Cancel Culture vs Freedom of Speech — rationally testing the case for deplatforming conspiracy theorists
“Deplatforming, also known as no-platforming, is a form of political activism or prior restraint by an individual, group, or organization with the goal of shutting down controversial speakers or speech, or denying them access to a venue in which to express their opinion.” — a common definition of the strategy that has been used by those who identify with the Cancel Culture movement.
The right to freedom of speech vs the right never to be offended. Actually, are these both human rights? If they are mutually exclusive, which of these is our primary responsibility to ensure?
The pros and cons in each group or side are not up for comparison or even measurable because they are, on the whole, the thoughts of one group about the other. These are of course loaded to help the home side triumph morally. Sides which never sit down and have a proper conversation are incapable of having their assumptions corrected, so the ‘straw man’ principle is commonly seen, where activists claim x to be someone’s opinion and go on to demolish it in a fit of self-congratulation. Where they have misrepresented that opinion, no correction is ever issued because the activist involved is usually too entrenched in their warlike mind-set to revisit their assumption of the truth.
The problem with an independent thinker taking a side in this clash is that each loose group definition has too many causes bundled into it, some of which you may believe are tangible, some irrational or dangerous and some you haven’t heard about. The world is just too complicated to call out as completely right or wrong.
As someone who isn’t a defender of either movement, as both are like herding cats, I’d like to argue for people to be reasonable. After all, the pursuit of reason is one of our greatest achievements and everyone should pay attention when large movements like the two featured here start to diverge from that ideal.
Arguments opposing conspiracy theorists often revolve around the issues of spreading false information (e.g. vaccines as cover to implant chips that track and influence minds) or sometimes that speakers selectively pick obscure and unorthodox information, presenting it out of context and out of proportion in an attempt to prove that an extreme political or anti-inclusive view is valid.
Arguments in favour of conspiracy theorists are that there is always a chance that any one of them might produce a theory which is absolutely correct and be the first to alert the public to what it is happening to them (taking over from investigative journalists, who are a dying breed), they provide entertainment and debate which stimulates the intelligence and, most importantly of all, they have a torch-holder role for our freedom of speech.
Arguments in favour of Cancel Culture and SJW-style activism in general are that if a view is voiced by a person in a position of authority which people find extreme, intolerant or variations of uncomfortable, there is a moral obligation to challenge the view with a counter argument. The intention is to stick up for those without a voice, or to correct our historical record and posthumously commemorate those who suffered and mainstream education conveniently forgot.
Arguments opposing Cancel Culture, Social Justice Warriors and modern political Liberalism concentrate on their overt re-use of aggressive Nazi Party and Stalinist policies such as shutting down or hurting anyone who does not align with their ethos, the forced imposition of minority will on the majority, the cancellation of the democratic process in favour of rule by dictat, reversing elected outcomes and also of ending freedom of speech in western culture unless the speaker’s philosophy is compatible with their own. The idea of selectively deleting historical icons who have inspired untold millions is not about adding historical perspective; it is closer to burning every book that wasn’t written by you and having much smaller public libraries.
In many ways, the real question is where society should attempt to balance the right of an individual to voice their ideas on the one hand and the right of the complainant to act against an irritant on the other. We already have two good systems to settle that dispute, those of voting and legal hearings. However, the conspiracy theorist has an incentive to produce a shocking theory at regular intervals and the activist is impatient as they don’t think anything will change without direct action (see The CANVAS Core Curriculum by The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies). Instead of democracy and the law, key foundations that make civilisation possible, modern ‘liberal’ activism has its analogue in the unruly mob with flaming torches which arrives to lynch the misfit monster.
Is this the only way to get redress from those with whom you disagree? As a blatant example, working to deplatform a public figure such as Oswald Mosely (1930s fascist) might have been more effective in the short term that debating against him but in the long term this muzzling could quickly backfire as he would attract sympathy from people who did not previously support his ideology.
