Thread by @AlexandraErin

Every single person who signed that Cancel Culture letter would absolutely speak out to defend an editorial calling for police to shoot more journalists in the head because that is what free speech means to them.

And if questioned on this they would say "Absolutely! Not because I agree but because where do you draw the line?"

But they have drawn it! They have decided the limits of acceptable discourse in this country! They are putting a limit on free speech to supposedly protect it!

And the thing is... a lot of the speech they want to protect us from is *also* motivated by a desire to protect free speech. Tom Cotton's "send in the troops" was a threat of violent force against free speech! The special treatment it received from NYT Opinions was also chilling.

There was no "discourse" or "market place of ideas", no competition between his speech and others. His opinion was elevated above others out of a combination of his position and a crass desire to stir exactly the backlash it received... to make news out of opinion.

When conservatives book speaking gigs on campus and student groups protest, the pure free speech position cannot condemn the protesters. And if the protesters win out in the marketplace of ideas... oh well.

When a conservative speaker is brought to a college campus and uses a platform paid for by the students there to argue that some of the students shouldn't be there (on the campus, or in existence at all), Harper's signatories think this is evidence that free speech is thriving.

When college students say, "No one should be allowed the use of *my* resources to argue against my *existence*", Harper's signatories call this a spirit of censoriousness.

Suggesting an argument should not be elevated to a particular stage threatens speech more than threats.

The defenders of free speech will tell you "But odious opinions like those of Nazis are canaries in the coalmine of free speech!"

Which is fine as metaphors go but you don't PROTECT canaries. You WATCH them.

Building the canary in the coalmine a nice little space suit to protect it from the noxious gases of the coalmine means the canary will stay alive, but it also defeats the purpose of having a canary in the coalmine.

It's not IF you can keep the canary alive at all costs, then the coalmine is safe for everybody to breathe in.

It's, if the coalmine isn't safe to breathe in, you can watch the canary because it'll go first.

Somehow many of our public thinkers left of the right have replaced the canary metaphor with a kind of totemic sympathetic metaphor where they think that free speech can be preserved by protecting the most odious opinions even at the cost of silencing everyone else.

And they will say, "But you could defeat this bad speech with more speech!"

So we do. That's exactly what we do.

And they call it cancel culture.

What Nazis being canaries in the coalmine of free speech is supposed to mean is: if you assume Nazis have the most objectionable opinions, then anywhere Nazi opinions are tolerated you can assume it's safe for all views.

Buuuuut it's been a long time since we calibrated the offend-o-tron and decades of a right-wing program of working the refs, ginning up outrage, and also lauding Nazi views as "canary in the coalmine" means Nazi views are nowhere near the first to be axed.

What kind of speech gets axed before Nazi speech?

In a lot of "liberal" settings, speech that suggests that Nazi speech is dangerous and may lead to Nazi outcomes gets axed before Nazi speech.

I take a dim view of the whole notion of "virtue signaling" but if it applies to anything it applies to liberals and progressives loudly and ostentatiously defending odious regressive right-wing views by way of attacking all speech critical of it.

"But surely you can argue against speech you disagree with without suggesting that it must be silenced! Explain what's *wrong* with it and you won't have to silence it."

Two things. Two things that are wrong with this approach.

One, the speech we're arguing against ALSO suggests outcomes that would silence people, often more totally and permanently than "Maybe don't give this dillweed a megaphone." would.

You're not worried where THAT will lead, so why worry where THIS will lead?

And the other is that if we argue about how bad right-wing extremist ideas threaten our lives and rights and existence *but we don't act like we're in danger* this becomes an argument to dismiss everything we're saying. It creates a disconnect.

The champions of "liberal enlightenment society" are happy to arrange a rhetorical boxing match with Nazis on our behalf but they demand that we and only we fight with one hand tied behind our backs, that we alone submit to the rules of the sport and the rulings of the referee.

To which my reply is: you will never see a freer example of free speech than what you call "cancel culture". For good. For ill. This is what you want, this is what you got. Sorry it doesn't look like the picture on the box. Sorry it isn't everything you hoped for.

J.K. Rowling, under an absolute theory of free speech, can advocate all the child abuse her heart desires. Tom Cotton is free to suggest shooting American citizens until we learn to appreciate the love of Donald Trump, and the New York Times can print it. That's free speech!

But free speech also says we can RESPOND to these things. We can say -- as the signers of the letters in Harper's have ALSO chosen to say -- that some ideas are corrosive to a free society and should not be casually or frequently elevated to a position of prominence.

The letter signed by these champions of free speech is itself a call for a spirit of censoriousness to descend upon our society and save it. Despite their heavy-handed protestations to the contrary, they agree with the basic premise that speech can lead to dangerous places.

And I'm sick and I'm tired of the class of people who think that freedom of speech stops at the point where we criticize the judgment of whoever happens to be in charge of the column inches at the New York Times calling the rest of us "illiberal".

What elitist censorious pricks.

LOL at everyone talking about strawmen while talking about "silencing over disagreement" as though that isn't the biggest strawman imaginable. Disagreement is fine and never the issue.