Freedom. A two-syllable word with a thousand meanings. Which matters more: my freedom to swing my fist, or my freedom to punch you in the face? Scholars remain divided.

But there’s one type of freedom that’s the queen of freedom, yea, the robust trunk and turgid root of the great tree of liberty, and that’s our most fundamental freedom: the freedom of speech.

Unfortunately that freedom is now under attack by leftists.

I mean, just look at all these hot takes: the left is killing free speech, the left is silencing free speech, the left turned against free speech, the left wants to suppress free speech, the left is assaulting free speech, the left is stifling free speech, the left is silencing free speech, leftist terrorists are at war with free speech gooby—

Fuck! This sounds pretty bad.

Luckily, one hero has emerged to champion freedom once again, and that hero is no less than YouTube’s own Dave Rubin, a man who loves freedom more than life itself, a man who may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to appear on his program and spout racist bullshit without interruption or objection, a man who’s prepared to water the tree of liberty with his own tears.

Interviewer: Are you tearing up?

Dave Rubin: No, it’s uh… It’s the lights, are getting me.

Was it the lights Dave? Are you sure it wasn’t—freedom? 😂

So here’s the thing. I know and have known a lot of people who are educated, sincere, and sympathetic to Rubin’s point of view. So I think it’s worth engaging. Dave is not a Nazi. So you know what, pull up seat, Dave. Let’s talk. Hold on I’ll make you a drink. 

Christopher Hitchens: Fire, fire, fire, fire. Now you’ve heard it. Not shouted in a crowded theater admittedly, as I realize, I seem now to have shouted it in the Hogwarts dining room.

Ten points to Gryffindor, my friends, ten points indeed!

Jesus, I can already feel myself being infected by Hitchens’ pompous oratorical style. I’m tempted to call him the fatuous, over-praised Christopher Hitchens. 

If I keep that up I’ll be quoting Philip Larkin at you by the end of the video. 

But you know, Dave, it’s fitting that I had an acid flashback and hallucinated Christopher Hitchens just then, because Hitchens is in a sense the steelman of your position, the ultimate champion of free speech. I mean, he’s every white-boy liberal’s favorite, the man who Bill Maher practically tears up over while besmirching his memory comparing him to Milo Yiannopoulos.

Bill Maher: I mean you remind me like of a young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens.

Ugh. The point is, if I choose Hitchens as the representative of my opponent’s position on free speech, surely, no one can accuse me of strawmanning.

So, tell me acid Hitchens, what does free speech mean to you?

Christopher Hitchens: So I’ll be very daring and summarize all three of these great gentlemen (John Milton, Thomas Paine, John Stewart Mill), of the great tradition of, especially English, liberty, in one go. What they say is, it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear. And every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something.

So free speech isn’t just the protection against laws regulating expression, it’s also the right of any speaker to a platform, and the right of an audience to hear. But does that really apply to everyone, like, what about a holocaust denier?

Christopher Hitchens: That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection, because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, but be, might contain a grain of historical truth, um, might in any case give people to think about why do they know what they already think they know. How do I know that I know this except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else.

So not only does a holocaust denier have a right to speak, but, in this view, because what they say is marginal, we actually have a duty to provide special protections to make sure that what they have to say is heard. This is a huge, all-inclusive, and very nuanced notion of free speech. And Hitchens isn’t making it up, it comes from John Stuart Mill, one of history’s great social justice warriors.

According to this view, the right to free speech goes way beyond anything guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. It takes into consideration not just legal restrictions, but also the social pressures that can silence non-conformists and marginal viewpoints in subtle ways.

And you know, Dave, I like that you and Hitchens have this very advanced conception of free speech. The idea that we should protect and perhaps even amplify minority viewpoints is one that I share. So, great! We actually start from a point of philosophical agreement. Where we disagree is in the application, the main point of contention being which speakers are really marginalized and in need of special protection. And I think the best way to flesh out that disagreement is to consider the accusations that the left has it out for free speech.

