You have this equation all wrong. This is not about protecting the public from bad ideas. It is about protecting communities targeted by violence. These speakers are demanding a microphone to spew hate directly in the faces of those they seek to dehumanize.
The freedom of speech, like nearly any ethic/moral/value is not universal. Universal ethics end in paradoxes. There is no right way to approach a social problem for any given situation, and in these instances we’ve arrived at Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Unlimited tolerance for violent speech will be the end of free speech.
Milo is now recognized as such, and it is a direct result of the heightened scrutiny he faced in the aftermath of Berkeley. You may not be comfortable with the means. I won’t say I’m comfortable with the means, either.
However, I do believe sincerely that the right of self-defense for targeted communities is being severely curtailed by the ivory tower attitudes largely expressed in this thread. When is what they say enough for you to finally stand up and say no more? When do their metaphors and illusions cross the line into reality?
Or go to any of a number of conservative or mainstream outlets that seem happy to give her a platform. Or a different university. Or a public square. It’s not like Berkeley is literally the ONLY place she could ever possible give a talk. People seem to love her, despite the fact that she’s so incendiary and mean spirited.
I used to live nearby to Berkeley and would go to the campus and Telegraph Ave on weekends; there’s ALWAYS at least one or two people on a soapbox or bench giving some kind of speech. Often with a drum circle nearby. Well, this was the 90s. Point is, there’s no shortage of places she could’ve delivered her vital inspiring message, if she’d wanted to.
Right. And she does. She’s not hard up for publicity, I don’t think. Which is, let’s be honest, what this was REALLY all about. The whole entire thing is about her and her book sales. Nothing more. She’s not interested in “sharing” her ideas with what might be a partially hostile audience. She’s there to insult them and drum up attention for her writing.
And the irony of free speech in America is that the court system is mostly accessibly only to the wealthy and press coverage mostly to the famous. So people who have no existing platform are shit out of luck when it comes to having their free speech protected legally (at best they might win the free speech lottery if a case goes viral). A person like Coulter with an almost unlimited ability to express themself has masses of people jumping to defend them.
Coulter’s free speech is not even remotely in jeopardy, but she gets to invoke the principle of free speech to make herself look like a victim. This reminds me of a passage from the Screwtape Letters:
It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very “spiritual”, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s “soul” to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
It’s time to stop praying for the soul of free speech and start listening to the voiceless.
