Case in point: let’s take the example of this young man, Jay Fayza.

Fayza: I’m a free speech absolutist. That means I believe in the freedom of expression, association and of course speech for any one and any idea. There are certain exceptions like defamatory speech which lead to individuals having severe economic burdens. These economic burdens would have to be proven in court, of course. But besides that I believe you should have the right to say anything you want to say to anyone at all.

On the surface this seems fine. Of course we would like the absolute maximum in freedom of expression, without limit, up until the point of legal consequence. But then again, what about basic civility? What about being simply decent to one another? What about not being a deliberate dickhead to someone’s face?

Fayza: Let me put it this way; If you want to call me “a nigger”—so hate speech—I would defend your right to say that. If you don’t want to serve me food because I’m black—so association—I would defend your right to do whatever you don’t want to do in your private business. If you don’t want to call me by my correct pronoun like these triggered snowflakes here, I would be offended, but also I would defend your right to call me whatever the hell you want. Furthermore, who cares if I’m offended?  That doesn’t mean what you’re saying is wrong, and it doesn’t mean that I should work to silence you. 

But sadly that’s the kind of world we live in. Vast amounts of people agree with loosened limitations on the freedom of speech.

For example it is common for young people to censor their own peers. According to the Pew Research Center up to 40 percent of young people believe ok to censor speech that is offensive to minorities. They have polling data that goes all the way up to 50 percent. A whole half of people, which is stupid because that just makes people want to say more offensive things.

So there is a whole lot wrong with this, and you can already begin to see the problems.

First of all free speech is not absolute. It never has been and it shouldn’t be. Just because you feel like saying something doesn’t mean everyone is required to listen to it. Just because you clearly don’t care if what you saying is perceived as offensive, or may be quite deliberately offensive, that doesn’t mean you don’t have any responsibility for what you’ve said and for the direct reaction of others to it. Communication isn’t just an issue of output or sending a signal, but also of input and receiving that signal—and then sometimes, responding to that signal in kind.

Let’s take the recent example of Kathy Griffin’s botched joke, where she was trying to make a twist on “blood coming out of her where-ever” by being photographed holding a bloody, severed faux Trump head.

Everyone pretty much roundly considers it a failure. Nobody is jumping out of their chair to defend Griffin’s free speech rights to suggest that a currently sitting president should be decapitated. 

Not even Mr. I’m-a-free-speech-absolutist Fayza.

Kathy apologized for the photo about eight hours after it was released. And yet with Donald Trump, we still have yet to hear an apology for so many things.

Donald Trump Jr. has ridiculously complained that conservatives were never so rude to President Obama.

Yeah, right. Never did they suggest his birth certificate was falsified, proving he wasn’t really a natural born U.S. citizen, all for cynical political gain, instead claiming he was really some type of illegal alien Marxist/socialist/Muslim from Kenya. Never did they suggest he was a witch doctor or akin to a fictional, lunatic, mass-murdering clown. That he hated America and what it stood for.  Never did they call him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress, or did they hang him in effigy, or burn his image as if he were a witch at the Salem trials.  Yeah, none of that happened.

Sure, Donald Jr. has a right to say that. But the rest of us also have a right to point out that he’s full of shit. And Melania Trump has the right to suggest that Kathy Griffin has “mental problems” — while in response to Melania the rest of us can also state the quite obvious in return.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer didn’t have much of a response when one reporter asked him about Ted Nugent having dinner in the White House after he had previously called for President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder’s heads to be cut off. Because obviously, Nugent’s rapier wit and glib metaphors are so much funnier than Kathy Griffin’s.

See, all of that is free speech. It also can be quite offensive—to some parties, at least.

Fayza does go on to make a fairly convoluted argument that young people who don’t believe in the perpetuation of offensive speech have been indoctrinated by the humanities and social science departments of universities into nihilistic postmodernism, where they refuse to accept objectivism and instead attempt to project their own subjective worldview onto everyone else.

Which is all fancy projectionist bullshit. Fayza and his ilk are the ones attempting to warp the world to fit their own subjective view, one where they get to do or say almost anything, but are responsible for nothing. Y’know that place, right? Libertarian Fantasyland.

