BY JOHN K. WILSON

One of the strongest arguments for free speech and against allowing speakers to be shouted down speakers was made on May 5, 2019 by a group of 15 white supremacist Holocaust deniers in Russellville, Arkansas.

Billy Roper, who runs the racist ShieldWall Network, led the group who disrupted a March of Remembrance ceremony about the Holocaust. They carried Confederate and Nazi flags, and yelled racist slurs like “six million more” while using a bullhorn to try to stop people from hearing the speakers, including 96-year-old Beryl Wolfson, a World War II veteran who saw Nazi flags back in 1945 when he witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

The reason for the protest was that Roper claimed “Jewish agitators” (whom he also calls “greasy hook-nosed kikes”) are pressuring his alma mater Arkansas Tech University to reject a scholarship memorializing his former professor (and “confidant”) who was a Holocaust denier.

According to Roper, critics of his late professor are “censoring free speech and academic expression.” But nobody has a right to be honored by having a scholarship named for them. However, they do have a right to speak without being shouted down, a right that a few people on the left have questioned when far-right speakers are allowed. But it’s a right that these Arkansas Nazis shows is essential to uphold.

Fortunately, the event was eventually able to continue, but what if it had been stopped by these protesters shouting down a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony? It’s a powerful argument for why mob censorship is a principle that we must reject.

I wonder what those people who support shouting down speakers would think of these white supremacists. Do they think everyone has a fundamental right to shout down anyone they want? Do they think colleges should allow left-wingers to shout down speakers, but stop Nazis who want to do the same (a clearly unconstitutional approach)?

Perhaps some of them might argue that the proper solution is to “punch a Nazi” and prevent the white supremacists from stopping a speech. But I doubt that physically attacking potentially well-armed Nazis in states with generous self-defense laws is a wise strategy. In any case, dueling mobs battling to determine physical supremacy is pretty much the worst way imaginable to protect freedom of speech, no matter how you define it. Can we agree, in the face of Nazis, that the notion of a “right to shout down speakers” is fundamentally wrong?

So what is the alternative to mob rule over the power to censor? One alternative is to give those in authority the power to decide. But should the police decide which opponents of police brutality are allowed to condemn the cops? Should government officials get to determine which dissenters are allowed to critique the government? Should college administrators be able to decide what speakers are sufficiently offensive to those sufficiently powerful to seek their censorship? Do the leftists who want to silence speakers really trust the administration and police to decide which speech is permitted?

The alternative is a principle of free speech, where colleges and governments do not ban speakers, and only ban violence and threats or forceful attempts to silence others. Sometimes, it takes an evil mindless scumbag to remind us what our principles mean and why they matter. In Russellville, Arkansas, the Nazis on parade have shown us how dangerous it is say that mobs should get to decide who can be heard.