Freedom of Speech Is Not Freedom From Dissent – GQ Magazine

The anti-Milo Yiannopoulos protests at UC Berkeley have left Donald Trump and friends suddenly in desperate need of a safe space.

On Wednesday, a planned appearance at UC Berkeley by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart contributor and high priest of the Twitter Pepe Avatar crew, was cancelled after some 1500 protesters turned out to make clear that his brand of vapid, bigoted bullshit was unwelcome in the university community. This was very, very good. Unfortunately, these vibes were ruined by the arrival of an estimated 150 Black Bloc provocateurs, who showed up on campus to start fires, break windows, throw rocks and fireworks at police, and generally ruin everyone's good time. This was very, very bad.

Although the university was quick to make clear that the mask-wearing rioters were unaffiliated with the assembled protesters, the damage was done. Right-wing media outlets spent the morning purposefully conflating the nonviolent demonstrators with the violent ones in order to boost their pet "dangerous unhinged violent liberals" narrative. President Trump, a man who has no time for things like "reading" or "facts," responded to these dumb headlines and the scary-looking images he saw on cable news by...threatening to pull federal funding from the University of California.

It was also very, very strange how the president had nothing to say about the the sanctity of tolerating "different points of view" when an apparent Milo supporter shot a protester at a Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington last monththe shooter later claimed self-defensebut I'm sure Trump's omission was just an oversight. Here's how serial liar Kellyanne Conway put it on Fox and Friends this morning:

I dont even know if they know what theyre protesting, she said. Is it the free speech? Having someone maybe on your campus who has a dissenting point of view or wants to present an alternative point of view?

Sounds to me like someone could really use a safe space.

The point that Trump and Conway and their ilk miss is that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom from dissent. Milo Yiannopoulos is a basically an Internet troll who hit the big time, and he cares more about the attention that his bigoted remarks earn him than actually engaging in legitimate, constructive debates over policy or ideology. (I mean, Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter after organizing a campaign of racist, sexist harassment against Leslie Jones. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get banned from Twitter for being racist and sexist?!) Nonetheless, he is perfectly within his rights to hold whatever deplorable or non-deplorable views he likes. Freedom of speech often isn't fun, but that's how it works.

At the same time, though, other private citizens are perfectly within their rights to show up where Yiannopoulos intends to spew his vile hate speech nonsense and, through nonviolent means, shut that shit down. Yes, Cal is a public university, and it boasts a proud tradition of supporting freedom of expression. But the administration didn't bar him from campusit was student protests that did it. Despite their fondest victimhood fantasies, when Yiannopoulos and Trump and Conway and company are met with thousands of protesters telling them to go to hell, no one's "free speech rights" are being trampled. This is just the free market of ideas responding loud and clear, and if they don't like the reactions their views elicit, they have no one to blame but themselves.

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Freedom of Speech Is Not Freedom From Dissent - GQ Magazine