FIRE, Alexandra Wallace, and Defending Nasty Speech
Roger Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who I criticized yesterday for his remarks on the Alexandra Wallace video, has written a new piece at the FIRE website responding to my criticism and explaining that organization’s approach to the various speech acts it defends on First Amendment grounds:
“An integral part of being able to do the work we do is not letting our feelings about the viewpoint of the expression itself affect how we analyze the expression or how vigorously we defend the rights of the speaker. … Instead, we consistently present on our website all the evidence that we have about the expression in question in order to help people make up their minds for themselves, and we expect people to draw their own conclusions.”
That’s certainly a reasonable position to take, and indeed I have commended FIRE for taking exactly that
