Freedom of Speech and the Heckler’s Veto

The recent article written by Burt Likko spends thousands of words making the case that some views are not worthy of public discussion or debate. As a fiscal libertarian of the Hayekian persuasion who agrees with free speech absolutism as a general moral principle, I got visibly angry; I grimaced while reading it. These thousands of words all danced around an argument used against his train of thought without him even deeming it necessary to mention it: The Heckler’s Veto.

The Heckler’s Veto is the idea that the loudest voices can shout down anyone they disagree with, be they only one person out of a crowd of hundreds or even thousands. A heckler is someone most familiar to comedians, but the situation at Yale Law School gave us a blatant example of this. The Heckler’s Veto is essentially letting the mob decide who gets to speak, usually under some threat of violence but not always (the cops did have to escort the YLS speakers out.) Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. As a man who prefers liberty to freedom, as I have previously discussed at length in my many discussions of Hayek and other figures of the libertarian (but not Libertarian) philosophy, punishment is the point of liberty. Violation of liberty leads to punishment by government and is the core reason government should exist. “Should” being the operative word there; that means it’s my opinion. To punish violations of liberty on life and property, among other things. But, very importantly, the government cannot punish speech it deems bad, whatever that nebulous term means at any point in time. At least not in America. “Fire in a crowded movie theater” is sophism of the highest order.

“They’re showing you the door.” This is an argument made in a six frame webcomic called xkcd. It is a foolish argument for many reasons, not the least of which is that restricting a person from being able to talk in a largely public forum not only leads to the Streisand Effect, but isolates that person and makes them more likely to be radicalized into worse ideas. Criminal reformers make this point in relation to the sex offender registry but would be loath to say restricting Alex Jones’ ability to post videos to YouTube makes him more likely to go further off the deep end. Newsflash: That’s what happened on Rumble with his less than 100,000 subscribers. He is remarkably somehow more unhinged than he was in 2008 when he suggested at the DNC that he whip up a mob to attack Michelle Malkin (who has since taken cause with white supremacist nationalists for some reason) after seeing her in public there. That’s when I knew that guy was crazy. I had only heard of him like a week prior to this. I was so naïve on politics at the time (in fairness, I was a teenager) that I thought he was Rush Limbaugh initially (because I had never seen or heard Rush Limbaugh speak at that point.) He’s a fat, balding white guy. They all look alike to me, as I’m a fat, white guy currently losing his hair.

What to do with people who believe and/or say awful things? (Some people are just trolls or play Devil’s Advocate.) According to Burt’s argument, we should isolate them from polite society. If you think that will work to make them abandon their ideas, one is not a disciple of Tyrion Lannister. Cutting out my tongue does not prove you right. The correct approach is to talk to these people. Shared humanity is the path forward, not making someone an “other” because it makes you feel better about the ideology you hold dear. Making someone an “other” has never worked out in human history. Ask any marginalized group, for whatever reason they were marginalized (usually some form of tribalism like racism or anti-Semitism,) if being treated differently from everyone else is a good thing. Treat everyone the same, with the same rights. As a human being with a shared humanity and beliefs they hold dear to them, just like you. Everyone has an opinion and should not fear death or career destruction for voicing it.

No one gets to decide the words that come out of my mouth. The lovely editors here, Andrew and Em, who restrain my worst rhetorical excesses, usually swearing (man, them brophaloms in the Republican establishment,) would tell you or anyone else that the general thrust of every article they’ve published of mine has remained so, no matter how it was edited by them. Not every idea I’ve ever had and/or written got published. Because of course not. But I write here because of the general principle called the diversity of ideas. Will originally reached out to me when I did real talk on Ritalin many years ago via a Twitter thread that some people engaged with. I was not in a good place at the time I did that. I passed on writing my high-strung emotion into words when he offered me a place to do so. Once I felt my life was in a place where I could write free of confirmation bias, I did. That Ritalin article was the hardest one I ever wrote. My mother told me later it made her cry. Because of my wasted youth. As I mentioned, I did not blame her for it. How many places would publish me as frequently as this website does on the litany of topics I write about? Not many. And that is why I love it here. And I suspect that is true of plenty of other people published here. I keep coming back because I feel welcome.

The Internet is basically a global street corner. I can say anything on the Internet. Not always without being deplatformed, but I can say it. And since I am an American living in America, I will not be arrested or fined for anything I say, no matter how egregious. That is a good thing. Defense of the ability to say the worst things keeps the rest of us free to say what we want without fear of government reprisal.

The biggest problem with Burt’s argument is his claim the right is worse on free speech than the left. Assuming that idea to be correct (and I disagree,) he says “both sides-ism” (I call it “whataboutism”) is bad. If the right is worse, he argued, we must focus on the right’s worst excesses more than the left. I mean, he seems to think Glenn Younkin, by most standards a middle of the road Republican, is somehow beyond the pale of polite society. This is balderdash. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. I write on economics, politics, cultural issues, movies, action figures, video games, TV shows, music, and whatever topic can hit 500 words or more.

But beyond that, the left controls up to 95% of the national media, 90% or more of academia that matters to that same media (the social sciences and humanities,) most tech companies, most massive corporations with a public stance on any political or cultural issue, and most of the entertainment apparatus of our broader pop culture. Andrew Breitbart might have been wrong when he said politics is always downstream from culture, as this only applies nationally, but he was dead right in saying it totally does on the national level. True power, influence, and money, another topic I have discussed at length previously, is in the hands of the cultural, political, and economic left in America. And has been for decades.

