The Resident’s proposed Executive Order to regulate social media platforms is not the first Executive Order intended to protect Right Wing trolls, propagandists, liars, conspiracy theorists, hate-groups and their collective Russian bot-enablers. Recall that in March 2019 the Resident signed an Executive Order entitled Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.
[M]y Administration seeks to promote free and open debate on college and university campuses. Free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation’s democracy, and it promotes learning, scientific discovery, and economic prosperity. We must encourage institutions to appropriately account for this bedrock principle in their administration of student life and to avoid creating environments that stifle competing perspectives, thereby potentially impeding beneficial research and undermining learning.
As Jason Stanley has noted since 2015, and discussed at length in his 2018 book How Fascism Works, the Resident has consistently abused the concept of Free Speech in a manner characteristic of fascists more generally: that is, by exploiting the utopian assumptions of “the marketplace of ideas.”
In the case of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the utopian assumption is that conversation works by exchange of reasons: one party offers its reasons, which are then countered by the reasons of an opponent, until the truth ultimately emerges.
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The argument for the marketplace of ideas presupposes that words are used only in their “descriptive, logical, or semantic sense.” But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.
The argument from the “marketplace of ideas” model for free speech thus works only if society’s underlying disposition is to accept the force of reason over the power of irrational resentments and prejudice. Language becomes a vehicle for emotion rather than meaning. If the society is divided, however, then a demagogic politician can exploit the division by using language to sow fear, accentuate prejudice, and call for revenge against members of hated groups. Attempting to counter such rhetoric with reason is akin to using a pamphlet against a pistol.
As the thin veneer of civilization has flaked away, it has become abundantly clear that the underlying disposition of far too many in our society is in fact NOT to accept the force of reason over the power of irrational resentments and prejudice. The Resident’s hypocritical and erroneous appeal to “free speech,” whether on the campuses of colleges and universities or with regard to Twitter’s mildest rebuke in the form of fact-checking, will undoubtedly play well with his cultists... who are fully enraptured by the beauty and warmth of the destructive flames.