Free Speech and Whatnot

"The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence"
 --Louis Brandeis (originally), Asshole White Guy Playing Devil's Advocate (usually)

As you're undoubtedly aware, the US is current mired in a fight for its very political soul, as college kids occasionally interrupt literal Nazis giving speeches. Ok, that might be setting up a bit of a straw man, but it's more-or-less correct. Read pretty much any David Brooks column from the past several years (this is a rhetorical device, under no circumstances should you actually read a David Brooks column) and you'll hear an old white guy ranting and raving about how the kids these days don't accept free speech because they keep interrupting people who are just saying the maybe there's an intellectual case to be made for why Black people are subhuman, or trans people should be beaten up in the streets, or anyone with brown skin should be rounded up and deported en masse. You know, for the sake of argument.

Again, maybe I'm being a bit unfair to the position, but it's so difficult for me to take that position seriously that I can't genuinely write out their arguments, because they're so obviously facile that presenting them with a straight face offers them far more legitimacy than they deserve.

Of course, in an empirical sense, the war on free speech is not happening at all. In fact, actual data demonstrates the vast majority of Americans strongly support free and open speech, and those who show most support for it are...wait for it...the very college students who hack writers love to wring their hands about for the blue-hairs that actually still read newspapers. But let's skip right past this, since the empirical reality of what's happening has very little to do with why people are writing these columns and think pieces and whatnot.

If you do read the link above, you will find that there is one group that Americans of all stripes feel pretty comfortable in denying free speech rights to, and that group is Muslims. Funny that I've yet to see a David Brooks article worrying about the abuse of free speech rights for Muslims, but I'm sure that's just because his cab driver hasn't told him about this yet.

But what makes it most interesting that the same Americans who just ~love~ free speech have no problem with it being denied to Muslims, is that the group most often harmed by their beloved free speech just happens to be Muslims.

A central facet of the argument made by the white guy free speech warriors of today is essentially the old "sticks and stones" bit, in which they note that, sure, sometimes these speeches are pretty caustic and offensive, but at the end of the day, they're just words. And words have never hurt anyone! Why, even the implication that words could harm someone means you're just so juvenile! You should have thick skin, like the rich white guys who write these articles who have, just coincidentally, never been on the receiving end of racial slurs or wide-scale attempts to demonize them. Some even go so far to concede this point, but argue it's a strength that allows them to view these issues rationally and dispassionately, not like all those hot-blooded, irrational coloreds (well, they use a bit more polite coded language to make that point, but that is unmistakably the point they are making).

This is, of course, a very dumb point. Words hurt immensely, as literally thousands of psychological and sociological studies demonstrate. But even if we ignore the mountains of evidence regarding how discourse can harm people at the individual level (which we absolutely shouldn't!), there's plenty of evidence to demonstrate that words hurt in a very substantial and real way on a larger scale.

A recent study by the New America Foundation found that spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes in American happen not after notable terror attacks or other major news stories regarding the supposedly perfidious acts unique to Muslims, but rather that such attacks follow a clear pattern of mimicking the election cycle; that is, people don't attack Muslims because they saw a news story about a terror attack and felt the need to retaliate, they attack Muslims because they listened to a politician speak about how bad Muslims are.

So I ask of the "the only counter to speech is more speech!!1!!1!!1!" crowd -- exactly what speech should these Muslims who were beaten and/or killed by bigots riled up by bigoted speeches have used in their defense? Because I'm willing to bet they tried the counter speech of "Please don't beat me to death!" but that was clearly not effective. Seriously, though -- what speech would have countered this? Because it sure looks like shouting down those speakers before they riled up a crowd of murderous bigots would have had a chance at being successful, but that's an open empirical question. But what is not an open empirical question is if more speech would have prevented these attacks, because there's been a shitload of "more speech" about how Muslims are human beings who do not deserve to be beaten and/or murdered simply for who they are, but that has been emphatically proven to not be effective.

This is not a process limited to the United States. For instance, the preeminent criminologist John Hagan has pretty conclusively demonstrated that rhetoric (a/k/a speech) was integral in laying the groundwork for the genocide in Darfur (particularly these two studies). Once again, many people tried the "more speech" option of arguing against the mass slaughter of human beings, but once again, that was clearly not effective.

Obviously people of good faith can argue about, say, what limits on speech are or are not acceptable, or what utility there is in shouting down individual speakers, and all of that sort of thing. But what is clearly inarguable is that the idea that "more speech" will effectively counter hate speech is simply false. And not "false" in the sense that I disagree with it, but "false" in the sense that all available empirical data demonstrates the "more speech" tactic to be completely ineffective.

But the point, of course, is that the "more speech" crowd is not arguing in good faith. Their central argument is not about the freedom of speech, but about the freedom of bigots and white supremacists to continue being bigots and white supremacists without anyone doing anything about it.