Now, there have been some cases where the push for a “safe zone” has gotten out of hand and gone a bit too far. The backlash against far-right provocateurs such as Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos on campuses has grown unnecessarily strident and sometimes violent, even if in those cases the violence may have come from ANTIFA (anti-fascists) who aren’t part of those particular campuses in the first place. There are some cases where “both sides” have definitely over done it.

But the point is that not going up to someone and directly insulting them with a racist or sexist comment doesn’t require being indoctrinated by some egghead professor into a nihilistic selfish postmodernist worldview. It just requires not being a Dick. In. Public.

It requires understanding that your every little utterance isn’t manna from heaven. It requires understanding that opinions aren’t all innocent and meaningless. An opinion is the formalization of a worldview, a rationalization for action or inaction. And it is through those actions—the choice, for example, to stand up and defend Muslim girls you don’t know even at the risk of your own life, or to simply walk away and allow them to remain at risk—the choice to stand by and say nothing when someone talks about “getting close to Trump” and wanting to be like “Timothy McVeigh,” or else providing police with a tip that leads to capturing a heavily armed man as he enters Trump International Hotel—that we make a genuine difference in the world.

Words are ideas, and those ideas can often lead to actions—or inaction.

As you can see in this video, Fayza is far from alone in his cockamamie analysis of social justice.

The idea of simply pretending race doesn’t exist as a method of solving racism isn’t new. It was the basis for Dinesh D’Souza’s book The End of Racism, which was a long screed about the failures of liberalism to address and solve our various racial problems. The book’s final chapter brings forth the awesome final solution of repealing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Public Accommodations Act and simply letting the businesses and individuals discriminate as much as they want again—to then just let the “free market” sort it all out.

Surely the market won’t let someone virulently and openly bigoted run a large public business for decades—right, Mr. Sterling?  Well, at least not until their girl friend catches them on tape.

That particular fantasy is not exactly a new idea.

The insight that markets break down discrimination is not new. Over 200 years ago Voltaire wrote: “Go into the London Stock Exchange. . . and you will see representatives of all nations gathered there for the service of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and give the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt.”

Voltaire was pointing out that people on the London Stock Exchange watnted so much to make money that they were willing to deal with others who had different religions and cultural backgrounds. This seems an obvious insight, but apparently it is not. How often have you heard people denounce businessmen for ruthlessly pursuing profits and, in the next breath, castigating those same businessmen for discriminating against a minority group simply because they’re a minority? Well, which is it? Are they trying to maximize profits or are they discriminating? It can’t be both.

Yeah, it can be both.  Some people are more than willing to accept a certain amount of racial shrinkage in their businesses. Donald Trump’s father Fred made that quite obvious.

The idea here is that discrimination is something forced on people by the government and is therefore “anti-freedom.” Rarely do those with this viewpoint openly admit that the government is and largely has been controlled by corporate and business interests who in fact were the slave traders and slavers who had a financial interest in protecting and perpetuating the inequality of the situation for their own gain and benefit. Government didn’t make them slavers, or discriminators; government simply got out of the way in those states where they controlled the levers of power.

Unlimited corporate freedom can, without government intervention, lead to individual servitude either as employees, or clients, or customers. It all depends on how much “freedom” we’re talking about for some at the sacrifice of others.

At some point, yes, we have to limit absolute freedoms in order to protect the consequences such actions may have on others. A person just can’t behave any way they want to, or run a businesses any way they want without regard to the impact on their clients, customers, employees, and the surrounding populace. This is not Marxism, nihilism or post-modernism. It’s simply good manners, recognizing that one person’s freedom can have a direct impact on another person and that as a society we have to balance these competing freedoms against each other for the good of all. No one’s freedom is “absolute” because if it were that would be anarchy, not justice.

But yet again we have those who claim they simply want “freedom” to speak as they wish, even if that speech is hateful to others who may be socially and economically vulnerable. They would next argue they should have the “freedom” to do as they wish to those persons, to accept or to shun them from their businesses as they prefer. To hire, fire, rent to, loan to, or ignore them not based on their own merit or character but based on what they are—not who they are.

I stand against that because that is bigotry. That is injustice.

And I am, indeed, a social justice warrior.