An excellent post from Ken White on “free speech culture” (defined as a “social norm that discourages me from calling for that person to be fired, shunned, or otherwise socially sanctioned, or criticized to a degree that is, by some poorly defined measure, excessive”) and its contribution to the current “unprecedented” wave of official government censorship. White hits two key points.
First is how free-speech culture contributes to the preferred first speaker problem, by imposing obligations on those who respond to speech but not on the chosen “First Speaker” (a term White coined and one I have been toying with for an article for two years).
Second–and the great insight of the piece–is how free-speech culture conflates defense of free speech with defense of the content of speech, producing what he calls “moral sociopathy:”
When the American Civil Liberties Union fought successfully for the rights of Nazis to march at Skokie, they did not convene a public meeting to ask the Nazis to explain why the Jews were so bad, and they did not portray the Nazis as heroic warriors for free expression. That would have been unserious: the Nazis, given their way, would have suppressed many people’s speech. Rather, the ACLU’s stance was that the First Amendment doesn’t permit censoring the Nazis however repugnant they are.
The “free speech culture” ethos, by contrast, has a tendency to go well beyond arguing that awful bigoted totalitarian people shouldn’t be officially censored or fired. Rather, it encourages treating people as “free speech heroes” so long as they are struggling for their own right to speak, irrespective of what they would do to other people’s right to speak. It also has a habit of apologia. It tends to drift defensively from “we shouldn’t call for people to be fired for saying awful things” to “actually what they say is not that awful.”
White distinguishes the ACLU’s approach to the Nazis in Skokie (using the First Amendment to defend the right of Nazis to march) from FIRE’s approach to Amy Wax (hosting Wax on its podcast to give her an opportunity to explain and defend her views). Another reason for me to doubt FIRE.
White does not mention Charlie Kirk in his post. But Kirk exemplifies the point–he achieved the status of free speech “hero” or “warrior” in the way White describes and decries. Kirk pushed his offensive views through speech and demanded protection for that speech and his right to speak. Celebrations of Kirk’s life have descended into that sociopathy–ignoring and seeking to censor criticism (and even discussion or mention) of his actual views and their moral value (or lack thereof).