Can we talk?

 

Richard Spencer spoke at Auburn University on Tuesday, giving a two-hour defense of whiteness and white culture amid protests. As CNN reported:

There were several attempts to shout him down as he extolled the virtues of being white and and called on whites to fight for their rights. People called him names and yelled at him to get to his point.

Spencer’s supporters occasionally chanted, “Let him speak” when he was interrupted.

Reiterating his key talking points, Spencer denounced diversity as “a way of bringing to an end a nation and a culture” defined by white people.

“There would be no history without us,” he said, prompting shouts from the crowd. “The alt-right is really about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Humpty should sue. Spencer’s views are vile. He has recast his overt racism as a defense of white heritage, attracting other racists to his cause while hoping to make his brand of white supremacy palatable to the mainstream. That there are groups on campuses across America interested in hearing this nonsense says a lot about where we are as a culture. While we’ve made progress on race, it has been tenuous and remains subject to the whims of a white majority.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. Spencer’s speech had been canceled by the university on the grounds that the event could lead to violence on campus. The courts stepped in. U.S. District Judge W. Keith Watkins allowed the speech to proceed, writing in his opinion that “Discrimination on the basis of message content cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment.”

So the speech went on and, as the First Amendment also permits, it was met with protests. Yes, there were some violent acts, but by and large it went off as so many others like it have — bad speech met with good speech, and (as reported by CNN) a crowd that thinned drastically by the end, a signal perhaps that those in attendance were only there because of the curiosity and that, after listening to Spencer speak, the curiosity wore off and indifference to his nonsense set in.

The Spencer speech — and the protests — are part of a pattern that warrants a far more complicated response than we’ve gotten to this point. Speeches by right-wing provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Anne Coulter have been met with similar protests, including calls for them to be canceled. Berkeley already has postponed a speech by Coulter, citing fears of violence. Though Coulter has vowed to speak there.

Let’s be clear: People like Spencer, Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos are repugnant. They traffic in caricature, use bullying tactics, and endorse an authoritarian approach to government that is contrary to what democratic self-governance is supposed to be about. I have no sympathy for them or their views and I support efforts to counter what they say and what they advocate with protest and solidarity.

But I’m also concerned that efforts to shut them down — and others on the far right — will backfire, not only because doing so may create sympathy for these thugs, but because anti-speech tactics, once unleashed, can be used by those in power to silence the rest of us.

This is not a First Amendment issue — at least not directly. The First Amendment only addresses government interference in the right to conscience (speech, press, religious belief, assembly and petition, when taken together, are about free thought and conscience). The goal was to protect individuals like Thomas Paine, who had been critical of the crown and instrumental in turning public opinion in favor of the revolution, from being silenced by the newly formed American government.

But the ideas that support the First Amendment undergird everything we say we stand for in this country. The government cannot shut speech down, unless there is a direct and provable likelihood that it will incite violence — which means that the speaker would need to do the inciting. It is not enough that violence may occur or that the speech may be degrading to some. If free speech is to mean anything, it has to be free and even the worst speech must be allowed to go forward.

This does not mean defending what is said. Just as Spencer — or Coulter or Yiannopolous or David Duke — has a right to spew his vile nonsense, we who oppose him have the same right to respond. By protesting at his speech and inside the auditorium where he is to speak, by answering him point by point, by turning his address into a debate, by providing good speech as a counter to his bad speech.

Yes, there is such a thing as bad speech. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic slurs and theories are bad speech. I’d love nothing more than to see these words consigned to the dust bin of history, to never be uttered again. They offer nothing to the public discourse. And where they rise to the level of legitimate threat or incitement to violence, we should shut the speakers of this language down. But absent a clear and present threat, we can’t.

The notion that some speakers lack rights because of their views is dangerous. Allowing the government or the crowd — what the courts have called the “heckler’s veto” — to determine what can be said may seem right when applied to the noxious views of a Richard Spencer, but we need to remember our history. This veto has more often than not been applied to voices on the left. Think of the treatment of the civil rights and labor movements, of suffragists and the women’s movement, of the LGBTQ movement, of socialists and communists in the United States. As the legal philosopher Geoffrey Stone wrote recently, “the court has held that the government’s constitutional obligation in such circumstances is to take all reasonable steps to protect the rights of the speaker,” and with good cause.
The issue came to a head over controversies during the civil rights movement, when angry whites threatened violence if civil rights marches were permitted to take place. In this light, the court recognized the danger of the “heckler’s veto” — that is, the danger of allowing threats of violence by opponents of a speaker to oblige the government to silence the speaker.
The court understood that giving such power to a speaker’s opponents would encourage opponents of other speakers to make similar threats. Recognizing that this would endanger freedom of speech, the Supreme Court concluded that the government’s responsibility in these circumstances is to control those who threaten violence, rather than to sacrifice the speaker’s First Amendment rights.

Shutting down Spencer may seem logical. But if Spencer can be silenced, who is to say the same cannot happen to Cornel West, to Chris Hedges, to #BlackLivesMatter organizers and so on? We must defend the right to speak, even if it means allowing thugs and carnival barkers like Spencer an opportunity to spew their nonsense. It doesn’t mean they get a free pass to say what they want without response — none of us do. Defending Spencer in the end is not about Spencer, but about speech in general. It is about ensuring that dissidents are not silenced, that we — and I mean we on the left — have the platform to speak truth to power.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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