The work of creating a more perfect union is a messy endeavor, with competing values often clashing and sometimes improving one another. After all, when the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, not every American was afforded its liberties. It would take the civil rights movements to fulfill the promise of free speech more honestly. Twenty-five years ago, when the Pyles waged their free-speech battle in the Massachusetts courts, town members were enraged about what they perceived as wasting town money on an academic exercise—the offending matter was mere vulgar T-shirts; the victims non-existent. But freedom of expression doesn’t always exist in a vacuum, absent of any other ethical obligations. We live in a country where for hundreds of years some humans were counted as less human than others—the bloody cost of which has been laid bare at a new lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, its legacy found in the bodies riddled by
Dylann Roof’s bullets on the floor of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. That precipice is never far off. It is easier than many of us would like to admit to fall into a rabbit hole of hate and dehumanization of our neighbors, and the Internet has made that descent near effortless.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of moral responsibility, and modern-day pamphleteers of white supremacist propaganda, whether they believe the ideology or not, bear it.
In their blinkered fight for the alt-right’s “free speech”—a battle rarely, if ever, waged by the same actors on behalf of liberals—Rubin, Shepherd, and a number of college groups around the country seem to be both unable to make the vital distinction between protecting and promoting hateful ideology and unwilling to learn about it. They seem to view white-supremacist ideas pushed by social-media trolls to be on the same plane of harmless offensiveness as a Coed Naked T-shirt, inured to their real-world implications.
Of course, they all have the right, at least in America, to give a platform without a heckler’s veto or credible counterpoint to ethno-state propagandists and noxious conspiracy theorists, who can smile and speak politely while peddling black crime stories and racist pseudoscience. But why, in the name of civil discourse and individual rights, would they want to?