Greg Lukianoff

And we insult the victims of actual violence by equating words with bloody violence.

Free speech is not violence.

It's the best alternative to violence ever invented.

Truth number three.

Free speech protects the powerless.

I fear, and I noticed this about 15 years ago, that people were showing up on my radar who seemed to have been taught that free speech is the cynical tool of the three Bs.

The bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.

Now, this is just bad history.

So historically, the robber baron, the wealthy and powerful, have not needed a special protection for free speech because they are wealthy and powerful.

And historically, the bully and the bigot in a democratic society, if they have the votes, they still get to call the shots.

You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority.

This is why revolutionary figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech.

It's why John Lewis, someone I got to meet, actually, because he was in my neighborhood a lot, the great John Lewis, civil rights icon, he would argue, he would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.

They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful.

It is the best check on power ever invented.

Now, truth number four.

Even bad people can have good ideas.

So much time is wasted in social media debates.

I can just probably end the sentence there.

But so much time is wasted in social media debates trying to establish that your opponent is a bad person as if that's the same thing as saying that they're wrong.