Watch out when Establishment figures “declare that they’ve changed their mind on free speech and now think there should be less of it,” I write in my new piece at Cato:
This new Washington Post opinion piece (“Why America needs a hate speech law”) is by Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine and the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016. In that post, he was charged with representing America’s values to the world.
Honestly, could Stengel’s argument be any weaker? “Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. … it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.”
If the prospect of violence by offended groups is what causes us to censor, we are well on the way toward closing down speech at the whim of whichever mobs, here or abroad, decide to be violent….
Whole thing here.
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The thing is, who is going to decide what is hate speech? Sarcasm? Same race hate speech? Will movies and other art feel the chill? So-called “code words?” Would vociferous opposition to affirmative action qualify? Would the court filings of Harvard about Asian kids?
This is more of people wanting to tell others what to do. I think anti-vaxxers are silly and ignorant., That’s my opinion–and I wouldn’t think to try to shut them down. I’d prefer to talk about T-cells and immune system “memory,”
Anything can be called hate speech. Disagreeing with Black Lives Matter, feminists, trans advocates, all hate speech. Pro-life? hate speech. It is used almost exclusively by the Left to shut people up. Facebook has even tried to (succeeded?) shut down the terrorism documentation project.
It is not a slippery slope, it is a cliff.
These sophisticated Arab diplomats have it backward: ” . . . it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.”
The First Amendment is to protect us from the violence of government. And I see the Koran was mentioned.
The fact that government officials anywhere, any time and any place don’t understand why it is needed is only the best possible evidence that it is.
” …it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.”
That sounds like a problem for the violent group to sort out. We’ve seen the weaponization of hurt feelings abound, from college campuses, to human resource spats between co-workers. This goes way beyond merely encouraging the heckler’s veto.
I have a solution, but I think no-one but me (and my successors) will like it:
“All speech I don’t like is banned. When I die, I appoint someone else to the position.”
It is simple, I would just sit around all day and charge $100 to consider something. If I don’t like it, it is banned. Also, I am the one who determines what “speech” is.
If you don’t like my solution, all is lost. Everything else amounts to rules as arbitrary as my views.
This will make things really easy. A judge will ask me: “Is this banned,” I will answer, and the case will be done. While my ruling would have precedent, if someone says something similar and tries to distinguish it, there is no problem. That is because, for $100, I will issue a new edict. Also, I would not precluded from issuing competing and conflicting decisions. That is a feature, because it would make it more necessary for me to make more decisions, which would result in me making more money. I might even be abe to make a full time ob of it.
An added benefit: when history is written, I will be considered the best person ever. Because everything else said about me would have been banned.
I’ve got an easier solution.
No speech is banned. Your feelings got hurt? Tough!
Speech is anything that communicates a thought, idea, information or emotion from one person to another.
>”Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. … it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another
This should become a standard question on oral foreign service exams and Congressional confirmation hearings. Anyone who cannot give a satisfactory answer is not qualified to represent the United States of America.
One could point out to Arab diplomats that in the USA it is safe and legal to convert from Christianity (or atheism) to Islam. The reverse is most emphatically neither safe nor legal in many Muslim countries.
While I share libertarian opposition to hate speech laws, I am less protective, in a private context, of idea-free *ssholery, eg spray-painting the N-word on a college building. Whether the perp is a racist, a hoaxer, or a lunatic, a university should be free to get rid of him.
Virtually all libertarians would defend the legal and moral right of a private university to expel a student who had committed such a crime, and I suspect that most would recognize a public university’s right to do so as well.
Vandalism is already illegal.
I’d expel the student if they spray painted “Love” on a building.
Vandalism is vandalism, period, regardless of the shape(s) of the swoops of paint applied.
Stengel is wrong to suggest that the “marketplace of ideas, where truth comes out the winner” is the sole historical justification for free speech. Read enough SCOTUS opinions and law review articles on free speech, and you’ll see an acknowledgement that the “marketplace of ideas” may be 1) fixed, 2) nonsense, 3) not successful at squeezing out the ‘truth’, etc. It’s a cute idea but hardly the strongest argument.