Antifa and their advocates have insisted that some speech is so offensive that violence is justified. This is nonsense because violence is never justified where peaceful speech is concerned, they are only looking for an excuse to silence ideas they oppose and have decided to frame everyone that disagrees with them as either Nazi’s or white supremacists.
Not every liberal is onboard with silencing speech they dislike. Peter Beinart at the Atlantic sounds as equally offended as I am.
“Why has [Charles Murray] been granted a platform at Middlebury?”
The answer is that Middlebury granted Murray a platform because a group of its students invited him. Those students constitute a small ideological minority. They hold views that many of their classmates oppose, even loathe. But the administrators who run Middlebury, like the administrators who run Berkeley, consider themselves obligated to protect the right of small, unpopular, minorities to bring in speakers of their choice. Denying them that right—giving progressive students a veto over who conservative students can invite—comes perilously close to giving progressive students a veto over what conservative students can say. If it is legitimate for campus progressives to block speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray, why can’t they block speeches by fellow students who hold Yiannopoulos or Murray’s views?
Beinart is correct, but he leaves something out. The progressive love affair with, micro-aggressions, race and gender studies, and the lot is the foul ground in which the passion for suppression has grown. A relationship that swells university budgets for offices, staffing, curricula, professors (tenured and adjunct), producing both pseudo-scholarly works and byzantine codes, all directed at the developing minds of the student body Beinart cautions.
And while he may have addressed the foundational nature of this intolerance elsewhere in his writings, as a self-admitted member of the progressive class and mountebank for the liberal cult, he shouldn’t expect students who have been soaking in the diversity movement to see the forest for the trees, but he tries.
What’s considered morally legitimate at Middlebury differs dramatically from what’s considered morally legitimate in large swaths of America. When colleges like Middlebury are considering whom to honor, they have every right to apply their own ideological standards. But if they use those standards to determine which speakers conservative student groups can invite, they will make it hard for those groups to function on liberal campuses at all. And in an era in which Americans are already ideologically cocooned, that would be a disaster.
It already is, but Mr. Trump had nothing to do with that unless you count progressives dragging it out into the open in their mad rush to delegitimize him at any cost.
Ideological cocooning was institutionalized in the shadow of the Obama years.
We had progressive truth squads, the IRS scandal, and raids on businesses that donated to Republicans. Lists of donors who backed unpopular initiatives were shared with left-wing activists who then threatened those donors. People lost their jobs. And there were repeated attempts from the top to get citizens to report on co-workers, friends, family members, or neighbors that appeared to misunderstand an idea or an issue favored by the left. And all the while progressive politicians, activists, administrators, professors, and students were building the gallows upon which to hang free speech.
Did Mr. Beinart oppose those moves? I honestly don’t know, but I hope he did. Because while the government isn’t a thing we all share it can and will use force to impose a morality that can’t be ignored.
This is why conservatives cherish the founding and the constitution. It left almost all of that expression, that power to impose a limited sense of their shared morality, in the hands of the states and the people, with the locals who could keep an eye on it, better constrain it to suit limited local interests.
In the era of big government and federal overreach that constraint is rare which creates a landscape where free speech is more important than ever.
If you want to claim the mantle of free speech protector you have to do more than pointing out why the urge to suppress protected speech is wrong. You need to show the people what is feeding that desire in the first place and work as hard as you can to change it.
And no, it’s not Confederate statues.
