An interview with Peter Ives

Free speech has surged back into the headlines and claims on it feel more contradictory and confusing than ever. In just the last month, we’ve seen elected officials commemorate a far-right influencer as a champion of free speech; powerful, profitable media figures fired for saying things other powerful, profitable media figures dislike, and daily the repressive power of the state is harnessed to attack people for speaking out and asserting our right to critique the powerful. On behalf of Fernwood Publishing, editor Fiona Jeffries reached out to Peter Ives, author of Rethinking Free Speech, to help us think through this bewildering storm of contradictions. 

Fiona Jeffries (FJ): What is Free Speech and why does it matter?

Peter Ives (PI): It seems like your question should have a straightforward answer. But it is quite complicated and the current events in the US make it even more confused and more important.

In Rethinking Free Speech I argue that we use the concept of ‘free speech’ to mean too many different things.  One important meaning of free speech is that people should be able to participate in public discussions, inform themselves and others, and form a democratic public will, which hopefully a democratic government will pay attention to, even between elections.

But we also see it more generally as the desire to have a good conversation in many environments about many topics including interactions with family, friends or strangers. Here the desire is that I can speak openly and critically, but also that others can express diverse ideas.

We see how important these issues are when Ezra Klein takes to the New York Times to applaud the late Charlie Kirk for “practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him…” But as Ta-Nehisi Coates so deftly counters, Kirk’s politics and how he practiced them are reprehensible. As Coates states, “It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views…. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s ‘civility’ are tough to square with his penchant for violently demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community." But these arguments (which I think any sensible person would be closer to Coates’ side than Klein’s), are quite distinct from issues of the US First Amendment or the free expression of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Both those constitutional principles hold that the government should not silence citizens, residents or visitors. So much more important than Coates and Klein’s exchange, or what Trump or anyone else happened to feel about Kimmel’s remarks or talent as a comedian, is the overstepping by the government of the First Amendment.

But this distinction between a constitutional protection against government censorship and various positions about what a productive debate looks like has been being eroded by the Right, and many parts of the Left, for a long time. This is one outcome of “free speech absolutism” which fails to make any distinction and holds free speech as one simplistic principle and portrays holding to it as some type of holy crusade.

In Canada we saw a clear example of the failure to make this distinction when the Conservative MP, Rachel Thomas, paid tribute to Charlie Kirk and received a standing ovation from many MPs, both Conservative and Liberal. It was a minority who explained to their constituents that they abhorred political violence, but would not honour Kirk’s racist, misogynist and hateful rhetoric and political project.

In the aftermath of Kimmel getting his show back, both sides seem to return to their corners as the outrage subsides. But this misses the bigger picture. While declaring himself to be the ‘Free Speech President,’ Trump uses his state-power to suppress the media, taking them to court for coverage he doesn’t like, and creating an atmosphere of retribution and fear.

Kimmel is a prominent, white, mainstream late night TV host. Whereas since Trump’s coming to power, the widely documented list of people, such as Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil who have had their First Amendment free expression rights trampled on by ICE, is very long.

FJ: Free speech has roared back into the headlines, what is going on and why do you think it is taking centre stage at this bewildering juncture? 

PI: This is the culmination of a long trend wherein the US right-wing has been pretending to advocate ‘free speech’ while they are actively undermining it. It goes back further, but a key moment here was in the wake of the white-supremacist insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump took Twitter, Facebook and Google to court for cancelling his accounts. As all the legal commentary noted, the suits were thrown out of court because the First Amendment applies to government, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Some just thought it was silly or maybe a crass fundraising effort, which it was, but it was also this long-standing effort to make free speech mean whatever Trump wants at a given moment.

FJ: What does it mean to think critically about free speech today? 

PI: In Rethinking Free Speech I note how many left-wing critics have illustrated the deep hypocrisy in free speech scandals. And this makes it quite tempting to approach free speech as a bankrupt concept used to provide a shield for abhorrent ideas, racism, misogyny, homo- and trans-phobia. But I worry this cedes too much of the terrain of struggle to the Right. It may be more difficult, but I think there’s important work to be done in insisting on the constitutional rights to free speech of the US First Amendment, or the quite different but related Canadian protection of free expression in our Charter. But also acknowledging that people want to have environments in which they can express themselves, learn things, and disagree with people, but do so in a way that does not immediately become acrimonious or in which certain groups must put up with ideas that are heinous, false, and hurtful.

Many left media outlets from Jacobin to The Nation seem to be taking their lead from the free speech absolutist, or as they prefer “opinion absolutist”, line of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression)  that Trump’s attack on free speech reveals him as a hypocrite who has transgressed absolutist free speech doctrine. This is a flawed and dangerous conflation. It’s one obvious reason why the left needs to be clearer in its distinction between two important but very different notions of free speech – that principle enshrined in the First Amendment or the Charter of Rights and Freedom and the desire for decent, diverse and critical conversation and public discourse that can achieve greater understanding.