Why the ‘words are violence’ argument needs to die

The response to the attempted Trump assassination proves that Cancel Culture is real — and that ‘speech = violence’ is bullshit

I have a rule: Those of us who have been in a fair number of fights growing up shouldn't discuss them with people who haven't. It makes them uncomfortable. Even if you’re just trying to convey a story, and even if it’s one you’re not proud of, people with no experience being in a fight either think you’re bragging or being threatening.

I’m going to break that rule here, because today I want to talk about the dangerous conflation, on campus and beyond, of harsh or offensive speech with actual violence. I addressed this many times, in all of my books and, in some detail, with my friend and “Coddling of the American Mind” co-author Jonathan Haidt in an Atlantic article titled, “Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence.” But I’m going to take a different approach here and talk directly about my experience with violence itself.

Anyone who equates speech and violence has likely never been punched in the face. I have been punched in the face quite a bit, and I have to tell you: It hurts. Of course, how much it hurts depends on who is hitting you. I once let a smaller kid punch me twice to show he was incapable of hurting me. It did hurt, but I didn’t want him to know that. So I just picked him up and calmly said, “Stop.” He stopped. Another time I was hit so hard that I got a concussion and couldn’t join spring training for football that year.

When I was younger, I was — let’s be honest — a weird kid. I probably would’ve been diagnosed as on the spectrum if I were growing up today. And I got bullied a fair amount. I was also a pacifist, so I would just take the abuse. Eventually, though, I had enough and started fighting back.

As I got bigger and stronger, I prided myself on being an “anti-bully” — someone who would stick up for other kids even if it meant fighting bullies, which I did. I remember telling my father this quite proudly, and he simply responded, “My son, is that not just another kind of bully?”

To this day, that one sentence feels like someone splashed my face with ice water. He was absolutely right. What started as me trying to be a white knight didn't end that way. And sometimes it was just an excuse for venting my own anger. And as we know now from psychological research, anger is like a fire: The more you feed it, the bigger it gets.

The scariest moment of my life involving violence happened in my sophomore year of high school. I remember the exact date: March 14, 1991. I walked out of school that day to see one of my friends covered in blood, which was streaming from a wound in his chest. He had picked a fight with a kid and had been beating the shit out of him. Turns out, the kid had been bullied a few too many times, and he snapped, stabbing my friend close to his sternum. I was pretty sure my friend was going to die — if the knife had gone in at a slightly different angle, he would have.

At that moment, my friend was the bully. He was a profoundly troubled kid. But the kid who stabbed him was troubled too. Both of them were in the wrong. And that’s how it often works. Many situations are not clear-cut, “good versus evil” narratives.

Whether or not we have personally experienced violence ourselves, we are all uncomfortably close historically to the unparalleled bloodshed of the 20th century. Violence is real, and it is horrible. That’s why it is an insult to anyone who has ever suffered from violence to argue that words can even compare.

This isn’t to say that people can’t hurt or abuse one another with the things they say, or that trauma and emotional pain aren’t also real. I’ve been very open about my own struggles with mental health. I know that pain too. But equating a barbed tongue with a barbed spear not only betrays a lack of understanding of genuine violence, but also the way words — even harsh ones — have served as both an alternative and a solution to violence.

As an unknown thinker adored by Freud once said, “Civilization began the minute someone hurled an insult rather than a stone.” Words and violence couldn’t be more antithetical.

‘Words are violence’ is less of an argument and more of a tactic

But the line between these two sides of the argument can’t be so clear-cut, can it? Surely, at least some of the people who argue that words are violence have in fact been punched in the face. So why would they make the argument anyway?

I fear the answer is simple: It's a tactical advantage when facing any speaker you hate.

Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Under this logic, my speech — even if sharp, brutal, and filled with invective — is still simply speech. Indeed, it might be commendable, righteous rage. But their speech, even if it’s similarly sharp and brutal, is violence — and I am therefore allowed to respond with violence. It is the kind of bad idea that can only be generated in an environment of low viewpoint diversity and highly moralistic ideological rigidity, which of course we see in too many corners of campus today.

We saw the argument made full-throatedly in the wake of the violent response to conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, when the newspaper of UC Berkeley, the school where the free speech movement was born, published article after article arguing that Milo's hate speech demanded violent retaliation. That same year, Northeastern University psychology professor and author Lisa Feldman Barrett penned an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that because words can cause a stress response and violence can cause a stress response, there's no clear delineation between words and violence.