What about the more recent deplatforming of mild-mannered conspiracy speakers who have no interest in divisive ideologies and do not seek to discriminate against any minorities? If an activist calls ahead to the venues at which such a person intends to speak and persuades or threatens the venue’s manager into cancelling the booking, any reasonable member of the public might then conclude that the real monster, the person we do not want to hear from in our society, is the activist.
A case study:
For as long as I can remember, David Icke has been a name that you hear come up in real life conversation (not meaning edited broadcast media) about once every six months, usually in connection to an unconventional idea that might be a stimulating conversational starting point but doesn’t necessarily fit your common sense understanding of human nature and acquired experience of physical reality. Having said that, I’m ambivalent about those who choose to do this sort of thing for a living, investigating and announcing far-fetched conclusions, as even the most accomplished people in our society can be wrong and the most unorthodox people can occasionally stumble upon information of which we weren’t aware but certainly should be. Therefore, I wield no agenda when writing about what I see as performance theorists, just my own observations, and believe that when you are discussing someone in public you should think of how you’d feel if they (a partially-informed stranger) were talking about you.
After half a career as a likeable sports presenter, history says David Icke had a Damascene moment and, as he said himself, the flood gates opened and a slew of ideas passed through his head. This all happened before I was born, as did the Terry Wogan Show, on which he embarrassed himself in a critical half hour that will be associated with him forever. Putting that aside (which hardly any commentator can ever resist), I wondered instead what really happened to the man, what changed from that moment of revelation and if it is reasonable that he should attract antagonism for it.
Does David Icke think differently? Do conspiracy theorists think differently? Why are these people different and who feels threatened by that? The reason I ask this is because I watched two Youtube documentaries. The first was pretty simple, a lecture discussing an experiment which showed randomly generated numbers to people and measured a strong correlation between those who believed at least one major conspiracy theory and those who concluded that the numbers were not random but had instead been directed by someone behind the scenes into a deliberate pattern. This is not just measuring paranoia but also the standard human ability to see a face in the shape of a cloud or a shadow, pattern recognition. Some people are better at this than others but seeing patterns everywhere usually means there are none.
The second documentary was about the most revered senior Buddhist monks who do very long retreats to rid themselves of earthly wants and bonds. When someone tried to interview a master who had been ‘stepping out of the everyday world’ in this way for fifty years, the monk said there is no point talking because they no longer have a common frame of reference, i.e. the monk now perceives reality differently to the rest of us. That’s an example of self-disciplined mental conditioning which a healthy person has chosen to do, but what if something changes physically in the structure of someone’s brain that results in an indistinguishable mind-set? Can people just have a mental ‘moment’ or an accident and switch to seeing the world from a new angle?
There is, for example, Sudden Savant Syndrome, which has been the subject of orthodox scientific study. In this rare condition, a person with basic talents can suffer brain trauma and come out of it finding that supremely complex skills are easier to acquire. In one case, a homeless man with rudimentary musical ability acquired suddenly the talent to compose for the piano and play at (reported to be) concert-level standard. Others can produce great art; Matisse fell on his head as a child and began painting very differently, helping to found Modernism. There is evidence that people can have an accident, a breakdown, an aneurysm in the brain or a tumour expanding in the skull case that affects their behaviour. A seminal US psychiatric study reported on a convicted paedophile who was not drawn to children for half a lifetime but then had a large tumour in his frontal lobe and was attracted to them, then the tumour was removed and he had no interest in children anymore, then the criminal desire manifested again when the tumour grew back. Their study asked to what extent was the man responsible for his criminal condition if the tumour had caused it? Can responsibility be disowned, i.e. to put the tumour in prison and consider the children and the man its victims? I’ve side-tracked as the convicted criminal studied in that paper shared no behavioural traits with David Icke, but the point relevant to this essay is that a physical change in the brain can alter perception and behaviour in anyone. They might then make use of it and go into public speaking because, why not? An unexplained change in personality, behaviour or perception is still a prompt to check whether any medicine you’re receiving has side effects or otherwise you might need to ask for a CAT scan. You could be The Chosen One, but that’s the far end of the probability scale again.
