Free Speech Reminders
Incidents lately:
An Asian, progressive professor at Yale was doxxed when students discovered her very nasty pseudonymous Yelp reviews.
June Chu, dean of Pierson College at Yale University, apologized last Saturday for her Yelp comments which included calling people “white trash,” “sketchy” and “low-class folks,” the Yale Daily News reported. Chu was placed on leave this week and will not take part in Commencement activities, according to an email sent to students by Head of College Stephen Davis, Yale Daily News reported.
Plus a Breitbart reporter is suing a reporter at conservative anti-Trump magazine Fusion, for saying she is racist for making the OK symbol in a picture.
In the complaint, shared with BuzzFeed News, lawyers for Cassandra Fairbanks allege that Emma Roller, the Fusion journalist, defamed their client when she tweeted an image of Fairbanks at the White House making what Roller claimed in a caption is a “white power hand gesture.”
Fairbanks is represented by Robert Barnes, a Malibu attorney best known for high-profile clients such as Wesley Snipes and Ralph Nader. In the suit, Barnes pits “independent, outsider writers, scribes, advocates, and journalists… a new media” against an “increasingly distrusted elite-backed press.” Mainstream media organizations “view the First Amendment as a wholly owned property of elite-backed journalists to smear and slime their adversaries at will,” the complaint reads. “The First Amendment is meant to protect the Cassandra Fairbanks’ of the journalism world: independent, alternative voices of truth in a sea of fake news.”
Yeah, the lawyer is declaring the importance of the First Amendment as he sues a reporter for saying something he doesn’t like.
(The actual issue seems to be that the alt-right is having fun appropriating “normie” symbols - like Pepe, Taylor Swift, milk, and now the OK hand sign - knowing that social justice opponents will treat this as credible, and throw another totem of mundane culture overboard because it had been infected by racists. Alt-right-adjacent like Fairbanks types help this along, and then are shocked when their opponents read them as participating in racist signalling. It’s dumb all around.)
Anyway, I’m not going to do the “no one is talking about this” whine because I have no idea what all the discourse is. But I haven’t seen many references to either of these on rationalist tumblr myself at least.
And it’s an important reminder that in any battle over “free speech”, a large portion of those defenders are completely opportunistic partisans who will abandon this principle when they are offended. (Or who will use the defense that they are “only highlighting the hypocrisy of their opponents”… by being massively hypocritical themselves.)
This does not mean that no one values Free Speech qua itself. There are clearly some principled defenders. But it’s really not very many. It’s certainly not as many as those who are shouting Free Speech as a defense in any particular controversy.
…so?
That sounds glib, but it’s a sincere question. It is true of any principle that, at a given moment, many of those defending it will be “people who are personally profiting from it right now” rather than “people who have made a sincere ideological commitment.” This tells us nothing about the principle’s value.
“Some shitty people are on your side for bad reasons” is one of the world’s least convincing arguments.