Yes, Milo Yiannopoulos is an ‘odious’ internet troll and hate-monger, as his detractors say.
Like many people, I first became aware of the self-described right-wing “journalist” and “free speech fundamentalist” when he was banned from Twitter for harassing “Saturday Night Live” star Leslie Jones last summer. Since then, we’ve learned how the senior editor for Breitbart News is using his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of college campuses to antagonize people on the left by espousing offensive, derogatory views on women, Muslims, minority students, transgender people and other groups.
Still, it’s unfortunate that the openly gay professional provocateur was blocked from speaking at UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech movement, even if he would no doubt have said things that would have offended many students.
Two hours before Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance, sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans, his talk was canceled. Violent protests broke out after 1,500 people gathered outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. At one point, a splinter group wearing all black clothing launched fireworks at police on a second-floor balcony. A light generator was knocked down and set ablaze.
But prior to the protests, campus officials had resisted calls from students and faculty to cancel Wednesday’s event. It’s not as if Chancellor Nicholas Dirks endorsed the idea of Yiannopoulos coming to Berkeley. But he believed it was necessary to allow the British national to speak, citing First Amendment principles.
“In our view, Mr. Yiannopoulos is a troll and provocateur who uses odious behavior in part to ‘entertain,’ but also to deflect any serious engagement with ideas,” Dirks said.
Yiannopoulos claims he stands for free speech. But detractors say he’s exploiting those principles to campaign for dangerous, un-American ideas.
That may be the case, but Dirks was right in saying that allowing him to speak was important “to defend all our rights of free expression, especially at this historic moment in our nation, when this right is once again of paramount importance.”
Meanwhile, the people who came to peacefully protest Yiannopoulos’ appearance were likewise entitled to exercise their rights of free expression.
The event that moves me to agree with Dirks happened more than three decades ago. I was a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a few years after a group of neo-Nazis announced their plans to march through Skokie, a suburb of Chicago next door to Evanston.
In Skokie at the time, one out of every six Jewish residents had survived the Holocaust or was directly related to a survivor. Of course, it would have been deeply offensive and painful for these survivors to watch marchers parade through their town, wearing Nazi uniforms and waving swatiska flags, symbols of a regime that imprisoned them in concentration camps or put their loved ones to death.
Skokie denied permission for the neo-Nazis’ gathering, but the American Civil Liberties Union decided to defend the group’s application.
These days, the ACLU is enjoying accolades on the left for fighting President Trump’s immigration ban, but the organization has a well-known history of taking on unpopular free-speech cases because of the principles involved.
Neo-Nazis certainly qualify as unpopular clients. The ACLU has said that the notoriety of this landmark case caused many of its members to resign but many others saw the case as representing “the ACLU’s unwavering commitment to principle.”
The ACLU prevailed in its arguments before the Illinois Supreme Court that the use of the swastika is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. As it turned out, the neo-Nazis never marched through Skokie, and staged a rally in downtown Chicago instead.
Even though the case was settled before I moved there, it was still a topic of discussion years later, and I came to agree with the ACLU’s arguments that even neo-Nazis should enjoy First Amendment rights to express themselves.
I’m sure I have friends who will take me to task for saying Yiannopoulos should have been able to speak at Berkeley.
The question for the courts isn’t whether speech is offensive or unpopular, but whether it will cause direct physical harm by inciting others to violence or, in the classic scenario, of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, according to writer Victoria Bekiempis in a 2012 commentary for the Guardian.
But this question isn’t just a matter for the courts. It’s a matter for all of us.
When the ACLU defended the neo-Nazis in the Skokie case, the organization used the same laws it had invoked during the Civil Rights era. As the ACLU points out, that’s when Southern cities tried to shut down civil rights marches with similar claims about the violence and disruption the protests would cause.
Similarly, if we say it’s OK to shut down someone like Yiannopoulos because he’s offensive, then we can’t object when Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and President Trump’s chief strategist, tells the media, and anyone who disagrees with new White House actions, to “shut up.”
For many, and not just those who protested Wednesday night, Yiannopolous’ ideas are intolerable. But free speech is free speech, and failure to protect free speech, “no matter how reprehensibly that right is being exercised,” makes nonsense of the concept of the right itself, Bekiempis wrote. And, yes, that’s something none of us can afford to lose.
Martha Ross is a Bay Area News Group correspondent
