[This talk was delivered at the Mises Institute’s 2018 Ron Paul-Mises Circle In Lake Jackson, Texas.]

There is a crisis, and only you, and people like you, can get us out of it.

What is this crisis? On the one hand, the statist order is collapsing all around us. America is mired in a futile war in Afghanistan. A belligerent policy toward Iran threatens to bring about a new war in the Middle East. And let’s not forget about North Korea, where the danger of a nuclear war is by no means over.

On the domestic front, the Fed continues the manipulation of our economy which led to the 2008 crisis. Government debt is rising to an unprecedented level.

Thanks to the works of great thinkers and scholars like Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, we know the solution to the problems that the State causes. Freedom is the answer. Only a completely free market economy and a non–interventionist foreign policy can solve our problems.

And people want to hear our message. The magnificent success of Dr. Ron Paul inspires all of us. His books, including End the Fed and The Revolution: A Manifesto, are best sellers.

Now we are in a position to understand the crisis I spoke about earlier. Freedom means the right to hold controversial, un-PC opinions, and to act on these opinions, so long as you don’t commit aggression. But today the lunatic left is trying to suppress those who hold opinions like ours. If they had their way, we would be completely silenced. Unfortunately, there are so-called left “libertarians” who have joined this campaign of suppression. They demand that libertarians embrace the complete PC agenda. It is because of this sad situation that we need to support alternative media.

Here is a sample of what we are up against. Jeremy Waldron is a well-known legal academic who has taught at Oxford and now teaches at NYU Law School. In The Harm in Hate Speech, he calls for suppression of so-called “hate speech,” which really means anything that is un-PC.

Hate speech, Waldron tells, us, consists of “publications which express profound disrespect, hatred, and vilification for the members of minority groups”

Why should we restrict hate speech? Waldron says it is like environmental pollution:

tiny impacts of millions of actions — each apparently inconsiderable in itself — can produce a large-scale toxic effect that, even at the mass level, operates insidiously as a sort of slow-acting poison, and that regulations have to be aimed at individual actions with that scale and that pace of causation in mind.

But why does contagion operate only with bad effects? Will not the cumulative effects of a series of individual encounters in which members of minority groups are treated with equal respect generate a positive atmosphere of assurance, in precisely the same way that Waldron postulates for the amassing of hate messages? Waldron assumes without argument a quasi–Gresham’s law of public opinion, in which bad opinion drives out good.

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