The trouble about fighting for human freedom, is that you have to spend much of your life defending sons-of-b*tches; for oppressive laws are always aimed at them originally, and oppression must be stopped in the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Everyone knows that censorship is bad. That’s why nobody calls it censorship unless it’s their opponents doing it–they’ll call it something like “defending truth” or “protecting minorities” instead.
I’ve seen way too many fellow liberals argue for the criminalization of pornography and/or sex work. (This isn’t what the whole post is about, but I gotta start somewhere.) When it’s phrased in terms of protecting women and children, it’s hard to argue against. No feminist wants to defend the toxic and degrading attitudes towards sex and women that mainstream pornography models, and nobody with a grain of moral integrity or social self-preservation wants to be seen as encouraging slavery, or the abuse and exploitation of women and minorities. But I worry, now that the ruling faction has made criminalizing porn seem actually doable, that those friends might miss the bigger picture.
Make no mistake: the recent crackdowns on adult content–delisting games from Steam and itch.io, stricter age verification on both adult and all-ages websites, increased pressure on payment processors to vet (read: abandon) vendors of adult media, etc.–aren’t really about protecting children or women. They’re about criminalizing sexuality.
Going after pedophiles, pimps, and perverts is just an excuse. As you’re undoubtedly aware, they’re also going after trans people, homosexuals and queers, scientific research on sex, abortion protections, and the sex workers themselves. Do you think they’re going to stop there? Letting them tamp down the fringes of society just shrinks the fringe. Promiscuity. Fetishists. Premarital sex. Divorce. Domestic abuse protections, including spousal rape. Art depicting sexuality of any kind. Birth control. It’s not paranoia, it’s spelled out in black-and-white in the Project 2025 playbook, which our current administration has been following almost to the letter.
(This is where I transition from talking about porn to talking about the kinds of left-wing censorship people get in real fights over.)
Humans are political animals, and it’s natural–commendable, even!–to want to silence bullies who are causing legitimate harm. But a person’s capacity for harm doesn’t come from their words alone, it comes from the power others give them. A bully with more power than you can’t be silenced by force, and if you silence someone with less power than you, guess what: you’re the bully.
Yes, really.
If someone is causing harm, by all means work to put a stop to it–but never forget that as a human being, you will overestimate how justified you are in silencing–not just stopping–your political opponents. Remove their ability to cause harm, not their ability to disseminate their beliefs.
Restrictions on freedom of speech are the canary in the coal mine of fascist takeovers. “Cancel culture” was a far sight from fascism, but it shifted the Overton window on what sort of political tactics were deemed acceptable. Do you still believe (if you ever did) that it’s okay to fire someone for voicing a belief that’s unrelated to their job, not about a specific person, in their free time and on their own channels? Because the exact same justifications are being used now to harass and persecute critics of the government, to wipe out entire federal departments performing critical work, to threaten free journalism, and more. If you feel reluctant to defend free speech when the people speaking are gross, evil, embarrassing, assholes, wrong, whatever–please, please get over it. It is not, and never has been, about them. Something much bigger is at stake.
Freedom of speech is the irreducible foundation of any free government. We all implicitly understand its importance, even if we never put words to it. So much so that even the fascists will claim “free speech” as a justification for their actions–and many of them believe it, too! Which just goes to show how difficult a principle it is to actually stick to.
Part of the difficulty, of course, is that a lot of beliefs really will cause harm if acted on. And of course we want to stop people from spreading these harmful beliefs! It really, truly feels like the right thing to do, deep down in the bottom of your soul. But liberalism (and by “liberalism” I don’t mean “left-leaning ideology” or something, I mean the miraculous civil-war-prevention technology that was both the product and engine of the Enlightenment) is more delicate and counterintuitive than most self-proclaimed liberals realize. If you stop critically examining your urge to stifle harmful speech, you throw sand into the gears of a machine that’s saved the lives of nations.
Freedom of speech and belief is amendment #1 for a reason. Never hesitate to defend the inalienable rights of others–not even sons-of-b*tches.
It’s not them you’re really defending.
In Search of Secrets 