We're Not Like Them - Pump the Breaks on Doxing Bad Takes

Celebrating political violence that killed and injured innocent civilians is reprehensible - but must be tolerated in free speech culture.

Photo by Liana S on Unsplash

To enjoy any possibility of being right, we must tolerate the inevitability of being wrong. This is the essence of free speech culture, and is as true for ethical reasoning as it is for empirical reasoning.

The true test of our allegiance to free speech culture is not our defense of speech we agree with, but our defense of speech we find reprehensible.¹

We know that cancel culture undermines free speech culture—both by punishing people for their expressions, and by cloaking free expression in a shroud of self-censorship.

Many who claim to be the targets of cancel culture are now taking up the mantle of cancellation, doxing fellow citizens for their bad takes on the failed assassination attempt against a former president and now presidential nominee which left at least one rally attendee dead and injured others. Perhaps no one has amassed more trophies in this contest than Chaya Raichik, the woman beyond

Libs of TikTok

and herself a target of doxing. Many people are losing their jobs—including public sector workers whose private speech is presumably protected by the First Amendment—over bad hot takes.

Don’t get me wrong—I understand the impulse. My tribalist lizard brain would like nothing more to than to see my ideological foes impaled by their own [s]words; unlike revenge, schadenfreude is best served seared and rare.

But I’ve been training my forebrain to spot vulnerabilities in free speech culture, even where I’d rather not find them, and canceling people for speech I don’t like is a glaring one. We can’t forfeit these free speech skirmishes if we want to win the principled high ground for free speech culture.

Like conservative political organizer Jessica Anderson, many have observed the distinct lack of rioting and looting in the wake of this political violence:

You have not seen anyone on the right burn down buildings, disrupt, have protests, destroy businesses. You actually see a call for unity, peace, strength, coming together to protect America, not destroy it.

We must carry this same restraint from the brick-and-mortar world into the metaphysical realm. I’ll never tire of saying that the answer to bad speech is counterspeech. The best way to respond to bad takes is to call them out for polluting public discourse while also acknowledging the speaker’s free speech right to be wrong. (The next best way is to ignore them.)

Channeling Evelyn Hall’s characterization of Voltaire, Vivek Ramaswamy articulated this vision of free speech culture in concluding his address to the Republican National Convention:

If you’re at home, and you disagree with everything I just said, our message to you is this: We will still defend to the death your right to say it, because that is who we are as Americans. We are the country where we can disagree like hell and still get together at the dinner table at the end of it.

We’re not like them. It’s more important to be for free expression than to punish violent rhetoric and other reprehensible speech. It’s time to pump the breaks on doxing bad takes.

Sarah Hartman-Caverly is an associate librarian with Penn State University Libraries at Penn State Berks. Her scholarship examines the compatibility of human and machine autonomy from the perspective of intellectual freedom.

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1. Note: There are narrow exceptions to First Amendment protections for freedom of speech in the US, including incitement and true threats, as outlined in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s Unprotected Speech Synopsis.