Must You Be Silenced If You Don’t Toe The Liberal Line?

Do you think people who disagree with you have a right to speak at all? Apparently there are more than a few people who think not including Dadahead, a blogger who had his fascistic rantings actually linked by Salon’s Daou Report.

Here’s Dadahead’s take on why conservatives should have food flung at them when they try to speak:

“Let the wingnuts scream from here till kingdom come about their free speech rights being stifled, I don’t give a sh*t. They’ll scream about it anyway. We have to realize that their complaints only occasionally and accidentally correspond to reality, and that this is of absolutely no concern to them. They will call us Nazis and terrorists and traitors no matter how nice we play.

In a civilized society, you don’t listen quietly to demons like Buchanan and Horowitz spewing their madness, waiting politely for your chance to rebut like it’s a high school debate team match. The very act of engaging them in discourse lends them a legitimacy that they haven’t earned; it is unconscionable to allow them to present themselves to society as rational human beings with opinions and beliefs and arguments when they are not. They are not just people we disagree with, for the sake of f*ck. They are not playing our game–they are not making a good-faith effort to make sense of the world and do what they can to make things better–and we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

…Horowitz isn’t a person; he’s a ridiculous hallucination, an evil spirit that thrives on our refusal to call him what he is. And the same goes for Buchanan and the rest of the wolf pack. Ridiculous buffoons all of them; treating them any other way is immoral and stupid.

Give me a choice, and I’ll take a dreadlocked Marxist college student dousing Buchanan with salad dressing over Paul Begala sitting down and debating him any f*cking day of the week. At least one of them hasn’t sold his soul to the devil yet. At least one of them is calling a spade a spade.

…Whatever you do, don’t treat irrationality as rationality; don’t treat insanity as sanity. And if flinging sh*t is the only way to expose the lie that says that the chimpanzee screechings of these f*cktards are actually attempts at rational discourse, then so be it.”

Yes, in the world according to Dadahead, people who disagree with him don’t have a right to speak at all, not even to groups of supporters who want to hear their message. But free speech is a right reserved for human beings, is it not? And in Dadahead’s world, people who disagree with him apparently do not rise to that level. Instead, to him, Horowitz is a “hallucination,” an “evil spirit,” who’s spewing out “chimpanzee screechings,” so it’s OK to throw things at him if he tries to speak. That’s the sort of “nuanced” opinion that most people probably associate with the sort of thugs who walk around with shaved heads and swastikas on their arms, darkly muttering about “subhumans.” What was that Dadahead said early on in his rant, “They will call us Nazis…?” Well, if the jackboot fits…

If Dadahead and others who think like him have their way, political dissent will quite literally become a food fight featuring goons hurling things at those who disagree with them. However, lowering ourselves to the level of feces flinging chimps at the zoo is not something that should be endorsed by civilized human beings, whatever their ideology may be…

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