best discriminatory at worst there have been a huge number of complaints from minority activists for activists for criminal justice and law reform saying that their expression has been disproportionately targeted and silenced as hate speech likewise women and feminists have complained that the standards on line against nudity and pornography have been disproportionately in force against women who are breastfeeding on the other hand

we want to make sure that if there is a threat or intentional incitement or targeted bullying or harris meant that that should not be allowed because that suppresses other people's free speech online and we see too many people who are giving up including journalists saying they're being docs they're being trolled they're being haris and they're no longer going on line and conveying information to the rest of us well i think that's a significant problem people who are harassed online and people who are stocked and persecuted and so forth and i think that that's where the efforts of government should play a part not in content regulation and to the extent that they regulate content i think they do that in europe i think as a practical matter because they have these hate. statutes there where again for instance you can't deny the holocaust or something like that they may have some ability to actually stop those platforms over there and those broadcasters in

europe and threaten them with jail sentences and so they have to be i think overly cautious in what they broadcast but here the first amendment i think trumps all of that and you really can't control a lot of what gets put on the internet here because it does have first amendment protection i mean basically if you don't threaten somebody or engage in something that's an imminent threat or maybe not so imminent that's one of the huge legal issues how imminent does the threat have to be so we'll call it a somewhat imminent threat but if it's not even a somewhat imminent threat you can say vile things on the internet under the first amendment well listen i want to share with you guys that i'm a living example of this kind of censorship i used to have a facebook network of millions and millions of people and a bunch of the facebook pages that i used to distribute my content on which were called cop block police the police the and the media and so forth all of their

distribution channels millions of people were all suppressed by facebook i think as part of an effort to begin to squash so-called fake news which i want to talk about next and a lot of the hosts they may have been very aggressive they may have had a tone that people disagree with but most of it i can tell you firsthand was absolutely not fake news at all and so what it felt like to a lot of constituents of those pages and certainly myself as a contributor was shipped what do you have what do you think about this atlanta daily it's a tough issue legally matthew because as many people don't realize i'm going to make a basic point of constitutional law here the first amendment and it's free speech guarantee only protect against government censorship we have no right to. free speech these of the private sector actors just as i have no right to be published in the new york times i also have no right to be published on facebook to the

contrary the social media have their own free speech rights to make decisions about what they will allow and what they won't allow but that means we have to look to other legal tools to restrain the unprecedented power that these private sector actors have as the supreme court recognized in a decision a couple of years ago for all practical purposes this is where it's at in terms of the forums for exchange of in for day information ideas among all of us individuals and with our elected officials so we're talking about communications that are essential for our democratic self-government as well as for ourselves and yet they have all this power but it's not subject to first amendment constraint so now we're starting to see serious discussion by scholars by politicians by foundations. what can we do instead what legal tools are there and one that is being talked

about i think you alluded to earlier and that is possible pro competition antitrust remedies they should not be able to take their enormous power in the economic marketplace and use it to squelch the marketplace of ideas that's one possibility well matthew you know i think that you should definitely you're a perfect person to be a spokesperson for just what the dean is talking about and to have reform now of course a lot of it depends on who's in the white house because i think it's very fair to say has the f.c.c. and other institutions of government really pushed that anti monopolistic agenda against these very huge firms that as nadine says because they're not the government they may be my. they may have huge market power but they're not the government the first amendment is only a protection against the government and government action is there historical

precedent that we can learn from as to how to begin to start to designate platforms like facebook and twitter and instagram as publics viewers i mean aren't these the new public squares in which we're exchanging ideas and certainly political ones i mean i've heard an argument made that we've spent one hundred years one hundred years working on our election laws to make sure that people can't buy votes and isn't that kind of exactly what we have now what can we learn from the technological innovations of one hundred years ago the telephone electricity and so forth in our way that we're going to handle social media i think it's i was going to use the tent landline telephone as an example matthews so i really agree with you we have used the so-called common carrier model that they have an obligation as common carriers to allow every message to that is not illegal to be carried regardless of whether they personally agree with it or

disagree with it or not to make sure that just as the government may not discriminate on the basis of ideas or viewpoints these powerful private sector actors may not do that either and there's something else that happened historically if you look at the traditional print media many people don't realize that it wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century that you started to get. generally respected although still there is always going to be controversy about particular. publications but that or media such as newspapers such as the new york times the washington post chicago tribune los angeles times started to try to appeal to a general. section of society before that newspapers were extremely partisan and really akko chambers addressing only certain political perspectives and in order to

bring about a larger audience and a sense of objectivity newspapers undertook self regulation they created press councils they had. inspector generals and on boots people and they basically became much more professionalised and i think we're starting to see rumblings of that same kind of self regulation and self restraint at least being talked about by the on line media mark soccer berga facebook as has issued a number of manifestos recently in which he talks about new restraints that they are imposing twitter has done the same thing soccer or even asked the government to impose regulations on him so i think they understand that they are getting so much criticism from the public from the mainstream media from government officials that they better get their act in order and david thank you so much for your time today

stassen eating discussion up next is it time to replace the ideologies of right and left here in america and if so with what award winning author philip k. howard joins me with his take when politicking continues. to respond to russia and lawrence. you know world big partisan lot of things and conspiracy it's time to wait to dig deeper to hit the stories

that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smart we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. and. their reform rush and lines.

