The Right to Drown Out Speakers

If you don’t want to risk being drowned out by opponents, don’t hold a rally on the Boston Commons.

The “Free Speech” rally on the Boston commons on August 19 steamed ahead in the wake of the deadly attack by a rightest in Charlottesville the week before. The Boston organizers of the rally declined to cancel or postpone, and, in its supporters included not only of the “alt-lite” anti-feminist, anti-immigrant,  “anti-sharia,”  nationalist sorts, but also open alt-right white supremacists  al a Charlottesville, including the Klan.  Understanding the rally to be another expression of the extreme right, the  counterprotesters were many times more numerous than the rightests. The antis, although physically separated from the rally by the police, drowned out the rally’s speakers. This has led to much internet whining that the left violated the free speech rights of the right wing rally.

Not being a governmental organization, the counterpotestors cannot have violated the First Amendment. There remains, however, a question whether they violated the underlying spirit of free speech principles by shouting down the rightests. 

Anyone who lobbied the city to prohibit the rally on content grounds, even indirectly on content grounds, would have violated those principles in my view.  I would also argue that a scrupulous adherence to free speech principles would usually require their opponents to forebear shouting down rightists if they held their gathering in an auditorium. (An occasional heckle is one thing; drowning out the program is another.)

A rally held the Boston Commons, however, makes an implicit appeal to the general public in, around, and passing through that public space. The organizers would have been delighted had the ambient Bostonians flocked to and applauded the rally. They should, then, accept in good grace the opposite eventuality. As the public had a free speech right to cheer, they had an equal right to jeer, and to jeer as long and as loudly as they wanted.

I recognize that the distinction between when drowning out opponents is morally and politically permissible free speech and when it violates the free speech rights of those drowned out only roughly follows the distinction between public parks and indoor meeting spaces. There will be some outdoor, public space gatherings at which one should at most heckle and some circumstances in which drowning out is permissible in auditoriums, but it is a useful rough cut that a rally open to all those who want to lend their voices in support is also fair game for all who want their voices to sound in opposition.