Free Speech Does Not Mean I Am Required To Engage Terrible Ideas

The talking point taking root amongst the pundit class is that we must treat all ideas and positions equally and engage their proponents in good faith. That is equally insulting and absurd.

A common theme of the post-Charlie Kirk assassination dialogue has been the idea that “we need to engage on issues in good faith” and “we need to have civil dialogue, especially about the issues that divide us.” What I find to be particularly wild is that Ezra Klein, a Jewish center-left opinion writer for the New York Times, has especially dug in on this issue, and I have yet to find any evidence of the obvious query being placed in front of him: Do you believe that you should have civil dialogue with somebody who shouts “Death to all Jews?” Would you have civil dialogue with an SS ober-gruppenfũhrer?

Extreme example? Of course it is. But it’s not unrealistic, especially in this current environment where anti-Semitism has been building to a fever pitch for a decade, where Israel’s government is prosecuting a campaign of genocide in Gaza, where anyone who looks Hispanic can be detained by our modern-day Gestapo known as ICE, and where the government is talking about transgender people being stripped of constitutional rights using language that sounds exactly like Nazis talking about Jews in 1935 Germany.

We are not required to confer legitimacy upon evil ideas, nor should we be. If you think that black women are less intelligent genetically, leave. If you think we should let the government force critics off the airwaves because they don’t like it, that’s unconstitutional and by virtue of that, it is also illegitimate. If you think that we should be allowed to deport people to concentration camps or torture sites, what the fuck is wrong with you? That is not an idea that deserves to be taken seriously and it should not be treated as such.

If you think the President is a king with no accountability, when we literally founded this nation on the premise of not answering to a king, no matter what the MAGA Six on the Supreme Court says, that is not a serious, legitimate idea. If you believe that millions of doctors engaged in a conspiracy to cover up a small percentage of children getting autism from vaccines, and the truth tellers are a long-term drug addicted narcissist and a mediocre actress, seek help. You’re arguing for a position with no evidence, against decades of scientific study, and one in which the disease predates the supposed causation, and I’m supposed to treat those positions equally?

Oh, before I forget, should I take this seriously? Is this a position deserving of engagement?

“Is this a call for violence?” the third paragraph says. “Yes. Explicitly it is.”

“I want blood in the streets,” he added in the column, which ran with the headline “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!”

Mr. Ingersoll also lays out specific situations in which he says violence should be used. If a progressive activist takes a sign away at a public debate, “She gets instantly clotheslined,” Mr. Ingersoll wrote. “I don’t care if police are present. Do it anyway. In fact, be wildly disproportionate.”

“Measure it in blood if necessary,” he added. “Change requires pain, and you’re either taking it or inflicting it.”

This has been the last thirty years of conservative politics and the entire right-wing media project: advancing false statements, bad faith critiques, racist pathologies, conspiracies about expertise, with the occasional call for full-blown violence. It is all aimed at tearing down every foundational piece of society that allows for a functional nation, and for what? Why have they pushed this so hard, and destroyed so much of the fabric that keeps America together? So billionaires can become trillionaires? So a bunch of racist white Southerners who still aren’t over losing the Civil War can run the country—and claim the mantle of Jesus while doing it? So Peter Thiel, one of the Afrikaner claque of right-wing racist chuds from that ugly apartheid family tree, can force AI down our throats because “the antichrist will destroy us if we don’t?”

We, as Americans, have been fed a gospel of hate by bad actors who wish to keep us divided while they ravage this planet, deplete our resources, and will then flee to their bunker complexes where they’ve got the ability to wait out the collapse of society. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, David Sacks, Jeff Bezos—they are plundering our wealth and our resources. They are spending ungodly amounts of cash to convince us to connive in our own destruction. The AI data centers are destroying water tables and polluting small towns. They program their AI products to reflect their credo of greed, hate and selfishness. They force it into our lives through Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini and Grok and ChatGPT and every other shoddy, half-baked, ill-designed “intelligence” showing up in places we do not need it and in ways we did not ask for.

It has utterly shocked me that there has not been more reporting on the fact that Musk, Sacks, Thiel, and Roelof Botha (grandson of the last apartheid foreign minister of South Africa) co-founded PayPal together. Thiel was born in divided Germany and grew up in a community in South Africa where they greeted each other with Heil Hitler salutes. Musk went to all-white schools in Pretoria, with a deeply racist father (who still lives there) and a grandfather who helped architect apartheid in the country before dying in a plane crash. Botha is the descendant of another founding family of apartheid and continues to argue that Afrikaners are the real victims of that nasty half-century in human history. Sacks was born in South Africa and then grew up in Tennessee in a South African expat community known for its racism and opposition to civil rights.

These are the people who put the money into the “institutes” and “think tanks” and other nonprofits that churn out the sort of crap Charlie Kirk loved to peddle on social media, on his speaking tours, and on his podcast. He wasn’t the only one, just a particularly skilled practitioner of this trade. These outlets swarm people with tawdry, ignorant, and downright angry ideas that influence our discourse through their sheer volume and frequency. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the current methods for purveying this junk (and indeed, the owner of the media outlet that hosted Kirk’s show daily), said in 2018, “The opposition party [Democrats] don’t matter. The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with that is to flood the zone with shit.” In other words, they can’t fact check you if you overwhelm them with too much to fact check.

They want us always arguing, always angry, always divided, while they reduce our arable land, destroy our freshwater sources, kill off undesirables through wars and police state actions, and turn shared resources into a distant memory. This is why they are advocating for these “techzone cities” or “government-free zones.” It’s the next step. Create parts of the planet where there is no authority but their whims, where they don’t have to pay taxes, where there’s no public utilities, where they control everything. DOGE came and went, having permanently wrecked the parts of our government that ameliorate the terrible conditions of those in poverty, in resource-poor regions, who suffer from famine and war. They wrecked people’s faith in their basic programs like Medicaid and Social Security. Once they’ve destroyed the alternative, it’s a lot easier to force you to accept their feudalistic society.

People like Ezra Klein need to wake up. If you want civil debate, start with ideas that aren’t designed to destroy civility altogether and people who constantly act in bad faith. Call it out for what it is: bullshit.