My understanding is that everyone has heavy duty brakes on their minds that operate 24/7 without anyone being consciously aware of them. Bear with me here because I’ll explain it. [Brakes, Pt 1]: The Universe is a complex place, in which the human mind receives an overload of information at any one moment. In evolutionary terms, in improving gene survival and propagation, in the scenario where a human is trying to evade a threat, the running person can’t be slowed up by the processing time needed to evaluate every single piece of sensory information and assessing all of their options. The function that improves our probability of survival is the mental blinkers that reduce our thinking to the monochrome options of fight or flight. Our sight might record that the tiger has nine visible teeth and part of their tail is missing but our mind edits that out, blocking factual delivery into the conscious stream if it is irrelevant. Even our perception of time changes in extremis. There’s a famous video of people passing a basketball and a gorilla walking between them that illustrates how we fail to see things when the brain separates them from the task it is focussing on. Our minds are designed to ignore the vast majority of data received — and that’s normal. That improves our chance of survival, unintuitively.
[Brakes, Pt 2]: The secondary issue is that if we were consciously aware of how insignificant and precarious our existence is, in the context of the Universe’s scale and hostility to life, we could go into an anxious ‘what’s the point?’ meltdown. Our minds hide some of this reality from us, so we stay positive and continue reproducing and trying to stay alive. What are we programmed to disregard? Well, we’re living at the bottom of a gravity well, orbiting an unshielded thermonuclear reactor showering us with radiation, in a freezing cold vacuum, breathing a poisonous gas (nitrogen), etc. and we’re all going to die in the next few decades. Your mind tries to unfocus some disturbing realities if they are ones you can’t change, so don’t need to get anxious about. Worrying about this stuff weakens your immune system and confuses your decision making process, so makes it less likely your genes will be passed on, so natural selection favours those who enjoy the world without a fully conscious understanding of it. This means though that we sometimes miss the obvious and filter out subtle patterns that we perhaps do need to be aware of. Pattern recognition is one of our best survival skills but the filters our brains apply can stifle this. Does everyone fail to spot what’s right in front of them because they’re not looking for it? The answer is no, most of us but not everyone.
[Brakes, Pt 3]: When the filters of perception (hmm, that sounds so freaky) widen in some people, we categorise them as either autistic or unrealistic — then speculate uncharitably on their drug consumption and whether they believe the [insert least favourite tabloid newspaper here]. However, what’s really happening in so-called ‘savants’ and ‘visionaries’ is that they receive the same sensory input as us but their filter settings for what information to disregard are placed wider than ours and they are also making unfiltered connections between seemingly unconnected data (between different subjects that we might think of as separate). I say ‘ours’ because if your settings are in the same place as theirs, you wouldn’t call them anything but normal.
In summary, minds with factory settings remove information unconsciously before the consciousness is aware of it and then remove even more information due to their critical faculties because of the information’s untrusted source. In contrast, the ‘savant’ consciousness receives information in full bandwidth. The downside is, imagine if your retina was unable to close, then when photon intensity went up you would struggle to function for want of a light-reducing mechanism. Information flow can be like that too.
[Brakes, speculation]: Anyway, the point is that I wonder if David Icke’s revelation and his ideas ever since were the result of something physical happening to his neural pathways which caused his perception to shift and widen involuntarily. That would explain his awareness of things which other people would filter out and label junk before they’ve been assessed. Is that a good or bad condition to have? I don’t know. I suppose it is negative if the amount of information arriving is so overwhelming that it reduces someone’s ability to function, but it is positive if the increase in conscious data allows that person to make connections other people don’t make (for either entertainment or public warning or income purposes) and still not drop out of society as an unbearable MH case. I think Icke has so far been somewhere in the goldilocks zone, where raging against the machine is how we all feel and others of his ideas may be fringe but don’t go beyond coherence, which means we should properly consider the hardest to dismiss of them in case he’s onto something. However, we should be realistic because some things which are not real will beat those wide filter settings that I think he probably acknowledges. Some might be fortune telling and guesswork, e.g. 2012 will be a bad year. Most years are good years and also bad years, depending what criteria you count. For example, there are fewer wars and fewer people dying in combat every year on an ongoing tally but wars are highlighted to still be as big a threat as ever.
