Spare me your idiotic free speech pearl-clutching
Societies necessitate all sorts of restrictions, including on speech.
Well, I never!
Alex Berenson is currently crestfallen that his former employer now considers government regulation of its conduct (i.e. output) to be a “thorny question,” as opposed to something that is philosophically unthinkable and legally proscribed.
Give me a break.
If the reader is familiar with the ascendant “alt right,” all that I have to say here will be semi-obvious; at the same time as a critic of the Covid vaccines, I trade in censored opinions and would seem an obligate free-speech supporter.
This is far from the case; there are plenty of things I would personally render illegal to print immediately if I had a button that could somehow do the trick; likewise things that I would require to print. It would be illegal to portray the death of George Floyd as strangulation in all defiance of biological reality, for example; or discuss recycling without mentioning that it is largely futile and toxic, for another. In the former case no one would be wrongfully imprisoned for strangulating him. In the latter case recycling would cease as a practice and humanity would be free of those blue bins, and the homeless would cease sorting through the trash as much. Oh, how horrible these things would all be!
Better that the press keeps being free to impose negative outcomes by printing managerial-class-preferred lies as the truth until society disintegrates. I’m sure this superstition over press freedom will not seem obviously idiotic in retrospect.
Having said that, I am a realist. Legally enshrined free speech reduces the state’s exercise of onerous force (as does any wanton legalization of behavior, this isn’t a magical feature of speech). Further, the Federal Government’s first amendment like much of the Bill of Rights is wholly redundant. Outside of 13 and 14A, which are aconstitutional, Washington has no jurisdiction over human communication to begin with, and so of course it cannot pass laws regarding speech. That is for the states to decide individually. Any state can restrict speech however it wants. Texas can sue Netflix for Cuties if that is in accordance with the will of franchised Texans, and this is good. So, I do stand with Berenson as far as the most finite understanding of the issue raised by the New York Times goes - if someone is going to censor them, it should be individual states, not Congress or the White House.
Other than in terms of states’ rights, free speech is not intrinsically ideal nor even possible. Humans are conformist, illogical creatures who cling to convenient fictions that optimize individual relative status. Every “objective” topic is potentially a political battleground in which “truth” will be determined not by the consensus of observations but by cui bono and the plinko-game of audience gullibility. As such, sans state censorship, all of us must simply be subjected to indirect censorship on the part of whoever can convince society to consider certain statements taboo.
As an “intuition pump” for why the First Amendment does not actually afford Americans with anything resembling free speech in practice, consider the following Detroit Free Press profile of a “Young Stormtrooper” from 1966 (encountered in my Holocaust series research last month).1 The subject is one Alexander De Fields.
What [Alex] was on fire about was race, and Alex believes that the fire began while he was a prisoner at Ionia [for breaking and entering].
“I don’t think I was race conscious until I went to prison,” Alex recalls. “But I became very conscious of it there.”
“About the time I arrived there was de facto segregation in the prison system. Negroes had menial jobs and there was segregation. But civil - rights groups brought pressure to bear on the authorities and they did away with segregation.”
The transition took place during Alex’s term, and if he can be believed, it created a lot of tension. He doesn’t recall that he was afraid, but that is the impression he leaves as he talks about the activities of the Black Muslims, stabbings, killings, and relentless pressure on whites to stay in line. […]
Alex talked about his questionable future. He had just been fired by a maintenance company and blamed his firing on his political views.
He has appealed the firing to everybody almost, the State Civil Rights Commission, the State Labor Department, the State Attorney General, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
He is not deeply concerned about getting his job back, mostly furious at the idea that he can’t be a Nazi and hold a job—like the university professor who said he wanted the Viet Cong to win, and kept his job.
“It’s been this way for a long time,” Alex says […]
The evening stretched out into a Gotterdammerung in which Alexander… mounted a terrible assault against all those people who believe that Hitler exterminated six million Jews.
“It couldn’t have happened, it just couldn’t… There’s evidence. Actually, it was only 480,000 Jews, and they died of starvation because in the last days of the war the Germans couldn’t get them enough to eat. But six million? That’s ridiculous.”
“This country isn’t made of college kids and race mixers. It’s made up of racists. The only difference between me and the other guy is that he draws his line at his daughter’s bedroom. I draw mine out in the open.”
There is an intuitive, stark liberality to author George Wallace’s portrait of this “dark corner of the mind” that is nonetheless subtle in form. Despite characterizing De Field’s views on “Negroes and Jews” as “impossible to understand,” Wallace freely presents those views without point-by-point condemnation. Any modern mainstream-press expose of the (again resurgent) race-conscious right will only expound on such beliefs in the service of warning the reader what is wrong to believe. Instead, in 1966, De Fields’ observations and opinions could simply be offered as valid observations and opinions that are nonetheless unconvincing in the judgement of the author. In other words, in 2023 as has in fact been true for decades, it is not permissible to publish the experiences and opinions that were publishable in 1966. (I quote his violation of the Holocaust “millions” taboo because its inclusion is not even unique; many papers treated the subject as an open, civil discussion at the time.) More modern memory still recalls when the news mentioned race for individual crimes, before Ferguson; the effacing of race from such headlines is only the latest example of so many self-imposed restrictions that have operated since the late 60s.
