This Whole Discussion Around Free Speech and Milo Yiannopoulos is Causing a Rift on the Left

[Warren DeMontague]

17. One person's opinion is not an ironclad objective standard, but-- okay, lets break that down:

1) A powerful speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience.


anyone who watched Milo last night would not have come away thinking he was a "powerful speaker". In fact, that was one of the benefits of having him on in that format. On a stage or in his Breitbart columns, he can flatulate away and make assertions with no one to challenge him. On a show like Real Time that doesn't fly. He came away looking like he was way out of his depth, ideologically and intellectually.

But lets go further- "a powerful speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience"? Really? This is one of the standards? Doesn't that apply to pretty much all politicians, at least the halfway good ones? And why the fuck would anyone listen to a speaker for very long, if they didn't have a high degree of influence? Also, what is the objective metric by which one determines a "high degree of influence", or not?


2) The audience has grievances and fears that the speaker can cultivate.

Again, isn't that fairly universal? When people spoke at the Womens March in DC, didn't the audience have "grievances and fears"? You bet your ass, they did- and legitimate ones, too. Again, this is a pretty vague and open-ended standard.

3) A speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence.

I've heard Milo say a lot of bullshit, but I've never heard him call for violence. I have seen a lot of people on our side suggest he should get punched in the face, however.

4) A social or historical context that is propitious for violence, for any of a variety of reasons, including long-standing competition between groups for resources, lack of efforts to solve grievances or previous episodes of violence.

I don't even know how one would begin to apply this to some situations and not others.

5) A means of dissemination that is influential in itself, for example because it is the sole or primary source of news for the relevant audience.

Again, what the fuck does that mean? We live in the internet age. Basically unless someone is communicating by telegraph, at this point, they're using an "influential means of dissemination".


I have no idea how anyone would manage to apply this vague criteria to Milo's speech and, tellingly, not to pretty much anyone else's in this day and age. And furthermore, it's notable that save for #3- the only useful part of this entire scheme, i.e. "don't advocate violence" ----she never actually comes up with a criteria for the speech itself, rather it is all about the context of the speech.