Kanye, Alex Jones, M.I.A and the Free Thinker Fallacy

I was recently mortified and mildly surprised to see musician M.I.A. tweet about how horrified she was that Alex Jones was being forced to pay a small fortune for sharing his truth with the world and asking important, dangerous questions while Dr. Fauci was not being burned at the stake for what she saw as his crimes against humanity.

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, because M.I.A. is a self-styled “free thinker” deeply invested in speaking truth to power and challenging “The Man” and his lies.

M.I.A. consequently subscribes to what I have deemed The Free Thinker Fallacy. Provocative souls afflicted with the Free Thinker Fallacy assume that if someone like Jones has been punished or de-platformed or is seen as dangerous that’s because he poses a threat to an ingrained power structure and must be silenced, censored or suppressed.

M.I.A. and the rest of the Free Speech Brigade don’t seem to understand that conspiracy theorists like Jones weren’t successfully sued in court and de-platformed on social media because they articulate important, secret truths but rather because they aggressively disseminate dangerous, destructive lies.

Yelling “fire” in a crowded building isn’t the default example of speech that is not constitutionally protected because people who shout “fire” in the proverbial crowded building when there is not a fire are expressing truthful, provocative information that The Powers That Be are trying to suppress.

No, yelling “fire” in a crowded building that’s not on fire is not protected speech because it’s a dangerous lie with the ability to do real damage, on a personal and collective level. Yelling “fire” in a building that is not ablaze could lead to people being trampled and injured, even killed. It could lead to mass panic and heart attacks.

Using social media to disseminate disinformation about the safety and reliability of masks and COVID vaccines, deadname and antagonize the trans community and spread anti-Semitism and racism are all similarly very dangerous on an individual and collective level.

A million Americans died of COVID. I can’t help but think that free thinkers on social media aggressively sharing “alternative facts” (otherwise known as conspiratorial lies) played a role in that body count.

That’s the trap of the Free Thinker. You start out asking what you see as dangerous and important questions and before you know it you’re on The Alex Jones Show talking about how, actually, Hitler was a groovy dude alongside Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes.

Look at these free thinkers!

Despite what the Free Speech Brigade and Free Speech Absolutists like Elon Musk might like to think, there are limits to moral relativism. There are things that are objectively terrible and should not be endorsed or praised by anyone.

Child molestation is one such issue. Yiannopoulos learned that the hard way when he seemed to implicitly endorse sexual relationships between adult men and boys in their tweens as a healthy rite of passage and promptly became radioactive to everyone other than Kanye and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There’s no grey area or moral ambiguity when it comes to child molestation. It’s evil and wrong and anyone who feels otherwise is, by extension, also being evil and wrong.

Loving Hitler, praising Nazis and denying the Holocaust are similarly unconscionable and unforgivable. Yet because of Kanye’s rhetoric the Free Speech Brigade has been given implicit permission to start challenging the conventional media narrative that Hitler was somehow “bad” because he murdered six million Jews and preached hatred and genocide.

I made the mistake of looking at a Talib Kweli post on Instagram pointing out how unfortunate and insane it is that Kanye West is aggressively promoting a man who preached the superiority of the Aryan race and saw that the Black Star rapper was being attacked in the comments by members of the Free Speech Brigade.

They expressed disgust that Kweli was using his power and platform to attack a free thinker instead of engaging with Kanye’s arguments and seeing for himself whether the conventional wisdom that the Nazis were evil and destructive was wrong, or at the very least deeply flawed.

Truly an image worth destroying your career over.

The Free Speech Fallacy is a self-contained loop. If you criticize their words and arguments they’re liable to point an accusatory finger at you and accuse you of being part of a mainstream conspiracy to suppress alternative voices and inconvenient, unpopular truths.

If you direct them to articles in The New York Times or Washington Post that contradict their deeply held beliefs they’ll dismiss those outlets as Fake News and direct you to any number of Youtube videos containing what they see as truthful, legitimate information.

You can argue with the Free Speech Brigade but you can never win. They might think they’re the only ones speaking truth and asking all the right questions but the truth is they’re just dangerous, deluded conspiracy theorists for whom the concept of truth is an an endlessly malleable and ultimately meaningless ideal.

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