Fascists Don't Need Freedom of Speech
It is commonly accepted in the US that freedom of speech is a right above all others, especially as it applies to one's political enemies. But the far right doesn't need this protection.
“I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It” - a platitude commonly attributed to French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire
Appropriately enough, the above quote didn’t actually come from Voltaire, but is a 1906 summation of what English historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall felt was Voltaire’s thinking:
Her book described an incident involving the French philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius who in 1758 published a controversial work titled “De l’esprit” (“On the Mind”). The book was condemned in the Parlement of Paris and by the Collège de Sorbonne. Voltaire was unimpressed with the text, but he considered the attacks unjustified. After Voltaire learned that the book by Helvétius had been publicly incinerated he reacted as follows according to Hall:
‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that!
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now.
Despite its questionable authenticity, this chestnut informs center-left thinking in the US and is all but taken as a given in modern political discourse: no matter how dangerous or vile an opinion, one should have the ability to freely give it without reasonable fear of repercussion. This doesn’t apply to direct incitements of violence or endangering speech, such as might be found in the statement “I will pay you $10,000 to murder my wife.” This is speech, but not a reasonably protected form of it. Defamation, fraud, certain forms of pornography, copyright infringement, discussion related to the commission of a crime—all of these are considered exceptions to the rule in the US.
The qualifier “reasonable” is important here as it on many rights and restrictions that dishonest lawmakers wish to take to extremes in order to excuse their inconsistency. Not every form of speech is considered worth protecting, and a world in which one could expect no repercussions for anything they want to say would quickly become chaotic, as words freely become weaponized and abused. This extreme interpretation is favored by critics of cancel culture and deplatforming, neither of which are truly related to freedom of speech issues because the community is doing the censoring rather than the government, and those “cancelled” in this way can simply move to a different platform. They have no first amendment right to have their speech heard wherever they please, only a reasonable expectation that they can have it heard somewhere which is accessible by all. Being banned from a social media site for running afoul of its rules is no different than being asked to leave a restaurant: there are other sites just as there are other restaurants (in fact, social media sites can be created just for cancelled individuals, as seen in the recent disastrous rollout of Trump’s Truth Social app).
Journalist Matt Taibbi recently cited two cases of “censorship” which are both instructive in different ways. The first case is that of author Chris Hedges, whose Russia Times show On Contact was deleted by video hosting site Youtube due to its connections to Russia. Hedges has a long history of being “cancelled” due to his outspoken support of left-wing causes and investigative reporting. From Taibbi’s interview with Hedges:
MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq? Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people with unpopular views generally?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.
So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created the space in which you exist.
I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are, of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked out of even the quote-unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.
Taibbi later tweeted the following, drawing an inappropriate connection between Hedges and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones: “I remember when Alex Jones was removed most mainstream media critics said not to worry, censorship would only ever apply to extreme raging assholes like Jones. Now almost every day independent media figures face suspensions or deletions even if their content is accurate.” Neither of these two cases relate directly to first amendment rights or even a more non-specific concept of freedom of speech. In Hedges’ case, a private company chose to remove all of Russia Today’s videos due to a shortsighted and prejudiced view of Russia-funded news sources. The decision to do so was regrettable, but it did not constitute the kind of censorship Voltaire might have taken issue with. In Alex Jones’ case, he was removed from a platforms such Facebook and Spotify because Infowars “expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics” (he is also being sued by the families of Sandy Hook victims for defamation, which is also unrelated to any government-issued restrictions on his speech). One case, however, is much more dangerous, because of the two individuals’ power imbalance: Jones sits comfortably on the far right in a rightwing country, whereas Hedges’ writing leans left and speaks truth to power. Jones reinforces the existing power structure, and only suffered some deplatforming because his messages began to veer too far from “useful idiot” status for the media conglomerates to continue to stomach. Hedges, however, has been deplatformed numerous times for writing about inconvenient truths—this is what led him to Russia Today in the first place.