In other words, I see no objection to seeing people like this deliver a distilled version of their privately gathered findings to their audience, then for you to wake up in the cold light of day and independently check and narrow down their conclusions yourself to see if something tangible remains at the end of the process. If you don’t have time to waste on this subject, fine, but someone somewhere will have time and should have a free hand to drill down into the substance. Destruct testing, peer review, wheat from chaff, whatever you want to call it. This will flag many things up as incorrect or having unintentional bias, but that does not mean everything an inconsistent source flags up will always be incorrect. Your job, as a trainee intellectual (pat on the head), is to find out what remains logically meaningful in the conspiracy theorist’s provocative information dump and take notice of anything that checks out — especially if other people don’t listen to anything because of the source. What matters is if something checks out to be true or not; it doesn’t matter where the idea came from. Even if it isn’t true, we can assess that and it represents progress to have recorded a myth as solved so we can all move on. It even helps the conspiracy theorist move on, or find better evidence to form a better logical position which improves their standing. The thing is, there’s a strong career and financial incentive for conspiracy theorists to find out something which is fundamentally true, so their name can be endorsed forever by being the first to discover it. These people are working, unpaid by the public, on a quest that if successful would be of value to the public. Why knock it?
The other thing I wondered is whether David Icke is simply an actor, playing a part. What gave me that idea is the scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where the computer Deep Thought announces it will take seven and a half million years to compute the answer to life, the universe and everything, then the philosophers who have built it respond that they cannot wait that long, so the computer advises the philosophers that they can make a living forever as pundits simply by disagreeing and slagging each other off on chat shows, which the philosophers agree is a brilliant strategy because they now have a reliable income stream. That’s very cynical, but imagine you’ve mucked up your credibility on national television and now have to make a new type of living. You’re a minor household name, so have that popular introduction going for you, and also it is known that you say entertaining things so it’s not very likely people will switch you off. How about creating a range of even more original and interesting things to say, eye-catching stuff, so people will pay you to speak at conventions? Get a Youtube channel, build an audience, collect clicks, sell books and tee shirts. A cynical observer could add that it doesn’t matter if an evangelical preacher figure believes he (it’s always men) can perform a miracle or not, as long as the performance causes no harm and their lifestyle is at least funded. It must be annoying to a speaker who is doing this to find that activists have interpreted or misinterpreted it all seriously and are trying to shut them down.
There’s a difference between a performing magic act and an evangelist miracle act though because one is honest and presents itself as a trick whereas the other claims it is all true and that could hurt or extort vulnerable people. Jesus will never need your credit card number but human entertainers do need to pay their bills. Icke can’t be accused of making false promises about possessing fantasy powers but instead says realistically that this is what he thinks (we are all entitled to hold an opinion and to voice it) and what information led him there, so what do you make of that and do you agree with this conclusion? This is what reasonable people do.
Being ethically eccentric in this way, as a speaker, can be a public service for some and fun for others, with equivalent pathways to compensation (i.e. lawful if it doesn’t prey on anyone), so that’s okay isn’t it? Does the motivation behind it all matter? There’s no acid test to determine whether a public personality is genuinely trying to repair the world or simply riding an income stream, so unless you are that person yourself… whatever, let it go. Cola damages your teeth but it’s swings and roundabouts, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s fair to ban cola, as the facts can be made available to inform people’s decision on the risk. If Cancel Culture tried to bully the world into making soft drinks illegal, that might help to put the movement into much better perspective.
