Woke Inc. author Vivek Ramaswamy crushed CNBC hosts for railing against freedom of speech in what turned out to be a heated debate — even a two-on-one cage match — over a basic Constitutional right.
Ramaswamy unleashed an onslaught of arguments in defense of free speech and free markets on the Nov. 3 edition of Squawk Box. “First rule of the road is no viewpoint-based discrimination,” Ramaswamy said. “Spam, porn content, moderate that — get it out of the feeds. But that means no viewpoint discrimination and here’s the rub, that means hates speech goes away as a category, because as heinous as it may be, hate speech is just someone else’s opinion.”
But for CNBC hosts Becky Quick and Andrew Sorkin, who have a combined net worth of $32 million, according to Celebrity to Net Worth, free speech is simply too dangerous to be protected. “On social media, everything is amplified and spread,” Quick said, warning of so-called “misinformation.” “And then people actually believe it. You have large populations of people who believe things that are absolutely false.”
Sorkin agreed with Quick, arguing that social media companies bear some responsibility for reining in “heinous stories” and “conspiracy theories.” But Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro pushed back on Sorkin’s anti-American arguments on Twitter, in yet another demonstration of the importance of free speech: “Does the phone company have a responsibility to stop you from saying nasty things about your neighbors?”
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Ramaswamy continued on to school the CNBC hosts for using “misinformation” as an excuse to censor Americans. “If you’re going to take down false speech, I believe a cardinal rule is that the company bears the obligation to prove that the speech was false before removing it, and then if in doubt, here’s a tiebreaker, give the power back to the user,” he said. “Let the user decide what protocols they opt into and not.”
CNBC host Becky Quick asked Ramswamy whether “advertisers want to be in the midst of that?” She then laughed and shook her head. Ramaswamy fired back: “I think advertisers can choose which of those user protocols they want to opt into or not.”
“The racist, hate channel?” Quick said.
It’s “the free-speech channel,” Ramaswamy responded. “I don’t think the people who are expressing those opinions want them described as racist.”
Ramaswamy and Quick also clashed over Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk’s now deleted comments on the Paul Pelosi controversy. After a reported illegal alien and drug user assaulted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband in their San Francisco home, Musk shared a story that questioned the official narrative of the attack, and asked why the attacker was reportedly in his underwear.
“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk tweeted.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact CNBC at cnbcnewspr@nbcuni.com and demand it defend freedom of speech instead of laughing off the dangers of censorship.
