Free Speech Not for Everyone.

• Author: Oladimu, Leo
• Position: WE HEAR YOU - Letter to the editor

Bill Lueders, in his piece about speech on college campuses ("Shut Up, Already," August/September issue), makes great points about being able to defend our ideas on their merits rather than having to rely on brute force or censorship to make us "safe" from opposing viewpoints. The libertarian in me instinctively agrees with him, for the same reason I don't want government telling people what drugs they can't use or religion to practice.

But it's also the case that these sorts of ideological distractions don't exist in a historical vacuum. When it comes to questions of organized white racism, we are not dealing with some kind of lively exchange of ideas among colleagues, but rather with ideologies that have been responsible for genocidal atrocities and worse, in both Europe and the Americas.

The free-speech argument that says ideas like white supremacism should be allowed to stand or fall on their own merits rings hollow when we look at how often those bad ideas have been followed to their logical, blood-drenched conclusions. These types of ideologies can't be peacefully coexisted with any more than you can peacefully coexist with a family of rattlesnakes in your bedroom. They need to be driven out, shut down, and banned by force, lest we see the long history of their atrocities repeated upon us and our communities yet again.

I agree with antifa. I'm uninterested in the alt-right's perspective on the world. I don't recognize any right on the part of the white racists to propagate their ideas and policies, and I frankly don't want to live under the same government with them.

--Leo Oladimu

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

In a public space, everyone on a soapbox is fair game for protest, which is itself free speech. Using Ben Shapiro as the injured party in his article "Shut Up, Already!" Bill Lueders presents a fairly sanitized example of the vitriol passing as "free speech" today.

I'm...