The outrage of the past week among liberal commentators was that conservative op-ed writers at the New York Times were writing about college progressives’ antipathy toward free speech.
Students at Lewis & Clark College earlier this month tried to stop conservative feminist Christina Hoff Sommers from speaking to a conservative campus group, calling her a “known fascist.” “Freedom of speech is certainly an important tenet to a free, healthy society,” students wrote, “but that freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals.”
Columnist Bari Weiss, not quite a conservative but more conservative than the average Times writer, wrote an op-ed on the danger of this trend, listing a handful of centrist or center-left speakers who received the same treatment on college campuses — being branded fascists and being prevented from speaking.
David Brooks wrote a column on the same event. Similarly, the Times had, in late February, run the text of a speech by conservative columnist Bret Stephens lamenting the country’s growing intolerance for opposing views. “What bothers me is that too many people, including those who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of liberal culture, are using these platforms to try to shut down the speech of others, ruin their reputations, and publicly humiliate them.”
Others on other opinion pages were chronicling similar experiences and worrying about similar dangers. This stoked a backlash. “Conservatives’ campus con job,” ran a headline by a liberal writer at The Week. “Conservatives and centrist liberals have dedicated an incomprehensible amount of time and attention to the politics of elite college campuses over the past few years,” the writer, Ryan Cooper, complained.
Liberal Vox Media dedicated a piece to debunking the belief that “the country stands at a precipice in which young, left-wing college students and recent graduates are the leading edge of a rising tide of illiberalism that comes in the form of ‘political correctness’ and poses a clear and present danger to free speech and rational discourse.”
And Twitter last week was full of similar complaints from liberals.
One liberal policy analyst, Sean McElwee, who also writes for the Times, was already complaining about this last year. “NYT ran half a dozen columns about the threat of political correctness culture on campus when Charles Murray was no platformed,” McElwee tweeted, referring to the practice of violent, disruptive protest aimed an ensuring an invited speaker cannot speak “but exactly zero (0) when a neo-Nazi murdered two children.”
It’s almost a good point. Neo-Nazis murdering children is very much worse than campus leftists harassing and shutting down non-leftists. McElwee hammered away the same point last week referring to the mail bombs in Houston that could be anti-black hate crimes.
So, why should the lesser evil — censoriousness, slander, abuse of the word “fascist,” and maybe the occasional assault in a dark alley that leaves a female teacher in a neck brace — get more attention?
Here’s why: There’s no public debate over whether it’s good to send mail bombs, be a Nazi, murder children, or commit hate crimes. These are not issues over which respectable people disagree. Arguing against them is using a battering ram to get through an open door. There is no resistance to the idea.
Shutting down right-of-center, or even right-of-hard-left speakers is completely different. It is not an issue where there is consensus among the elites and the commentariat. Any number of people, McElwee for instance, support the suppression of conservative opinion, with violence if necessary. He agrees with the practice of “no-platforming,” which was what was going on in the “occasional assault in a dark alley,” which he dismisses so breezily.
Here’s a policy analyst who is published in the New York Times, saying elsewhere that it’s fine to attend an event organized by a campus group and scream and shout and demonstrate, using force if necessary, to ensure that the people who invited the speaker never get to hear him or her.
The Times even published the arguments of students defending the ferocious and eventually violent “no-platforming” of Charles Murray. “For too long, a flawed notion of ‘free speech’ has allowed individuals in positions of power to spread racist pseudoscience in academic institutions, dehumanizing and subjugating people of color and gender minorities,” one philosophy student wrote to the Times. British newspapers regularly run op-eds in favor of no-platforming and shutting down speakers for certain ideas.
We have in this country an urgent live debate over whether free speech and liberalism more generally is good or has run its course. That’s unsurprising, as these are new ideas on a historical scale. No other country honors free speech the way we do.
Some people want us all to quit harping on the issue. But we won’t, and we shouldn’t. It’s far too important for that.
