The Right To Listen

Watch just the first couple seconds of this reel.

It opens with a megaphone-wielding activist declaring, “We’re here to shut down...”

The reel then continues with him calling Charles Murray a white supremacist, and a rebuttal of that slander - and an interview - by John Stossel.

All that is an aside. For today’s purposes, everything after those first 5 words is irrelevant.

Because freedom of speech.

Those activists will claim that they are simply exercising their own right to free speech by shouting down, chanting over, and “shutting down” a speaker whose words they deem too objectionable to be heard.

In that claim, they prove they do not understand what freedom of speech means. I’m not talking letter-of-the-law 1A, which restricts government from infringing. I’m talking about the principle itself, born of the primacy of the individual as conceived during the Enlightenment, and of the Golden Rule.

Freedom of speech is about the unrestricted exchange of ideas. To speak is to speak so that others may hear, if they choose. The listener is free to ignore, or to walk away, or to consider the heard words and possibly respond. In any case, freedom of speech involves listeners. Those who would deny a person his right to speak to those who choose to listen are also denying the listeners of their right.

The people seeking to shout down speakers with whom they disagree, disrupt their events, and deplatform anyone not of their tribe are overwhelmingly of the modern Left. Because of this placement on the political spectrum, people who hold liberal values - including reverence for freedom of speech - have reflexive sympathy for the disruptors. They may be uncomfortable with the tactics, but often share opinions on the subject matter. Cognitive dissonance kicks in, so when it’s pointed out that there’s nothing liberal about such censorious tactics, they resolve the matter with a “yes, but...” and slowly convince themselves that things have gotten so bad that censorship is both reasonable and necessary.

Call it drinking the Kool-Aid, call it Stockholm Syndrome, call it whatever you want - it’s an insidious and deeply corrosive capturing of the minds of good people by bad people.

They forget that they are not only denying the speaker’s right to speak, they are denying the listeners’ right to listen. And they forget that listening is not the same as agreeing or endorsing. I can listen to Zohran Mamdani spout his socialistic garbage, and I defend his right to do so, but I don’t have to agree with a word of it, much less say “good idea!”

I also have the right notto listen. Nothing obligates me to attend some dunderhead’s speech or lecture or publicity stunt.

I also have the right to criticize. To rebut, to debunk, or to fisk. As long as I don’t disrupt or take away others’ right to listen.

The answer to speech you disagree with is always more speech. Anything else undercuts the fundamental values of our society. Anything else affirms that censorship is OK. Anything else signals to the government that punishing undesired speech is acceptable.

Too much of anything else, and we end up like the UK, arresting thousands every year for mean tweets. Or like Canada, fining people six figures for saying things that insult others’ “dignity.”

Or, like the myriad places where insulting someone’s religion puts your own freedom at risk.

When you hear someone say “that person should not be allowed to say those things,” flip it around. Say “I want to hear what he has to say. How dare you take that away from me?”