imagine that you run a blood bank and they in one room are dead patients they've been dead since two thousand and eight that room are dead patients they've been dead since two thousand and eight that would be j.p. morgan goldman sachs deutsche bank the n.p.a. society generali just these say except her and in the other room you have a living middle class people and the point of blood bank is to take blood from the living middle class people and to transfuse that blood to the dead banks next door as if they've been dead now for more than ten years well naturally the people that are in the middle class are going to start to suffer and suffer horribly and many of them will die and by the way they won't be getting any of the blood from the other middle class people to keep them alive all the blood all the plasma goes to the dead.

welcome back to politic founder and chair of common good philip k. howard joins me now from new york in addition to his many years working with that nonprofit which advocates for simplifying the u.s. government he is also an award winning author and sought after commentator he's out with a new book try common sense replacing the failed ideologies of the right and left it is a pleasure to welcome him back to the program philip nice of nice to be with you matthew nice to have you here now i want to talk about your book shortly but first

what is your reaction to the miller report well i think it's clear the president a truck tried to break the law you know he kept asking people to do things that he should have done. but i guess what the report finally concludes is that he didn't succeed in it. and if so what's the possibility of impeachment i think impeachment is remote and would probably be a political mistake because it would. it would even further divide a polarized society the people who who. are to get beaten at the ballot box by his opponents not be beaten because of. all of his mistakes in the election so earlier this month you wrote that the elections of both barack obama and donald trump could be viewed as quote symptoms of unrequited

reform can you expand on that yeah american survey really been trying to find a leader who could come in and bring some common sense back to washington they've done it for a number of election cycles now president obama comes in two thousand and eight and he's he's young he's african-american he. promises change we can believe in and there's just an incredibly attractive candidate and obviously got the nomination and won the election but after eight years in fact washington didn't change that much he did some some important things but he didn't change the way washington works and so then donald trump comes in and he promises to drain the swamp and eight million people who voted for president obama turned around and voted for donald trump these are not people who are india locks these are people who want the place to change. so how do we elect

a representative who's actually going to reform because it seems like we've elected two people whose personality is really matched those who wanted to both of them i mean trump as you said trump says he's going to drain the swamp and then it becomes more swamp like than ever obama says it's a massive change and yet we see kind of the same policies that we saw prior you know with us that's what try common sense is about basically we don't have a vision of what change should be so in the case of president obama he thought change meant incremental reform he recently gave a speech talking about that well that's actually not the way change happens political scientists say change happens in big gulps like the one hundred sixty s. in the one nine hundred thirty s. or or the progressive era political scientists call it punctuated equilibrium everything goes along for a while and then drops off so he had the wrong idea about how to change present a truck says he's going to drain the swamp but what he really means when you cut

through it is less just deregulate so every republican since reagan has promised to deregulate but the reality is that most americans want clean water and they want clean air and they don't want toys with lead paint on them so do regulations probably not quite the right idea what's what's happened that neither party has or coherent vision is it government has become this enormous machine of micromanagement where people spend half the day filling out forms twenty one states have more non-instructional personnel than they have teachers in their school system it's become this bureaucratic nightmare and not only does it make think people make things fail but it drives people crazy you mean americans hate going through the day looking over their shoulders and asking themselves can i prove what i'm about to do with legally correct so so what's needed is a simplification of government where people are given go. walls but then they're

given the freedom to actually make sense of the choices in their day so you're look at their in their own way your latest book calls for replacing the failed philosophy of modern american government so what is that what is the failed philosophy it's basically an idea of bureaucratic correctness that government will not only tell us what our goals should be to have a safe workplace for example it will give us four thousand rules to tell us exactly how to have a safe workplace the electric plugs have to be so many inches above the. the rail her whatever it it's. well don't you know you need to know you need a certain amount of a checklist so that buildings don't fall down and electricity or they have to rest on fire sure and so or so there's a. there are certain things where you want protocols that are clear like

