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During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Ira Glasser, who served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1978 to 2001, laid out the case for why attempting to ban “hate speech” and “false speech” is a bad idea.

“When people say they want to ban hate speech, what they mean is they want to ban speech that they hate,” Glasser said. “But if you allowed something called ‘hate speech’ to be banned, then the only important question would be ‘who decides?'”

Glasser then discussed how giving the government or other institutions the power to make this decision rarely results in a favorable outcome for those pushing hate speech bans.

“If the government is going to be the one to decide what hate speech to ban, it’s not going to be the same speech as the speech you hate, it’s going to be the speech they hate,” Glasser warned. ...

“It all ends up coming down to who decides and most often, it ain’t you,” Glasser said. ...

When asked by Rogan whether the solution is to “leave everything up and let everybody kind of just duke it out in the town square of ideas,” Glasser agreed that this was the best option. ...

“The fact is you can never trust the powerful with your civil liberties,” Glasser said. “That’s true about speech and that’s true about all civil liberties. Power is the antagonist, not Republicans, not Democrats, and whoever has it is a danger to civil liberties if they’re not restrained. And one of the restraints is in the First Amendment to the Constitution.”