In Defense of (Real) Free Speech

Mario Savio vs Elon Musk

On December 2, 1964 a UC Berkeley student named Mario Savio stood on the steps in front of Sproul Hall, which housed the college administration, and gave a speech that has become immortal. There’s one bit in particular that has resonated across decades: 

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

It’s one of the clearest, most succinct encapsulations of what civil disobedience and protest movements are all about. If you’re not a fanboy of the 1960s protest movements like I am you might recognize this speech from Battlestar Galactica, where Chief gives it in the 2006 episode Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II. Gotta bring it back to pop culture somehow. 

Savio was the de facto leader of what was known as The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, an important bridge between the Civil Rights Movement of the early 60s and the Vietnam protests of the later 60s. Savio had taken part in Freedom Summer, where volunteers from across the country came to Mississippi to register Black voters, who were under the thumb of repressive and racist Jim Crow laws. Moved by what he had seen, Savio returned to campus looking to raise money and awareness for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was a major student-oriented civil rights group. 

The problem is that he was told he couldn’t do that - political speech and fundraising were banned on the UC campus. The Free Speech Movement began in earnest in October of 1964, when student Jack Weinberg was arrested for manning a Congress of Racial Equality table on campus and refusing to show ID. When he was thrown into the back of a police car, students surrounded it and sat down; Mario Savio climbed onto the roof of the car. 

I had a chance to go to Berkeley this past week, and I was able to stand on the steps in front of Sproul Hall where Savio gave that speech. It was electrifying, not least because while I was there University of California graduate student workers were engaging in protest training - they are on strike because the university system that relies on their labor pays them nothing even close to a living wage. To see that proud tradition of protest live on was an honor. I think Savio, who died in 1996, would have been proud. 

But would he have been proud of the way the term ‘free speech’ is used now? If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s to not assume too much of my 1960s counterculture heroes, but I suspect that Savio would look at the way that term is being thrown around today and be disgusted (Savio, who was adjunct faculty at Sonoma State University, died after suffering a heart attack brought on by a serious argument with an administrator over student fee increases. Savio was a real one to the end). What Savio and his fellows were protesting was not, at all, what Elon Musk is “protesting” when he talks about free speech on Twitter. 

It’s hard to imagine, but back in the 1960s college students did not want to be treated like children. The institutions acted in loco parentis (acting in the place of a parent), but the students - feeling the wave of cultural emancipation - bristled at being treated like high schoolers. Berkeley had outlawed all political activity, ostensibly to maintain order and decorum, but this was a significant violation of the student’s rights because the UC system is public. The idea that students could not organize or make their opinions heard was clearly unacceptable, and the Free Speech Movement paved the way for students across the country to break free of repressive campus rules; in many ways the college experience we take for granted today was born on the steps of Sproul Hall. 

Today the right wing bleats and moans about free speech, but they do not understand what it means. Savio and the Free Speech Movement were in a righteous position because it is unconstitutional for a public institution to decide who gets to speak and about what. When conservatives moan today about free speech they’re always talking about private companies who have content moderation policies. It just so happens that the moderation policies are tough on conservatives, as most of those policies ban racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism and hate speech in general. 

Now Devin, you might say, it feels a bit wrong to make a sweeping claim like that. These conservatives say they’re being censored (I’m using their bastardization of the word, not condoning it) for their ideology. Here’s the thing: ask a conservative just what ideology they’re being censored or “canceled” for. Is it their belief in a flat tax? I don’t think so. Is it their views on the federal budget deficit? It is not. Is it about zoning, or about tariffs? You know it isn’t. You know exactly what they’re being ‘canceled’ for saying, and it’s racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic and antisemitic stuff. Always. Without fail (except when they were getting banned for lying about COVID). 

At any rate, they are free to say these things. They’ve certainly been saying them on Twitter for years, and they’re saying it more than ever now that Elon Musk emptied the cells of Arkham Asylum by unbanning the worst bigots, stalkers and harassers. What they want is not free speech. What they want is speech free of consequences. They don’t want pushback, they don’t want to feel the impact of saying hateful stuff. 

More than that, they don’t just want to be able to speak, they want to be heard. This is what it all comes down to - it’s not enough that they can spout hate at will, it’s that they want that hate in front of as many people as possible, even if it is wildly unpopular (and the good news is that it is). They don’t want to be able to speak, they want a system that amplifies their speech. The problem is that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom to be heard. Nobody has to listen, and they’re not oppressing you if they don’t. 

We know this is all bullshit lip service anyway - these same people cheer on Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which imposes exactly the kind of oppressive anti-speech rules on schools that Savio and the Free Speech Movement stood against. These same people want to ban all sorts of books from libraries and schools. There’s no interest in free speech here, only interest in being heard. 

What Elon Musk represents, though, is a new wrinkle in this faux-free speech warrior pose. Musk represents a new generation of shitmouths who want to not only be heard, they want to be liked. They want to be accepted. They want you to approve of them. Disliking them, not wanting to do business with them - these are censorious acts. How dare companies not advertise on Twitter, where hate speech has been spiking and where the CEO has been acting erratic at best? People called for Congressional hearings about the rumor that Apple was going to take Twitter out of the app store (the same people who spend all their time talking about small government, but you know that the government needs to be big enough to force you to like them). It’s not enough that these hate speakers are allowed in the public square, you have to invite them into your home, seat them at your dinner table and offer them the best cuts of the roast. Anything less than that would be intolerable leftwing bias, which would be trampling on free speech. 

While I was in Berkeley I saw a one man show called Remember This; it’s based on the life of Jan Karski, a Pole who escaped Poland in WWII after witnessing Nazi atrocities. He sat down with Churchill and Roosevelt and told them about the Warsaw Ghetto and the death camps; they ignored him. Later they would claim they didn’t know what was happening to the European Jews, but they were lying. 

I think a lot about the Nazis these days, and how in the years leading up to the Final Solution the Holocaust was unthinkable, something no human could imagine. I think about how you might have been labeled a hysteric for saying, in 1936, that the Nazis were going to kill six million Jews. I think about how the kind of speech that these ‘free speech’ warriors are fighting for is the kind of rhetoric that dehumanizes people in the same way the Nazis dehumanized Jews and Romani and the disabled and other victims of the Holocaust. When Elon Musk tweets about pronouns - attacking trans people is one of the main kinds of speech these folks want to preserve - he shifts the Overton Window of how the non-gender conforming are viewed. He’s doing it on purpose. 

Here’s the final thing about these ‘free speech’ warriors: they do not want you to have free speech. When they truly call the shots, when they get rid of “leftwing bias” (which means compassion, empathy, respect for others, etc) they will not give you the speech they demanded for themselves. They will define anything you say against them as censorious (they already do this) and they will shut you down. Freedom of speech is a bedrock value of modern society, and that’s why they are using it as a cover to take away the rights of others. Who wants to say that they’re against free speech? It sounds horrible. That’s why they cloak their own attacks on speech as being in defense of free speech. 

And look. I will defend these scumbags’ right to say this horrible stuff. I’m a pretty solid free speech defender; I do not want to define what speech is or isn’t okay because I don’t want someone else to come along and use that definition against me, or people who I like. These people have the right to say this shit, but a private company has the right to not carry it, I have the right to not listen to it and most of all we all have the right to shout them down. 

But maybe most important is that these guys retain one very important right: to get their asses kicked if they keep saying hateful shit. Getting a beatdown for opening your fat mouth is, where I come from, one of the great God-given rights. Some people just love exercising it.