view. and they re gonna get this sweeping draft of immunity. this is an outcome that has left a lot of victims of the opioid crisis feeling but you are, feeling as though that s not justice. and beth, you ve written the definitive book about the victims on the frontlines, dope sick, while this deal was hailed as a breakthrough, many, many victims of the opioid crisis found it so unsatisfying, because they have struggled. they ve lost loved ones. there are still struggling because of the epidemic. the sackler family has voiced, quote, regret, but they deny any wrongdoing. beth, they say in a court filing, quote, while the family has enacted wrongfully in all respects, they seem to sincerely regret that oxycontin, prescription medicine, that became part of the opioid crisis that has brought grief and loss to far too many families and communities. cnn, we should note, reached out to the sacklers, and did not get anything. what did you, what is your take on all of this, pat?
author of dope sick: dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted america. let me start with you, that. j.d. vance gave a statement to cnn, responding to pulling out that weekend fund-raiser. it reads, quote, j.d. s own mother suffered from opioid addiction. this issue is deeply personal to j.d., and ryan intends to weaponize against him. tim ryan has taken tens of thousands of dollars for the very big pharma joins, who paid billions for their roles and the opioid epidemic, unquote. let me remove you, too, from the back and forth in the ohio senate race. how much do you think, beth, that lawmakers in general are at least partly culpable for the opioid crisis? well, i think of the words of richard sackler who said, i can get any senator or congressman on the phone in an hour, if i want to. i think the opioid crisis is brought to us by greed. i think the sackler and perdue
try to get in on the rescue, offering him a mature summary, which unsworth called a pr stunt. and musk, he did not like that. he called that gave diver a, quote, beto guy. which unsworth and pretty much everyone else took to mean, pedophile. a hideous charts that musk doubled down on and tripled down on, and unsworth took musk to court for defamation. it s a case that unsworth lost. vernon went toe to toe with a billionaire bully, and not many people have the courage to do that. so, that was a quote ruled, legally protected speech by elon musk. but that does not make it right, which is the area in which we find ourselves in this debate. none of musk s bizarre and offensive tweets have met the bar for removal from twitter.
currently gets nearly ten times more monthly visit on average than parler. i signed up for gab this morning. i clicked on explore, which took me two popular posts across gab. i came in with an open mind, and immediately, gab hit me with this post. quote, we are in a wartime, but it s a quiet war, perpetrated by the jew, with a picture of adolf hitler. and there was plenty more where that came from. the n-word is super big on gab. it is a cesspool of hate. but we should note, gab moderates content, when too. you can t transmit unwanted advertising or promotional material on gab. you can t impersonate someone else on gab. you can t do anything that might cause gab, itself, to be harassed on gab. so, again, gab, too, does not just allow any speech. it takes precautions. it doesn t seem to care about hate speech, however.
brandeis, wrote, almost 100 years ago, that for bad speech, for lies and evil, quote, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not in enforced silence. it s a proposition with which i generally agree that speech should be met with better speech, not with censorship. in the aftermath of the synagogue attack, executives at gab something similar. quote, the answer of that speech will always be more speech, on quote. but the more speech i saw on gab this afternoon was more speech hailing not seize, and more speech engaging and holocaust denial. and more speech sharing more hideously racist posts than i ve ever seen in one place in my life. i saw less of it, but still, too much of it on parlor, today. it s about time we recognize that the hate on many of these far-right sites is not just an unfortunate result of belief in free speech. they hate is the whole point.