Dealing with Neo-Nazis and white nationalists doesn’t need to be that complicated. But they really want you to think it is.
Detroit police officers escorted Neo-Nazis in Detroit during the annual Pride Parade.
In light of such events, our minds turn to what can we do? Often saying It’s a public place! They have as much right to be there as anyone else!
Whether or not we consider their attempt to disrupt the parade a matter of free speech is not the only factor up for consideration.
Why would the police escort them? If they feared for their lives, isn’t that why they have the guns? To protect themselves? Or is it really about something else?
Why did officers protect them and not the thousands supporting minority rights? Generally, police are stationed to keep things civil, not escort.
But this isn’t our only thought. Their presence escorting white nationalists is especially galling given the presence of white nationalism within police departments. And the long history of our police departments being tools for the enforcement of white supremacy.
Events like this one reveal the perpetual political cowardice in actually dealing with systemic racism.
And then, of course, what exactly are these people actually protesting? LGBTQ persons? Israel? Minorities able to exercise their rights? People having fun?
What do the swastikas communicate? What is the message? Is it clearly a protest in the traditional sense? Of course it isn’t.
No, the logic and the visuals don’t match the rhetoric.
It isn’t a matter of free speech any more than this group actually needed protection.
The point isn’t how we bend over backward to protect a majority group who are in the minority in this particular situation. It’s what they came to do to a big, public event. There is a specific intention here we always gloss over.
They came to intimidate and use the tools of the powerful to silence.
This is completely unacceptable in a free society. People must have the right to assemble and share and be in public.
But more than that, protecting intimidation as if it were free speech is truly dangerous. It makes a total mockery of free speech because if we declare it to be speech, then it is a form of speech which deprives speech. We are tacitly granting a freedom to restrict freedom.
And as we’ve seen in other areas, notably the poorly named religious freedom, a freedom which restricts the freedom of others is intolerable.
By defining freedom in such a way, we allow one kind of freedom: the bullying kind: to hollow out society. In pursuing a free society, we create a vehicle to make society inherently unfree.
Beyond Free Speech
While the circumstances are more complicated than the free speech extremism which governs modern debate, picking out the truth isn’t actually hard.
What’s hard is dealing with how ingrained our prejudice is. Harder still, standing up to those looking to use it to abuse others.
So instead, we’re tempted to keep it as a debate about free speech because we want a universal absolute. That’ll settle things and make us feel more comfortable with the decision.
But Neo-Nazis and white nationalists are using that very loophole to destroy free speech.
Protecting speech isn’t just about keeping racists safe, too. It means preventing the intimidation tactics Neo-Nazis and white nationalists use to curtail minority rights. Anything less than that ensures that some speech, and some minorities, are never truly free.
Because right now, the only real opponent of free speech is the one wearing a swastika.
And I’d rather the one wearing a badge not make it easier for them.