Trevor Noah says to let Ann Coulter speak at Berkeley

After Ann Coulter had her planned speech at UC Berkeley canceled this week, Trevor Noah took to The Daily Show to defend her right to free speech.

I guess it’s like the old Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Trevor Noah had his hands full with topics to cover on last night’s The Daily Show. He began with a defense of former president Barack Obama, who’s receiving a large payout for a Wall Street speech. Obama has been getting a lot of flak for this decision, but as Noah points out, at least he waited until he left office. “Unlike this guy,” Noah adds, referring to President Trump, who’s “using the White House like an ATM machine.”

Noah can’t spend too much time talking about that though when there’s so many other things happening in the news. This includes another controversy involving speeches, this time concerning Ann Coulter’s canceled UC Berkeley speech. Amid “safety concerns”, her speech has been “rescheduled”, and the political commentator has been raising a firestorm about it in the media ever since.

But here’s the thing. As much as a lot of us want to plug our ears when Coulter is speaking, she has every right in the world to do so. That’s simply the cost of free speech — giving the right to others to say what they want, even if we don’t agree with it. And Noah stresses this same point on The Daily Show, saying that we need to just let her speak.

You can watch the entire segment below.

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What’s funny, as Noah says, is that Coulter clearly doesn’t even want to speak. She’s much happier being stopped from speaking, just so she can use it to complain about being censored. As Noah puts it on the show, she’s basically the “guy in a fight who asks his friends to ‘hold me back’.”