Let the racist speak at Auburn

Perhaps Auburn University just made an error.

It should have let white nationalist Richard Spencer go on and give a speech Tuesday.

It already rented him the venue, for only $700, apparently — which makes you wonder whether it knew who “Richard Spencer” is – then it revoked that reservation, saying he posed too great a threat to public safety.

That may be, and it wouldn’t be the first time, but that is not the standard for mere speech under the First Amendment.

Here in the United States of America, the standard is we err on the side of freedom, and where we have established an open forum for varying points of view — such as a publicly funded university — we let controversial people speak, regardless of the security risk or the cost.

If you set a cost, and say this speaker or that is so great a threat that securing the venue costs too much, where do you stop? Maybe next time the speaker refused is not a white nationalist. Maybe it’s a black nationalist, or a feminist or a humanist or an atheist.

Here in Columbus, we know the First Amendment rule on public safety and security costs, because the city once played those cards on the protest against Fort Benning’s former School of the Americas.

After 9/11, the city claimed demonstrators posed too great a risk to be allowed to block Fort Benning Road, by then their designated protest zone for a decade, so they had to be moved to Golden Park.

Remember that, next time the city tries to sell Golden Park: We might need it for a protest.

A federal judge later ruled against the city, as U.S. Supreme Court precedents of course say the most objectionable views must under the law be as protected as the most accepted, else our First Amendment is meaningless, having failed an existentialist test.

Speaking of big words like existentialism, another reason Auburn should have let white separatist Richard Spencer speak is that his material is boring.

Maybe you’ve not spent a lot of time around real or pretend academics, so you don’t know what it’s like to hear 20 minutes of jargon say something that otherwise could be expressed in a sentence or two.

Here’s an excerpt from Richard Spencer’s blog, a 2015 piece on ex-U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation:

“Today, the Republican Party is haunted by the specter of White dispossession and ethno-politics. This is what the Trump phenomenon is really about, and this is why Trump is loathed by establishment conservatives (FOX, the GOP, the ‘conservative movement,’ et al.) and why he appeals — on an instinctive, unconscious level — to White Americans. White Americans recognize (again, in an instinctive, unarticulated way) that taxes and budgets are meaningless in the face of White dispossession.”

Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, and so forth and so on, etc.

Big words can make 19th century eugenics sound like academic research instead of regular old racism, and make racists think they’ve some scientific basis for thinking the amount of melanin in people’s skin determines whether they’re superior or inferior to others, despite what we know from genetics, which is that our common ancestors all wandered out of Africa a few thousand years ago, and humans are pretty much all the same regardless of color.

Racism today is not like it used to be. The colorful days of race-baiting politicians such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Eugene Talmadge are over.

Richard Spencer won’t stand in the schoolhouse door, wave a pick handle outside a restaurant or give a segregationist speech on the steps of the Muscogee County Courthouse while thunder roars like a lion of doom overhead.

Guys like Spencer need others to roar. Alone they just drone, like a mosquitoes spreading a virus.

So let them speak, and let their supporters go listen, if they have nothing better to do.

That’s punishment enough.

This story was originally published April 16, 2017 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Let the racist speak at Auburn."