Attention, student protesters: Use your words

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Or so we were told by our mothers. But events on both sides of continent in recent weeks seem to belie that old adage. A new generation of protesters has come to the conclusion that words do hurt — and that therefore, extreme measures, up to and including physical force, are justified to keep them from being spoken.

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At Berkeley last month, a riot broke out over a speech planned by Milo Yiannopoulos, a sort of professional conservative troll who worked for Breitbart until a scandal over some remarks on pedophilia. Multiple people seem to have been beaten by the “antifas” (anti-fascists). In videos, the anti-fascists look a lot closer Nazi brownshirts than the people they’re trying to stop. There was further violence this weekend in Berkeley at a pro-Trump march.

Then a few days ago, a speech by Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont also turned violent, and a professor was injured as she walked with Murray after his speech. Murray has given his own account of what occurred, and a lengthy video of the proceedings is available on the web. They are not as frightening as what happened at Berkeley, but they are plenty horrifying enough: they shouted him down, refusing to allow him to speak, then banged on the building and pulled fire alarms when he was transferred to a private room to do a streaming talk they were unable to disrupt. Finally, they tried to physically prevent him from leaving.

The fact that two different speeches triggered violence within the space of a month suggests that we may be entering a new and more dangerous phase of the anti-free-speech movement. Free-speech advocates, particularly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, have done a great job pushing back against overweening college administrations that try to curtail the speech of students and professors. But who do you sue to keep a mob of students from resorting to the heckler’s veto, or their fists, to combat ideas they don’t like?

I asked that of my friend Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, who agrees that while it’s early to call this a trend, there are definitely warning signs.

He suggests one thing that could be contributing to the change is “the progression of ‘safety’ into meaning ‘perfectly comfortable.’” Once you’ve defined words as being equivalent to assault, you’re plausibly justified in using violence to repel the threat.

That’s basically the logic of the editorials that the Berkeley student newspaper published in defense of the rioters. “A peaceful protest was not going to cancel that event,” wrote student Juan Prieto, “just like numerous letters from faculty, staff, Free Speech Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that. The so-called ‘violence’ against private property that the media seems so concerned with stopped white supremacy from organizing itself against my community.”

The implicit assumption here is that their protest movement is not merely entitled to be heard, but to win — win with a victory so total that no voice is ever even raised in opposition. And if they cannot win by raising their voices, then they must move on to more aggressive means. This makes sense only if, as Lukianoff says, you define Yiannopoulos’ outrageous statements as equivalent to violence, or worse than violence.

I will admit that this is a coherent world view. Indeed, it cohered for decades in the old Soviet Union. But most of us don’t want to live in the world it leads to, if for no other reason than because we aren’t so confident that we’ll get to be the ones choosing who needs to be violently silenced.

In a pluralistic society where many questions are contested, the alternative to letting your enemies have their say is not that they shut up and you get to live in peace. It’s that both sides arm up. Though the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that one of Yiannopoulos’s fans may have turned up at an event looking forward to mixing it up with protesters. He later shot a 34-year-old anarchist who was there to protest. When people show up at demonstrations looking for trouble, they rarely have difficulty finding it.

The majority of Americans want to live in a liberal order, where disputes are settled with words — sometimes angry words, wrong words, mean words, but still just words, allowing everyone to walk away with their bones intact. But if we want to keep living there, we need to act now to preserve it, because Lukianoff argues that when it comes to speech, the slippery slope is real, and perilously steep.

This story was originally published March 11, 2017 at 12:49 PM with the headline "Attention, student protesters: Use your words."