Samira wrote:
However, another point of view is that showing up to oppose out and proud fascists has value, for people who would otherwise feel even more marginalized if the original protest had gone unremarked. I can see that argument; my way doesn't give the attention whores what they want, but also makes no statement against them.
Sure. So show up with your own signs and messages and engage in your own free speech. One of the problems I've seen is that some protesters (and it sure seems to be almost exclusively those on the left) have come to believe that
their free speech is protected to an absurd degree. Their free speech can include unscheduled protests. Their free speech can include blocking roads. Their free speech can include blocking businesses. Those are not lawful assemblies, but any attempt to break them up is declared to be a violation of free speech and thus condemned.
Also, their free speech can include obstructing someone else's free speech. Free speech does not mean you get to say anything you want, any time you want, on anyone's dime. Free speech means that authorities cannot prevent you from doing so
on your own dime and in a manner which does not infringe on other people's liberties. I recall a story about a graduation speech this year where the speaker was a conservative (Betsy DeVos I believe). The school had arranged it. She was one of a handful of people speaking at the ceremony. Yet, when it was her time to speak, many in the audience began shouting her down. They stood up and turned their back to her. This was hailed as fair free speech by the students in most media re-tellings of the event, but if you stop and think about it, while they certainly were expressing their own opinions, they were also preventing he free speech. They were blocking the free speech of the university, which had chosen this speaker to speak. They were blocking the rights of other students to
hear what the speaker had to say.
It was defended as a "peaceful protest". But the word "peaceful" in this case has shrunk to mean "no physical violence occurred". But that's not the extent of peaceful. We don't only call something peaceful if there is an absence of violence. I would argue that if you are disrupting an event, that's not "peaceful". Just because you didn't start punching people, you're still preventing them from doing what they came there to do. So I think that the language gets twisted around a bit in cases like this.
And my biggest issue is the one-sidedness of it all. The same rules for speech must apply to speech, regardless of whether we like or dislike that speech. And it certainly appears to me as though many on the left use extremely different methods of measuring whether speech should be "free" based purely on whether it aligns with their own personal ideology and beliefs. So, as mentioned above, their speech should have nearly unbridled freedom, and justifies virtually any amount of disruption to anyone else due to its vast importance. But speech they don't agree with can be cavalierly blocked, banned from campuses, blocked from all public places, and even if a private event uses it, they'll try to disrupt it as well by showing up and trying to create havoc.
Again. I'd be inclined to agree with you, except that this same tactic is used against far broader types of speech than merely racist speech. The left has an unfortunate habit of labeling any speech that they don't agree with as "fascist" and "hate speech". This then gives them a green light to use disruptive and/or violent tactics to block it. And this in turn leads to media reporting the event based on the type of speech being opposed, rather than the tactics used to oppose it.
An easy way to test this is to just change the speech type. Let's imagine that this wasn't about Lee's statue, and there weren't any racists involved. Imagine it was a protest against a city council decision regarding use of a public park. Some people want it to remain a park, and some want it turned into a new housing complex. Now, imagine the exact same counter protest occurred, and then imagine someone on the "we want a park" side blowing a gasket for some reason and driving his car into the crowd, injuring a number of people and killing one.
What would the story be about? It would first be about the crazy guy who rammed the crowd. Perhaps with talk about mental illness or whatnot. It would also be about letting counter protests get so out of control in the first place. No one would be making it about the initial position of those who scheduled the protest itself. So what we're seeing here is a reaction based on whether we agree with the speech of those who scheduled the event. But in so doing, we're essentially taking the "side" of the counter protesters, not on their position on a park versus housing, but on their counter protest tactics in the first place.
No amount of free speech allows you to violate the law in the process of that speech. That means that jaywalking is still jaywalking, even if you're doing it with a hundred other people at the same time. A simple test if you find yourself in a rally, march, protest, etc, is: "Would I be doing this if I were the only person standing here?". If the answer is "no", then you should not do it. We see this all the time though. I remember the occupy protests, and people complaining that the police were violating their free speech by arresting them for merely standing there. Except that they were standing in the middle of a street, with hundreds of other people, blocking traffic, without having made previous arrangements for a march in that street at that time. Same thing: If one person were standing in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, what would you expect the police to do when they arrive at the scene. They'd ask the person to get out of the street, and if he refuses, they'd tackle him, cuff him, and arrest him.
And none of us would blink at this, or think it was a violation of that person's rights. But if a crowd of people are all doing it? We suddenly think there's some magical free speech issue at hand.
So yeah. TR/DR. Whatever. I guess my point is that you counter speech with actual speech. When your form of speech involves disruption and violence, then you're not using speech. You're using intimidation tactics. In a free society, as painful as it might be, you have to actually allow other members of your society to hear all sides of an issue, listen to all forms of speech and opinions, and then let them make up their own minds. The moment we start trying to choose ahead of time which opinions and positions are "good" or "bad", and then acting to prevent the speech of the "bad" sides, out of fear that they might influence people to believe them, we no longer have free speech, and we no longer live in a free society.
I get it. It's really easy to just say "That's hate speech. It's horrible. We shouldn't allow people to say that". And there's some legitimacy to that. We could easily argue that if we could make racist speech illegal, it would make it harder for racists to spread their hate, and we could seriously decrease the amount of racists in our society (or even completely eliminate it). The problem is that we all know it wont stop there. Yes, slippery slope, whatever. But we all
know this to be true. As I've mentioned above, we're already seeing this. Conservative speech is often very broadly labeled as "hate speech" and condemned and attacked, not because of what is said, but in many cases, merely because of the political or ideological persuasion of the person speaking.
I'm all for opposing someone else's opinion, but you're veering into authoritarian state when you start suppressing that opinion. It's just too dangerous. Far far more dangerous than allowing such people to speak their minds, IMO. We can listen to, judge, and dismiss their speech. But we can never know what someone might have said, and whether it might have made sense to us, if we never get to hear it in the first place.