10/28/2020 was a big day for America’s history of free speech. It is a long and storied history, important enough to be first and foremost in the Bill of Rights. Alexis de Tocqueville dedicated an entire chapter to it when exploring the rough edges of our American democracy. The ACLU fought to defend it when the rights of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois were threatened. The free market of ideas is a core tenet of America and has endured its fair share of attacks over the past 200 years and today it its braced against two separate foes. One a dysfunctional body jockeying for political leverage. The other? Twitter.
The first is the Senate, packed full of partisans each looking for an edge in the upcoming election, looking to strike a blow to the foundation of our modern internet. Senators from both major parties spent 4 hours hurling talking points at the leaders of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in was was supposed to be a hearing regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Democratic Senators spent their allotted time pushing for suppressing conservative viewpoints labeled Russian propaganda. Republican Senators railed against perceived blocking of conservative talking points, but really spent the time staging promotional videos for their base.
But the political circus in Washington is nothing new. The major threat to our hard fought right to freedom of speech, our freedom of thought, is Cancel Culture. A digital mob with its woke fingers wrapped around the larynx of America. On the very same day that the Senate was holding hearings on the law that allows for the free exchange of ideas across the breadth of humanity, Americans were using that amazing power of communication to force speech from public spaces.
The Twitter mob renewed its push to punish Joe Rogan for his uncompromising defence of free speech by attempting to spur a boycott of Spotify, who recently signed a licensing deal for the wildly popular podcast, following Rogan’s decision to have the highly controversial conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones return despite a prior ban on the Spotify platform. The outrage ranged from claims of the two spreading vaccine disinformation (Jones may have, Rogan certainly did not), Jones’ past denial of the Sandy Hook shooting (which Jones denied on the show, but seems like a cover for his legal troubles), to just a general desire to cancel anything involved with Jones in any way.
Now, is Alex Jones insane? Possibly. Does he hawk vitamins and supplements while making dubious claims as to their effects on human health? Absolutely. Does he believe that current events are the result of high level agreements between the leaders of our terrestrial governments and inter-dimensional entities? Does he also believe that these meetings take place through the use of powerful psychedelics that allow humans to access these aforementioned dimensions? Maybe, I’m not entirely sure, but let’s go with yes.
What Jones may or may not believe is irrelevant. He has a right to believe whatever he wants and if the Joe Rogan’s of the world want to have a 3 hour conversation exploring the depth of those beliefs, they have every right to do that too. Anyone offended as the right to not listen to those beliefs. Hell, they have a right to attempt a boycott if they want. The issue lies in the inability to tolerate an offensive viewpoint. Having the right to an action does not make the action right. Any attempt to silence an odious opinion is as offensive as the opinion itself.
A democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Does anyone really think that Alex Jones is so persuasive that the mere exposure to his lunacy will corrupt the minds of America? Of course not. It appears those pushing hard against Rogan believe the American population so stupid, so malleable, that any concerning viewpoint needs to be shielded from view. Stuffed away and forgotten. It also presupposes that their own viewpoint is so correct that it cannot be challenged. This is the truly frightening idea. The idea that one group has a monopoly on righteousness, on truth. These are the hallmarks of zealotry.
The greatest irony of #cancelspotify and the backlash against Rogan is that the following day saw the release of a multi-hour conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glen Greenwald that touched upon this very tendency of the mob to suppress free speech. This is a man who broke news of the National Security Agency blatantly violating our collective 4th amendment protections through illegal . This is a man who intimately understands the true value of the rights enshrined in the United States Constitution. This is a man who was forced to flee, along with Edward Snowden, the country as a result of breaking this news.
Yet, despite the egregious nature of the N.S.A.’s transgressions against our enumerated freedoms, the Twitter mob cares more about canceling guy who believes U.S. leaders are dropping acid to hammer out intergalactic trade deals, than enacting justice for a whistleblower who sacrificed his freedom to bring these transgressions to light.
Perhaps Rogan is the one who has it right.