"This is not a free speech issue!" Or so goes the slogan of the crusading censor.
Benny Huang is enthusiastic about the new book by the author of
There is No Such Thing as a Free Press.
Mick Hume, free speech advocate and author of
Trigger Warning (Is Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?) daftly disassembles the arguments of the shut-your-piehole crowd. Hume
argues that the expression of controversial ideas is becoming nearly
impossible in the West despite its professed adoration for free speech.
While Hume
assures the reader that his book was not written in response to the
Charlie Hebdo massacre which occurred just as he was wrapping up the
project, he does discuss the hypocrisy of the European elites who
suddenly became staunch defenders of Charlie's artistic expression—and
acted as if they always had been. Western nations are full of censors,
he argues, and many of them are in high places. Banning sentiments that
might offend Muslims was fairly pedestrian before the Charlie killings
and continued unabated after the fact.
While almost most people
claim to support free speech in theory, plenty of people rationalize exceptions to the principle that essentially nullify
the sacred liberty. Free speech, he argues, is dying a death of a
thousand exceptions. He focuses primarily on his native Britain, where
the situation is dire, but warns that even the United States, despite
its expansive first amendment, is succumbing to this dangerous
trend. Hume obliterates some of the common rationales for censorship,
including "That's not free speech, it's hate speech" and Oliver Wendell
Holmes's "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater!" His analysis is
spot-on.
