<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> Speeches, protests and platforms

Don't let people with repugnant ideas abrogate your rights

A commitment to the freedom of expression has one constantly irritating corollary: You have to support the rights of people who can be, frankly, detestable. They may be terrible writers, execrable cartoonists, or — in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, pro-paedophilia neo-Nazis with terrible fashion choices — but they all have a right to speak, and to write. 

Unfortunately, the terrible people — such as the aforementioned Mr Yiannopoulos — have cottoned on to this unfortunate fact. And thus they have reinvented themselves from being horrible people into “free speech activists”. Mr Yiannopoulos in particular, once a random blogger, became in