Letter to the Editor: The Limits of Free Speech

Last month, we defended our friend Douglas Murray against calls that he should be investigated by the police for discussing his popular 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe. In this title, and elsewhere, Douglas has repeatedly warned that poorly controlled immigration will eventually lead to chaos in his native United Kingdom. And, tragically, he was proven right over the summer.

On July 29, three girls under the age of 10 were murdered at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class in Southport, in the north of the UK. Rumors spread on social media that the alleged perpetrator was both Muslim and an immigrant. He was neither; the 17-year-old, Axel Rudakubana, was born in the UK to parents from Rwanda. Nevertheless, inspired by these rumors, a mob began attacking Southport’s mosque. The violence spread. In towns across the country, people gathered to variously harass migrant centers, attack mosques, and burn police vehicles.

The establishment’s reaction was swift. A 55-year-old woman was arrested “on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred.” The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales said that even retweeting a post “which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred” makes one liable for arrest. 

Was this a campaign of suppression against free speech? Or, as Zaid Jilani argues in this letter, a case of “bigots who have disqualified themselves from an adult conversation about pressing issues in the UK”?

As a longtime reader of The Free Press, I’ve always admired the publication’s underdog spirit and commitment to freedom of expression; and as a red-blooded American, I couldn’t agree more that the United Kingdom often fails to protect freedom of speech. I believe that even the most bigoted people should have a right to speak, provided they are not directly inciting violence.

But we should be clear about one thing: Those who encouraged the British riots, by spreading false rumors that an asylum seeker had stabbed little children to death, are by all accounts bigots who have disqualified themselves from an adult conversation about pressing issues in the UK.

Contrary to Douglas Murray’s claims, Labour and Tory governments have not suppressed debate about immigration and labeled anyone who dissents a “racist.” Debates about immigration policy have been numerous and robust in the country, with one example being the Conservatives recently using campaign advertising about ominous migrant boats landing in Britain. (Their fear tactics were rejected by voters, who were probably more bothered by years of Tory austerity devastating British communities.)

I’m not one of those people who labels anyone who wants fewer immigrants or slower demographic change in a country an irredeemable bigot. Immigration policy should be subject to democratic control just like anything else. And there are fair questions to ask across the Western world about the breadth and pace of migration and the right strategy to encourage assimilation.

But we can’t validate the violence of people who assaulted police officers, tried to burn down hotels with asylum seekers inside, and threw bricks at mosques, by pretending that they are speaking for some kind of silent majority. Polling conducted after both the protests and riots found that just 14 percent of Brits said these individuals spoke for them. When asked what motivated the riots, 23 percent said legitimate concerns about immigration; 32 percent said far right ideology and racism, and 46 percent said a desire to engage in violence and looting.

Not every extremist who attacks minorities is motivated by some kind of understandable and underlying grievance we have to treat as legitimate. That wasn’t true after the antisemitic Tree of Life shooting—where the attacker was angry that some Jews were helping migrants and refugees—and it isn’t true now.

Over the summer, our contributing editor Abigail Shrier argued against new legislation in California that prevents schools from giving parents any information about a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Now that the “SAFETY Act,” otherwise known as AB 1955, has been signed into law, families can no longer “convince their school boards to require schools to notify parents that their daughter, Sophie, has been going by ‘Sebastian’ in class,” writes Abigail. “The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have ‘supported a pupil’ hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.”

While researching her book, Irreversible Damage, Abigail spoke to hundreds of parents whose daughters abruptly identified as transgender. She can cite multiple disturbing case studies that illustrate the dangers of such a law. “One parent told me a California school counselor had given her son the address of an LGBTQ youth shelter,” she writes, “and suggested he emancipate himself from parents who were loving but skeptical of his sudden transgender identity.”

One reader wrote in to offer case studies that, he believes, justify the new law. Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher at James Monroe High School, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, argues that AB 1955 protects students, rather than alienating them:

In “California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets from Parents,” Abigail Shrier says the controversial new law supports “deceiving” parents, in a way that can lead to a “school-wide conspiracy.”

AB 1955 will prohibit educational entities from “enacting or enforcing any policy. . . that requires an employee. . . to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by law.” 

The bill is a response to the “parents’ rights” movement, which is pushing measures that put LGBTQ youth in harm’s way. According to the Movement Advancement Project, eight states, all Republican-led, have passed laws mandating that schools notify parents of a student’s gender transition. Even in liberal California, nearly a dozen school districts now have policies with some form of requirement that schools inform parents if a student appears to identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming. 

