Novel? No, nothing in defense of a nazis’ right to speak, and nothing critical of the way in which people criticize nazis has been anything i haven’t read before a hundred times. Of course people use the same arguments every time, people argue for free speech for nazis find those arguments compelling. But since they are so well tread, it should be obvious that anyone who disagrees is already familiar with them.
Try googling “why do people support free speech for nazis”.
I gave specific examples of borderline cases where people attempt to shield attempts to incite actual violence behind a cloak of free speech. It wasn’t histrionic. Pizzagate did lead to a potentially deadly situation. Specific internet commenters do have groups of attack-dog-like followers who issue death threats to anyone who their leaders speak badly about.
The problem is that when someone else likened the speech of white supremacists to violence or threats, you assumed they were talking about someone saying something trivial that they disagreed with. You didn’t think, “Well, there are certain cases where the line is blurry, so maybe this person is speaking from a reasonable place.”
The first hit in my search for “why do people protect the speech of nazis” was an editorial by the national legal director for the ACLU who wrote, among many things:
The future of the First Amendment may be at issue. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups, as compared to only 12 percent of those born between 1928 and 1945. Young people today voice far less faith in free speech than do their grandparents. And Europe, where racist speech is not protected, has shown that democracies can reasonably differ about this issue.
(Why We Must Still Defend Free Speech | David Cole | The New York Review of Books)
He goes on, of course, to argue as strongly as he can for the first amendment and rejects the European approach he makes reference to. But it’s hard to take defense of free speech seriously from someone who won’t even recognize that hate speech is threatening. That’s why David Cole expressed sympathy for that idea in his piece, because he realized that the tide of history is turning, and he has to actually make his case to people who disagree with him, not laugh them off. The line between calling someone a racial slur and making a threat of violence can be pretty wide in some cases, but it can be pretty thin in others, and sometimes there’s no line at all.
I don’t think I insinuated that. But the thing is, you can repeatedly state that supporting someone’s right to speech doesn’t mean supporting the content of their speech, and, just like any other opinion, other people can disagree with you.
If a person says to you “you are a nazi” then, fine, I can take issue with that. But if someone says that supporting the free speech of nazis is supporting nazis, that’s just one of the many opinions you have to contend with when you support the free speech of nazis. It’s not ad hominem, it’s a logical conclusion (obviously one based on premises you disagree with).
My final thought, though, one I imagine many people in the thread will get a kick out of: I read through that the ACLU legal director to verify that, yes indeed, I’m not up against novel arguments for free speech, but the standard faire and I came across this gem:
A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy all used the advocacy of violence as a justification to punish people who associated with Communists, socialists, or civil rights groups.
Those lessons led the Supreme Court, in a 1969 ACLU case involving a Ku Klux Klan rally, to rule that speech advocating violence or other criminal conduct is protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action, a highly speech-protective rule.
So wait, the government, despite the first amendment, suppressed and jailed communists, but when they tried to do the same thing to the KKK the ACLU convinced the supreme court that now the first amendment prevented it?
If he was trying to say that the first amendment wasn’t supporting white supremacy, he couldn’t have picked a more ironic example.
