Free Speech. It's under assault. And it's under assault from the Left. Not just the Alt-Left, but the Left. There's really no hiding it. In fairness to the Left, it's growing more and more comfortable proclaiming its desire to infringe upon, and curb, free speech. No under a bushel anymore. Much of its open pride in this comes from the traditional bulwarks against tyranny jumping on the bandwagon. Academia, the press and the arts and culture crowd are all warming up to this 'freedom for me, not for thee' development. From the side that once boasted complete and unrestrained freedom of expression, you now have it turning on a dime and insisting it meant some things are more free to be said than others.
A big argument that is picking up steam across the radical Left is that free speech cannot be given over to hate speech. Hate speech is bad, and therefore it should be banned. Those with IQs higher than a chipmunk's can see the obvious problem with that standard.
Of course, part of being an intellectual is having the talent to declare squares to be round and make it sound reasonable. And if you're the same intellectual surrounded by like thinking intellectuals, and aided by like thinking journalists and film makers and artists, you can begin moving forward in convincing 66% of any population that squares have always, in fact, been round, and it's only because of a vast, geophobic conspiracy that the real heroes of history couldn't proclaim this fundamental truth.
Thus the movement to end freedom by first ending free speech is picking up steam. Who wouldn't want to ban hate speech? After all, so the argument goes, the Nazis were all about hate speech. Had they just banned Nazis' hate speech, there would have been no Holocaust. And that's a good thing.
It takes a certain unparalleled dumb to believe such bilge, and yet it's not only believed, but taught in colleges and debated on mainstream news outlets. In Canada, the laws are increasingly swinging in that very direction.
That's where Mark Steyn steps in with old, pre-PC/Multi-Cultural/non-Marxist education. He reminds us that the Weimar Republic was not, in fact, a bastion of unlimited free speech and unrestrained liberties. He reminds us what everyone learned decades ago about the rise of the Nazis, that the Nazis were often curbed by the authorities, even arrested and banished to the back alleys. Restricted freedom was never lacking, and that's what we learned in the days of sanity and knowledge. In fact, it was the Weimar's very restrictions to freedom and liberty that the Nazis were able to exploit with such devastating consequences.
And yet, in our modern world of upside down lunacy from the top down, the forces against freedom and liberty have embraced a level of non-reality, a defiant rejection of facts and truth and the actual world as it exists. It has done it through the promises of narcissism, pride, hedonism, debauchery and the not so subtle support for vengeance and retaliation against all who displeases them.
You misspelled his name in the title. ;)
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