OK.
Let's get into audience questions this week,
and there are some good ones, many of you
probably saw the letter published in Harper's
Magazine signed by more than 150 people criticizing
a call out culture and council culture as
it has become known to many.
And I got a bunch of questions essentially
saying, can we cancel or ban cancel culture?
Maybe by making political beliefs a protected
class, much like nationality or religion,
et cetera.
I mean, listen, I think that that's very,
very dangerous to do.
And there's a couple different reasons why.
If you look at religious beliefs being considered
a protected class, that's already problematic.
Now, I understand the basis for, you know,
if if if you need to establish in all aspects
of the law nondiscrimination on the basis
of religion or lack of religion, then it follows
that you probably have to include religious
beliefs as a protected class.
But understand that religious beliefs herself
professed.
In other words, they're not immutable, saying
that you can't discriminate on the basis of
race or national origin as examples or disability.
One has no control over those characteristics,
whereas you very much have control over your
religious beliefs.
And of course, there is the reality that people
are born into religion in many ways.
But it is different.
But the point is to add something like political
belief as a protected class would create absolute
and complete chaos.
White supremacy as a value set would be protected.
Business can't fire someone or say they won't
serve a customer who comes in wearing a KKK
hood because those are political beliefs.
And if you make political beliefs protected
under the law, all of a sudden you are forced
to do business with individuals in these categories.
And the reality is that it's B.S. in the sense
that it runs directly counter to everything
that Republicans claim to want.
It runs directly counter to the idea of small
government.
Wait a second.
You think many of them think that nondiscrimination
laws are already too strict, but they want
to add political beliefs to that list.
Many of them believe that businesses are already
overregulated.
You want to add another element where businesses
are not free to decide how they're going to
operate their businesses.
It is a disastrous idea.
And at its core, I mean, listen, we can have
a reasonable debate and I'm glad to engage
in it about what are productive and unproductive
examples of boycotting or calling for boycotts.
That's a great conversation to have.
And there's no one answer to it.
And sometimes a boycott or a call for a cancelation
makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.
Let's figure that out.
But the people who are talking about ban the
epidemic of cancel call culture, they don't
like that speech has consequences and that
there are new tools for people to voice their
displeasure.
Like, for example, social media, there's really
no way to end cancel culture without curtailing
speech rights.
Something being a right.
The right to speak doesn't mean that it must
be free of ramifications.
And the consequences to speech are speech
in and of themselves.
So no political ideology should not be a protected
class.
In fact, it might make the problem worse.
Imagine.
Imagine an employee says something absolutely
insane and horrifying and a company can't
fire them because it's their legally protected
political belief.
Now the company has to keep an employee on
who regularly makes anti-Semitic or racist
comments.
They can't fire them because those are merely
political beliefs.
This is literally the free market we're talking
about here, right?
Businesses are driven by customer wants and
desires.
If one customer says, I don't want to do business
with you, if you have a white supremacist,
maybe you ignore it.
If you have a white supremacist working for
you, four hundred thousand people say it,
then maybe you evaluate that in the market
and decide I'd better get rid of this employee.
Of course, assuming that there is not a contract
that keeps the employee in place, or if it
does, you have to look at whether the contract
has any kind of clause in it about unbecoming
behavior.
Right.
We have a system for this stuff and simply
saying political beliefs are protected as
if they were race or national origin or disability.
Not a good idea and I would be against it.
