Let the Hatemongers Speak
Last week, Charles Murray, a conservative writer best known for his racist book The Bell Curve, was shouted down and chased off the Middlebury College campus by an angry mob. A professor who was scheduled to interview him was also injured when someone pulled her hair, tweaking her neck so badly it merited a visit to the emergency room. This was only the latest incident where people who hold terrible views have been prevented from speaking by left-leaning students whose sense of righteousness lies in their anti-racist, LGBT-friendly, pro-feminist bona fides; some of these incidents have turned violent, as we saw last month when demonstrators at Berkeley protested against professional hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos.
The impulse to push back against racism, sexism, and bigotry in all of its forms is an important one. But so is protecting free speech - even when that speech is ugly, hateful, and unacceptable. And at no point in recent history has it been so crucial to live out those norms.
There is little question that Charles Murray is promulgating awful ideas. The Bell Curve relies on bad science to make the case that some racial groups are more intelligent than others, and was widely criticized by scientists and academics upon its release more than 20 years ago. He wasn’t coming to Middlebury to speak about that book - he was coming to discuss his more recent one, which is about the decline of white America - but his career has been so odious, and his views so intellectually lazy, that it’s embarrassing he’s invited to speak at college campuses at all.
Murray is at least an academic whose ideas, though bad, could at least be defined as ideas. That is not true of Yiannopoulos, whose sole contribution to society seems to be making dimwitted young white men feel like it’s cool to speak their worst thoughts out loud (or at least laugh when someone else does).
These men do not need defending. But the concept of free speech does. Though the First Amendment only protects individuals from government encroachments on speech - police arresting Murray for his speech would violate it; students shouting him down at a university do not - free speech is as much a concept as a legal standard. And the ideals behind it are worth protecting.
Free speech doesn’t mean that everyone deserves a platform to speak - the fact that Middlebury has never invited me for a speaking gig does not violate my free speech rights. Nor does it entitle you to an audience - if no one attends a neo-Nazi’s speech, his rights have not been violated. And free speech also doesn’t mean that people have the right to speak without protest or consequence - peacefully protesting a talk by Yiannopoulos may be strategically foolish, given that his whole schtick is being seen as an embattled anti-PC voice, but people can push back against his words without threatening the concept of free speech itself. Nor do other forms of challenging hateful speech through words or expression - silently turning one’s back on a graduation speaker, writing an op-ed criticizing the College Republicans club for inviting a racist to campus, chanting and holding signs outside the event, challenging the speaker with difficult questions, or planning a competing event as a way to demonstrate where a community’s values lie are all practiced, real-life responses to bigots invited to campus.
The hard part, of course, is still letting people give voice to abhorrent views, especially when you are very sure you are right and the speaker is wrong (I get it - I am also very sure that Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos are wrong). Yes, shouting is also speech. No, shouting down a campus speaker doesn’t violate the U.S. constitution. But it does violate a norm that every American should value: free expression, and tolerating the existence of speech and ideas you don’t like.
This is a problem that goes beyond Middlebury and Berkeley. A 2015 Pew survey found that 40 percent of Millennials were OK with the government preventing people from saying things that are offensive to minorities. Another survey carried out by the Knight Foundation found that nearly half of college students thought it was OK to ban the press from covering student protests if the people protesting believed the coverage would be unfair to them, or if they thought they had a right to privacy while protesting. And a YouGov poll found that half of Democrats support criminalizing hate speech (and anecdotally, a lot of Americans seem to believe hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment - it is).
These are striking, and frightening, figures for those of us who believe free speech and expression is one of our nation’s most important and necessary values.
There are better approaches. In 2007, Columbia University was embroiled in a scandal for inviting Iran's then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, and his country’s laws discriminate against women and gay people. Given that he was a world leader, offering him a platform was more justifiable than offering one to Murray or Yiannopoulos, but still, many people were outraged. Columbia let him speak anyway - and the school’s president, Lee Bollinger, pressed him on difficult questions. It’s unlikely the event changed any minds, but it was nonetheless an example of exactly what academic institutions are supposed to do, which is to allow a broad range of ideas to be freely discussed and debated. At Columbia, a leader with terrible views was challenged on them (and then mocked in one of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits of all time). But no one pulled the fire alarms to make his speech impossible, as students did at Middlebury; no one forced him to move to an alternate location to film a livestream (which was then aborted because people pounded on the windows of the alternate location); no groups mobbed his car.
The students who shout down speakers like Murray, and the many people who support them, will argue that certain views are simply bad enough to necessitate firm and unequivocal silencing. Anyone who questions the full humanity of marginalized groups, the argument goes, is doing something akin to violence, and their presence on campus sends a message to members of marginalized groups that they aren’t as valued in their own communities.
These are serious concerns. But the role of an academic institution is also to teach students that the presence of an idea does not equal the endorsement of an idea - that assigning Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto for class does mean that the professor agrees with the contents of those texts. Student groups inviting odious speakers to campus probably does mean that some of those students agree with the speaker - and if I were a student at Berkeley, I would express my disgust at the immature little boys who invited Milo Yiannopoulos to campus. Given that Yiannopoulos has also threatened the safety of students at schools where he has spoken (he outed a transgender woman at the University of Wisconsin), I would probably also take it up with the administration - it’s not about dangerous ideas, but acts that put students in danger.
But no matter how terrible someone is, you don’t compromise your own most deeply held values to shut them down. You ignore them, you speak out against them, you protest them, but you don’t set things on fire or threaten their safety or prevent them from speaking. You model a better way.
You do this because it’s the right thing to do. But you also do it because the more aggressive and violent tactics are strategically idiotic. When anarchist “black bloc” agitators showed up at Berkeley to protest Yiannopoulos, they set fires, hurled rocks at police, broke windows, and did $100,000 worth of damage. They did get Yiannopoulos’s speech canceled - but they also made headlines across the country, spreading Yiannopoulos’s ideas much further than they would have been disseminated had most Berkeley students ignored him. And they positioned him as a free speech martyr attacked by an intolerant left to boot.
Most disturbingly, these encroachments against speech and expression put the pieces in place for those with authoritarian tendencies - our nation’s president, for example - to crack down on protesters, media outlets, and perceived opponents. Already, conservative lawmakers are trying to make protesting more difficult. Trump has attacked the press and mused that he would like to make it easier to sue journalists. Violence offers a justification for authoritarians to behave more authoritatively, and to preemptively curtail protest, criticism, and expression. The victims of this kind of crackdown will be the same people who are always more vulnerable to policing and constricted freedoms: people of color, undocumented immigrants, LBGT people, and, outside of the U.S. - and perhaps soon in it - journalists. When it becomes OK for people with unpopular ideas to be shouted down when they’ve been invited to speak, it makes it easier to shout down good ideas too - it’s worth remembering that feminism, gay rights, civil rights, and every push for the protection of minorities have been deeply unpopular. Obviously Murray and Yiannopoulos are pushing ideas that move us backward, not forward; they are agitators for inequality and discrimination, not social justice and progress. We don’t have to listen to them. We don’t have to buy their books or give them a platform. We should counter their bad ideas with our own and make our case convincingly enough that we have more people lined up on the side of good than rallying for evil.
But we should let them talk.
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