Lizards. I’ll generalise this as it is a topic which becomes important if you are someone trying to make your name as a conspiracy theorist or investigator of non-mainstream subjects. The thing is, you will be under pressure to come up with original ideas frequently, of what’s going on and possibly also shadowy figures who might be behind it all. If you can’t keep the ball rolling, you will be forgotten as your audience is distracted to the next sensation. You need to keep the theories credible but also want to avoid litigation, so might name a type of villain and think you’re safe to speak about them because they aren’t a legal entity. David Icke publically said that there is a dominant ancestral blood line that is common to the ruling families of the world (thought to be of reptilian origin) and that these people can form a cabal or cabals to control society and big business. No one should really take that personally. Lots of folk believe that the world is a big stitch-up to benefit a small section of the population, so that’s fair enough and conforms well with capitalist theory, but you’d think that reptilian genetics would show up every time when your genome is sequenced, so that can’t be true. All fine to say because the laws of libel and slander don’t apply to anything which is too absurd for the average person to believe is true (e.g. saying the Queen has lizard genetics sounds stupid), so there shouldn’t be a problem legally, although it is insulting.
However, what the speaker didn’t take into account is that some people in society are looking for reasons to be offended and start a witch hunt, those social justice warriors and cancel culture activists, so all they have to do is insinuate a connection that the conspiracy theorist had not meant and then beat them over the head with it until they abandon their career.
We’ve seen professional and business careers destroyed, actors become unusable, the admittedly unpleasant Jerry Springer the Opera closed down and statues topple because a long time ago they said something which does not conform to modern politically inclusive standards. Winston Churchill, Sir Frances Drake and Teddy Roosevelt were and are heroes to many but all of a sudden they have to be removed from the history books according to the self-appointed arbiters of social justice.
Okay, so you either have freedom of speech in your country or you don’t. A ‘liberal’ vendetta to control what society can and can’t say, can and can’t think, who can walk on stage and who must be prevented from doing so is not a liberal philosophy at all but authoritarian fascism. “We must impose our will on you and punish you if you fail to comply” is the same philosophy as the worst of the people that SJW, Antifa, Cancel Culture and the Liberal Democrat Party in the UK also believe they are opposed to. Essay topic: Modern Liberals have become what they hate the most. Discuss. Here’s an even better essay topic, although it is the most controversial point I can make. In the Old Testament, God murders or orders to be murdered over two million people, instructs his followers to take slaves and carry out rapes, conquest and incest. Surely God does not meet modern ethical standards? Therefore the Cancel Culture should pit themselves to remove Christian (and Islamic) religion. Good luck with that, but I insist that they must try to do it because not attacking God and his followers would be an uneven application of these (fake) liberal principles.
As discussed nearer the beginning of this essay, putting words into people’s mouths and then responding to them is a technique called ‘straw-manning’ and it is simply unfair. Some people in the US took Icke’s weird idea about reptilian blood lines manipulating politics and corporations then accused Icke of meaning in the sense of a metaphor that the Jewish population are reptiles (DNA obviously laughs at this claim and link — which I conclude was never made in writing or verbally, just invented and then contested by the same critic). This speculation of a Judaism link is the reason why people call ahead to the venues he is trying to lecture at and agitate for the event booking to be cancelled. As a fair-minded person, I think these people are behaving unforgivably. Social justice warriors are, in this context, just another hate group trying to end free speech without engaging in a debate. They stop entertaining speakers making their living and feel righteous that they’ve done something good today, a warm feeling of exercising amateur hate power. Logically, you should only take offense at what people say or do, not what you’ve invented yourself and attributed to them — which is what usually happens. What if they said something decades ago and no longer stand by it because their position has evolved? Codified justice recognises redemption. What if they have repeatedly explained the misunderstanding attributed to them? Is there any change in the popular trending campaign to stone the heretic? Should an adult be made to feel guilt about something stupid they said on a school playground when they are now a very different person? Personally, I’d trust the court to get this right, not the mob. The mob were responsible through history for not just extra-judicial racist lynchings in America, but also the medieval mania of witch hunts that murdered tens of thousands, the South Sea Bubble, the First Crusade, Alchemy, the slaughter in the Jewish ghetto when the knight Tancred accused a whole religion of people who were not alive at the time as being “Christ Killers”. People like joining a mob, feeling the sensation of brotherhood and being respected as a force of will that will build to become unstoppable. Who stops to question whether it is all going too far?
