When Government Threatens Free Speech By Doing Nothing

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Here's a transcript of this short dialog between Dave Rubin and Steve Simpson on governmental threats to freedom of speech:

Dave Rubin: But in terms of the government, do you sense right now that there’s a unique threat, or what level would you say the threat is?

Steve Simpson: I don’t think it’s unique to the Trump era, although there’s one caveat to that that I’ll get to in a minute. But, I mean, there’s always — there’s a greater threat from government when our categories are fuzzy and we don’t understand what the proper purpose of government is, or what the scope of our freedom is and how to think about that. And the key concept here is individual rights, and we just — we’ve practically banished the idea, or a coherent idea of what individual rights are all about, from our lexicon these days. And this has been a long time in coming. We’ve just diluted it or destroyed the idea of it. So, it’s much more an issue of who has the privilege to do — you know, it’s not just speak, but it’s do all kinds of things. And, so we need to recapture the Enlightenment view – I mean, the Founders are the ones that I think defined this — at least, I think, implemented it in political terms. But because of that, the government is always sort of hovering around as a threat. And then when you get a guy like Trump in office, who seems like — I mean he’s a crazy guy I think, he’s a nut. I don’t, I think he’s a nutball, and he’s just a dangerous person because he recognizes no limits to the authority of government. But he hasn’t done anything unique other than, I mean, he criticizes the media — I’m not, I think it’s dangerous for a president to be criticizing the press as an institution — in the same way that I thought it was very bad for Obama to be criticizing the financial industry, or Wall Street, as an institution. It doesn’t mean there aren’t bad actors in there. But when you damn an entire institution, that’s a dangerous thing, especially from a government who has the power to actually regulate them and shut them down. There are specific threats, Title IX we mentioned. Let me mention one other sort of threat that is, I think the most terrifying thing happening in this country now — is inaction by government when individuals or groups of individuals, and I think this is happening on campus primarily, when they start using force against people (and we forget that the distinction between freedom and, you know totalitarianism, or freedom and not-freedom is the use of force). So, you look at Middlebury, you look at Evergreen, as the two recent examples. And in both cases you have people getting attacked by bands of students — you have students then justifying the attacks as self-defense, which is crazy; it’s not self-defense its offense. And then you have the administration telling the police essentially to stand down — and we’re not going to protect people. If people come to view free speech in those terms, or if that’s what they associate with free speech, no one will support the idea of free speech. If they think that people have a right to attack others, and then we’re going to look at that as speech or protest — I would reject the concept of free speech if that was the case. But it’s really scary to see college officials telling the campus police to stand down and do nothing. Local officials doing nothing about it, and essentially then, what you get then is replacing force with persuasion – and you get the, the dominant principle becomes “the way we settle disputes in society is through force.” That’s anarchy. And then, you’ve lost the ability to speak, you’ve lost the ability to deal with people on rational terms. And that’s an important step down the road to statism.

The panelists are Steve Simpson, director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute and editor of "Defending Free Speech"; Flemming Rose, author of "Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech," and Dave Rubin, creator and host of the Rubin Report. The event, "Free Speech Under Attack," took place at Objectivist Summer Conference 2017 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, June 13, 2017.

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