by Joe Miller
I’m starting this week with a few promotions.
First, I’ll be filling in for Jeff Marcum (more on him in a minute) as the host of the Old Mountain Tavern’s weekly trivia night. We’ll start at 7 p.m. the next three Wednesdays.
The good folks at Old Mountain Tavern are allowing me to collect donations for the Battle of the Books, a literary trivia contest for elementary and middle school students.
I hope you’ll join me in supporting a local business, raising a bit of money for a terrific literacy program and showing off how smart you are.
Speaking of Jeff, he’ll be appearing in Deera’s Country Funeral, a play that runs September 12-14 at the Pocahontas County Opera House. Everyone involved – actors, set and lighting designers, the director, the stage manager, even the playwright – is a local volunteer. You should absolutely check it out.
Finally, close out your weekend at Little Levels Depot on Sunday, September 14, at 4:30 p.m. Playwright C.J. Hopkins and Columbia University professor Hugo Fernandez will discuss life in America on the third stop of their “Strangers in a Strange Homeland” tour. I’ll be part of a panel of locals joining in the conversation.
I will confess that I hadn’t heard of Hopkins until about two weeks ago. But since I’ll be on a panel with him, I figured I should do a bit of homework. I read a few articles about Hopkins, then started working through latest book: Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich.
Hopkins is an avant-garde playwright, novelist and essayist. He was born and raised in the U.S. but moved to Germany in 2004 amid what he describes as a midlife crisis triggered by his despair over US foreign policy. (Hopkins had organized several protests ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.)
Hopkins describes his work as offensive. In the opening chapter of Fear and Loathing, he tells us that at one of his plays the audience “stormed out in droves” after being confronted with closeups of an actor shouting about burning down libraries interspersed with scenes of Ronald McDonald sodomizing the pope.
Hopkins’ essays are no less controversial.
In 2022, Hopkins published a book titled The Rise of the New Normal Reich, a play on William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Hopkins – like Shirer – includes a swastika on the cover of his book, though Hopkins’ version is covered with a semi-opaque surgical mask.
In 2022, Hopkins tweeted a picture of that cover at the German minister of health. That’s where things got weird.
German prosecutors char-ged Hopkins with violating a law that prohibits distributing “propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”
Hopkins was initially acquitted, but an appeals court overturned his acquittal. He could face jail time.
Germany’s prosecution of Hopkins is self-evidently an attempt at suppressing speech. The Rise of the New Normal Reich doesn’t promote Nazi ideology. Just the opposite. The book criticizes the German government for engaging in some of the same authoritarian tactics that Nazis employed.
So, yes, the German government responded to an author claiming it was acting in authoritarian ways by misusing the criminal justice system to stifle the author’s speech. I guess Irony is more a French thing than a German one.
Hopkins’ story is a single data point in a bigger trend line. Free speech is losing ground across the Western world.
An Irish comedian made news recently when he was arrested at a British airport. His crime? Offensive social media posts – a crime for which UK police arrested 30 people per day in 2023.
Things aren’t much better here in the U.S. Those on the left cancel anyone who strays from progressive orthodoxy or who dares utter one of an increasingly lengthy lists of verboten words. Those on the right ban books for centering nonwhite or queer (or, heavens forbid, queer nonwhite) protagonists.
Disappointingly, a 2024 poll by FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) found that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans believe that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it protects.
Now I’ll admit that I wanted to throw Hopkins’ book across the room on more than one occasion. It is chocked full of bad arguments, cringeworthy hyperbole and false and misleading claims. The book is a perfect storm of things that irritate this one-time philosophy professor, writing instructor, and professional fact checker.
Many of Hopkins’ ideas are dangerously wrong.
And yet, I firmly believe that people should be permitted to air dangerously wrong ideas without fear of being canceled or having their books banned. Certainly no one should be jailed for offensive tweets.
I believe in the marketplace of ideas. In an open market, good products tend to succeed. Bad products tend to disappear. The same is true of ideas. Bad ideas wilt under public scrutiny.
It’s easy to defend speech that we like.
Defending speech we don’t like? Speech that’s offensive or tasteless or immoral or false? That’s the true test of our commitment to the principle that the founders of our country thought important enough to make the first right enumerated in our Constitution.
