A couple of years ago, commentary editor Timothy P. Carney and I realized we needed a new approach to writing editorials about the Bill of Rights. Once upon a time, it had been possible to condemn policy or political rhetoric by pointing out how they traduced America’s founding values. Today, however, this is no longer sufficient; the Left and an increasing number of college-indoctrinated young adults resist persuasion. If you mention, as though making a killer point, that a sacrosanct right is being breached, their likely response is “So what?”
These rights are neither understood nor, as a consequence, valued as they used to be. It has become necessary to go back to basics and explain why they must be protected as bulwarks against tyranny. Free speech, the most important right, is also the most endangered. Left-wing Jacobins not only don’t want to hear views opposing their own, but also don’t want anyone else to hear them. It is an intellectually bankrupt philosophy — willful, dictatorial, contemptible — that cannot withstand even a zephyr breeze of disagreement.
Where tyrants cannot persuade, however, they can deploy violence. Censorship and self-censorship in the face of threats up to and including murder is the subject of our cover story this week. It is the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Author James Kirchick examines the abject failure of the West to withstand not merely Islamist intimidation against blasphemers, but also Western civilization’s wider, cringing retreat from the core value of free speech. Free expression is the right that undergirds all others, and it is increasingly either howled down or else voluntarily abandoned to appease the forces of tyranny. Kirchick’s essay is a call to arms.
It’s only a little more than two years since the so-called Women’s March arose more or less spontaneously nationwide to protest President Trump’s election victory. It seems such a long time ago, for the march is unrecognizable, having been hijacked by a gang of left-wing hucksters, who’ve made it an anti-Semitic and anti-democratic charade. Karol Markowicz probes the activities of the leadership that have turned the march into a goose step.
Threats to liberty should prompt fierce and determined resistance, but sometimes, at least in Downtime, it is better to go with the very leisurely flow. At least, that’s what Eric Felten discovered as a luxuriously accommodated intern at the now bankrupt utility, PG&E. There are lots of great reads in Life & Arts this week, including an On Culture column about juggling and Jesus, how pole-vaulting kept a U.S. Marine away from the battlefield, and how buying and selling houses reveals much about different cultures.
Our obituary is of Morton Sobell, a spy who, contrary the fictional lore of the Left, betrayed America to the Soviet Union, and yet recently died a free man in New York at the age of 101.
