The Troubling and Counterproductive Trend of Liberals Policing Free Speech: We Cannot Silence Those We Disagree With
One of the fears you have to examine with the meteoric rise of someone so overtly evil in our politics is the feat that you might become like them in your zeal to defeat them.
That same week when Schierbecker spoke at a skeptic conference in Springfield, MO, several attendees questioned his motives for covering the story, and implied that he had racist intentions. Subsequently the conference’s organizer formally apologized to those in attendance for hosting a speaker whose story “only reflected the views of white people.”
By contrast, Matthew Rozsa (the other author of this article) had an incident from the other extreme – one that a radio host suggested tested the limits of free speech. After he wrote an article criticizing Trump for comments he considered anti-Semitic, prominent neo-Nazi websites wrote several pieces defaming Rozsa in overtly bigoted language. Alongside emails attacking him with racist slurs, Rozsa also received a few from leftists who argued that this proved he should reconsider his earlier views on free speech (which he had written in pieces like these).
The problem with this logic is that it mistakes the right to call out hate speech with the right to suppress it. Certainly it is the moral responsibility of anyone who witnesses racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, or other bigoted language to openly call it out as such. Unless they do so, prejudiced ideas and attitudes will not be effectively identified and confronted. A line must be drawn, however, at practices that go beyond simple denunciation and instead try to silence those with contrary opinions (however unsavory they might be). When accusations of bigotry are used to shut down opinions that may not in fact be bigoted, or when the argument is made that a bigoted view should be censored altogether, everyone’s liberty is jeopardized.