The suppression of free speech: a clear and present danger
Our friends on the left despise free-for-all debate because it challenges their woke social and equity justice narratives.
Former President Barack Obama called upon “our better angels” at the “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference at the University of Chicago—a gathering of media and political elite to discuss how to defeat their common enemies: Republicans, Fox News, and apparently half of the electorate. Obama described the conference as hopeful since it showed “how easy it is to shift people’s views on issues by changing their media diet.”
Obama denounced “anger-based journalism” while promoting a model of advocacy journalism in which the media shape the news for citizens who supposedly need help to frame ideas correctly.
However, “while pushing for greater private censorship, the conference adopted an almost clinical tenor of conservatives and Fox News-watchers being brainwashed or cognitively challenged. Yet, despite years of such attacks, Fox remains the most popular cable news network; it not only often doubles the viewership of its rivals, but more Democrats watch Fox than CNN.”— Jonathan Turley
The many contradictions spoken at the conference provide an insight into the minds of woke liberal partisans and serve as an example of the hypocrisy that permeates today’s media. The contradictions are both a cause and effect of the media’s cancel culture, a mentality that censors and cancels opinions that diverge from the liberal-progressive orthodoxy. It dislikes free speech when it comes from the right, censoring and restricting voices that conflict with its own.
The mainstream media manage—suppress, omit, delegitimize, slander, spin—conversations and voices that are opposed to their own. In doing so, the media fails in its first duty, to provide honest and objective news reporting. It misinforms and misleads, pushing a woke liberal bias that banishes alternative narratives, which are invariably conservative or Republican.
Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, declared that “only one party in the American system has currently given itself over so comprehensively to fantasists.” Goldberg denounced “social media-Big Data” for not censoring such views. He also said that right-wing narratives about the conference were ‘misinformation’, a statement so broad that it exposes him to the charge of what he decries—partisanship. Arguments should be right or wrong, not left or right.
We can communicate with one another through social media faster and better than any government or corporation can. Our collective views, shared in real-time debates and unhindered by censors, perform as a virtual think tank.
For many, the internet has become a marketplace of ideas where beliefs and opinions collide and conflict. Bad opinions perish; the fittest survive. But those that survive also become new narratives, refreshed and invigorated by the contest. When new information is presented, old assumptions are converted into new knowledge and new narratives—and the “war of the words” continues. The mainstream media, however, has become an autocratic voice, determined to control the House, Senate, White House, and, of course, the media.
Our friends on the left despise this type of free-for-all debate because it challenges their woke social and equity justice narratives, so often formulated to gin up support for liberal progressive policies. Most of these policies Americans reject, but only when they understand their real intent, which the mainstream media and social media do their best to conceal and camouflage.
Narratives constantly change, and we change with them. This ‘war of the words’ shouldn’t be a ‘War of the Worlds’ because, for us, there is only one—and while we should dispute and debate our ideas, we shouldn’t be at war with ourselves.
The following highlights are from William Deresiewicz’s On Political Correctness. Power, class, and the new campus religion.
Political correctness is the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas. Dogma, and the enforcement of dogma, make for ideological consensus. There is zero percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct. That, in turn, is why freedom of expression includes the right to hear as well as speak, and why censoring or canceling certain politically incorrect voices abridges the speech rights of the listeners as well as of the speakers themselves.
This brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship.
The term political correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism—and it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was not a crime at the time you committed it. So you were always already guilty or could be made to be guilty, and therefore we're always controllable.
But so much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. Political correctness creates a mindset of us versus them. “Them” is white men, or straight cis-gendered white men—a.k.a. “the patriarchy.” (The phrase “dead white men,” so beloved on the left, would have little force if its last two words were not already felt to constitute a pejorative.) “Us” is everybody else, the coalition of virtue (virtuous, of course, by an accident of birth).
Political correctness expects us to plot our experience on the grid of identity, to interpret it in terms of our location at the intersection of a limited number of recognized categories. You are a lesbian Latina, therefore you must feel X. You are a white trans man, therefore you must think Y. But identity should not precede experience; it should proceed from it.
Fortunately, we already have a tried-and-tested rule for free expression, one specifically designed to foster rational discourse. It’s called the First Amendment, and First Amendment jurisprudence doesn’t recognize “offensive” speech or even hate speech as categories subject to legitimate restriction. For one thing, hate is not illegal, and neither is giving offense. For another, what’s hate to me may not be hate to you; what’s offensive to you may be my deeply held belief. The concepts are relative and subjective.
When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.