I hate this notion that universities need to let literally anyone speak or else you’re stifling knowledge. Here’s something that stifles knowledge: having to explain very basic things over and over. If you let someone barge into a medical laboratory and yell “everyone stop what you’re doing and prove to me that germs exist”, that’s stifling knowledge. Shutting everything down so that a neo-nazi can calmly ask whether black people are people does not enrich a learning environment in any way, It drags everything down and exhausts everyone. Free speech absolutism is crude and unsophisticated, we need to acknowledge that sometimes speech has deleterious effects on the free speech of others.
Also like… Speech is an action. Fascist speech as an action that excludes, demonizes, and makes their targeted groups feel intensely uncomfortable.
The ‘intensely uncomfortable’ isn’t some ‘people need to always be comfy’ thing either. Like, it’s okay to make people uncomfortable with your opiions but that’s not what’s meant here.
Fascist speech communicates ‘there are people here who do not want you to exist and the audience doesn’t care enough about you to kick them out inn disgust’. It makes the targets of fascists feel isolated and unsafe and ultimately drives them out of the space, while the fascism in the space is allowed to grow.
Your university probably already has limits on speech covering everything from copyright to ads for alcohol. You can shut a fascist up.
QueerAnarchism 