O problema de os tornar mártires da liberdade de expressão

One important part of the free-speech consensus that now appears to be breaking down is the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organisations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse – rather than as, say, terrorist organisations – and therefore have a moral right to be heard. “The mantle of free speech in the contemporary political context has somehow been claimed by the white supremacists,” Ahilan Arulanantham, the legal director and director of advocacy at the ACLU of Southern California, told me. To Weinrib, the historian, the conflict surrounding the ACLU is largely about “the extent to which defending these groups is perceived to legitimate their ideas”.

To critics of the ACLU’s approach, there is something hopelessly naive about deploring the views of white supremacists while celebrating their right to express themselves freely, and thereby influence the political debate. Defenders of the US’s free-speech status quo often paint its detractors as “snowflakes” whose primary objection is that hateful speech hurts people’s feelings. But to thinkers such as the literary theorist Stanley Fish – who once wrote a book titled There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech … And It’s a Good Thing Too – the promotion of white supremacists’ rights represents a failure of political realism. “The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognise it as the speech of your enemy,” Fish told an interviewer in 1998, “and what you do in response to the speech of your enemy is … attempt to stamp it out.”