Have you ever seen a news story portraying prison violence as specifically a problem of Black and white desegregation? And if white prisoners are supposedly protected against cruel and unusual punishment by Federal and state constitutions, what role does media indifference and self-censorship regarding race play in allowing and sustaining the hellish character of the American prison system which has prevailed for almost as long as slavery did (in the republic)? Will the Times or any other media institution ever be paying reparations to descendants of turn-of-century white prisoners?
Meanwhile, this rendering of so many experiences and opinions unfit to print, except as example of what is wrong to believe, has made it largely unnecessary for the state to arrest anyone for distributing “hate speech” — the only reason such arrests do not take place all the time. As long as the Federal Civil Rights Act regime persists in obviating Americans rights to free association, of course it cannot permit public criticism of desegregation. It was first necessary to arrest and disemploy dissidents, until there no longer were any, at which point their views could be rendered taboo in the press without anyone noticing. Racism is not an opinion, but a wrong opinion.
So what does the Times’ pivot on censorship reveal? Not some wild corruption of a traditional, cherished principle regarding free speech, a tear in the fabric of reality in the very atoms of writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s brain, as Berenson seems to believe. Simply that media is comprised of a coastal, educated class that now wishes to render many novel ideas taboo. The public largely disagrees that ideas such as working and living during a declared “pandemic,” or humans being an organism of two sexes, are wrong.
What else should the media want, but to make them illegal.
The answer: Make speech restrictions overt
Every society functions on taboos. As Stanley Fish wrote in “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” there’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too. As Blake Smith summarized in Tablet:2
In an insightful interpretation of Milton’s 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica, one of the most famous statements against censorship of the press, Fish argued that liberal understandings of free speech are shallow and incoherent. Free speech depends on an unacknowledged spiritual tradition, he insisted, and can only make sense within it.
Fish began the titular essay of There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech by observing that “the concept of free speech” was falling out of favor with the left. In the 1960s and ’70s, supporting free speech had served the leftist efforts to lift restrictions on expressions of radical politics, sexuality, and the perspectives of minority groups. By the 1990s, however, claims about “free speech” seemed to have become a weapon by which conservatives shielded themselves from accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Fish did not call on leftists to congratulate themselves on this moral victory, by which they had convinced conservatives of the value of free speech. Nor did he urge them to consider how the right’s change of heart might have been a response to the left’s growing cultural power. Instead, he insisted that this shift had revealed free speech for what it was: an empty placeholder for political interests.
Consensus-defined wrong-think is not magically different from any other culturally proscribed behavior, i.e. any moral wrong. In American, you cannot say certain things just like you cannot be naked in the middle of the street, unless you are Black or trans. While a constraint on freedom (as is every aspect of social living), moral taboos preserve communal life and work.
What is objectionable about the Times’ idea of misinformation is simply that it is out of accord with currently prevailing traditional consensus in most of (white) America. (I might argue that the opposite of misinformation in the woke era is fundamentally incompatible with human happiness and actualization, but that’s just totally like my opinion, man).
More broadly, what is objectionable about the American cultural religion’s fetishization of free speech (FREE SPEECH!) is that it renders invisible the inorganic suppression of dissent that takes place during any epoch of liberal “progress.” If it were understood that racism is only “wrong” because no one is allowed to say otherwise, lest they be exiled from society, opposition to the liberal orthodoxy might be more widespread. In other words, overt suppression of speech might be more robustly resisted than covert suppression, as well as less susceptible to privileged violations (e.g. magic words that only one race can say). One could argue that Europe and Canada, with their widespread restrictions on speech, are a counter-example; but these places have not yet reached the level of “progress” foisted on Americans with so little resistance after the 60s.
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Anyone who’s afraid of free speech is the problem. If you’re so confident you’re right on an issue, then you shouldn’t be scared of public debate between people who disagree. I’m certainly not worried about someone who believes the earth is flat having a platform, because in a debate on the merits I think truth would come out. People who believe government has some sort of monopoly on what is truth and what is “misinformation” is a sheep begging to be slaughtered.
I'm honestly not sure what your point is here, but one thing I would make "taboo" but not outright ban - capitalizing Black but not white, which is racist, and just foments unnecessary resentment and division. Besides, there is not one person on the planet who is legitimately "black" or "white" in skin color unless you count albinos. Skin tone value statements should be simple adjectives and not divisive racial categories in a more enlightened society.