Speech Or Silence: Freedom Or Fascism?

It Is A Choice. Choose Wisely.

From the moment Substack rolled out its Notes feature, it seems there has been a running debate on if, when, and how Substack should “moderate” Notes (and Substack writers generally). From the moment Substack opened up this new engagement tool, there have been those who have engaged with a view towards silencing at least some of the voices here on Substack.

Thus far, I do not appear to be on the list of those some demand be silenced here. Will that change? Only time will tell.

Still, as my readers may recall, I have been silenced elsewhere. For the mortal sin of citing actual CDC data on COVID, I was summarily and permanently banned from LinkedIn.

Speech Or Silence: I Have Been Silenced

The seemingly endless debate on Notes about censoring “moderating” brings that specter of censorship back front and center once again to my attention span. Since this debate will not go away, I believe that you, my readers, should know my full thoughts on this issue.

My stance has always been simply this: Free Speech is a moral imperative.

As I wrote at the time of my banning from LinkedIn:

Free Speech allows us to have a Free Society.

Free Speech allows us to have Freedom.

Without Free Speech, none of us can ever hope to be free.

This I believe absolutely.

While it is easy to defend the rights of people to discuss matters of economics, or science, or even most schools of philosophy, how do we respond to the challenge of ideas we find loathsome and objectionable? How do we respond when confronted with ideas that are simply evil?

Ironically, the Notes threads on this topic are themselves a showcase for the solution. We respond to the challenge of objectionable ideas by rebutting with sounder ideas and better arguments. We respond to the challenge of evil ideas and evil words with hopefully virtuous ideas and virtuous words (each of us deciding for himself or herself what makes ideas and words “virtuous”).

Some will object to ideas and comments with ad hominem invective.

White men think there’s no such thing as hate speech because they aren’t the targets of it. And because white men engage in denialism and gaslight women and Black people.....

Others will respond with calls for bans and exclusion.

There's at least one other dude who's equally antisemtic and racist, using the N word. I'm a champion of free speech but I'm conflicted about sharing a platform with racists. I think Substack has to get a handle on this.

Still others call for community policing of “dangerous ideas.”

I don’t want the government censorship. But, it’s not true that the best ideas win in the free marketplace of ideas. Most people are not capable of doing their own research and coming to the correct conclusion. We need voluntary societies to protect people from dangerous ideas.

I disagree with each of these modes of response, but of this much I am certain: these commentators are firmly convinced that they are right to say these things. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that theirs is the virtuous position.

Yet, as the discussions which surround each of these statements demonstrates conclusively, these ideas are themselves offensive to some. These “virtuous” ideas are themselves “evil” to some.

However, instead of striving to suppress these ideas, instead of striving to silence these voices, others (including myself) have chosen to engage with these voices, matching thought for thought, idea for idea, word for word. We perhaps have not “won” the debate—for the voices of censorship have not yet quit this latest rhetorical field of battle—but we have at least held them at bay for now.

This is but a small sample of what is possible when we recognize Free Speech as a moral imperative.

This is what becomes impossible when we deny that Free Speech is moral imperative.

This was what was lost when YouTube deplatformed freethinker and philosopher Stefan Molyneaux.

Speech Or Silence: Free Speech Is A Moral Imperative

This was what was lost when Twitter banned the account of alternative media site ZeroHedge.

Speech Or Silence: Facebook Will Now Decide For You

This was what was lost when Facebook and Twitter deplatformed virologist and SARS-CoV-2 researcher Dr. Li-Meng Yan.

Speech Or Silence: FactCheck.org Flunks Basic English

While those who call for censorship and the policing of thought will invariably trundle out undeniable evils such as Nazism, arguing that texts such as Mein Kampf are clear examples of ideas which must be suppressed, what they ignore are these immediate examples of censorship, which have happened and which are happening.

What they forget are the people who are demonized and “cancelled” simply for presenting ideas and narratives not approved by those who arrogate to themselves a mantle of authority.

What they deny is that, even if there were moral justification for suppressing Mein Kampf (there isn’t), such suppression could never stop with just that one text. Once someone claims the authority to decide which ideas, which words, which texts are “dangerous”, they must forever after judge all ideas, all words, all texts, arrogating to themselves the power to decide which are “dangerous” and which are not. Power, once claimed, can never easily be put aside. Human history teaches us that much over and over.

There is something else the would-be censors do not say—and quite possibly would deny if challenged: They are afraid. Yet it is clear from their own words that they are afraid of the ideas they would see suppressed.

Do you know how words work? I’m engaged in an argument on Notes where I’m being told I should educate myself on the rise of Nazism and that the Nazis introduced censorship in reply to my contestation that free speech allowed Mein Kampf to be published which was the genesis of the Holocaust. I’m endlessly being told that the Nazis used censorship. How does that disprove that Mein Kampf was an expression of free speech. Or that it led to the Holocaust (with preludes in German academia and literature). The opponents of Nazism used their free speech to oppose Hitler’s rise. They failed. Free speech is not a panacea to fascism. In fact it is necessary for its rise. The fact that fascists then limit free speech means nothing here except that they recognise that ideas good and evil are dangerous. PS stop telling me free speech is good when Russian genocide in Ukraine is justified in the West under the guise of free speech.

Fearful of “fascists”, they present censorship as a “pre-emptive strike”, arguing that the only way to hold the authoritarians among us at bay is to use against them the main tool of authoritarians throughout history: censorship. In their fear, free speech becomes the authoritarian’s pathway to power. In their fear, the only way they see to block the authoritarian’s path is to go down it first.

Implicit in all the arguments in favor of censorship is this admission that censorship is what authoritarians do. Thus, the argument for censorship is invariably the argument for authoritarianism. The argument for censorship is the claim that the “enlightened” few should exert power and dominion over an unenlightened humanity—and that somehow this will prevent the “evil” few from exerting power and dominion over a virtuous humanity.

However, as Shakespeare observed in Macbeth

¹

, things are never that simple.

But in these cases We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

As censorship is the tool of authoritarians, to embrace censorship is to become authoritarian. The moment one silences another, in that moment one “but teaches Bloody instructions”—instructions which will most assuredly “return to plague the inventor”. One cannot use censorship as a means to defeating fascism, for in the act of censorship one becomes fascist—one becomes the very thing nominally being opposed.

Actual opposition to authoritarianism is libertarianism. The alternative to allowing a select few power and dominion over everyone else is to reject notions of power and dominion for anyone over anybody.

As censorship is the weapon of the authoritarian, Free Speech is thus the shield of the libertarian. Free Speech is what preserves our freedom of thought, without which we can have no true freedom at all.

Thus the core question in the eternal debate over censorship vs Free Speech is ever and always this: Will we be authoritarians or libertarians?

Will we seek freedom for all, or power for a few and oppression for the rest?

For myself, I choose to be a libertarian. I choose to seek freedom for all. My one desire is simply this: to live and die as a free man.

To that end, I choose Free Speech over censorship.

Which do you choose?

1. Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII