Reason magazine has a very good Nick Gillespie interview of former ACLU head Ira Glasser. (The bolded question is Gillespie, the rest is Glasser):
It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to understand free speech, that the real antagonist of speech is power. The only important question about a speech restriction is not who is being restricted but who gets to decide who is being restricted—if it’s going to be decided by Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Rudy Giuliani, [President Donald] Trump, or [Attorney General] William Barr, most social justice advocates are going to be on the short end of that decision. I used to say to black students in the ’90s who wanted to have speech codes on college campuses that if [such codes] had been in effect in the ’60s, Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver would have been their most frequent victim, not David Duke.
Was that a convincing argument?
It pulled people up short. They imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against. I would tell them that speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting—especially politically—and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.
Back when I was at the University of Chicago, there was a great deal of controversy about the ACLU’s decision to defend the right of Nazis to protest in Skokie, Illinois (which had a large Jewish population.) In 1977, there were many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, so the ACLU’s decision was understandably highly controversial. Thus I was interested to discover that the strategy seems to have paid off:
How did Skokie turn out?
We won the case at every level. It even went up to the Supreme Court. It was an easy case legally because these bonding statutes had been struck down a million times before.
Meanwhile, some of the people who lived in Skokie—once we won the case and the Nazis said they were coming—did what the town should’ve advised them to do in the first place: They organized a massive counter-demonstration. About 60,000 people were ready to come. And then the irony of ironies is, when confronted with that, Collin and the neo-Nazis never came to Skokie. Once we won that case, it also allowed them to demonstrate in Marquette Park, which was what they had wanted to do all along. They also confronted a massive counter-demonstration there that never would have happened without the case. It completely overwhelmed them; they couldn’t be seen or heard. Right after that they fell apart.
One thing I’ve discovered in life is that bullies tend to be cowards.
READER COMMENTS
KevinDC
Feb 3 2021 at 4:55pm
On the topic of counter-protests, I remember reading about one particular implementation that was just beautifully done. It’s been a while since I heard of this, so my memory is a bit fuzzy on the details, but the broad strokes went something like this.
Some group wanted to organize a march of their own. I can’t remember if they were Neo-Nazis or the KKK or something else, but they were in that general ideological neighborhood. And rather than try to shut the march down, the local community instead implemented a parallel event of their own on top of the march, and converted the march into something like a Race for the Cure type event. Except, instead of medical donations being given per unit of distance run, donations would be made to various charities and organizations providing support to racial minorities and gay people. They even established checkpoints along the march, showing the marchers how much money they’ve helped raise so far, and encouraging them to keep going to drive those numbers even higher. People cheered for the marchers and thanked them for generating all this financial support for marginalized people.
Reading about how the community handled that march made me want to stand up and cheer. That is how you handle people who want to use free speech to spread hateful messages. Imagine how much better the world would be if hateful messages weren’t met with censorship, or with fear, but instead were used as an inspiration to take direct action to do even more good in the world.
Scott Sumner
Feb 4 2021 at 3:01pm
Great example!
KevinDC
Feb 4 2021 at 7:15pm
Found the event I was thinking of – it was in response to a Neo-Nazi march in Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/18/neo-nazis-tricked-into-raising-10000-for-charity
And apparently they inspired a Jewish group in California to take a similar approach: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/8/26/adopt-a-nazi-how-groups-are-countering-neo-nazis
Jose Pablo
Feb 4 2021 at 1:32pm
People should not be afraid of nonsensical “talking”, no matter how big the megaphone the hateful powerless idiots are holding. Nothing easier to fight back than “powerless stupidity”.
What people should always be afraid of is “power”. And, particularly, of powerful good doers using the monopoly of violence to impose Heaven on Earth.
If I have to pick one of those two, I like the hateful powerless idiots and their right to free speech, one hundred times better.
Hazel Meade
Feb 6 2021 at 5:08pm
One thing I’ve discovered in life is that bullies tend to be cowards.
This is an interesting point as it related to modern social justice advocates. The thing is that much of the advocacy comes in the form of enforcement of social norms against certain kinds of speech. That’s not a terrible thing in itself – it’s a non-violent mechanism to regulate what kind of beliefs and attitudes are socially acceptable, and that can serve a useful role. However, in order to believe that this works, one has to believe in the power of social pressure to influence people to censor themselves. And if one believes in that, then there is a tendency to NOT say the things one believes when one doesn’t have the support of other people in society. In other words, the people who most strongly advocate using social pressure to suppress certain kinds of speech, tend to be the people most likely to keep quiet when they don’t have the backing of a large number of other people.
I suspect this is why you get this mob-like atmosphere – where basically when someone gets called out on social media, other people pile on who normally wouldn’t say anything. They’re brave enough to join the mob, but not brave enough to be the first person to say anything. Bullied tend to be cowards.
A corollary to this is that people who are the most susceptible to being socially pressured to fall in line with the dominant belief system are the most likely to think social pressure will work on others. I.e. Cowards tend to be bullies.
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