The Right to Free Speech Is Not the Right to Monologue

In August, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck. The novelist has spent decades living under the threat of a hit put out by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The religious directive was a response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which Khomeini regarded as blasphemous. For many, the attack was an opportunity to reflect on the importance of free expression, and a reminder of the clear distinction between speech and violence.

For others, it was an opportunity to remind others of the clear distinction between speech and violence, which is something that all those snowflake libs, who are sort of like the fanatic who stabbed Rushdie in the neck, should take to heart.

“We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence,” Bari Weiss wrote on her Substack, citing no one in particular. “In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” She added that “of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist.”

As an outlet, attempts to provide readers with a broad spectrum of perspectives based on shared values. One of these values is freedom of speech, a principle to which