In my experience, the big pieces of evidence usually brought up against the “social justice warrior” left are prohibitions against hate speech, TWs, safe spaces, and deplatforming. In this video I’ll cover hate speech, and the rest of it, well, we’ll get to it soon, Dave, we’ll get to it real soon.

Sorceress: Tell me, Laoshi, what is the meaning of freedom?

Objection 1: Hate Speech Prohibitions

Unlike the accusations regarding trigger warnings and safe spaces, the suggestion that the prohibition of hate speech violates the right to free speech is at least not completely frivolous. I think this is worth taking seriously. Now hate speech prohibitions exist at three levels. At the highest level there’s legal restrictions, such as the laws against displaying Nazi imagery which have enabled Nazis to get some of my anti-Nazi videos blocked in much of Europe.

Speaking as a freedom-loving ’Murican, I find these laws clearly in violation of what the right to free speech protects. I mean, what, the Fuhrer’s gonna make it illegal to display a swastika now? What is this, Nazi Germany?

At the middle level there’s institutional prohibitions, such as those prohibiting hate speech in particular settings such as workplaces or universities. These I think are generally quite a good idea, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

At the bottom level there are social restrictions. For instance, there’s a lot of social pressure in certain communities not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. 

And although not formal rules, these norms can have a silencing effect, and place a de facto limitation on the things people are willing to say. For instance, conservatives and classical liberals are constantly complaining to me about how the words “transphobe,” “racist,” “Islamophobe,” and so on are being used to silence them. And in a sense they’re kind of right. I mean, people are saying those things to you because they want you to stop saying what you’re saying.

But of course, this is pretty microscopic as far as restrictions on free speech go. So, I guess you might say it’s like a kind of free speech microaggression, right? And that is what it is. It’s a subtle, indirect way of trying to get you not to say a certain thing. So great! I wanna congratulate conservatives on independently discovering the idea of microaggressions. But! If you’re willing to grant that words like “Islamophobia” can have a subtle silencing effect, you should also be willing to grant that small acts of sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on can likewise suppress the speech of marginalized people.

For instance: I constantly hear from women, trans and gender non-conforming people that they’ve thought about making YouTube videos, but they just don’t want to deal with the hate, the trolls, the constant misogyny and attacks on gender identity, the public shaming in “Genderqueer and Feminist Cringe Compilations,” and so they just avoid speaking up on YouTube altogether.

So, in a sense, these people are being silenced by the misogynistic and transphobic atmosphere, in the same way that your average YouTube shitlord would probably feel pretty alone and silenced in a gender studies class with 19 women complaining about sexist men.

Now, when I bring this up with classical liberals, they uniformly respond, “If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. The Internet’s just like that. Why can’t you just deal with it?” To which I respond, why can’t you just deal with being called a racist on college campuses? Academia’s just like that. And whatever you say to that, there’s the answer to your question. 

So, if you adopt a sophisticated view of what free speech means, you have to contend with the following contradictory situation: there are many instances where you have to choose between suppressing one person’s speech or another’s.

The fact is that there is no true neutral when it comes to free speech. It’s literally impossible to protect all speech equally, because some forms of speech tend to dampen other forms of speech.

So there comes a point where you have to choose whose side you’re on. In this case, do you want to defend the speech of misogynists or the speech of women? Homophobes and transphobes or queer people? Racists or people of color? And I’m not talking about passing laws here, I’m talking about establishing norms of discourse.

And what I notice about you, Dave, and about much of your audience, is that you only seem to rush to stand up for the right of people not to be silenced by the threat of slurs like and “racist” or “transphobe”and in fact you present the topic like it’s the most important political issue in the world right now.

But on the subject of how bigoted attitudes and speech may silence people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized groups, you seem to have absolutely nothing to say. There’s endless catastrophizing from classical liberals on YouTube and elsewhere about how policies prohibiting transphobia in the workplace, including intentional misgendering, are a terrible limitation on the freedom of speech of transphobes. But these same people give no concern whatsoever to the way in which a hostile environment where, for instance, a trans employee’s identity is constantly disregarded and disparaged, might itself have a silencing effect itself, if it doesn’t pressure trans people out of the workplace altogether.

