Five years ago, I was an aspiring journalist living in Paris when 12 editorial staff members of the provocative satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were murdered by radical Islamist terrorists just a few miles down the Seine from my apartment. The attack instigated a slew of aftershocks, including an anti-Semitic hostage operation resulting in the murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket. The debate around the attacks would come to define not just my own experience as an expat but also the existential purpose of my career.
Namely, even as world leaders coalesced around the paper and publicly declared #JeSuisCharlie, the cracks in liberal support for its right to free speech emerged among my own peers. These students advanced an argument somewhat akin to “slut shaming” — i.e., that somehow the journalists had it coming for being needlessly provocative. Such thoughts that were once the province of liberal college students have gone mainstream.
Consider, the paper of record overhauled its entire opinion page because they argued that a sitting U.S. senator expressing an opinion shared by 58% of the nation literally put black people in danger. It is no coincidence that mounting violence from lootings to shootings are quickly followed by pledges from localities to take down any statue or label of a person now deemed problematic by our woke overlords. Sure, first they come for the statues, and as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times said, summarizing the vast left-wing consensus, destroying property is “not violence.”
So in a lexicon where speech is violence, property destruction is not, and in the words of Ayanna Pressley, progress requires “unrest in the streets,” it’s not hard to see that the next logical jump deems those purveyors of so-called violent speech fair game for physical terror. After all, in a time of a contagious pandemic primarily passed through breathing on people, we’re already seeing the woke, unmasked mobs shout in the faces of strangers on private property to coerce them to raise their fist in a show of fealty to the new religion.
Even then in Paris, as public demonstrations offered immense support for the Hebdo crew, in private, I heard misgivings. Perhaps those of us literally virtue signaling with hashtags and social media posts were met with a much quieter cadre of opposition. But today, would we see more vice signaling in condemnations of the paper’s penchant for provocation? Or at least, a tacit suggestion that they simply got what was coming to them?
Sure, something as obviously violent as a shooting by radical Islamists would be hard for the wokes to support expressly if it happened today, but downscale it to a beating and replace the perpetrators as “anti-racist” activists, and it’s not hard to imagine that the public condemnations would be far, far quieter and the private satisfaction a little greater.
Five years on, je suis Charlie, and truly believe that today Emmanuel Macron’s France would mostly stay the same. But stateside, would we?
