Free Speech is a moral imperative.I have said this innumerable times when rising to the defense of various silenced speakers, most recently to protest the deplatforming of philosopher, online commentator, and host of FreeDomain Radio, Stefan Molyneaux, as well as other notable figures. What I said then is just as true today, and just as applicable to Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan as it is to any political, moral, or philosophical commentator. Free Speech is the necessary moral standard because any other stance is a moral double standard, an hypocrisy, an indefensible abdication of our status as a free people.
If we accept the double standard, if we tolerate and excuse one rule for conservative voices and another rule for progressive voices, then our speech is no longer free, and we are no longer free.
At its core, all censorship rests on the hypocrisy of the double standard. The proposition that some ideas should be silenced and others not is the very essence of what a double standard is. That hypocrisy is why censorship can never be the right thing to do, why it is always the wrong thing to do. Avoiding that hypocrisy is why the alternative, free speech, is always the moral imperative.
Yet we must also recognize that deplatforming is but one form of censorship. There is another, more insidious and more perverse form of censorship: the "fact check" of a claim which is itself based on a lie.
FactCheck.org, in attemting to dismiss (and really to defame) Dr. Li's research into the origins of the CCPVirus, engages in an horrendous and self-evident lie, that her research is somehow "baseless". The only thing FactCheck.org establishes with its critique is that the author flunked 8th grade English.
