You can offend, sure, and the courts will protect you, but there are consequences
Legally protected speech, no matter how offensive, is a glorious and uniquely American invention, a gift to the marketplace of ideas and an example to the world.
Coming from a journalist — me — that statement should not be even mildly controversial.
Increasingly, though, such a statement is being reviled even here in the U.S. as archaic, revanchist, bigoted, paternalistic, reactionary, sexist, probably tinged with racism or just out of tune with modern thought.
That would be no surprise in Canada or European nations where the impulse to regulate real or imagined insult, using hate speech laws, human rights commissions and the like, can trump free speech.
But in today’s America, the domain of constitutionally protected expression, anti-free-speech forces are stepping up co-ordinated attacks.
- New anti-terror bill could put chill on free speech
- Opinion: Want to protect freedom of expression? Strengthen hate speech laws
Most of these freelance censors seem to be politically left of centre, and range from the “social justice warriors” to — and I’m ashamed to say this — many in the mainstream media, which once celebrated the right to offend established norms and ideas.
There are bags of examples in a new book by Kirsten Powers, the columnist and longtime Democratic Party operative, titled The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.
Powers argues that left-of-centre activists (she calls them the “illiberal left”) are leading a “forced march towards conformity,” striving to control and punish anyone who disagrees with the groupthink in which they wallow with such certainty.
The academic and writer Fredrik DeBoer has called it the “We Are All Already Decided” phenomenon.
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