Bill Maher, I can defend free speech without listening to every nut on the stree…

Bill Maher, I can defend free speech without listening to every nut on the street

I think I see where Maher is coming from here: it's a good thing to listen to folks who we disagree with, the echo chamber is a dangerous place to be, a free society includes freedom of speech.

But I think he's (over-sensitively) missed the mark here. Nobody is talking about "disappearing" Rush Limbaugh — given the term's use for the arrests and murder of dissidents in totalitarian countries, that's a Godwinesque metaphor. Rush Limbaugh has every right to say whatever the hell he wants — and people have the right to say whatever the hell they want back, including social ostracism, which includes commercial ostracism.

While I disagree with the results of the legal concept that spending money = speech, that metaphor works here. People who offer financial pressure (by declining to spend their money) on sponsors of Rush's show are using their free speech to offer their statement that his words are socially unacceptable, and they choose not to subsidize them through rewarding the advertising dollars of his sponsors.

Rush (or Bill, or anyone else) doesn't have their platform to speak (vs their right to speak) through some inherent virtue in their words, or through some Constitutional program of taxpayer-subsidized free expression. They have their platform to speak because people find it commercially attractive to let them do so. That's neither a social good nor a God-given right, it's a financial equation. Refactoring that equation in reaction to the things he says is part of the business he's in.

Rush is free to speak and preach and fulminate all he wants. As is Bill Maher. As am I. But none of us are entitled to being listened to, and no value of the marketplace of ideas means that all ideas will always get the same shelf space. #ddtb

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