Conflation and Lying To Oneself

Lindy West’s opening gambit would have brought a smile to any lawyer’s face, but for the fact that it was written by Lindy West.

The first thousand times I was accused of being a politically correct, anti-free-speech censor, it seemed silly. The charge was always in response to some relatively innocuous bit of cultural criticism — like, say, that racism is bad and artists should try not to make racist art if they don’t want to be called racists. Or that if comedians want to joke about rape, they should write their jokes very carefully because rape is very horrible. I saw it happen to other women, too, women who had asked for better representation in media, or had even gone and said the words “video games.”

I always laughed at the anti-free-speech charge. I was not the government. I literally could not censor anyone. I cannot go around handcuffing comedians and dragging them off to joke jail. (Anyway, I am a prison abolitionist. That goes for open-mic-based offenses, too.)

Criticism is not censorship, and no matter how insistent Twitter’s free speech brigade might be, I felt safe knowing that we could always go back to the text. The Constitution was on my side.

West wrote for Jezebel on racism, sexism and fat shaming. And she was accused of being “politically incorrect”? Perhaps she doesn’t mean it in the same sense that anyone else does. Anyone. Anyone at all.

But her first few paragraphs, aside from her opening gambit of victimhood, make an excellent point. She’s just a voice. She’s not the government. She can’t violate anyone’s First Amendment rights, no matter what she does. If she shouts while others are trying to speak, she’s just rude and offensive. If she shrieks that you’re racist and sexist, a homophobe or xenophobe, a guy who doesn’t appreciate the hotness of fat chicks, then she has merely used the best weapons in her social justice arsenal.* Isn’t she allowed?

After those first three paragraphs, Lindy West could have been on any end of the political spectrum, for as she says, the cries of censorship are conflation, and indeed they are. But then, she was still Lindy West.

But that was when I thought facts had power, when what we think of as the truth was based more on observable reality and less on the incantations of paranoid uncles who would rather die of preventable diseases than let America’s first black president leave an intact legacy. When the “free speech” canard started nibbling away at me, around 2012 or so, it seemed as goofy as the idea of Donald Trump becoming president. Oops.

It’s those paranoid uncles, you see, who rejected facts based on observable reality, and not her. She is the good guy (is calling her a “guy” problematic?) in her own narrative, the speaker of truth and wisdom, and it’s those paranoid uncles who, well. Let’s turn to West’s own words.

Since then, the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web — men’s rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

This is where West does what she complains of others doing, conflating. No, she is not the government. No, she personally lacks the capacity to violate the First Amendment. But that does not mean what she has to say is “cultural criticism.” Screaming racist and sexist at everyone who disagrees with you is ad hominem, not criticism. And yet, she’s entitled to scream whatever she wants, because this is America, and isn’t she allowed?

Yet, what West attributes to “men,” which doesn’t necessarily flow easily from her paranoid uncle example, isn’t men, but a small slice of men who evoke an even smaller slice of female ire. The men of GamerGate, who have been ungenerous in the extreme, in West’s eyes, to her lionized Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

You can find disingenuous rhetoric about protecting free speech in the engine room of pretty much every digital-age culture war. The refrain has become so ubiquitous that it’s earned its own sarcastic homophone in progressive circles: “freeze peach!” Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you don’t like is allowed to criticize you.

QED. Except her claim of disingenuous rhetoric is disingenuous rhetoric. They complain about being silenced, which is exactly what West complains about, under the non-legal concept of free speech. To the extent the First Amendment was involved, it was because the gals were demanding laws and sanctions, actual First Amendment stuff, to silence if not criminalize those who unfairly, in their minds, silenced them with their mean and hateful words.

If their goal was really to foster free public discourse, we would have seen deafening bipartisan support for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Princeton African-American studies assistant professor and author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation,” who canceled two speaking engagements in late May after Fox News aired video of her calling President Trump a “racist and sexist megalomaniac.” Professor Taylor received more than 50 “hate-filled and threatening emails,” many racially charged, some containing “specific threats of violence, including murder,” she wrote in a statement.

And the disingenousness of the rhetoric comes to pass. Again. While there were people who addressed this situation, West pulled a shrewd move by switching from people arguing for their own speech to people arguing about fostering free public discourse. West complains about others failing to do what she fails to do. West conflates people defending their own right to speak with defending speech she favors.

Where were the brave knights of free speech when Professor Taylor was being intimidated into silence?

Notice how West’s totally appropriate cultural criticism just morphed into “intimidated into silence”? And West doesn’t get to ask if she’s a flagrant hypocrite.

They were nowhere, of course (except, perhaps, on the other end of some of those emails), because their true goal has always been to ensure that if anyone is determining the ways that we collectively choose to restrict our own speech in the name of values, they are the ones setting the limits. They want to perform a factory reset to a time when people of color and women didn’t tell white men what to do. And only one 2016 presidential candidate promised such a reset.

Lindy West should have stopped after the first three paragraphs, before she devolved into the parody of the hypocritical and disingenuous social justice warrior. She was totally right about conflating free speech and the First Amendment. And she’s totally guilty of it in the First Degree.

*There was a time when being called racist or sexist might have been taken seriously, but when even the most social justice-y white guy can’t overcome the shrieks through his faithful allyship, then why bother?

SERIOUSLY JUST BE QUIET. ONLY APPOINTED/APPROVED WHITES CAN SPEAK (AND ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO)

Sorry. No.

15 thoughts on “Conflation and Lying To Oneself

  1. wilbur

    “(t)hese communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre.”

    I’ve never visited a site like “men’s rights forums (or) video game blogs”, and find it no less than bizarre that zhe believes those who take issue with her belong to this stratum.

    I did have to look up the word “gyre”. I guess that makes me a mediocre white man.

    1. B. McLeod

      She apparently believes fat chicks are hot, so it is not surprising her other beliefs are untethered from reality as well.

      1. wilbur

        Some of the very best times I’ve had in my life were in the company of a plus-sized lady.

        Sir Mix-a-Wilbur’s philosophy is that the most important attribute is enthusiasm.

    2. Fubar

      I did have to look up the word “gyre”. I guess that makes me a mediocre white man.

      Some women, when men ask for dates,
      Want to know if they’ve ever read Yeats.
      They’ll talk really tough,
      About falcons and stuff,
      And slouching beasts stealing home plates!

  2. Jim Tyre

    Sorry. No.

    Whoa. A tweet of yours reproduced in that blog post has you using maga. I must now rethink everything.

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