The right has Fox News Channel and talk radio and The Daily Wire. Maybe ten million people actually listen and agree (that’s important) with those folks. Preaching to the choir is what those websites or talking heads do. They’re not converting new disciples. These relatively large individual operations pale in comparison to dozens of news anchors and newspapers and online websites that come at politics from the left. The left has virtually everybody else who pays attention and most of the people who don’t.

The Heckler’s Veto is a very easy concept to understand but those with political, cultural, and/or economic power like to pretend it doesn’t exist as long as the hecklers are on their side. They think the mob will eat them last. Shouting down a speaker because you don’t like what they have to say does not invalidate their beliefs. It makes you look like an immature child who can’t handle a free exchange of ideas. Jordan Peterson laid this bare. He’s not a bomb thrower, tossing red meat to his followers. He’s a genteel Canadian professor. Just about the last person I thought would repudiate the illiberalism of the progressive movement. But he made his mark by fighting against a Canadian law that would compel speech. That’s not what freedom of speech demands. The government cannot compel someone to say something that that person disagrees with, no matter the good intentions (the road to Hell is paved with them.) The government can punish libel and slander, but that’s a very high bar to clear as both Sarah Palin and Stormy Daniels realized recently. You might be fine with that, but it is hard to find a hole in Jordan Peterson’s logic as one can tell by the awful things his critics say about him. Being dismissive of an idea without even attempting to repudiate it or understand where the speaker is coming from leads nowhere good.

But let’s discuss the elephant in the room; Jordan Peterson is basically considered worse than Satan by a certain segment of the political class, usually by people who have never heard him speak. Why is this? I never really watched the guy until recently, outside of that grossly unfair interview on BBC 4. I always heard bad things about him from certain people without really voicing an opinion (I was indifferent on him,) but having actually watched the guy, I have changed my mind. The dude is not evil. He’s just trying to be realistic about society. People who refuse to put their own house in order demanding the power to reorganize everyone else’s are tinpot authoritarians who know they can’t convince anyone to do what they want. Because what they want everyone to do is usually a manner of insane, if we go by Einstein’s definition. It’s usually just communism under a different name. An ideology that killed at least 100 million people last century is still awful by any other name. But let’s move on…

I have been listening to a man with a YouTube channel called the LFR Family the last few weeks. He’s the reason I started listening to Jordan Peterson. He is a black American male married with children who never really paid attention to politics. He mostly reacts to political debate videos. It didn’t take him long to come to Jordan Peterson. It was fascinating watching the perspective and reaction of a person with little skin in the political game watch Jordan Peterson. His general reaction is that Jordan Peterson knows how to debate his ideas and defend them from challenge. Not everyone is good at that. Which is why he got so much hate for even reacting to Jordan Peterson (and Ben Shapiro and Thomas Sowell) that he had to do a video telling his critics that he will not be stopped on his intellectual journey by limiting his scope.

That’s the correct approach to hecklers. Not thinking they have a point because they’re loud. The heckler is always in the minority in a crowd. Even if they whip up a mob. It is courageous to not be stopped when a mob comes for you.

But what are these consequences I mentioned? If you’re a terrible person who does something terrible, you probably should be fired. As long as we can agree what is defined as “something terrible.” But here’s the rub: Insiders don’t stay down for long. We know what Jeffrey Toobin did. Awful. And guess what? He was hired again in mere months, likely making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if not millions. He’s crying all the way to the bank. The whole issue with cancel culture is not who is cancelled or why. It’s what it does to the target of the cancellation. Insiders like Jeffrey Toobin must do something incredibly egregious to be shunted off polite society. Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and maybe Andrew Cuomo (he may run again) are some of the few examples I can think of where an insider got cancelled and stayed cancelled.

Outsiders, especially those without a public profile, can get cancelled and remain cancelled forever. Standup comedians typically fall under this rubric. The woman who got fired for Tweeting a very off-color joke before she boarded a plane was fired from her job before the plane even landed. She had a scant Twitter page with almost no followers. And the awful media vultures who whipped up a mob to punish her for wrong think just moved on to the next target without a single consideration as to what they were doing. Cancelling someone like that is not speaking truth to power. It is using your power, money, and/or influence to punish others with less of those things than you. It is punching down in the worst way. People need to be better and extend grace and humility to others that make honest mistakes. Society cannot function if the powerful take their knives out constantly over relatively nothing.

At the end of the day, I believe actions will always speak louder than words. I try to act on my beliefs whenever I can, especially when an action requires me to decide on following or violating said beliefs. I can’t possibly listen to everyone, but I tend to only mute people on Twitter who bore me. Idiots are fine, but when you come after me and accuse me of things, put words in my mouth, you ask to be ignored. Invective free of intellectual thought is uniquely boring to me. The Overton Window is a subject of much debate. I don’t truly think it exists outside of the halls of power. The Internet has no windows or doors. It is pure and unbridled chaos. Twitter, like the Internet writ large, is beautiful at revealing who people really are by removing their “polite society” filters, which is why we must keep the Internet anonymous if the person decides to be so.

To the people who don’t like a completely and unrestrained free exchange on the Internet, especially when the people they’re talking to are anonymous, it would be smart to ask them why. The answers should be very illuminating. My suspicion is that they cannot defend their own beliefs from challenge or lack confidence to do so, so they will seek to restrict the viewpoints of others who would challenge their sacred cows. Safe spaces? Trigger warnings? Is that not what results from such things? Madness that way lies.