H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H.L. Mencken.
December 3, 2019
QotD: Defending freedom of speech
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October 27, 2019
Freedom of speech under threat (again)
In The Atlantic, Ken White strongly urges pro-free-speech advocates to avoid using some arguments that have been bandied around recently:
What speech should be protected by the First Amendment is open to debate. Americans can, and should, argue about what the law ought to be. That’s what free people do. But while we’re all entitled to our own opinions, we’re not entitled to our own facts, even in 2019. In fact, the First Amendment is broad, robust, aggressively and consistently protected by the Supreme Court, and not subject to the many exceptions and qualifications that commentators seek to graft upon it. The majority of contemptible, bigoted speech is protected.
If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in America, or listened to talking heads on the news, you’ve almost certainly encountered empty, misleading, or simply false tropes about the First Amendment. Those tired tropes are barriers to serious discussions about free speech. Any useful discussion of what the law should be must be informed by an accurate view of what the law is.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Photo by Harris & Ewing via Wikimedia Commons.
[…]“This speech isn’t protected, because you can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”
This line, though ubiquitous, is just another way to convey that “not all speech is protected by the First Amendment.” As an argument, it is just as useless.
But the phrase is not just empty. It’s also a historically ignorant way to convey the point. It dates back to a 1919 Supreme Court decision allowing the imprisonment of Charles Schenck for urging resistance to the draft in World War I. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the “most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” This decision led to a series of cases broadly endorsing the government’s ability to suppress speech that questioned official policy. But for more than half a century Schenck has unequivocally and universally been acknowledged as bad law.
Holmes himself repented of the decision — though he continued to indulge his taste for pithy phrases with lines like “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” to justify forcible government sterilization of the handicapped.
So when you smugly drop “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” in a First Amendment debate, you’re misquoting an empty rhetorical device uttered by a career totalitarian in a long-overturned case about jailing draft protesters. This is not persuasive or helpful.
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October 4, 2019
QotD: Freedom of thought
For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On —”, 1940.
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July 7, 2019
QotD: Speaking for the dead
Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment.
Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn’t presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it’s been clear since about October 2001 that the Federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, they could at least quit dragging us into it.
And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of “desecration” of the Koran by US guards at Guantanamo – that, in the words of one reader, “it’s not possible to ‘torture’ an inanimate object”.
That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the “desecration” of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat Senators want to make speeches comparing the US military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It’s always useful to know what people really believe.
Mark Steyn, “The Advantage of Knowing What People Really Think”, SteynOnline, 2017-06-14 (originally published in The Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-06-26).
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June 26, 2019
Social media giants can be publisher or platform, but not both
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace explains why Facebook, Google, and the other social media companies have been playing fast and loose with the rules, sometimes using the rules that apply to publishers and sometimes the ones that apply to platforms, depending on their whim:
Only a speaker or publisher of claimed defamatory content can be sued.
Not being a speaker or publisher of a defamatory statement gives you total immunity from suit. You’re just a guy, you had nothing to do with the tort alleged.
Section 230 [of the Community Decency Act] specifically says that “neutral content platforms” shall not be deemed to be the “speaker or publisher” of a claimed defamatory statement made by a third party using their service — hence, the complete immunity from suit. You can’t be sued for something someone else said, obviously.
Now newspapers can be sued for the defamatory remarks of, say, an interview subject. They are publishers of that defamatory statement — they chose to publish it. The interview subject made the statement, but then they chose to publish it themselves, becoming another “speaker” of the defamation.
Now, “neutral content platforms” are never considered “speakers” of third-party defamations (or any third-party crime involving speech, such as offering to sell contraband or conspiring to commit a crime). But a newspaper or media company — or this blog — could be.
The corporate cucks claim that you cannot put restrictions on Google, Facebook, or Twitter as regards their right to censor opinions they disagree with because that constitutes “compelled speech.” You’re compelling them to speak things they do not believe, the cucks’ argument goes.
But… section 230 states that, as a legal matter, they are not considered the “speakers” of any statement made on their “neutral content platforms.”
So which is it? Are they the speakers of these words — in which case, like a newspaper or tv station, they’d have every right to exercise editorial judgment and decide what they wish their company to say — or are they not the speakers of these words, which is their claim whenever someone tries to sue them?
As it stands, they are speakers when it comes to their power to block people from speaking on their platforms — and thus can indulge in the vice of censorship — but not speakers when it comes to people suing them for what other people said on their platforms.
Choose one or the other: Either you are a speaker of other people’s words or you’re not. You can’t forever choose one and then the other when it’s in your interest to have the Clown Nose On or the Clown Nose Off.