“5G is dangerous” — this is a claim but a notorious exaggeration because there’s a scale of what threatens us. Sunlight, water and soil are all ever so slightly dangerous but the whole thing has to be put in proportion. If there’s a one in forty million chance that one of your cells might have an atom displaced by a wave transmission, which is what sunlight can do to cells anyway, I’d advise just accepting the odds of being struck by this sort of comet. Clearly the odds concentrate if you climb up and rope yourself to the actual transmitter but what is in-scope for fear depends where your defensive parameters are set compared to, for example, water, bacteria or the sharpness of broken glass. What about the danger of information — should be abolish all records of information in case they might be used against us? Should we ask Prometheus to take the spark of fire back up the mountain? No, 5G has got no connection to spreading viruses either (although I am not sure what was said on this subject as it isn’t realistic enough to bother reading). In my view, 5G represents change and the unknown (to people who haven’t learned about it yet) and it is normal to fear the unknown especially when you have not been consulted before you see it being rolled out into common usage. Additionally, the protest could also be a reaction to the insult felt by people being taken for granted in this respect. Maybe they should have talked to the public about it more before doing it?
The final thing I wanted to say is about David Icke’s speaking style. Hypnotists have a sort of lilting, melodic, summer evening modulation that lulls you into trance, creating that state allows them to embed subconscious suggestions. David Icke definitely has this calming, undulating pattern to his talks. Often these presentations can last for five, seven or even ten hours, which is note-worthy because not only is it good value for money but how many members of the audience come out saying they can’t believe that was ten hours, the time has flashed by? Why though? Was it very interesting or, quite likely, did they pass into a state of waking trance caused by the speaker’s relaxing voice? If so, an objective well done to the speaker because that’s impressive craft.
I thought about an experiment to separate this effect and did this (across three hours) — which I’d only expect you to try if you’re OCD like me and a quick typist. Stage A: I watched a lecture and found myself agreeing with many things. Stage B: I transcribed the lecture. Stage C: I went through the transcription to see what he had actually said — and then found a lot of points that I questioned immediately, which hadn’t jumped out at me when I was immersed in the full acoustic lullaby. For example, in a couple of cases David Icke speculated that a connection between two things might exist, then an hour or so later raised another issue and reinforced that as having already been evidenced by citing the connection between the two things discussed previously as established, which was not the case because the link between them was left as a question mark. If you lay the ground work as ‘what if’ and then construct a pyramid of interconnected evidence based on unestablished foundations, the conclusion is a monumental guess, surely? There are single points of failure in most speculations.
So what do I think? I feel that the world does need eccentric investigators who operate in non-mainstream ways and view the world from a slightly different angle to the rest of us. That is what healthy cynicism does. It is also what proper comedy should do, as both form part of our apparatus for questioning whether our leaders are taking the best approach or highlighting where they might be slipping off the tracks into some sort of delusion. Yes, whole societies can become deluded and unbalanced, so don’t think of that as only a risk for independent speakers. Whole societies can be re-directed or enslaved by their leaders and those rulers who hold power that can’t be held to account do go mad by common standards (almost all of the emperors of Rome were murdered), so people asking questions can be an essential beep on our early warning radar. If the theorist is wrong, fine, but who stood up and spoke out against the controlling dictators as they emerged in the past century? Only exceptionally rare people with complete disregard for their own safety. Were they called crazy? I expect they were called that, back then. It isn’t all foresight. Sometimes only a few people speak up because only a few people aren’t natural cowards. Critics and comedians and those who speak truth to power need to be brave. Getting people deplatformed is cowardly. Sometimes, often, they are simply wrong in what they say but I think we need them in position, come the day it matters.