The Jones/Hedges dichotomy is a microcosm of the greater issue, which is that restrictions on the speech and assembly rights of fascists is different in character from those visited on the left—there is a directional component to the principle that is impossible to dismiss. While it’s true that neither of the two men are strictly having their 1st Amendment rights abrogated, there is the issue of chilling effects. As Hedges noted above, sufficiently destructive and oppressive private restrictions on political speech can begin to constitute a de facto governmental restriction if it facilitates those restrictions. He sites the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which is an important example of government policy leading to what amounts to censorship in absentia. Anti-BDS laws have sprung up in a majority of states which punish companies for participating in a boycott against the state of Israel, which may or may not be a valid restriction on the rights of those companies to choose who they do business with, but it is undoubtedly a government endorsement of one viewpoint over another. This is not the only aspect of the Israel/Palestine issue in which the US government chooses sides. Its endorsement of the Zionist position and explicit designation of BDS as anti-Semitic (see the phrases in H.Res.246 “Whereas cooperation between Israel and the United States is of great importance, especially in the context of rising anti-Semitism” and “Whereas the Global BDS Movement promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation”) hampers what ought to be a freely promoted movement to isolate and pressure the state of Israel to amend its discriminatory policies, similar to earlier efforts to stop Apartheid in South Africa. In this case, the government isn’t directly outlawing the group or preventing its members’ free association, but defanging it in a crucial way and implicitly calling its position “wrong.” This leads to professional ostracism and a culture of silence surrounding the issue.
Jones’ freedom of speech has never been hampered in a comparable way to this, despite the protestations of many on the right. There is no actually dangerous culture of censorship regarding his incendiary conspiracy theories, because these theories reinforce the fascist capitalist state rather than threaten it. Fascists like Jones are on the wrong side of history and hide behind the right to free expression in order to operate their grift and shield themselves from having to provide argumentation and evidence—theirs is a cynical exploitation of such values.
This tendency to favor the rightwing permeates the American government, which is unabashedly biased in its handling of the most important form of political speech: protests. Leftwing mass movements are brutally repressed, infiltrated by police, and monitored via questionably legal means. The right on the other hand is allowed to assemble in relative comfort, even as they brandish weapons or storm the US Capitol (see also Kyle Rittenhouse’s release from prison and newfound celebrity status). Recent studies showed that US police are three times as likely to employ force against leftwing protesters (importantly, this is not because leftwing protests are more violent):
In the past 10 months, US law enforcement agencies have used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and beatings at a much higher percentage at Black Lives Matter demonstrations than at pro-Trump or other rightwing protests.
Law enforcement officers were also more likely to use force against leftwing demonstrators, whether the protests remained peaceful or not.
The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests across the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies have responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared with demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.
Another example is instructive here. In 2012, a conservative Christian (homophobic) baker in Colorado refused to do business with a gay couple who were looking for a wedding cake for their upcoming ceremony. The couple sued, alleging discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation, winning at the state court level but being rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which issued a limited ruling applying only to this particular case because it found the earlier decision to be excessively biased against religious expression. The law protects from discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and religious belief; when the two appear to clash, which right takes priority? The baker claimed his right to religious expression allowed him to discriminate against gay couples, but his “freedom” was employed in the service limiting others’ rights whereas the couple’s “freedom” to operate free of discrimination was employed in the service of reinforcing the rights of themselves and others. The directional nature of free speech rights applies here. The baker was not meaningfully harmed by being legally forced to bake a gay wedding cake, but the couple was harmed by the act of discrimination. (This is also an example of the absurdity of the concept of religious freedom in the US—by the baker’s own logic he should be all too happy to welcome customers seeking anti-Christian Satanic pastries, because the Satanists are expressing their religious beliefs to the possible consternation of others just as he is doing.)
