What Liberals Dont Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump

"Why have so few talked in detail about Milo’s specific acts of hate, from sexual harassing a blogger and supporting the abuse of Gamergate, to using derogatory slurs and anti-Semitic symbols, playing a role in the rise of hate crimes against Jewish people?

Why was there no battalion of op-eds in major newspapers about Adelaide Kramer, the trans woman Yiannopoulos harassed off of UW’s campus after he devoted the better part of his address there to attacking and slandering her? Whither her free speech, or her right to the education at UW that she had earned on her merits? Coverage of her story was limited mostly to online opinion outlets and Teen Vogue. Yiannopoulos warranted an editorial from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board.

...where *were these noble defenders of liberty — from eggs on Twitter to carefully manicured beards at The Guardian  when it emerged that US Customs and Border Patrol were searching the phones of certain people of color to see if they had criticized Trump on social media?

You can think whatever you like, and even say it without fear of government reprisal, but when you introduce force-multipliers for speech into the equation, things begin to get very hazy indeed. You have a right to a view; do you have a right to pronounce it to millions of New York Times readers, however? No. ....

To speak to so vast an audience is a privilege, not a right. To speak through a newspaper or magazine column, a TV talk show, an interview on national TV, a speech at a university, or a primetime debate program, is, by its very nature, a privilege not open to all. There are billions of people on this planet, each speaking their views at any one time, but they can’t all appear on the Today show. Once again, we intuitively grasp this basic logistical matter, but forget about it entirely when a raving bigot shows up, feeling cornered by an abstract principle into insisting that he or she be given not only space to speak, but the largest possible platform and audience for it.

It has been the pride of my life to be able to write editorial copy and speak at universities and conferences around the world. I do not, however, delude myself into thinking I have a right to any of these things. They are privileges I have earned. I have a right to the views I espouse here; I do not have a specific right to force the editors of The Establishment to use their platform for that espousal.

The same applies to Yiannopoulos at Berkeley. What people are really arguing about is whether Yiannopoulos has a right to be paid to go on a speaking tour, complete with hotels, a bus (yes, really), and an entourage. That is a separate question from whether he has a right to hold his views; he could spread them, as so many do, from street corners and subway stations. He does not have a specific right to any particular rarefied rostrum, however.

One of the biggest problems with mainstream liberalism is its fetish for abstract principle over material reality. It is prone to forgetting that in a democracy, principles exist as a means to an end: the guarantee of maximal rights and liberties for the greatest number of people. ...

What liberalism’s fetish for abstraction does, however, is leave it woefully unprepared for rights conflicts, which are inevitable in a complex society. At some point, one person’s exercise of their rights will come into conflict with another person exercising theirs, and this dispute must be adjudicated upon. Someone’s rights will be abridged as a result, which will be necessary to guaranteeing democracy’s stated aims.

The right to free speech is essential; it is very, very far from abstract. Ask anyone who had their phone searched at a border crossing this past week. That scenario is the very reason we have a First Amendment: uniformed, armed officers of the state, searching the correspondence of a civilian to see whether they criticized the president, punishing them if offending material is found. More than anything our First Amendment exists to protect the rights of the ordinary person to criticize those in power without fear of reprisal from the state. Yet instead we debate the right of an already rich man to use his exalted platform to take away the speech rights of others.

This is largely because liberal abstraction — and its counterparts on the political right — are very shy about delving into the specifics of any one case, lest it complicate an otherwise triumphantly straightforward argument.

So many people are hung up on Yiannopoulos’ right to free speech (without enumerating the specifics, e.g. a right to this platform, a right to payment from this institution, et cetera, none of which are democratic rights per se), while ignoring the rights his hate-mongering specifically abridges. This recent editorial in The Guardian by Matthew d’Ancona does not even try to reckon with the rights-conflict issue raised by Yiannopoulos’ planned Berkeley rally, and it’s quite typical in that regard. For the principle-obsessed pseudo-civil-libertarian, details only confuse the matter. D’Ancona merely gestures at it through yet more generalizing language, saying: “In a pluralist society, the line of least resistance is to shield citizens from offence. The problem is that everyone is offended by something, or by many things.” But this discourse of “offence” is a refuge for those who do not wish to speak of substance.