You Really Can’t Have Limited Freedom of Speech
If You Get to Ban Speech, Suck It Up When They Do
Last week, the McMinn County, Tennessee school board’s voted in a 10-0 decision to remove Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum.
Also last week, the horde of aging rockstars put heavy pressure on Spotify to remove The Joe Rogan Experience or disappoint their aging classic rock listeners by cutting off their noses and spiting their faces.
The book banning across the red states is in full swing.
The American Library Association tells me that there were 330 “challenges” in the three months between Sept. 1 and Dec. 1, 2021, with December still to be tallied. That compares with just 156 in all of 2020, and 377 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. This means book bannings are happening at roughly quadruple the previous pace.
Colleges are paying serious dollars to protect students from encountering speech that makes them uncomfortable:
“Everybody’s in favor of free speech—as long as it’s theirs,” Ira Glasser, former head of the American Civil Liberties Union said on Bill Maher’s Real Time last week and he’s exactly right.
The Utopian Left rallies against hate speech and misinformation and whitewashing of racial Marxism and uses the crowdsource method of bombarding individuals and organizations in order to stifle words and ideas they find objectionable. Municipalities and legislatures in states run by the cultural conservative right wing organize to pass laws prohibiting the teaching of topics and ideas that they find objectionable.
All things being equal (and they are, gang) the thing that suffers throughout is the very marketplace of ideas required for a focused, open, and intelligent society. You know, the kind of society envisioned by the slave owning, revolutionary capitalists who borrowed from the Magna Carta and foisted upon the world the most progressive and freedom-loving country in history.
Are there Holocaust-denying, n-word saying, rape-y bigots in this society? Of course there are and I want them to be able to say whatever they want so I know who to avoid inviting to dinner parties (as if I ever throw a dinner party). Likewise, I want the kids to learn about all of it but not as dogma or indoctrination but with the lens of look critically at this stuff and decide for yourself.
Frankly, we all should. The First Amendment guarantees that the government cannot determine legally who says what and when. If Spotify wants to host an artist who openly proliferated the anti-science misinformation regarding GMOs (sorry, Neil) that is the company’s prerogative. If a school decides to teach Critical Race Theory, bully for them. Parents can drive their kids to a local private school if they don’t like it in the same way that a woke collegiate kid can I go to a different university if he doesn’t dig the libertarian speaker presenting a lecture.
More ideas, more speech, more incredibly offensive and ridiculous shit equals an opportunity to listen, learn, and come up with better, more refined ideas.
Imagine that offense to words and ideas is like the muscles in your arm. As a child, you can’t lift shit. Your weak, tiny muscles have no strength or sinew so you whine when you need to lift that box of toys or the rake. If your pissing and crying results in you being relieved of the responsibility of lifting things, you grow up to become an adult who cannot lift your precious smartphone to your face to take a selfie.
You gotta exercise the muscles to become strong enough to take a selfie.
Same with speech. You need to listen to the ideas you despise in order to effectively debate and/or persuade in opposition to those ideas.
The only reason to fear unlimited freedom of speech is if you think that other people are too stupid to know the difference or that you might be wrong. Both really dumb reasons to limit free speech.