A friend of mine, Richard Horowitz, wrote a beautiful book called In The Garden of the Righteous. He's a phenomenal writer, and he researched a number of the most poignant cases of people who, at great risk and at great cost to themselves, stood up for strangers against the Nazis.
He points out in the introduction to the book that only about 27,000 people have been recognized at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel, for righteous deeds. And he compares that number to the 500 million citizens that there were in Europe at the time. He says that for every Madison Square Garden filled with citizens, there was one person who was willing to stand up.
I imagine that part of the reason for writing the book is to look for the common characteristics that define people who are capable of acting in the face this kind of evil and, frankly, this kind of math. The odds are that if you do the right thing, it's going to work out very, very badly.
I'm very respectful of Richard, and I appreciate very much the work he did for the book. We must appreciate how extraordinary the people on whom he focuses are. Ultimately, though, that number of one for every packed arena has probably been a pretty consistent number over time for people faced with these kinds of horrible choices.
Faced with these kinds of odds, people do what's rational, even if they have strong feelings that go against what's happening around them. They calculate the cost to themselves of resisting is going to be so extreme that they make the decision not to resist. Perhaps that explains why, as Richard pointed out in recent conversations, that there have been 40 episodes of genocide in the world since the Holocaust.
Is the right question to consider that somehow humans are flawed in our response to these kinds of situations? Or maybe the flaw lies in the way that we're setting up our societies. If you create the conditions where these mass atrocities are possible, why wouldn’t we see the same results over and over again?
If you look at the United States, there is a growing belief in the concept that words can be violence. Not the idea that words that incite violence are somehow wrong, or words that encourage violence are wrong, but actually that ideas can have the impact of violence. As this concept becomes more mainstream, our freedom to speak is in peril, and the danger of losing that freedom is truly existential for our way of life.
The concept that my feelings matter when I am exposed to your ideas probably started in our colleges and universities where we started to hear about the notions of safe spaces and triggering events. NYU psychology professor Jon Haidt has done groundbreaking work on these issues. We have a new generation of leftists who believe that in and of itself, an idea can have the impact of violence. When Senator Tom Cotton wrote an Op-Ed in the NY Times decrying the actual violence in the streets post-George Floyd’s murder, a NYT staffer tweeted out the following: “Running this (piece) put Black NYT staffers in danger.” How could the view of a sitting US Senator that riots should be quelled endanger people who work at the NY Times?
In the landmark decision in the Skokie Neo-Nazi march case (Collin vs. Smith), Federal District Court Judge Pell wrote: “ If any philosophy should be regarded as completely unacceptable to civilized society, that of plaintiffs…would be a good place to start… Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judge and juries but on the competition of other ideas.“ Is this foundational concept getting lost?
If you look through history the one common thread, the most important tool in the arsenal of autocracies, is the control of media and the limitation on the expression of ideas. The reason that tool is so important is that resistance becomes rational when we know how our fellow citizens feel about what we see. Our odds of being singled out for punishment simply go down when we know that others share our views. We don’t have to be quite so extraordinary to do the right thing.
In the introduction to Richard Hurowitz’ book he talks about the White Rose resistance movement in Germany, where a group of students were openly handing out pamphlets during the war that were critical of the government. They were handing out pieces of paper with words on them.
That act of sharing ideas was considered to be so dangerous by the Nazi autocracy that they beheaded the people who did so - Hans and Sophie Scholl, Kurt Huber. Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf and Christof Probst.
This terror at the thought of the free exchange of ideas has not been limited to the Nazis. The hallmark of any society that is not free is that there are strict limitations on information, on the the sharing of ideas.
Greg Lukianoff, Jon Haidt's co-author in the phenomenal book, The Coddling of the American Mind, has a wonderful organization - FIRE, which has become the leading free speech advocate that perhaps the ACLU might have been at one time but is no longer. We need more. We need everyone. We need you, no matter what your political ends are.
When freedom of speech dies, freedom dies.
Let's talk a little bit about two words that are very commonly thrown around these days, misinformation and disinformation. The distinction between them is absolutely critical. Misinformation is information that's incorrect. Disinformation is information that's purposefully inaccurate. There are plenty of arguments that are valid to an extent with respect to the spreading of intentionally false information, but we already have many rules about that. We have rules about slander and liable and fraud. As a basic construct disinformation is already not protected, so we do not have to much to our basic system to be more vigilant about disinformation.
Now, misinformation on the other hand, we really do need to discuss, because misinformation is protected speech under the First Amendment.
By the way, there's a reason it's the FIRST Amendment, not the seventh or the 12th, or the 23rd that protects speech. The Founders understood that we do not always know what's misinformation. We don't always know who's right and who's wrong. If you think about so much of the scientific information that has been disseminated during the COVID pandemic that was labeled as misinformation or disinformation has turned out to be true. So much of what was presented to us by our government authorities, by our media, has turned out to be at best misinformation and potentially even disinformation.
We have to come to a place where we almost revere misinformation because when everyone thinks the world is flat and you claim the world is round that is perceived as misinformation for a time.
One of the really disturbing parts of the Twitter files revelations, (most likely this wasn't just happening at Twitter). was the organized effort, a collusion of people in government and people in industry to try to silence certain voices. It is stunning that is that there is so little bipartisan agreement about how important this incident is. Folks on the left try to make the subtle intellectual point about the relationship the government had with these entities. They remind us that the freedom of speech protection that we have is confined to our relationship with government, not private actors.
Yael Roth, the former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, said the following in a prepared statement before Congressional testimony: “Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more. Trust & Safety’s job is to try to find a balance between one person’s free speech, and the impacts of their free speech on the ability of others to participate.” Now that is a pretty terrifying concept for Twitter to believe - that there is such a thing as too much free speech.
We can acknowledge that there is certainly a legitimate question as to whether coordinating with the social media companies represented government action and violated the Constitution. But there's a bigger point - the general principle that the reason freedom of speech is in the First Amendment is because it is the foundation of freedom. And when we have people who control the information flow that is viewed by the public, (encouraged by the Government) who essentially are saying that they do not endorse the First Amendment, we are headed down a slippery slope.
The free exchange of opinions and information has historically been where freedom makes its stand. For the first time in my life, we now have a very palpable sense that well, maybe I can’t say that. Maybe you can’t say this. I wrote a piece last year about this phenomenon called When Truth Must Be Whispered.
Imagine you can only choose one of the following - freedom of the press, freedom of speech or democracy. Which would you choose? Well, clearly the press can be extremely biased and electing leaders does not always lead to the preservation of basic rights.
At the end of the day, speech is the antidote to control. That is not the case because the exchange of ideas will change the minds of our fellow citizens. Rather, it is because we can truly understand how isolated we may or may not be in the views we hold. Beware those guardians of “Democracy” who come bearing the gift of “necessary” limitations on speech. They are sowing the seeds of the end of a free society.