I’m in favour of freedom of speech. I’m in favour of a culture where mockery, a diversity of opinions (including those that turn my stomach), intellectual debate and the right of individuals to call each other ‘wankers’ on occasion are allowed. Having seen freedom of speech, a freedom bought dearly for us by our ancestors, eviscerated where I live and replaced by dubious and capricious ‘hate speech’ laws, I have come to appreciate more and more the protections the US First Amendment gives to the citizen and would like such rights exported to where I live.

The ‘Town Square’ whether it be a physical place or a virtual place, should be one where the State does not have any power to silence any opinion, except one where the speaker is calling for an immediate and credible threat to violence against persons or property. This is because it is in this ‘Town Square’ where ideas are debated and good and bad ideas are tested. It is the threshing floor of open societies where the wheat of good ideas are removed via vigorous debate, from the chaff of bad ones.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that it is those with bad ideas or those with fixed ideologies that they don’t want challenged who are most favourable to the idea of censorship. You see it in the UK where there are identity politics groups who are obsessed with stopping those who disagree with them from having a voice and you see it in the political class who do not want challenge to their viewpoints as they see their viewpoints as the only ‘good’ ones. These identity politics groups and the political classes see the removal of viewpoints they don’t like as a victory, but it is a hollow one. This is because you don’t make bad ideas go away by removing the speaker from the Town Square, you only force those with bad ideas into small echo chambers where they can often end up radicalising themselves and others.

The video below by Myles Power the chemist and well known Quack-buster, is for me a classic example of using freedom of speech to counter a bad idea, in this case Holocaust denial. Although Jewish myself I don’t believe that Holocaust deniers should be banned from speaking in public as although they might be removed from one platform, you can bet your last pound that these nutcases would not change their views or cease to influence others by being removed. They will still operate, still influence people and still believe what they do. What’s worse is that banning such nutters gives them a sort of cachet, it makes them believe that they are ‘onto something’ because they have been banned and turns them into martyrs for their twisted cause.

I would much prefer these nutcases to be visible where they can be challenged and even laughed at. Pushing such people into echo chambers removes them from being countered and still allows them to influence others without any countervailing voice challenging that influence. Also by debating and disproving them although you may not influence the speaker themselves, there’s a greater chance that you may well influence their audience. I believe that it was Ben Shapiro who once said that the best reason for debating a far Leftist was not that by such debate you would change the mind of the individual far Leftist, but that those in the audience might be swayed away by your arguments and stop listening to the far Leftist. In other words you enter into debate with ones enemy to discredit them and to persuade others that what your enemy is saying is of no value or that their argument has a great many flaws.

What Mr Power does in the video, which is a response video to some Holocaust deniers who called him a liar because Mr Power previously made a series of three videos debunking the major claims of Holocaust deniers is a classic example of using fact to defeat fiction. Mr Power skilfully takes apart what the deniers are saying and uses credible and checkable facts to show that the deniers claims that there never was a Holocaust and that Mr Power lied about it, were utterly and completely wrong. Mr Power has probably done a great deal more in this video to stop people being sucked in to the cesspit of Holocaust denial than any law preventing such nutcases to speak would ever have done. This alone should show the value of freedom of speech and why it must be both protected and increased.