A few recent media reports warrant your attention:
Item: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., requests the Justice Department consider criminal charges against individuals and groups who do not share the Obama administration’s views on climate change. The former U.S. attorney suggests that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a statute originally drafted to assist the feds in the prosecution of mafia dons and drug cartels, could serve as a legal predicate.
Item: The University of New Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language Guide” lists “problematic” words such as “mothering,” “fathering,” “illegal alien,” “older people,” “rich person,” “poor person,” and “Americans” — all products of hierarchy and oppression, don’t you know. Alas, negative media coverage of this ludicrous project led the university to reject the proposed new speech code. Parenthetical fact: One recent study found that 55 percent of 437 alleged “institutions of higher learning” had adopted such codes.
Item: Lois Lerner and her merry band of progressive accomplices at the IRS successfully slow-played the administrative approval process for the formation of conservative non-profits during the lead up to the presidential election cycle of 2012. Ms. Lerner subsequently pled the Fifth when called before Congress. Alas, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently required the IRS to produce the so-called “spreadsheets” it created with respect to the targeted groups.
It is difficult to miss the common thread in these stories. Indeed, such attacks on free speech are now commonplace as the Democratic Party completes its transformation from Kennedy-esque champions of freedom to progressives gone wild. Today, the chair of the Democratic National Committee finds it difficult to distinguish “Democrat” from “Socialist.” Herein are those who truly “feel the Bern”.
Yet, the majority of Americans who remain immune to progressivism’s appeal see little more than an illiberal attack on free speech. And the mounting outrage should not be confined to dues-paying members of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, LLC”.
I’m referring to so many of my slightly older friends who qualify as proud ’60s liberals. These folks came of age during Kent State and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Some protested the war. Others marched for civil rights. Still others organized for women’s equality. Such were the great social movements of the era. These dissenters changed the course of American history — and culture. And they accomplished their goals by wrapping their discontent around the First Amendment and our precious right to free speech.
Now, fast forward to our present world, wherein the children and grandchildren of this protest-proud generation demand speech codes and trigger warnings and safe zones on their college campuses — all in order to limit speech. They disinvite speakers to campus when such invitees are deemed not pure enough for their politically correct, offenseless world. They even take over the offices of university presidents — and then demand no consequences. Their collegiate enablers are no doubt proud. Where else could they perpetuate such transparently silly constructs? Where else could they find and influence such gullible children? Where else could they find employment (even tenure) while advancing such ludicrous propositions?
Back in the real world, where the private sector has yet to establish criticism-free safe zones for overly sensitive, underperforming employees, we have a problem: How to combat progressivism’s distaste for robust debate and uncomfortable dissent.
The obvious answer is to elect a president who does not subscribe to the rules of political correctness; a leader who is ready, willing and able to remind the wider culture that our unique experiment in democracy and freedom is all about protest and dissent. In other words, let’s go old school and shame ’em. Make ’em take a course in U.S. history, join a debating society, read (and understand) Dr. King’s speeches, maybe even research the Federalist Papers.
Admittedly, this “tough love” approach is radical. Requiring college students to read, write, and think about their freedoms would generate congressional investigations and widespread campus demonstrations. The ACLU would be brought in to stop the exercise. And I don’t want to think about the depth and variety of trigger warnings such learning would set off in the minds of so many coddled students.
Memo to the voting public: What a few years ago was unthinkable (even laughable) on our college campuses is today a primary tool for those who wish to fundamentally transform America and limit our cherished right to free — even provocative — speech.
Those of us who reject such dangerous cultural revisionism possess the means to reverse course. The family dinner table at semester break is a good place to start. But the message must originate from the top — from the Oval Office. Our path to this realigning freedom begins on Nov. 8, 2016.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich is a Washington Examiner columnist, partner at King & Spalding and author of three books, including the recently released Turning Point. He was governor of Maryland from 2003-2007.
