The Committee to Protect Bloggers has agitated on behalf of people whose personal philosophies are repellent. But we have exerted our efforts not truly on their behalf but on behalf of freedom, the freedom to speak unpopular thoughts without government interference. I have noticed a tendency to confuse this sort of pressure, to keep governments out of the free speech business, with support of the contents of that speech. The CPB will advocate for anyone whose government is attempting to keep them from speaking their minds through intimidation and physical violence.

The whole idea of the CPB, or perhaps its ideal, is one of a society of open discourse, uncompromised by governmental interference. In other words, our goal is a free marketplace of ideas. In fact, when it comes to that marketplace, we are laissez-faire in the extreme. If an idea doesn’t float, it doesn’t deserve to. And, just as in a democracy a citizen is obligated to do his or her duty by voting, in a marketplace of ideas, the same obligation ensues.

So that’s why the validation of Holocaust deniers, and any other racist idiots, by universities and alleged “free speech” groups in countries where they are not silenced by the government is outright bullshit. This has recently come up in the town where I live, the university town of Eugene, Oregon, where a Holocaust denier has been invited to speak at the local university by an organization that calls itself a “free speech” group.

The government, at least in the U.S., is not in the business of jailing, or otherwise silencing, Holocaust deniers. But useful idiots like the Pacifica Forum nevertheless trot out a self-justifying appeal to free speech that is half-witted at best and cynical at worst. For a government to interfere and shut people up, even nitwits, is intolerable. Equally intolerable is making the advocation of cretins palatable by sprinkling free speech rhetoric on it.

In other words, any one, in any society in which the government is not silencing these opinions, is a voter. You are either voting for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism or you are voting against it. Whenever you hear people defending their glorification of evil, whether out of ignorance or cleverness, with free speech, well, it’s time to go to the polls. Check free speech or faux speech.