Where are the defenders of Kanye Wests right to speak out on television and on social media? The newest censors in our land are the moguls who own the newspapers and TV stations and social networks like Twitter and Meta; they proudly de-platform the rants of the Kanye Wests.

I was among the lucky who got to hear West, the Black dissident, on Tucker Carlsons Fox News Channel show when West mocked those who criticized his having worn a White Lives Matter t-shirt. I heard his contentious viewpoints about Jews, some of whom think they have a right to dictate the terms and prohibitions of our discourse about vexing social justice issues if and when an advocate utters the J-word. I disagreed with most of what West had to say, but Im glad I got to hear it from the horses mouth.

Who do these modern-day censors think themselves to be, and why do they think that the readers of tweets and watchers of the Idiot Box need their protection from the rants of the weirdest and wildest provocateurs of our times?

The modern-day censors think that banning the wild West from our TV screens and his angry voice from our social media outlets is the civically responsible solution. Why not deplatform hate speech? Because their rules are arbitrary, and their goalposts, ever-moving. Today theyre banning Kanye; yesterday they banned speakers on our college campuses who spoke up for Palestinian rights, or on behalf of Zionism, and the defenders of Anita Bryant, the fierce opponent of gay rights.

It was on the college campus where literal barricades were erected against hearing the speeches of renegade lecturers who decried censorship of any kind, where the advocates of political correctness were welcomed and the purveyors of anti-racism were cheered; they condemned the works of authors like Mark Twain whose Huckleberry Finn cleverly and prodigiously used the N-word.

Kanye West attends the "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold" Premiere Screening on Oct. 12, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Jason Davis/Getty Images for DailyWire+)

That Mark Twains books and the author himself was anti-racist did not much matter to the zealots who think the best thing about freedom and speech is purging controversial ideas and bad words from our conversations. Gone and just about forgotten are the great defenders of free speech stalwarts like Nat Hentoff, the now-deceased author whose columns and books argued that odious ideas and so-called hate speech not only deserved to be heard and read, but should never be banned outright in our literature or public arenas. Rather, they should be answered.

Hentoff was one who favored bringing onerous, offensive ideas into the open where they could be confronted instead of hidden or squelched as bad ideas. In a democracy, practiced in a truly open discussion, the instinct to bury our viewpoint differences is the equivalent of errant nonsense.

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But not even the American Civil Liberties Union took Hentoffs side when he excoriated its leaders for passing rules that would have prohibited its dissident board members from expressing to the public their opposition to pompous, errant positions.

Even then, Hentoff and his free speech colleagues were a dwindling legion, especially on the college campus and on television. I remember a time when Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were invited onto television talk shows to pronounce their ideology and to protest Black incursions on everything sacred and white. Occasionally, a Black nationalist would be invited onto TV and to the campuses to complain about whites studied silence about supposed Jewish foes of Black power and intact Black communities.

Not every day did we see the likes of Louis Farrakhan or Black anti-Semites on our TV screens or in major media but occasionally, they got heard and seen, and their books and venomous preachments read and debated. Airing such putrid sentiment and contested opinions used to be the fashion of the colleges and social media.

Yes, I understand the legal argument that Twitter and Facebook, as private companies, have a right to craft and enforce so-called community standards and ban people who turn their platforms into uncivil environments. I am speaking to the wider wisdom of such an approach, not to its legality. The First Amendment surely does not require owners of our media to let in trouble-making speakers. (West may try to avoid the problem by buying Parler, another social media platform; well see if he can build that into a true free-for-all.)

But where are the owners of mass media who used to welcome fierce and contentious disagreements about social events and civic matters? Are there none (other than Elon Musk) who want to hear what others think and say who disagree with them and the body politic?

Stifling free expression in any widely available forum is un-American. Not every social media platform, newspaper or TV station will choose a free forum for programming choices, but some, at least one, should be a purveyor of free, unfettered speech (with warnings to their audience, if they want). If racists or anti-Semites make it on the platform, so what? Neither Jewish nor Blacks blood is so thin we cant stomach hearing what our foes think of us and themselves by way of fake superiority.

Meyers is president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.

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Where are the liberal defenders of Kanye West's freedom to speak? - New York Daily News