a building code for example. but if you're in focusing on safety it's very hard to have a universal code that will make a perfectly safe workplace because every workplace has slightly different conditions so the way they do it in the u.k. for example is that they have a worker safety agency that has golson principles but they focus on getting rid of unsafe conditions instead of telling people exactly how to go through. almost each minute of the day safely so this is about this is about common sense is what you're saying yeah it's about it's about life is too complicated to tell people how to do things correctly number one and number two law is not supposed to replace our freedom it's supposed to support our freedom and so the way law does set is it sets boundaries you can't pollute you can't cheat in your contract but it

lets people in general within those boundaries be free got the idea that it could not only set outer boundaries but actually grow into our daily lives and wrap around each choice and tell people how to do things correctly weather is not a correct way to teach a classroom you know it depends on the classroom well this sounds like exactly what the republicans have been arguing for for decades is that. it well it's not because i think it and enter dependent society you need government oversight we want oversight to make sure the schools are any good we want clean air and clean water it's a question of going to goals oriented regulation a given example australia had a thousand rules for its nursing homes they were terrible somebody had the bright idea of replacing the rules with thirty one general principles have a home like setting respect the dignity of the residents that sort of thing within a year the nursing homes had dramatically improved could turns out giving people

a goal. and then overseeing to make sure that they're not you know abusing their freedom or whatever will result in better nursing homes in that case so you know the interstate highway act in one thousand nine hundred eighty six was twenty twenty nine pages long ten years later twenty one thousand miles have been built of roads. last year last year for tuition bill it was five hundred pages long implemented by thousands of pages of regulation it would take a decade just to get a permit for one stretch of road that's the difference so is america still the leading nation in the world and yes it and we have a great culture and well what other nations are leading in terms of common sense approaches goal oriented approaches the kinds that you're talking about i mean you've made one example well no no no state is perfect and we certainly but

australia new zealand both have more flexible regulatory structures. germany which is a very green oriented state has a much better infrastructure approval processes most european countries have one stop shops for people who want to go get a permit they can go to one government office and the person in that office will help them navigate all the different agencies that they need to get permits from the building code etc so so there are lots of things we can learn from other countries it seems like we're in a state of we're at an impasse here in the united states because democrats they don't trust the private sector and republicans don't trust the public sector and how can we regain that kind of trust. well both parties are. getting rich on hatred there both polarization

sells you know i was i was working on infrastructure the first year of the trump administration the deal was completely obvious they democrats agree to streamline the red tape somewhat in the republicans agreed to fund the infrastructure completely obvious in both sides said they wanted to build rebuild america decrepit infrastructure and neither would budge they don't want to budge to they don't want the other side to get credit because in fact being able to yell at the other side and say how evil they are is fills up the party coffers with money what do you think are some of the things that the next wave of presidential candidates can do to cut through this oh i think and is anyone doing it. well. not much there's a candidate named andrew yang of the democratic side who's talked about rebuilding civil service systems sunset laws that sort of thing here's the only one that i've seen with concrete structural overhauls but the candidate who comes out and says

we're going to maintain the important government oversight functions of the environment and safety and you know basically all the functions i think are important we're going to maintain it but we're going to do it in a commonsense way we're going to let local communities provide services in their own way governments not going to let them do whatever they want but instead of being big brother breathing down their neck we're going to be more like a distant uncle and make sure they don't you know stray beyond the boundaries we're going to give people room just room that's all people need room to do a good job and right now they don't have that room and the person who makes that pitch i think will get twenty million votes philip thank you so much for your time today the book again is trying commonsense replacing the failed ideologies of the right and left it's out now and it's available everywhere thank you for joining me on this edition of politicking and also thanks to larry king for letting me sit in

this chair today remember we love hearing from you so join the conversation on larry's facebook page and as always you can share your thoughts on twitter by tweeting at kings things and using the politicking hash tag i also invite you to join me on my facebook page at matthew cook official and that's all for this edition of politicking. aeroflot russian and lights. in a world of big part of the law and conspiracy it's time to wake up to

dig deeper to hit the stories that made stream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the bath shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. aeroflot russian and lights.

after the previous stage of my career was over everyone wondered what i was going to do next that multiple different clubs on one hand it is logical to set off on fields where everything is familiar on the other i wanted a new child. and the fresh perspective i'm used to surprising. or not if you think . i'm going to talk about football nazi or else you can think i was going to go. by the way ways of the slide here. join me every thursday on the alex simon chill and i'll be speaking to us in the world of politics small business i'm show business i'll see you then.

russian national money boots in a sense the eighteen months in prison by u.s. federal court for failing to register as a foreign agent. i don't think she's in jail shoulders of politics but that anyone who thinks that someone who wasn't russian would be in this situation is for self. journalists who leaked sensitive information on home sales in the yemeni war hold in for questioning by french intelligence. and a project of truly epic ambition britain germany hailed china's belts and road trading network initiative as the countries take part in a major economic forum on beijing's plans.