Jonathan Kay talks to two poets – Clint Margrave and Timothy Green – about the shunning of fellow poet Frank Sherlock after he confessed to having been in a skinhead band in the 1980s. Clint Margrave recently wrote an article about Frank Sherlock’s public shaming for Quillette.
Editor’s note: The text that follows is adapted from a speech delivered recently by the author to the Montreal Press Club. On the op-ed page of The New York Times, former Central Intelligence Agency general counsel Jeffrey Smith recently argued that Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan “violated Mr. Brennan’s First Amendment right to speak freely.” It’s an intriguing thesis. And, being a former lawyer who once wrote long law school essays about constitutional freedoms, I read it with keen interest. But I also felt a twinge of nostalgia as I parsed Smith’s lawyerly arguments. Notwithstanding the nature of Mr. Trump’s treatment of Mr. Brennan, the gravest threats to free speech in democratic countries now have little or nothing to do with government action (which is what Constitutions serve to restrain). And with few exceptions, public officials now sit as bystanders to the fight over who can say what. Last month, Facebook, Apple and Google deleted gigabytes of video, audio and text content from Alex Jones’ Infowars …
