Banning Candace Owens Will Only Promote Her Ideas

Antisemitism is widespread in some jurisdictions, including American blacks, so trying to shut up Owens just tends to discredit the censor.  We should tolerate antisemites, and argue with them gently.  Otherwise they will go on unchallenged.
 
 I put my money where my mouth is. I have been a Zionist for at least 70 years but I still tolerate the traditional  antisemitism of my European girlfriend.  That does seem to have toned down her attitudes a bit  — JR

Brendan O’Neill

I cannot stand Candace Owens. I find her the most grating of all the bigoted irritants on the internet. And that’s saying something….

Given she gets my goat, you might think I would welcome her banishment from Australia. You might think I would cheer the Immigration Minister’s rejection of her visa application to do a speaking tour in November. After all, why should the good folk of Australia, especially the Jews of Australia, have to watch as this queen of grift waltzes round the country planting seeds of bigotry? Keep her out – right?

Not so fast. A dangerous precedent is being set. The Australian state is assuming for itself the staggering power to determine which ideas its citizens may hear, and which ideas their dainty ears must be protected from.

It is behaving in loco parentis. Where mums and dads babyproof their homes to protect their little ones from bumps and grazes, the Australian government is Candace-proofing the nation to protect people from her barbs and nonsense.

I object to everything Owens says, but I object even more to the right of the state to protect people from what she says. If it’s a choice between being offended and being protected from offence by a bureaucracy that thinks it knows better than the rest of us, give me the former every time.

The thing is, Immigration Minister Tony Burke is right in what he says about Owens. He’s right that she’s been “downplaying the impact of the Holocaust”. He’s right that decent folk will find such drivel vexing and hurtful.

But he’s wrong – catastrophically wrong – when he says “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else”. Shorter version: Australia will be a better, healthier country if this wicked woman is kept out. Really? The edict against Owens’s speaking tour actually suggests Australia is a fragile country, one so jittery it can’t even intellectually face down a bloviating muppet such as her. It also gives the impression Australians are a childlike people. When Burke says Owens could “incite discord in almost every direction”, he’s slighting his own citizens more than her.

He’s depicting Aussies as a mob-in-waiting. Apparently all it will take to tip them over the edge of civility is a lame speech or two by a visiting irritant.

This is always the impulse behind censorship – not only to silence problematic people but also to tame the unpredictable plebs.

Censorship is a double calumny: it shushes those who have something to say and patronises everyone else. The entire engine of censorship is the patrician urge to protect the masses from their own worst instincts. It is the government’s dread of its own populace and their alleged latent hatreds that convinced it Owens must be kept “somewhere else”.

It will backfire. Bans always do. The only person who will benefit from Burke’s edict is Owens herself. She will pose as such a brave teller of truths that states feel the need to crush her. Burke is aiding and abetting her grift. See, she’ll say, I told you the establishment is out to get me. More people will now look her up, to see what Australia is so scared of. How much better it would have been to give her the liberty to speak, and everyone else the liberty to laugh in the face of her lies.

That’s how bad ideas are best tackled – not by forbidding them but by mocking them, by subjecting them to the unforgiving spotlight of free discussion and frank ridicule.

I want to speak up for an under-represented minority – the one who hates what Owens says but thinks she should be free to say it.

For the price of the “safety” the government is offering you is your own autonomy. In protecting you from insulting words, the government is insulting you in a far worse way. It is taking away your liberty to hear and your liberty to decide for yourself.

That’s far more annoying than Owens’s shtick.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/candace-owens-is-a-bigot-but-banning-her-will-only-backfire/news-story/2de9b5e68bcc798279afc014fb45dc1c

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Source: http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/2024/10/banning-candace-owens-will-only-promote.html