I don’t want to glorify conspiracists sounding the alarm bell for fears which don’t resemble the evidence. However, the natural market forces of whether the audience agrees or not should promote reasonable fears ahead of ridiculous ones. Conspiracy theorists and other categories of professional social critic do spot corruption and abuses of power because they are competitively looking out for them, thereby bringing subjects to our attention and either prompting them to be investigated professionally or forcing the person or organisation thought to be behaving unethically to reign back what they are doing and take the popular heat off their activities. Okay, so people in this role name and shame others, risking real consequences if they make false accusations against individuals, which is a kind of safeguard on what they can say openly without evidence. It is incorrect to assume that conspiracy theorists can say absolutely anything because there are publically accepted legal limits. If they aren’t questioning others but instead have a theory about the composition of the moon, that shouldn’t be a problem and it creates a debate, challenging others to factually disprove it and then we have a better scientific and public understanding of the subject.
Sometimes I think that crazy claims are made in a calculated way to generate a headline, e.g. saying quite seriously that occult worshippers ‘still’ gather around a local standing stone to make sacrifices. I think it’s up to an editor to not bother printing that without corporeal evidence and a missing persons report. The filter is that to have the editor’s endorsement, the conspiracy speaker must persuade the gate-keeper with a reasonable and logical weight of evidence. That’s fair. Turning to the activist community, what you don’t do though is control what the source is allowed to say because then it’s all too easy to censor them not for what’s incredibly unlikely or nasty but rather to block anyone who doesn’t support your own, or your employer’s, agenda. That’s wrong. They have a basic right to give their view, just as you do.
Cancel Culture is interesting. Here’s a case study to check on which side of the fence you fall: Sir Hans Sloane, the founding collector behind the British Museum, was a slave owner who inherited slaves and didn’t free them. What a nasty man; who used his unethical profits to do something redeeming. Therefore, by the demands of Cancel Culture and BLM, the British Museum should be closed immediately and everything in its collections should be destroyed as tainted by association. Hmm, well, I don’t support doing that (although can imagine those two movements would approve) but think it’s interesting to see how this type of activism centres on destruction but never creating anything cultural. I would not have approved of the Athenian invasion of Syracuse at the time, but it doesn’t make sense now to go to the back garden and smash the flower pots.
The public should perhaps receive training at school to be more incredulous, to improve their critical faculties. People should be encouraged to filter out for themselves what’s incorrect or unreliable, sort any facts from the speculation of probable fiction, but we also need new and original ideas to generate conversation (even if it is to refute them and sharpen our debating skills) and we like keeping the opportunity open for the wild and unconventional minds in our society to tell us what’s true when, once in a blue moon, we haven’t noticed the obvious problems because of our own mental filtering system and conditioning ignoring the subtle signs. Sometimes we go along with things, a case of the emperor’s new clothes, where we feel something isn’t right but no one wants to say it first. Alarmist people will say it first — and I would argue that we shouldn’t prevent them.
That’s my view anyway. Not a full endorsement, but certainly a free pass to conspiracy theorists to carry on without further sabotage. In some cases these speakers can do harm, by guiding impressionable people away from projects that were only ever intended to save their lives (e.g. trying to eradicate measles) or improve open communications, but when the theorist’s focus is anti-social it’s up to informed people to make a sensible counter-case.
As an activist trying to improve the world, if you do set out to take down and de-platform conspiracy theorists because you don’t agree with their conclusions, I’m sorry but you are just another kind of fascist (don’t dare call yourself a liberal) and you should be aware you are also shutting down a public service, opposing free speech, championing the cancellation of an adult’s freedom of action within the law, disenfranchising minorities and denying the facet of human nature that we yearn to be fed with novel ideas we can have a conversation about. Humans need ideas, entertainment and they like to laugh. A return to puritanism is in no one’s interests, so give these guys a break.
