What should be done in response to online hate is that we should first and foremost not put it out ourselves. That might seem like a very trite point, but I noticed that last night there was a tweet from a professor of political science, for whom I thought I had some respect, which had a clip of a political leader speaking about the fact that we're all God's children and he said, “Keep your imaginary “beep” out of my public policy”. I thought to myself how have we come to a place where somebody like that would not be ashamed just to utter obscenities in public—can we please stop doing that—but in the second place to dismiss Christianity as a word I'm not going to say into the record? This seems to me to incite hate and ridicule for Christians at least in its intention, but what it does is expose the perpetrator as contemptible.
First of all, we don't tweet things like that. Second, we react to them with contempt. We can unfollow these people. We can answer them, as I did, in what I hope was courteous language but very firm on the substance. If invited to debate a Nazi, I would not be afraid to do so. If invited to debate a racist, I would not be afraid to do so. But what you don't do is silence by force the expression of odious opinions. I was thinking actually to do with this thing about New Zealand and the manifesto, which apparently is unfit for consumption by parliamentarians, although as with Mein Kampf or, say, Stalin's Foundations of Leninism, you need to know about this stuff because it's dangerous.
In the middle of the 20th century John Scarne was one of the most eminent magicians in the United States. During World War II he went around teaching American GIs how to cheat at poker. Someone said that was the strangest thing and why was he teaching GIs to cheat. Scarne responded, “Because the bad guys already know all this stuff and I want the guy who wants to play an honest game of poker to recognize when somebody is doing something with a deck that they shouldn't be.”
Again, if you think you can keep the name of that shooter or his ideas out of the dark web, you are deluded as to your powers. What we need to do when we encounter online hate is answer it indignantly, but, as I say, in such a way if possible as to redeem the hater themselves, because as Andrew Scheer said, we are all children of God. But if you can't redeem the hater you can at least protect others by showing what's wrong with these ideas. And that's what we do. We don't drive them underground. We don't drive them into the places where the Nazi party spread its message despite laws against anti-Semitism in Weimar, Germany. We do not have the wisdom.
Do not arrogate to yourselves the power to silence speech, because you don't have the wisdom to know what needs to be silenced. None of us should have that power. And it doesn't help. It simply gives hate a hiding place where conditions are propitious for it to breed and swarm out.