We often heard it said that “free speech is good, but . . .” But it has to be restrained so that crackpots like white supremacists can’t get their message out, for example.
Not long ago, someone declared that there was a “Nazi problem” at Substack, which wasn’t diligent in keeping out irresponsible content. A couple of years ago, the problem was with people who thought Covid might have come from a laboratory. Such conspiracy theory stuff needed to be suppressed for the common good.
In his latest “Bastiat’s Window” post, Bob Graboyes takes this controversy on, arguing that it’s far better to let the crackpots (and the far more numerous people who are not crackpots but differ from conventional leftist thinking) say what they want.
Here’s a snippet from the post:
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It’s beneficial to know what these kinds of people are thinking and how broad their reach is. Substack said that altogether, the deleted newsletters had fewer than 100 active readers. Observers noted that they had elicited very few likes or comments.
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Expelling Nazis/neo-Nazis/Nazi sympathizers invites censorious activists to expand their definitions of “Nazi” and pressure Substack to ban their writings as well. Shortly before the 1948 Truman-Dewey election, a New York Times multi-tiered headline declared, in part: “PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … TRUMAN SAYS GOP PERILS U.S. LIBERTY.” Dewey, of course, was a milquetoast, liberal Republican instrumental in elevating Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency four years later.
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Expelling Nazi-sympathizers and expanding the definition of “Nazi” intimidates thoughtful writers of goodwill into restraining their writing for fear of violating some hazy present or future verbal prohibition.
Right. Trying to silence bad ideas won’t work and will have undesirable unintended consequences. It will open the door to the silencing of reasonable people who say things that upset those in power.
When I hear “progressives” railing about the need to regulate speech lest diabolical neo-Nazis should make their case, I wonder if they really have so little confidence in the ability of the vast majority of Americans to detect nonsense and refute it. Or are they eager for the slippery slope to open so they’ll have the power to shut down all dissent from their statist plans?
Graboyes correctly worries about the long run, writing:
Illiberalism spreads like toxic algae across the surface of a fish pond. On Day 1, a small bloom appears invisibly in a remote corner of a pond—covering only one square foot of the pond’s 1,000-square foot surface. On Day 2, the bloom has doubled to 2 square feet—and a still-imperceptible 4 square feet on Day 3. At that rate of growth, however, by Day 10, the toxic slime covers 50% of the pond, and early on Day 11, the conquest is 100% complete, with all the fish beneath dying or dead.
Free speech is nothing to fear. The power to control speech is.