As noted above, Jonathan Haidt and I wrote a piece for The Atlantic countering this canard back then, but unfortunately, “words are violence” continues to be argued to this day, both on campus and off. In 2021, for example, a Case Western Reserve University Observer editorial reasoned that protesting outside an abortion clinic is “inherently violent.” In 2022, Cornell students disrupting an Ann Coulter event shouted, among other things, “Your words are violence” (and as I tried to point out above, if you need to tell someone something is violence, it’s not violence). In 2023, the pride office at the University of Colorado Boulder warned that misgendering could be “considered an act of violence”: After being called out by conservative media, a reworked page describes it as an “act of oppression.”  

The notion that speech is violence fails to recognize the essential role of provocative speech and art, the revelation of harsh truth in science, and the reality of messy and distorted psychological states people can genuinely find themselves in. Most importantly, however, it is an affront to the foundation of our democracy and modern civilization. The bright line between action and speech is one of the best things humankind has ever devised, and it has been an engine for peace, progress, artistic achievement, and innovation for centuries. Without that line, representative government — not to mention the freedom to be our authentic selves without fear — is impossible.

Equating words and violence is also emotional blackmail — a rhetorical tactic Rikki Schlott and I talk about in our book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” Emotional blackmail is a way to shut down your opponent’s rational faculties, often by using an appeal to empathy for one group or person to discourage empathy for another. It’s effective at making a person think, “Well, I don’t want to hurt anyone. And if good people believe this, I probably shouldn’t think about it too hard.” 

The irony, of course, is that the “words are violence” argument is almost always used to justify hurting other people. And if you’re not a fan of hurting people, hurting people to prevent hurting people seems like a doomed mission, doesn’t it? That is, of course, unless the people you’re hurting are bad and the people for which you’re hurting them are good. This is a tactic grounded in what we describe in “Canceling” as the Great Untruth of Ad-Hominem: bad people only have bad opinions.

Don't be taken in by that.

As my colleague Angel Eduardo has said, “Fascinating that some ‘speech is violence’ advocates resort to or support physical violence in response to speech. Given their perspective, you'd think that merely hurling invective in return would be sufficient — but apparently even for them there's a relevant distinction.”

Rob Henderson defines a “luxury belief” as “an idea or opinion that confers status on members of the upper class at little cost, while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” Like those who endorse the idea of stochastic terrorism, I think proponents of the “words are violence” argument are at least half-aware that it is bullshit. But maybe that is what luxury beliefs ultimately are: Ideas that increase your esteem in elite circles, but can also be tactically useful — they may be harmful for society but they benefit you personally. 

Henderson did a great video on the concept of luxury beliefs for The New York Times, which I encourage you all to check out:

The assassination attempt showed the gulf between words and violence, but it also proved, once again, that Cancel Culture is real and cross-partisan.

Last weekend, a would-be assassin's bullet came within a fraction of an inch of killing one of our two major presidential candidates. It tragically ended the life of a firefighter and father — and shortly after, the shooter was killed as well. All of this happened in front of the eyes of supporters and even children.

That alone should remind us that speech — even horrible, hurtful, and hateful speech — is not violence. Violence is a very different thing. But the response to it in the last few days also has me thinking about this bright line and how important it is.

After the narrowly averted assassination attempt, some people and organizations have very fairly and rightfully called for a lowering of the rhetorical temperature in our discourse. I have no issue with that. Indeed. I think the way to solve our problems is often through precise arguments rooted in real-world solutions rather than simplistic battles about which of your opponents is personally evil (spoiler: humans have a nasty tendency to see anyone who disagrees with them as stupid, evil, or both).

However, there were also calls for people to be punished for flippant comments or dark jokes that, while profoundly insensitive and even obnoxious, are and always have been a regular part of any society's political discourse.

That the rhetoric might touch on violent imagery does not make it violence in the eyes of the First Amendment. In August 1966, 18-year-old Robert Watts was having a discussion in a small group after an anti-Vietnam war rally on the Washington Monument grounds when he made a anti-war rhetorical statement: “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

Watts was convicted of threatening the president — then the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1969. The Court recognized that the “political hyperbole” of Watts’ statement did not convey a genuine threat: “The language of the political arena … is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact. We agree with petitioner that his only offense here was ‘a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.’”

In April 1981, after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, state data entry worker Ardith McPherson had a conversation with her co-worker/boyfriend where they criticized Reagan’s social policies. She ended with, “Shoot, if they go for him again, I hope they get him.” McPherson was fired. In 1987, the Supreme Court held that firing violated her rights. McPherson had a right to comment on a matter of public concern, and “the inappropriate or controversial character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.”

This is especially the case when animosity between rival factions is high, and most especially when (and we're not imagining this part) the stakes appear so high.

