Joe Rogan Experience #1595 - Ira Glasser

Glasser acknowledges Twitter and Facebook have First Amendment rights like publishers, yet their scale and role in public discourse mean deplatforming can effectively exclude voices—including ordinary people—from the modern ‘town square’.

He suggests a telephone‑company model—providing infrastructure without policing content—as a conceptual starting point, while warning that any public‑utility oversight still risks censorship if a regulatory body gains content control.

Using campus codes, UK student unions, McCarthyism, and Giuliani’s attempt to censor museum art, Glasser shows that once ‘hate speech’ becomes a legal category, it is inevitably turned against radicals, minorities, and future dissidents.

Glasser defends vile verbal protests, including outside abortion clinics, but draws a sharp boundary at violence and coercive acts—bombings, assaults, forced entry—arguing that expression is protected, harmful conduct is not.

He explains how the Brandenburg standard requires explicit, imminent calls to unlawful action, and warns that stretching 'incitement' to nail Trump could set a precedent that future governments weaponize against legitimate protest and agitation.