‘Free speech can’t extend to lies’

‘Free speech can’t extend to lies.’ But it can, and it does — whenever people lie. What people mean when they say this, is: they will not allow ‘free speech’ which extends to lies. They mean that they will not allow free speech.

It may be a facile point to ask what a lie is anyway or bring up Pilate’s question to Christ. There is such a thing as truth, whatever Pilate implied, but it is dangerously hard to draft laws that define lies.

The illiberal liberals who say now that free speech cannot extend to lies bring up the guidance for newspapers and the existence of libel laws, yet print journalists have often been appalled at the constraints of libel law.

Do we want to jettison free speech in favour of defensible speech? Maybe, if we are paid well by a company with funds, we do. But already we are losing freedom to fear of attack. Perhaps, if we are alone during a series of lockdowns going into their second tiresome year, we feel like letting the strong voices, who want to regulate speech, take over.

Nevertheless, however appalled we are at the amateur coup in America (and at all that led up to it): if Rightists have managed to convince us that ‘free speech’ is a synonym for their peculiar Rightist views, and to seduce us into changing the meaning of the words, they have won. We then live in their world.

Of course the technocratic reflex is to think up more laws. The harder thing was always to engage in real debate, change society, and keep institutions robust; not to whittle public institutions down to minimum costs and political convenience, or manage people’s expectations rather than confront them. Going for the easier (and what seemed the cleverer) way, of managing people rather than taking them seriously, was what started this slide out of democratic politics in the first place.

This, on Capitol Hill, was one attempted coup. It has not succeeded. Illiberal liberals stand one step away from being a Trojan Horse for the Right. They should never have taken those whom their elites excluded for granted in the first place, and it may seem too late now to take a purist stance on freedom of speech. Really, it is too late not to.