Bringing it back to race stuff, there's a common story you hear from people on certain parts of the internet: they saw one side that had what looked like a lot of calm, compelling scientific arguments, and they saw another side that never responded with anything more substantial than "you're a bunch of horrible racists whose opinions should be suppressed," and so they decided, welp, looks like these "human biodiversity" people have Important Hidden Truth. And from there some of them can be recruited to white nationalism, which has a similar rhetorical advantage. For anyone who's not a white nationalist, this should be at least a bit worrisome.
Free speech, as Mill views it, always helps individuals better understand why they hold views in the first place as well as why others hold seemingly unsavory views as well. If you want to successfully combat those unsavory views in the political sphere, it is necessary to understand the other side; censoring them pre-emptively is ineffective both for your own understanding and in terms of politically opposing them (see also from the other side: bans on teaching anything related to CRT).
Especially in a democratic country like the US that is highly polarized and divided into very different political geographies, supporting free speech is necessary if you want to understand where the other side is coming from better. (See this article about how both sides, but liberals in particular, misunderstand the other: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...)
This raises a related, but much tougher, issue.
Does free speech include false speech? Does it include misleading speech? White nationalists are not known for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Does free speech allow them to make up claims about raping children? Should someone be allowed to make those claims in a college classroom? Should someone be allowed to present photos of child rapists, but only people of one race, without even acknowledging the existence of the other child rapists? This quickly becomes the dominant issue when you go down this road. I find the naive "pro-free speech" stance to be unsatisfying.
Keep in mind too that many on the right would view a lot of what the left says on various contemporary issues to be "false" and "misleading." Should a professor be allowed to say that all white students are inherently racist? That communism is the best system of government? And is there a difference between exposing students to these ideas vs. requiring students to parrot them back on assignments?
The AAUP drew a pretty good line in terms of setting the limits on "free speech" that I think would address the kind of hypotheticals mentioned: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject...The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is “controversial.” Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject."
> Should a professor be allowed to say that all white students are inherently racist?
That's an opinion. Very different from singling out a white student and saying they are a child rapist.
> Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster.
I don't disagree with that statement. The problem is that lies are not controversial, they are lies.[1]
[1] MW defines controversy as "a discussion marked especially by the expression of opposing views".
This is actually the primary issue in the article.
That is covered by what Mills calls a "false opinion."
> It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses, each of which has a distinct branch of the argument corresponding to it. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
And here is some more of the reasoning about this:
> When we silence an opinion, Mill says, our reason, at least in part, is that we are certain it is false. But in taking our certainty of its falsity as a reason for silencing an opinion, we are treating our subjective certainty as absolute certainty, which is tantamount to assuming we are infallible about the truth of our belief. But of course, we are not infallible beings; therefore we are not justified in silencing an opinion on the grounds of being certain it is false.
Note that "someone making up lies" is someone's opinion that you have determined to be a lie. If you don't recognize this you are doing what Mills has so pointedly warned and pointed out - assuming infallibility
You've missed the point. Removing the speech of white nationalists begets more white nationalism.
>When we act to silence white nationalists because we believe their views are false, we undercut our ability to justify our belief that their views are false, by preventing our reasons for believing so from being weighed against their reasons for holding those views, and thus we undermine our justification for the very act of silencing them. And this problem is not unique to the act of silencing white nationalist views. No matter the content of an opinion or the character of its proponent, the act of silencing it is self-undermining.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, consider what white nationalists explicitly want to do. They want to prosecute a culture war, up to and including the marginalization, expulsion, or genocide of left-wingers, non-whites, Jews, Muslims, gays, the mentally ill, and generally anyone not perceived as part of their in-group[0].
I don't even need to go as far as to say free speech is an instrumental goal of something else like anti-racism. Even if you think free speech is itself the final goal, white nationalists are still harmful to you, because censorship is specifically a foundational plank in the platform. This is the sort of thing where the ardent free speech supporter needs to think a few steps ahead and consider what maximizes total freedom at the end of the game rather than the first move.
I'll give you that frequent accusations of being a Nazi are mind-numbing. In fact, Nazis use that to their benefit. But at the same time, free speech supporters should not jump to their defense if those accusations are true.
[0] Notably, what is actually considered the in-group - the "whiteness" to be protected - has no real logic to it; so this list will change all the time based on who swears fealty to whom. American nativists wanted to kill and eat the Irish, Hitler had underlings that wanted to replace Christianity with the old gods, etc.