“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me.” – E.H. Haywood, 1862
It was around 2004 or 2005, but the exact year really doesn’t matter. What’s notable for the purposes of this write-up is that I traveled with Cato Institute scholar Roger Pilon down to Atlanta to watch him give a speech on constitutional matters to members of a golf club in the city.
At the time, flag burning was still a legislative issue; as in should there be a federal law on the books disallowing the burning of the American flag. Pilon saw no role for Congress or courts. Paraphrasing his talk, Pilon told attendees that if someone told him they intended to burn the flag, he would passionately try to convince them not to. At the same time, he would just as passionately defend the right of someone to burn the flag despite the act of doing so offending him so much.
My view is that Pilon got it right. In the U.S. we’re free to be fools, and to say foolish things. Just the same, there’s no right that protects us from being offended or insulted. Good. A government powerful enough to shield us from having our feelings hurt is logically powerful enough to do lots of things to us much more harmful than odious speech.
It brings to mind an obituary written about Andrew Breitbart after he died in March of 2012. A friend of Breitbart wrote about a raucous party that Breitbart had attended in the Washington, D.C. area in 2007, and at which the frequently outspoken (some would say “politically incorrect”) Breitbart routinely said with laughter that “You can’t say that in L.A." Readers likely get what Breitbart meant: in left-leaning Los Angeles, there were certain things you just couldn’t say without triggering snowflakes on the left.
Away from Breitbart, it’s a safe bet that conservatives reading this write-up have themselves edited their expressed thoughts, or better yet, have expressed perfectly innocuous thoughts in private that can’t be expressed in public at risk of offending easily offended members of the left. I know people who have lost jobs for offending the wrong snowflake.
Limits on free speech set by easily offended members of the left came to mind last week while reading about Republican lawmakers interrogating the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn on Capitol Hill, and the subsequent reaction of conservatives to the interrogation. As readers already know, with great cowardice the presidents of the three schools punted questions about whether speech calling for the mass murder of Jews was ok on campus. Their answers were weak, idiotic, and most certainly offensive. Ideally they would have answered in unison that they police free speech, including hideous speech about genocidal acts, by not policing speech. Instead, they drooled about "context" and other vagaries.
Despite the stupidity of their answers, there was little joy as a member of the right reading about Republicans in Congress interrogating lefty college presidents. My view once again is that people have the right to be foolish, and to say foolish and ugly things.
The obvious response from conservatives might be that elite college presidents operate with a double standard; as in speech calling for the mass murder of Jews is fine, but speech disdaining the transgender lifestyle is cause for dismissal. Yes, it’s an ugly double standard, but let it be. Seriously. Particularly if members of the right are confident in their own reason, why stop their ideological opposites from revealing how shallow their own reasoning is? And if the double standard is so bad that donors close their checkbooks and prospective students look elsewhere, all the better. Let markets work.
What’s disagreeable is conservatives acting like their reliably hysterical opposites. Think back to Breitbart, or better yet, yourself. How often do you or have you not said what you really think out of fear of offending the easily offended? Self-censorship is annoying, and the annoyance is rooted in the sad reality that so much speech and opinion triggers members of the left. Ok, but why be like them? Put another way, do conservatives reading this want members of the left to start editing themselves out of fear of offending us? Job loss is brutal. Do we want to be vicious in the way that others are? What about 'do unto others'?
Which is the point of this write-up. Speech, including ugly speech, is just that. Let’s not mimic the left and its ugly, cancel culture ways. If we believe we’re correct, we shouldn’t fear their ugly speech. Let them freely expose themselves free of all our manufactured shock. More “names will never harm me,” and less speech police.