One final example of de facto censorship: climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus’ excellent piece in the Guardian, “Climate scientists are desperate: we’re crying, begging and getting arrested,” a lament of the many environmentalist voices trying to raise an alarm about our planet’s very dark future but not being heard despite over 1,000 of them engaging in civil disobedience on April 6:
I hate being the Cassandra. I’d rather just be with my family and do science. But I feel morally compelled to sound the alarm. By the time I switched from astrophysics into Earth science in 2012, I’d realized that facts alone were not persuading world leaders to take action. So I explored other ways to create social change, all the while becoming increasingly concerned. I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I reduced my own emissions by 90% and wrote a book about how this turned out to be satisfying, fun, and connecting. I gave up flying, started a website to help encourage others, and organized colleagues to pressure the American Geophysical Union to reduce academic flying. I helped organize FridaysForFuture in the US. I co-founded a popular climate app and started the first ad agency for the Earth. I spoke at climate rallies, city council meetings, and local libraries and churches. I wrote article after article, open letter after open letter. I gave hundreds of interviews, always with authenticity, solid facts, and an openness to showing vulnerability. I’ve encouraged and supported countless climate activists and young people behind the scenes. And this was all on my personal time and at no small risk to my scientific career.
Nothing has worked. It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics. (source)
Kalmus on Twitter a few days later: “The mainstream media barely covered climate scientists getting arrested all over the world in a desperate bid to save the Earth, it is actually even worse than Don't Look Up”. This is genuinely terrifying censorship; Alex Jones losing a small part of his fortune because he’s down a platform is not.
The American concept of freedom of speech isn’t universal, and shouldn’t be taken as an inherently just concept. Other countries have their own no less valid interpretations of the general principle, and often their conception of free speech is more restrictive than ours. Despite laws against anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and endorsements of Nazism, Germany is currently experiencing a growing anti-Semitism problem:
Germany’s speech laws are rooted in its history and national identity, said Robert Kahn, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who studies German hate-speech law.
“Anybody who denies the Holocaust undermines the sense of post-1945 Germany,” Kahn said.
Authorities in Germany believe that fascist organizations could pose an existential threat, recalling how Hitler used the electoral system to gain influence until he had the power to abolish the country’s democracy entirely. “Right-wing extremism is the most vital threat that we face at the moment in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Stephan Kramer, chief of intelligence in the German state of Thuringia, said in Germany’s Neo-Nazis & the Far Right.
This is a directional protection of speech rights that seeks to preempt imminent threats against those rights—there is ample evidence that if Germany were to remove these restrictions, the emboldened far right would gain even more power to curtail (no doubt violently) the rights of marginalized groups. This dangerous rightwing extremism is alive and well in the US, especially in its armed forces. We are not immune to the growing danger of Nazism in the world, and the coming climate-driven resource scarcity and attendant mass migrations increase our susceptibility to fascism, an all too obvious fact in the aftermath of the Trump administration and its racist border policies (which have been more or less continued by the current administration). The dangers posed by unrestricted fascist speech are valid and real; the dangers posed by unrestricted communist speech are entirely fabricated.
The American far right doesn’t need freedom of speech, because its power is supreme in the US. The First Amendment is meant to provide a bulwark against tyranny, and is only ever mismanaged in the hands of a tyrant (“speech” becomes “propaganda”). The fascist movement in the US constitutes such a tyranny, and needs no protection for its speech calling for the empowerment of the economic system currently destroying the planet, or for the harassment and marginalization of certain groups, or for the continued abuse of America’s massive prison population. They already have their ill-gotten power, and now keep it by twisting and corrupting the concept of free speech with astroturf political movements, propaganda, and the deafening, all-encompassing silencing of dissent.
Real, dangerous, problematic censorship will always be focused on the left. We might be afraid that if we don’t stand up for the rights of fascists, that we will be next, that once “they” come for the fascists, they will come for us. “They” will never come for the fascists, because the fascists are the ones who are coming for everyone else. “They” don’t need or want the high-minded commiseration of the left.