The student population of many large public school districts is heavily low income, minority, and immigrant. As a whole, Latino and other immigrant families tend to be socially conservative. My students have often described their parents’ and families’ attitudes towards those who are LGBTQ, and one thing is very clear—LGBTQ youth often have very good reasons for not wanting their gender identity or sexual orientation being disclosed to their families. 

During the Covid school closures, one of my students was kicked out of her parents’ home, largely over her sexual orientation. She struggled to finish her senior year and graduate, while working long hours to pay her rent.

Another LGBTQ student wrote a powerful piece for Speech and Debate class called Maricon, in which he detailed how this word—akin to faggot in Spanish—was used cruelly by certain family members, and had haunted his youth.

Is a transgender student who is being abused or is depressed or suicidal going to confide in a teacher or counselor if they fear it would result in them being outed to their families? If we did betray students in this manner, would we still be considered “trusted adults,” to whom students should go if, for example, they learn there’s going to be a fight on campus? 

Educators aren’t “deceiving” parents; we simply respect our students’ needs and privacy. We accept our students as they are. AB 1955 offers needed protection to LGBTQ youth and the educators who help them. 

At the end of August, we ran a special series on What School Didn’t Teach Us, in which Joe Nocera described his path into journalism and Julia the Intern explained why she wanted to try farming before taking up her place at Stanford. (You can catch up with it.)

In response to the series, we got a letter from K. L. Evans, who homeschooled her daughter Ruby LaRocca—otherwise known as the winner of our first-ever High School Essay Contest. Last year, Ruby wrote us a gorgeous Constitution for Teenage Happiness. Reading her mother’s letter—about what you can learn in school, if you have the right teacher—we now get how Ruby ended up so wise beyond her years.

The best students are the bad ones. That was my great discovery in school. I was not belligerent or idle, just a little deviant. Dreamy. I would dodge what I was supposed to be doing and work industriously on projects that were not asked for and would never have been assigned. (Bold, unwieldy affairs that required enormous effort and patience and drew tiny audiences.) I tortured and enjoyed myself. Pondered long and earnestly on how I should make use of my life. I met with many successes but of a kind so marginal they scanned as failures. People found me charming and ridiculous. 

My favorite teachers were the same: unpredictable, untidy, gifted in a way that only a handful of people appreciated. They tended to be honest, and so uncertain about their own effectiveness. Both exacting and affable. Bound absurdly to the twin demands of scholarship and art. Never friendless, but often lonely. (I know because eventually I became one of them.) I found my teachers in old books, in novels and plays and films, and occasionally in real life. Some who I knew in person were just assigned to me, and I had the good sense to cling to them like a barnacle. Some wrote books that taught me how to think, and once in a while I would be brave enough to send a letter to one of these hardworking scholars, and the most generous of them would write back. Corresponding with lively intellectuals far beyond my limited circle of acquaintance was almost as exciting as coming to understand with profit those playful, dynamic, radical works of education sometimes called “classics.”

A classic is one of those rare, synoptic books around which a whole life can evolve, or which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper. That’s why classics have what Ezra Pound calls “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” They do not reinforce but challenge our habitual, settled ways of thinking—which is perhaps why so many people assiduously avoid reading them. As the playwright Alan Bennett jokes, “A classic is a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves.” Of course, school is not the only place one could find readers of such books, but in my experience, school was where you found them. (Even if on the perimeter, without a formal position.) 

My point is that the experience of formal education missing from the Editors’ recent investigation into “What School Didn’t Teach You” is the one clung to by the most serious teachers and students: those eccentrics and oddballs who associate school with the charged, productive space one person opens up for another. The philosopher Stanley Cavell said a teacher is any person who “shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing.” According to this view, “school” is where students find (only by looking) teachers (not all, not most, but a small, animated faction) game to ward off the stultifying atmosphere in which educators take up a mode of explanation premised on students’ inability—in which teaching assumes the form, “I must explain this to you, since you cannot understand it yourself.” Most people feel fondly about school in proportion to how much they practiced thinking, unraveling difficulties, for themselves. 

Schooling as I experienced it and tried to re-create for my students felt less conventional, more bohemian than the kind of pre-professional training the contributors to your series rightly fled—for the farm, the newsroom, or the workshop. A very clever friend of mine (one of those brilliant, legendary, unemployed intellectuals happily occupying what John Ashbery calls the “category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way”) says that human genius is like grass breaking through concrete; it persists even in situations of institutional hostility. School is and ought to be the straining, daring green and the crushing pavement—minus which the grass ain’t so beautiful.

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