MSNBC’s Chris Hayes unequivocally defended the free speech rights of a group that hosted a “Draw Muhammad” event this weekend in Garland, Texas, breaking hard Thursday night with many of his colleagues at the Peacock network and with others at CNN and Fox News.
For Hayes, it’s not important that the American Freedom Defense Initiative and its founder, Pamela Geller, hosted an intentionally provocative contest this weekend wherein $10,000 was awarded to the artist who best lampooned Muhammad. The content doesn’t matter.
What’s “important,” the “All In” host explained in a discussion with the Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan, is that people in the United States not be cowed by threats of violence and that they are free to exercise their First Amendment rights.
“[T]his idea that this was a provocation which, yes it was a provocation, but I don’t care if it was it was a provocation, if what it’s provoking is attempted murder because I want to live in a society that that is essentially not okay and not tolerated,” Hayes said Thursday.
As it is forbidden in Sunni Islam to depict Muhammad, jihad-inspired murderers all over the world have taken it upon themselves to kill anyone who satirizes Islam’s chief religious figure. The most notable example of this was in January when two terrorists stormed the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering 12 people.
The same nearly happened Sunday on U.S. soil.
Luckily for the nearly 200 attendees at AFDI’s cartoon contest, a police officer shot and killed two heavily armed would-be terrorists, Nadir Soofi, 34, and Elton Simpson, 30, before they carried out their planned terrorist act.
“[I]n the wake of [AFDI’s contest], is that there’s some part of me that feels that if the thing you’re worried about is doing an event that will provoke two people rolling up in body armor and automatic weapons trying to murder people, then it actually weirdly is important that you do that or it’s important that that be done,” Hayes said.
Moynihan agreed, suggesting that perhaps the real problem with things like the Garland contest isn’t “odious and cretinous views,” but men who are willing to murder over them.
Hayes continued, saying, “If someone — if we were going to do a segment that was about someone that was advertising on the network and I was kind of on the fence about it, or actually didn’t like the segment, right, I thought it was a little unfair maybe, but then someone came to us and said ‘you can’t do that segment because of an advertiser.’ I’d be like, ‘now we have to do the segment.’ Because I have to — it has to be the case that we can do that segment.”
The MSNBC host and Moynihan were clear in their discussion that they didn’t particularly care for Geller’s views and that they both found the contest to in poor taste.
But that “doesn’t matter,” they agreed.
What matters is that Americans get away from the idea that the “provocative” is something to be avoided or even silenced.
“[W]hat I don’t like is the notion that there are people going to be making calculations, particularly like a venue, do we want to give you venue over to this thing? And the calculation they’re making isn’t a calculation of do I think this person is bigoted or odious?” Hayes asked. “But, is this going to create a security footprint that I’m not comfortable with? Because that seems to me to be a real threat to free speech.”
Hayes broke sharply with several notable media figures, including Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren, Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera and Martha MacCallum, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and CNN’s Chris Cuomo, by issuing a full-throated defense Thursday night of free speech rights, regardless of content.
Hayes is not alone, though: He has an ally in Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, who has been perhaps the most outspoken and passionate defender of free speech rights this week at the famously right-of-center network.
