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There is no right to the platform of your choice at the time of your choosing

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A very rich and famous comedian was CANCELLED at one venue and had to…perform at another venue in the same city because workers at the former don’t like his recent reliance on routines that are both anti-trans and incredibly hacky, leading to predictable outrage from the usual suspects. In addition to being directly upset, the Atlantic’s correspondent for Free Speech Unless An Oberlin Student Politely Tells A Reporter That It’s Kinda Insulting To Call A Pulled-Pork Sandwich a “Banh Mi” gives us an unintentionally revealing hypothetical:

Wait — this theater has never turned down a booking? Two bands have never wanted to use it on the same night? The theater is run by extremely deep-pocketed philanthropists who just don’t have to consider whether what they’re putting on will have enough of audience to pay the staff members, the utilities, etc.? This stipulation makes the whole exercise completely meaningless.

The actual reason that there’s controversy over platforms is generally that the spaces are both desirable and scarce. Presumably Chappelle and his supporters are pissed off because the First Avenue is a place a lot of people would like to play. But because slots in the venue aren’t freely available, choices always have to be made about who to give them to. The owners and managers are always making choice about who to “platform” and who not to.

As far as I can tell, the argument boils down to a claim that when making inevitable decisions about who to platform and who not to, it is not legitimate to consider content considered hateful and offensive as one of the factors. But this is just nonsensical. And nobody really thinks that it would violate scared principles of free speech for theater owners to refuse to host, say, a Klan rally. There are just some groups a certain kind of well-off white dude thinks you should be able to say hateful things about with zero consequences, and right now trans people are the paradigmatic such group. The First Avenue theater did nothing wrong or anti-“free speech” by choosing to have different values.

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