Free Speech Is For Weirdos Now

Alexander Vindman, a small man who played a significant role in an isolated moment, but who has been trying to parlay that momentary significance into a more general relevance ever since, has taken to the social media monster called X — where the clowns gather — to “warn” Elon Musk, who runs X, that the recent French arrest of Musk’s counterpart at Telegram is not merely a good thing (although Vindman presumably has no more knowledge than the rest of us about the details or motives of that arrest), but also ought to have a chilling effect on what he refers to as “free speech absolutism,” and which he regards as the position of “weirdos.”

“There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous,” Vindman says. A growing intolerance. Yes, it is true. We live in a time in which a growing majority of people, not only within the public sphere (where such “intolerance” is to be expected and typical) but among the general populace — which was previously thought to have a diametrically opposed vested interest in tolerating diverse views, which is why some men of most distinguished intellect and statesmanlike influence promoted the idea of freedom of speech in the first place — have become free speech skeptics. This majority, for whom Vindman presumes to speak, and of which he is certainly representative, feels quite comfortable with the idea of curtailing free speech, not in the more traditional realms of obscenity and calls for violence, but in the specific realm from which freedom of speech derived its historical purpose and strongest justification: political opinion and dissent.

Vindman notes, correctly no doubt, and approvingly, that there is growing intolerance for “platforming” disinformation, which is a fancy word for lies intended to deceive. Do all opinions that are disagreeable to Vindman count as lies, or only certain ones? And if lying (deliberately saying what one believes to be untrue) on the internet is no longer to be tolerated, then what would this do to the entire industry of advertising? Or to all public dissemination of political party platforms and talking points? Or to most social media self-promotion of the sort engaged in by YouTube influencers, TikTok celebrities, and the like? And to the popular music industry, which is built on digital fakery and commercial misrepresentation of a hundred kinds, and without which, to take only one example, the entire category of entertainment called K-Pop would immediately cease to exist? In short, which online “disinformation” is Vindman willing to tolerate? Or is he proposing to shut down the whole internet apart from official government statements, as is done in North Korea, in the name of preventing lies from being disseminated in a public forum?

Vindman also decries the intolerability of “malign influence.” And is he prepared to draw up the precise and understandable guidelines as to what kinds of influence are malign, so that citizens might reasonably be able to know what the crimes are before they commit them? For example, is supporting Donald Trump’s election campaign a malign influence? Is openly opposing the Democratic Party’s agenda a malign influence? Is disagreeing with Israel’s foreign policy a malign influence? Is criticizing the Zelensky government’s leadership (which some prominent Ukrainian leaders have done) a malign influence? Is publicly asking whether excessive immigration might be a threat to a society’s stability and institutions a malign influence? Is advocating recreational drug use (which former U.S. Speaker John Boehner does, along with the official Libertarian Party platform), or praising designated terrorist organizations (which several current members of the U.S. Congress do), or supporting Vladimir Putin’s claims against the West’s “provocation” (as many people across the political spectrum, from Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens to Jordan Peterson and Nigel Farage to Cornell West and Noam Chomsky all do) a malign influence? It would be helpful, on these and a thousand similar questions, if Vindman would clarify just how he would like to define the sort of malignity that he believes should not be tolerated in the public square.

There is, he also says, a “growing appetite for accountability.” In other words, there is a growing public outcry, which Vindman supports, calling for people who express “intolerable” ideas to be held to accounts legally, which is to say coercively, which is to say by the state. When one is openly calling for governments to be more coercive in dealing with the public expression of opinions that are intolerable, it would certainly be helpful if one could define which sorts of opinions one is referring to, and which sorts one is not referring to, again for the sake of not appearing to promote a bluntly totalitarian approach to the suppression of thought and speech.

So it is, at any rate, that Vindman, rebuked on X for his threatening language aimed at Musk, reinforced his position by deriding his opponents as “free speech absolutists [sic] weirdos.” The “weirdos” slur, I presume, is Vindman’s attempt to glom onto the recent brainstorm of the Kamala Harris campaign, which is to brand Trump and his allies as “weird,” by contrast with Harris’ supposed normalcy. But I am more intrigued by the term “free speech absolutist,” as he is using it in this context.

Free speech non-absolutism, the implied alternative which Vindman, along with the respective national governments of Europe, Canada, The United States, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand — and Russia and China — prefers, seems in practice, when you boil it down, to mean something like “freedom to say what you like, as crudely and ignorantly as you wish, as long as what you are saying comports with, and is not judged to present any challenge to, the truth as safeguarded by a roving panel of algorithm-trolling bureaucrats assigned by a given country’s national government with the express task of controlling which opinions, particularly on politically-charged issues, are government-approved for utterance in a public forum (and for thinking or discussing in private?), such approval now being identical or coextensive with the concept “truth,” and conversely which opinions are unacceptable to said government, such unacceptability now being identical or coextensive with the concept “falsehood,” aka “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

Truth as determined by government dictate, with public discussion to be monitored for falsehoods (as determined by government-selected “experts”), and such falsehoods punished not merely with banishment from the public square, but with direct police action against the perpetrators, and especially against private citizens who dare to provide a forum in which the expression of such non-government-approved thoughts is permitted.

I am not taking a position one way or the other. I am just defining our terms, so that the question can be approached with a clear understanding of what is involved. In this case, what is involved is the question of whether there can in fact, human nature and fallibility being what they are, be official truths — along with the further issues of whether the enforcement of such truths by law is likely to benefit or harm society in the long run; whether such truths are susceptible to being reevaluated and altered by subsequent conditions and evidence; whether, if such reevaluation is possible, this would lead to a reevaluation and punishment of the government officials and agents themselves, private or public, who took part in defining and enforcing the previous official truth (in other words, whether or not any person or entity involved in this issue is or ought to be above the law); and whether, if such reevaluation is possible, this might not lead, in theory, to situations in which views that were once banned and publicly branded as dangerous falsehoods could eventually become official truths themselves, thus leading us back to the question of whether, or to what extent, we ought to be so sanguine in the first place about rejecting “free speech absolutism,” weird or otherwise, in the name of today’s increasingly popular notion of “free speech non-absolutism,” aka state-sponsored and state-enforced intolerance.

I note, in closing, that the issue discussed above has nothing to do with the question of whether privately-owned public forums themselves have any obligation to allow absolutely everything (non-criminal) to appear in their forums. They do not, anymore than you have an obligation to allow everyone to come into your living room and say whatever he wishes. I have little doubt that Telegram is associated with a great deal of pro-Putin propaganda, which is to say Kremlin-sponsored lies. Lies of the sort that I heard just the other day in a speech by U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and that I have heard from all the individuals cited in my broad-spectrum sample, above, of Putin propaganda in the West’s popular political discourse. Lies that I have been pointing out and ridiculing in this private forum for over two years. What is at issue in this essay, however, is specifically the legitimacy of the state’s claims against speech — or rather, against ideas — that it chooses to regard as false, reprehensible, or “malign,” and its claims against private citizens choosing to allow such expression within their own discussion forums.

By way of a different, but clearer, example: Did the major American philosopher and the world’s most influential education expert, John Dewey, have the right to lie through his teeth in writing his lengthy apologia for Stalin’s Russia? Did the New Republic have the right to publish Dewey’s pack of lies? And did I have the right, back in 2013, to write my unravelling of Dewey’s lies at American Thinker and in greater detail in my book on public education? Personally, my instinct would be to say “yes” to all three questions, and to let the chips and the truth fall where they may.