And I can’t help but look at this and conclude that you’ve taken a side in an ideological battle, while pretending all the way that you’re simply standing up for the supposedly neutral value of free speech.

Well, don’t think we don’t notice which instances of speech you choose to defend. And this doesn’t just apply to Dave Rubin either. 

Let’s see what Hitchens, so passionate in his defense of holocaust deniers’ right to a platform, has to say about protecting the speech of women, queer people, and people of color.

Christopher Hitchens: Because we’ve had invocations of a rather driveling and sickly kind tonight for our sympathy: “What about the poor fags? What about the poor Jews? The wretched women who can’t take the abuse, and the slaves and their descendants, and the tribes who didn’t make it and were told that their land was forfeit. 

So the women, the “fags,” the “slaves and their descendants” and the “tribes who didn’t make it” should just take the abuse, but the holocaust denier deserves special protections? Like I said, don’t think we don’t notice whose speech you rush to defend, and who you tell to take the abuse and get over it.

Why does everyone love Hitchens so much? I mean we’ve got people in the comments saying they want to memorize his speech, and that they cried during his speech because of freedom. 

I mean every American liberal with a weakness for a slick turn of phrase and an oaky private school accent is susceptible. I certainly had a boner for the man for years, and part of me still does. But there’s something self-satisfying about it, isn’t there? 

“I, the intellectual kin of Socrates, appreciate the true value of free speech in accordance with the great English tradition of liberty, unlike these wretched whiny women, blacks, and Muslims.”

Fuck that shit.

Sorceress: Tell me, Laoshi, what is permitted and what, forbidden?

The truth is that there are always explicit or implicit limitations on the kind of speech that’s acceptable. And there are major restrictions that no one complains about, not even Dave Rubin. 

For instance, there’s a whole lot of stuff that you aren’t allowed to say and do in a YouTube video. If there weren’t, there’d be a lot more full penetration on this channel, I can tell you that. Just multiple camera angles of me being ruthlessly pegged by a giant woman in a lizard mask. And sure, maybe that’s not what Milton had in mind when he wrote the Areopagitica, but you know what, do you support freedom or not, Dave?

And okay, I guess obscenity and hate speech are maybe not equivalent examples, granted, but even the staunchest defenders of free speech all seem to have cases where they’re willing to make exceptions.

For instance, Hitchens claims at the beginning of his free speech lecture that he’s willing to tolerate any interruption, no matter how abusive.

Christopher Hitchens: I exempt myself from the speaker’s kind offer of protection that was so generously proffered at the opening of this evening. Anyone who wants to say anything about or to me is quite free to do so.

And we’ve heard his defense of platforming holocaust deniers, but was he willing to give 9/11 truthers the same courtesy? Let’s a take a look:

Christopher Hitchens: Go away. Go away. We don’t want fascist crackpots taking up our meeting, thank you. Go away. Go away. Fascist crackpot. Fascist crackpot! We’re not here to talk to you. Throw him out. Throw him out! Security! Security, please!

So he calls them fascist crackpots and has them removed by security. And in the comments his fanboys are celebrating the “ownage.”But all he did is deplatform them, which, fair enough, I would do the same. But he’s doing exactly what I suggest we should do with people like Richard Spencer. And then people accuse me of being against freedom of speech.

The point is, no one is perfectly consistent when it comes to protecting the speech of people they disagree with, and in fact it’s impossible to be perfectly consistent, because as I’ve argued, some kinds of speech tend to suppress other kinds of speech.

But I think you can learn a lot about a person’s politics by which speech they choose to defend, and which speech they choose to shut down.

So when I see people protecting Richard Spencer and acting like the Declaration of Human Rights has gone up in flames because of campus or workplace hate speech prohibitions, but saying absolutely nothing at all about the way hate speech itself is silencing, I don’t see neutral defenders of free speech. I see people who have taken a side. And it’s not the right side.