Free speech advocates will often accuse so-called Social
Justice Warriors of shutting down speech with nothing more than a claim to
victimhood, as though the marginalization of specific groups were based solely
on a person’s squishy feeling of being victimized and not a matter of historical
record (which it is. Anti-Jewish state propaganda exists. Laws banning women
from voting exist. Look ‘em up). The next claim is that while such laws might
have once existed, we’ve cleared them all away and now we’re all on an equal
footing (let the moral hand-dusting begin). How these people would explain the
overrepresentation of African Americans and Indigenous peoples in the prison
system, or the high likelihood of assault being committed on members of the LGQTQ++
community remains a mystery to me if group-based marginalization doesn’t exist.
If these free speech advocates want us to be super specific about
which speech SJWs want to shut down and which speech they don’t, they need to
be equally rigorous about the flip side of the equation: what does and does not
constitute a violation of a person’s freedom of speech? When we ask this
question, we see just as much hand-waving by free speech “victims” as they accuse
SJWs of engaging in.
So let’s start off with a baseline for a violation of a
person’s freedom of speech.
Case #1: When the government threatens to legally prosecute,
intimidate, or disappear someone based on something they’ve said.
That’s it. Seriously. That’s it.
The Antifa groups that sometimes engage in violence such as
Nazi punching?
Nope, not a violation of a person’s freedom of speech. Even if
you don’t believe in violence, this is a violation of a person’s right not to
be assaulted. The assailant might not know the person is a Nazi at all. They
may have thought the person in question was looking at them cockeyed. Even if
you don’t believe in punching Nazis, this is (and is only) a violation of a
person’s right not to be assaulted.
When a university denies someone the right to speak on campus?
Newp. Not a violation of their freedom of speech. This is a
matter of campus policy. Different campuses have
different policies about who can come onto their campus and speak, and they can
change these rules any time they want. There may be some argument here based on
the fact that these are publicly funded institutions, but the fact remains that
policies about who can and can’t come speak on campus are different at
different schools.
When I start screaming at someone to shut up and drown them
out?
No, this doesn’t constitute a violation of that person’s
freedom of speech. If it did, the free speech advocate would have to admit that
speech in itself is capable of violating
another person’s rights. That means speech is a form of violence, and the
entire divide between speech and violence that free speech advocates rely on
would come crashing down.
The screaming example raises another important point, and it’s
one I repeat to myself whenever people start talking about their free speech
being violated.
The right to speak is not the right to be heard.
In recent conversations on the internet (and they have been
actual productive conversations), I’ve engaged free speech advocates about the
idea of internet “mobbing” of those who express unpopular views, be it on the
right or left. One claim to victimhood that is constantly made by free speech
advocates is that when more than a few people (let’s say more than five) gang
up on someone to call them a Nazi or some other epithet, this somehow
constitutes a violation of that person’s speech. To these people, being a
person who bravely presents a dissenting view to a group orthodoxy somehow constitutes
a more authentic act of speech than those who just so happen to share a common reprisal. We can talk all we want about the necessity of maintaining civil
discourse and a rational exchange of ideas, but this doesn’t come close to
violating that person’s freedom of speech. If Twitter (a private company) bans
that person or the people who come after them, it doesn’t violate anyone’s
freedom of speech.
Why not?
Because the right to speak is not the right to be heard.
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