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June 25, 2019
Barbara Kay on the rise of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada
In The Post Millennial, Barbara Kay explains why there may be a good opportunity for Maxime Bernier to attract votes from disaffected Canadians who don’t feel the other parties represent their interests and concerns:
The nationalist Brexit Party, led by outspoken euroskeptic Nigel Farage, came into existence last January. Four months later, it boasts 29 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament). By contrast, this past May, Canada’s Green Party elected its second member of parliament after 36 years of existence.
There’s a message here. The Green Party is not a “disruptor” of the status quo, and it doesn’t represent a groundswell of voices who feel left out of the conversation. It’s just a more fibrously left wing form of the same political granola served up by the NDP and the Liberal Party. It’s not really needed. But the Brexit Party’s success is a genuinely organic statement of anger directed at traditional parties by great swaths of citizens who not only felt disrespected and ignored, they actually were, by any objective standards, disrespected and ignored. It was needed.
Forty percent of Canadians routinely choose not to vote. A certain number are politically indifferent, but another number don’t vote because they don’t feel any of the parties represent their views. Normally, they don’t feel worried enough to bestir themselves. Will the pattern hold in October?
Or is this Maxime Bernier’s “disruptor” moment? His People’s Party of Canada was officially launched in January, and it presently has more members than the Green Party. The PPC is fielding candidates in all 338 ridings, an impressive accomplishment given the time constraints. Their basic platform, which includes tax simplification, the abolition of supply management, as well as long-overdue abolition of inter-provincial tariffs, indicates commitment to fundamental conservative principles.
But those issues speak to the mind, not the heart, and a slew of anxious Canadian hearts are what is presently up for grabs. One of Bernier’s great strengths is that in spite of years of political experience, he has not become jaded or cynical. He wears his own heart on his sleeve. Not a thespian, mantra-driven, lachrymose, pre-programmed “heart” of the kind Trudeau is so famous for, but an unsentimental heart full of deeply-considered convictions that beat, like ruggedly-manned boats, against the progressive current upon which Justin Trudeau is a dreamily bobbing twiglet.
One of those convictions is that chronic breast-beating about the sins of the past and suppression of pride in Canadians’ national identity is creating an unhealthy social and cultural environment, dominated by grievance-mongering special-interest activism that corrodes national confidence and unity of purpose.
Another related, perhaps pivotal strength is Bernier’s passion for freedom of speech.
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June 21, 2019
The PPC’s 2019 election platform on freedom of expression
Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada is posting the individual issues from their 2019 election platform online, and today’s addition was their position on freedom of expression:
The rights of Canadians to freely hold and express beliefs are being eroded at an alarming speed under the Trudeau government. Some of its recent decisions even require that Canadians renounce their most deeply held moral convictions and express opinions they disagree with.
[…]
Our Plan
What some people find politically incorrect, offensive or even hateful cannot serve as the legal basis for discrimination and censorship. Canadians should be able to enjoy maximum freedom of conscience and expression as guaranteed in Section 2 of the Charter.
A People’s Party Government will:
- Restrict the definition of hate speech in the Criminal Code to expression which explicitly advocates the use of force against identifiable groups or persons based on protected criteria such as religion, race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation.
- Repeal any existing legislation or regulation curtailing free speech on the internet and prevent the reinstatement of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
- Repeal C-16 and M-103.
- Ensure that Canadians can exercise their freedom of conscience to its fullest extent as it is intended under the Charter and are not discriminated against because of their moral convictions.
- Withhold federal funding from any post-secondary institution shown to be violating the freedom of expression of its students or faculty.
You can read the full policy statement here, or the whole platform here.
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June 19, 2019
BOHICA! Section 13 threatens to come back to life
Mark Steyn recently testified before the parliamentary Justice and Human Rights Committee recently. They carefully avoided having the video cameras turned on during his testimony and that of two other civil libertarian speakers. The committee clearly ignored everything that was said:
Lindsay Shepherd, Mark Steyn, and John Robson prepare to give testimony to the Parliamentary Justice and Human Rights Committee, June 2019.
Photo via Andrew Lawton.
“No monarch, no parliament, no government, and certainly no bureaucratic agency operating the pseudo-law of section 13 can claim jurisdiction over my right to think freely, to read freely, to speak freely and to argue freely.”
Those were the closing words of Mark Steyn’s testimony before parliamentarians on the Canadian House of Commons’ so-called justice and human rights committee just two weeks ago.
His call fell on deaf ears.
Yesterday, the justice committee tabled its report on “online hate” in Canada’s parliament.
The report laid out nine recommendations, one of which being that government should provide a “civil remedy for those who assert that their human rights have been violated under the Canadian Human Rights Act, irrespective of whether that violation happens online, in person, or in traditional print format. This remedy could take the form of reinstating the former section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, or implementing a provision analogous to the previous section 13 within the Canadian Human Rights Act, which accounts for the prevalence of hatred on social media.”
Once you strip away the mumbo jumbo bureaucrat-speak in there, it means the Canadian Liberals wish not only to revive section 13 from the dead, but to give it untold powers to force social media companies to purge online speech from whomever the government deems the hatemongers du jour.
This is apparent in another recommendation, that lawmakers “establish requirements for online platforms and Internet service providers with regards to how they monitor and address incidents of hate speech, and the need to remove all posts that would constitute online hatred in a timely manner.”
Of course there’s no provided definition for what “hate speech” is in the context of this desired law. Just a promise to figure it out later.
Before section 13’s repeal under the previous Conservative government, there was a quasi-judicial body to decide if online posts were sufficiently “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Those found guilty of violating this provision were slapped with a fine or gag order, while having none of the protections afforded to criminal defendants throughout the process.
This regime seems like child’s play compared to what’s proposed in this report – elimination of online speech by social media giants under the threat of government penalty. Not sure which I like better, actually: the opaque, unappealable hammer or the sham tribunal that at least pretends to give you a shot at beating the rap.
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June 4, 2019
QotD: Freedom of speech and “balancing” competing rights
“And actually it’s no better in the United States. On the one hand you have the absence of a monarchy and free-speech absolutism, but on the other hand you prostrate yourselves before judges. I’m in the fifth year of a lawsuit that started with a 140-word blog post — there’s not much of a First Amendment when that happens. And then, on your college campuses, you have the debate about ‘acceptable’ and ‘safe’ speech. You have a tiny little Canada on each campus, with the same sort of shrunken, shrivelled public discussion. ‘Safe speech’ is a road to hell. Their goal is the abolition of hate — the abolition of a human emotion. They want everyone to have this glassy-eyed look, celebrating diversity. And they don’t recognise their own totalitarianism.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
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June 2, 2019
A rare word in favour of free speech from the PM
Chris Selley on an unusually free-speech oriented comment from Justin Trudeau, who is more commonly heard making threats to shut down speech he doesn’t like:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something interesting this past week, in a conversation with Vox journalist Liz Plank at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Ottawa. When it comes to regulating social media giants like Facebook, he suggested, governments like Canada’s have to be very, very careful.
“We recognize that the solution doesn’t lie in government’s heavy hand over our internet (and) public spaces,” he said. “Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, is so fundamental to our democracies that … as soon as we say we have to limit hate speech, we have to protect citizens, there are some really tricky decisions we have to (make).”
It’s interesting primarily because Trudeau and various of his ministers have been threatening for what seems like forever to bring the hammer down. “The platforms are failing their users and they’re failing our citizens,” a full-thesp Trudeau intoned in unveiling the government’s buzzword-laden Digital Charter. “They have to step up in a major way to counter disinformation. And if they don’t, we will hold them to account, and there will be meaningful financial consequences.”
Indeed, Trudeau warned Plank that if “partnership” with social media companies doesn’t yield the desired results — whatever those might be; the government has been studiously vague — “we will take measures that we will regret having to take.”
Still it’s nice to see freedom of speech get a shout out from the top. The sabre-rattling act is wearisome, but it’s vastly preferable to the government speech-regulation power trip that a remarkable number of mainstream Canadian voices have been demanding. Perhaps Trudeau realizes that while the government can and should encourage and work with social media companies to weed out national security threats and illegal material, it has no legal grounds to compel those companies to prohibit “disinformation” or “hate speech” as loosely defined by many people calling for serious regulations — which is to say nasty stuff they don’t like.
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May 22, 2019
May 11, 2019
Jonathan Haidt – Social media has altered a fundamental constant of the universe
Katie Herzog attended the first Heterodox Academy conference and reports on Haidt, the academy’s founder, and other attendees at the event:
Jonathan Haidt at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on 19 March, 2012.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I told three people that Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle this week. One is a left-leaning university professor, another is an apolitical meditation teacher, and the last is a conservative talk radio host. Despite the chasm between their personal politics, they were all equally enthusiastic to hear Haidt speak. He seems to have that effect on people, and is one of the rare political thinkers who manages to both appeal to (and occasionally enrage) people across the political spectrum.
A professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Haidt is also the author of best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he published with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff last year. That book grew out of an article of the same name that the duo first published in the Atlantic in 2015. As anyone who was paying attention back then may recall, the article made quite a splash, and it brought some emerging trends at university campuses into the public consciousness, including the rise of trigger warnings, deplatforming speakers, and university administrators’ attempts to protect students from any perceived harm. The article, and the subsequent book, didn’t exactly make Haidt popular in some hyper-left circles, and Haidt is occasionally accused of being a conservative in disguise. What he actually is, is a centrist, which gives him a perspective outside the typically left/right binary, and much of his recent work is about tribalism and division in the U.S. It’s a trend he thinks is getting worse.
[…]
“If you are in a university that puts you into interaction with diverse ideas, that makes you smarter,” Haidt says. “You can solve more problems. You become a more critical thinker. The more you hang out with people who think like you, especially if they enforce orthodoxy, the lower your IQ gets.”
In other words, only engaging with ideas you already support can actually make you dumber. It can also damage your cause. As an example, Haidt sites student attempts to deplatform both outside speakers and faculty on campuses over the last few years. Video of protests at schools like Evergreen State were widely shared on conservative networks, and while the students may have seen themselves as warriors in the fight for social justice, those who don’t already support their ideals were more likely to see hysterical students screaming at befuddled adults. The backlash was inevitable. “The antics on campus did a lot, I think, to elect Donald Trump,” Haidt says. “Most people on the left have not seen those videos but most people on the right have seen them. And so even if you think it’s virtuous to always be fighting, in the long run, you are harming your own side.”
In an effort to reverse the trend of ideological homogeneity on campus, Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for universities to embrace viewpoint diversity (even, yes, when those viewpoints are conservative). Last year, they hosted the first Heterodox Academy Open Minds Conference in New York, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel, for which I was compensated.)
The conference was remarkable: Everyone I spoke to seemed to have some story about what made them first see that the world isn’t cleanly broken up into good versus evil, from professors who’d been the subject of protests to journalists who’d been canceled. Still, this was a conference mostly made up of academics and writers, and I doubt there was a single stereotypical Trump voter or social justice warrior in attendance. For the sake of viewpoint diversity this is probably a failure, but the organization still managed to bring together a crowd that included conservatives like Bret Stephens and liberals like Alice Dreger and libertarians like Kmele Foster all in one space. There were heated discussions, to be sure, but no one called for anyone else to be fired. This, I am sure, would be appalling to a certain subset of leftist Twitter, but as Haidt reminded me, social media may be loud, but it’s not representative. “We have to distinguish between the average and the visible anecdote,” he said. “This is another thing social media has done to us: We used to have a sense of the mood in a room or the mood in our social network, and now we have no idea.”
Still, he’s not optimistic that we’ll work our way out of these divisions, at least without significant disruption in the process. “Things feel so strange to me,” he said. “It feels as though a fundamental constant of the universe has been altered. I think social media has done that.”
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March 29, 2019
March 17, 2019
QotD: McGill University
… if the freedom to speak harsh truth and engage in adventurous social critique means nothing at McGill, it is doomed at younger universities — especially those that have materialized, or been promoted to new feudal rank, during the ongoing academic bubble era.
The stakes are high. We all enjoy a laugh at McGill’s perception of itself as the Canadian Harvard, but if there is one university from which others in our country are bound to take ethical and stylistic cues — well, McGill probably is Harvard.
Colby Cosh, “Scary Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: an alternate view of the storm engulfing McGill”, National Post, 2017-03-27.
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March 15, 2019
QotD: Gender correctness
Five years ago, if someone had told you it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘There are two genders’, you would have thought them mad.
Sure, we live in unforgivably politically correct times. Ours is an era in which the offence-taking mob regularly slams comedians for telling off-colour jokes, demands the expulsion from campus of speakers who might offend students’ sensibilities, and hollers ‘Islamophobe’, ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ at anyone who transgresses their moral code on anything from same-sex marriage to respecting Islam. (A phobia, we should always remind ourselves, is a mental malaise, a disturbance of the mind. How very Soviet Union to depict your opponents essentially as mentally diseased.)
And yet for all that, surely it would never become a risky business to utter the opinion: ‘There are men and women and that’s all.’ Well, that has now happened. It is now looked upon as hateful, sinful and phobic, of course, to express a view that has guided humanity for millennia: that humankind is divided into two sexes, and they are distinctive, and one cannot become the other.
Say that today in a university lecture room packed with right-on millennials and watch their faces contort with fury. Write it in a newspaper column or blog post and witness the swift formation of a virtual mob yelling for you to be fired. Say it on TV and there will be protests against you, petitions, demands that you and your foul, outdated ideology be denied the oxygen of televisual publicity.
Brendan O’Neill, “It isn’t TERFs who are bigoted – it’s their persecutors”, Spiked, 2019-01-28.
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