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In 2022, the number of advocates for principled free speech has dwindled.
It wasn’t that big to begin with. In recent years, however, free speech advocates have benefited from marriages of convenience to conservatives who fear they are being censored by higher education, the media and big tech. But now some conservatives see “wokism” as a bigger threat and use censorship as a way to combat it.
Perhaps that’s why Florida politicians enacted the Stop Walk Act in April. This bans discussion and discussion of his eight topics related to race and gender at state universities. It was only a year ago that the same conservative Congress passed another law. This prohibited censorship of ideas that some universities deemed “offensive, unwelcome, offensive or offensive”. Support for free speech can certainly deteriorate quickly.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, has filed a lawsuit challenging the higher education provision of the Stop WOKE Act. A federal judge recently dismissed these provisions as violating the First Amendment, calling them “clearly dystopian.” Surprisingly, however, in defending the act in court, a Florida attorney argued that left-wing politicians have taken decades to create unconstitutional speech rules that punish conservative speakers on campus. I used some of the same arguments that I used throughout.
To refuse to exercise the censorship argument when you have the chance, you have to be principled. Florida legislators opted for political expediency instead. Luckily the judge said not so fast.
Speaking of the left, there is a popular argument that language is violence. “I don’t want you here. Your words are violence,” yelled one heckler who helped shut down conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s recent appearance at Cornell University.
But if language is violence, then the encounter between language and actual physical violence is logically justified. I’ve seen this happen in recent years when conservatives schedule talks at Penn State, Berkeley, and Middlebury College. At the University of California, Davis, they’re throwing manure to stop documentary screenings. A great virtue of a democratic society is the use of language rather than violence to resolve conflicts. Throw away the distinction between words and violence and the ball game will begin.
Some leftists have been lukewarm about free speech since the 1990s. Before “words are violence,” it was a request for microaggression policing and trigger warnings.
There remains an older generation of liberals who understand the need for free speech. They’ve seen it used to defend representation for civil rights activists, gay rights activists, and heavy metal rockers. was. They understood, as former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser put it, that censorship is like poison gas and works only if the enemy is in sight, but the wind changes. There is a way. Now the Glasser generation is rapidly retiring from the barricades. Are the lessons they learned retiring too?
When it comes to libertarians, they have often been trusted partners in the fight for free speech. But the libertarian movement is currently in turmoil. America’s third-largest political party recently made a significant right-wing move in the culture wars, which could jeopardize its support for the principle of free speech, as has some conservatives. At the same time, they have little to no political power, so they are clearly much less of a threat.
And then there’s Elon Musk. where do i start? Every news cycle is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist‘ is clearly not. He began his 2022 by buying out his Twitter to bring free speech back to the platform, arbitrarily suspending journalist accounts, and allowing other social media outlets to sell content from his platform. I ended it by creating a new policy to prevent sharing. Indeed, Twitter is a private platform. Musk owns it. He can do it however he pleases. But it’s bad for the free speech brand when vocal free speech advocates give in to censorship desires.
So who are we with? A scatter of principled peoples who do not adhere to political tribes and are difficult to identify and mobilize. But if we are to maintain a culture of free speech in America, we need to establish free speech districts. That is, to revive what Twitter’s first founder once called “the free speech faction of the free speech party.” a party they later abandoned.
The challenge is that censorship has always been an attractive tool for achieving political goals.The censorship debate is nothing new, and history has repeatedly shown its consequences to be detrimental.
Today’s “misinformation” is yesterday’s “fake news”. The call to censor social media is the same as the call to censor the printing press, radio, or the internet. Recent efforts to ban books are very similar to efforts to ban comic books in the 20th century.
We now see past attempts to solve problems through censorship as false. But we keep making the same mistakes. Danish attorney Jacob Machangama calls the erosion of support for free speech over time “free speech entropy.”he write “The leaders of political establishments, no matter how wise, inevitably convince themselves that free speech has gone too far.”
So what should principled free speech advocates do?
We must defend free speech without fear or favor. Even if the speech offends us, we must defend it. He must acquire converts one at a time. We need to understand that defending free speech is always an unpopular cause. It must be remembered that commitment to principles is often praised in hindsight. Even defending the right of neo-Nazis to rally in Skokie, Illinois is now respected. At the time it was reviled.
“Once you restrict free speech, it’s not free speech,” said author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed repeatedly this year for exercising his right to write an allegedly profane book.
Fortunately, Rushdie survived. But the question remains: what happens to the free speech principle?
But only if censorship said “enough” every time it came into our words, or in Rushdie’s case, our lives.
Nico Perrino is Executive Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and host of “So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast.” Perrino previously worked in the Communications Department of the Institute for Justice. His writings have been featured in his USA Today, Politico, Newsweek, and The Guardian, and he regularly travels the country to speak on free speech and civil liberties issues.
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