SIO244: On Publishing Fascist Op-Eds, with Bryan W. Van Norden
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2020
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
The New York Times recently published an Op-Ed by Tom Cotton advocating a severe crackdown on the protests. The piece sparked a giant backlash and even a bit of a civil war within the Times. The Opinion editor officially stepped down. Joining us today is Professor Bryan Van Norden, who has written about why not all opinions deserve to be heard. Much of the justification people use tends to derive from Mill's On Liberty, but does that essay really justify platforming fascism?
Links: Bryan's Op-Ed, Bryan's lecture on political discourse, Mill's essay, Marcuse's essay, exposure to false claims increases likelihood to believe them.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is episode 244. I'm Thomas. That's Jamie. How you doing, Jamie? |
| 0:36.0 | I am all right, Thomas. How about you? |
| 0:38.6 | Totally sufficient answer. I too am all right. but I am excited because we have a guest today why |
| 0:45.9 | you introduce our guest yes I am so excited we have a very special guest who is |
| 0:52.0 | very very generously up at 2 o'clock in the morning his time to make this possible. |
| 0:57.9 | So today we have Brian Van Norden who is the James Monroe Taylor chair in philosophy at Vassar College. |
| 1:04.4 | Brian Van Norton is an expert on Chinese philosophy and he has published 10 books including |
| 1:09.6 | taking back philosophy a multicultural manifesto. But perhaps most importantly or at least |
| 1:15.5 | most relevantly for our discussion today, Brian is also the author of the New York Times |
| 1:20.8 | op-ed The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to to an audience and so we're going to be talking to him today about free speech, censorship, Todd Cotton's oped in the New York Times, and what happens when social media giants like Twitter and Facebook it into fact-checking |
| 1:34.6 | news stories and the president. |
| 1:36.5 | Welcome Brian. |
| 1:37.5 | Thanks for having me on the show. |
| 1:39.1 | Thanks so much for coming on. |
| 1:40.8 | So hopefully we'll be able to post a link to the article that you wrote in the New York Times, but for those of our listeners who haven't read it yet, could you give us a bit of background information about this article, what motivated you to write it, and what, |
| 1:56.3 | you know, the main argument is that you're making in this piece. |
| 2:00.3 | Sure. |
| 2:01.3 | Well, I give some examples of controversial and in some cases just you know factually |
| 2:07.9 | false claims people have made in the in the media and then I discuss John Stewart Mills famous argument for |
| 2:18.8 | an almost unlimited freedom of expression as presented in his seminal 1859 work on liberty. |
| 2:27.5 | And Mill gives this kind of seductive line of argument. |
| 2:31.3 | He says, look, any claim someone advances is either got to be wholly true, |
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