Take, for example, Kyle Gass of the band Tenacious D, who made a joke about the attempted assassination of former President Trump during a concert in Australia — which led to calls for he and bandmate Jack Black to be deported, Black canceling the remainder of the tour, and Gass being dropped by his talent agency. Or consider “Morning Joe” being preemptively pulled off the air, allegedly just in case they said something offensive, on the Monday after the attempted assassination.

Or consider Darcy Waldron Pinckney, the Home Depot clerk from Cayuga, New York, who wrote “To bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!” on her Facebook page in response to the attempt on the former president’s life. The social media account Libs of TikTok (who has been on an absolute tear with this kind of behavior following the assassination attempt) posted a video on X of someone confronting Pinckney at work, tagged Home Depot, and asked, “Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”

Home Depot responded on X, saying “this individual's comments don't reflect The Home Depot or our values. We can confirm she no longer works at The Home Depot.”

In summation: Pinckney posted her political opinions on Facebook, was targeted by a mob, and subsequently fired. Sound familiar? It should.

This is Cancel Culture — and as Rikki and I pointed out in “Canceling,” it is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. The wave of doxxing and calls for people to be fired coming from some on the political right in the last few days is all the proof you need.

It’s not violence to argue that the ‘speech is violence’ argument should die

So what have we learned today? Well, for the 50,000th time: Cancel Culture is real and is not going away unless we do something about it. Also, the phenomenon comes from both sides of the political spectrum, and people tend to care about it only when it's directed at their own side (a crucial part of what Rikki and I call hypocrisy projection).

But most importantly, I want people to understand this takeaway: Speech is not violence, and saying so is an insult to anyone who's experienced actual violence. The phrase, “Your words are violence!” itself is little more than a rhetorical device, useful in politically homogeneous settings. It functions as a luxury belief, something that helps the advocate gain esteem for his or her passion in certain circles, but would lead to an inevitable spiral of violence if it were generally believed.

As Rikki and I argue in “Canceling,” there has been a more-than-50-year campaign to turn elements of the left against freedom of speech, despite the left once being the greatest champion of free speech. A major arrow in this quiver is the recharacterization of speech as violence, whether in the form of the “fighting words” doctrine (which is hanging on by a constitutional thread) to justify passing speech codes in the ‘80s and ‘90s; or the more recent conflation of both speech and silence with violence (a tell that these are rhetorical tactics rather than actual arguments, because obviously you can use one or the other any time you like without regard for consistency).

The attempt to besmirch the reputation of freedom of speech has been extremely successful throughout my career despite the efforts of so many — including FIRE and the people I admire most in the world like Jonathan Rauch, James Kirchick, Nadine Strossen, Jacob Mchangama, Alice Dreger, and so many others.

But freedom of speech has nothing to apologize for. In fact, it remains the best alternative to violence ever invented. The argument that speech is violence is a flippant justification for enacting violence against your opponents. It's a simpleton's argument disguised as a profound insight. It is also an ancient argument, one that was squarely in place back when people dueled in order to avenge insults on their honor.

It's only when the powerful become deeply in denial of their power that they can convince themselves that maybe the censors were on the right side of history. Jacob Mchangama’s book, “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media,” makes this point as clear as day. Chapter after chapter, we see human beings who don’t have free speech rights espouse its virtues and fight mightily to attain it. But once they do, and once they gain power, we see far too many of them suppress or desire to suppress the speech of others. “For me, but not for thee” is an all-too-human impulse. Those of us who value free expression need to remain constantly vigilant and principled, because I don’t call free speech “The Eternally Radical Idea” for nothing. Defending this critical freedom is truly a never-ending battle.

The worst thing about the argument that speech is violence is that it makes actual violence inevitable. But I can guarantee you that once that process begins, and once those who advocate for this idea experience real violence directed at them, they’ll change their tune very quickly. I wish we didn’t always have to learn things the hard way in America, but if we don’t wise up to the absurdity of the “words are violence” luxury belief, we’ll soon be hit with something much worse than a punch in the face.

Update: For more on this theme, check out my speech at FIRE’s 2024 Student Network Conference:

SHOTS FOR THE ROAD

Congrats on making it to the end of this whopper of a Substack post! I think two shots are in order this week, so I present you with a couple of clips from an interview Rikki and I did while promoting “Canceling” late last year:

First up, we tackle the idea that "cancel culture isn't real" — which is about as tough to kill as a tardigrade. And then, of course, those who start by saying "cancel culture doesn't exist" often quickly turn to, "cancel culture is real AND it's a good thing!"

Next, Rikki and I discuss ways we can finally defeat Cancel Culture, once and for all: