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When people like him, and there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.
The idea that ‘freedom of speech’ somehow equates with a freedom to spout undiluted, often inflammatory nonsense without being contradicted or called out is currently more popular on both sides of the Atlantic than at any other point in living memory.
I don’t know what’s worse, doing it for money while not believing in it or doing it because you really do believe that ethnicity and geography deliver some sort of innate value to a human being.
But you can have a conversation, arrive at a compromise, agree to disagree. That we so often fail to do so speaks of intransigence on both sides.
The philosopher John Rawls’ famous ‘veil of ignorance’ posits the idea that a just system can only be constructed by people completely ignorant of their position within it.
The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith. It’s just a fancy phrase that kids who grew up without ever learning how to share use to describe themselves.
We need a complete reversal of the idea that every argument has two equal sides, that every question is debatable and that every story needs to be ‘balanced’.
