Summary
Candace Owens, a U.S. conservative commentator, has been denied a visa to enter New Zealand for a speaking tour after being banned from Australia.
Australian officials barred her in October, citing her Holocaust denial remarks and potential to incite discord, following calls from Jewish groups.
New Zealand immigration laws prohibit entry to individuals banned from other countries.
Owens, known for controversial statements on topics like Black Lives Matter and vaccines, had planned to discuss free speech and Christianity at events in both countries. Tickets for her tour remain on sale.
If you are a person who doesn’t defend freedom of speech then you are not a defender of democracy. You can’t have one without the other.
This sounds so good on paper, but completely falls apart without carefully defining free speech. Like, what if I hire actors with prop weapons to march around minority neighborhoods and scream that they’ll shoot any non-whites who try to vote?
You think that fun performance art is going to be healthy for democracy? Really?
What if I use AI to make convincing video footage of politicians I disagree with mutilating dogs and then graphically fucking their corpses? Do you think my commentary on their lack of support for dog shelters is going to foster democratic dialog, or do you think that maybe some voters will develop a viscerally unpleasant disgust and have trouble looking at them or engaging in what they have to say?
What if you buy a botnet and use it to convince both sides of the aisle that the other candidate is an authoritarian who will destroy democracy and try to control their life. Or to send death threats to people who publicly admit to being trans?
It is important to make room for marginalized voices to be heard, yes, that is essential for democracy, but there are also tons of bad actors who will try to use the very freedom you’re trying to protect to deny others that freedom. A completely laissez faire approach to free speech will ultimately serve to silence the marginalized and further empower the wealthy.
Threatening others is a crime. Generating false AI videos to harm another person’s reputation is a crime. Opinions are not crimes. It’s really not that complicated. People want to pretend it is complicated so they can control what can be said to gain power. Really not complicated.
But what if your opinion is threatening to others? If you believe that white people are inherently superior to other races and it is right for them to be served by the inferior races, then expressing that opinion is inherently threatening to many non-whites.
Sure, I’ve given hyperbolic examples, because I wanted to demonstrate that you can use freedom of expression to make threats, but there will also be examples that are in more of a grey area. There’s nothing inherently threatening about the Confederate flag. If you had flown it in 1600 people would’ve just said “cool flag, what does it mean?”.
Now however, many people see it as a threat, a constant reminder of how things used to be for their ancestors. Expressing your opinion by flying that flag says to those people “I want your children to live as your forefathers did”
Now, not everyone who flies that flag is making a threat, but some of them absolutely are. So what do we do?
I’m not saying I have a one size fits all solution. Simply banning anything that neo-nazis adopt clearly isn’t practical and could also be easily abused by the government to quash dissent. I’m just pointing out that it’s not a simple fucking problem.
