The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.
To be clear: Racial epithets; slurs based on gender, sexuality, or ethnicity; and other personal attacks and denigrations have no place in civil society or discourse. However, Baer is suggesting that we should put in place what the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly called prior restraints on free speech.
Baer’s pseudosophisticated model applied at our nation’s colleges and universities would result in regular censorship. This is dangerous because students are supposed to learn to debate and overcome bad ideas with words, facts, and reason rather than violence, censorship, or government suppression.
In fact, this is exactly what happened when Charles Murray tried to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont in March 2017.13 Rather than listen to his arguments and debate him, students attacked Murray and another professor. After successfully disrupting a planned speech by Murray, the students tracked Murray and a professor down to where they had fled and assaulted them. The professor, Allison Stranger, was ultimately hospitalized.
Applying Baer’s model to society at-large would bring about a system of government-led speech oppression that would place the United States in the company of China, Russia, and North Korea.
Who, after all, should be the one to decide whether a speaker’s opinion meets Baer’s “conditions for speech to be a common, public good?” What authority should Americans trust to be “balancing the inherent value of a given view.”
The answers are: no one, and no authority. What Baer is suggesting is an absurd counter to the ideals of free society that would empower elites (such as Baer) to dictate which opinions are valuable and which should be silenced.
Baer is remarkably close to the governing party in Orwell’s novel 1984. That frightening description of a Britain turned totalitarian has a dictatorship based on three slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
As the modern left explains its thinking, it is remarkably close to the Orwell description of a totalitarian elimination of free thought.
STICKS AND STONES
The latest alarming, reckless attack on the First Amendment by the politically correct elites is the effort to equate words with actual violence. Some have even used this line of illogic to justify violence as an appropriate response to speech they find offensive.
Indeed, Natasha Lennard wrote in the liberal magazine The Nation on January 19, 2017, that President Trump was a fascist, represented “violent racist forces,” and that “counter-violence” was necessary to oppose his agenda.14
Keep in mind, Trump had not yet been inaugurated nor taken any actions as president when Lennard wrote this piece. He was sworn in the day after it was published.
Nevertheless, Lennard espoused the virtues of violent anti-fascist movements throughout history and made clear that while some liberals “cling to institutions” such as freedom of speech or “investigations and justice,” the brand of liberalism she supported “does not tolerate fascism; it would give it no platform for debate.”
This was a clear call to arms for the actually violent, dangerous so-called Antifa members who harassed Trump supporters and vandalized cities across the country on Inauguration Day.
Their actions, which led to injured police, destroyed property, and endangered Americans, had zero impact on President Trump’s presidency—except to highlight how truly crazy the Left was.
Yet this is exactly the kind of activity Lennard would seem to support in her piece:
Those of us who long before Trump have defended counter-violence against oppression—as in Ferguson, as in Baltimore, as in Watts, as in counter-riots against the Klu Klux Klan, as in slave revolts—know where we stand.
… disruption, confrontation, doxxing and altercation remain tactics anyone taking seriously a refusal to normalize Trump-era fascism should consider. Liberals who reject such a strategy in defense of the right to [freedom] of speech and assembly engage in an historical NIMBYism, in which only in the past, or in other countries, has militancy against white supremacy been a legitimate resistance.
Lennard is clearly an extremist, but this is an example of what happens when politically correct ideology replaces freedom of speech: “Incorrect” speech is viewed as violence; therefore, actual violence is justified to combat it. Lennard’s labeling of Trump supporters as fascists is simply a verbal way to justify the illegal, violent activity she is promoting.
Now, to practice what I’m preaching and civilly consider an opposing viewpoint, I’ll point out that Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett addressed this concept of speech as violence much more eloquently.
In a July 14, 2017, op-ed for the New York Times titled “When Is Speech Violence?” Barrett rightly pointed out that prolonged, pervasive stress—such as the stress caused by being in a verbally or emotionally abusive home or relationship—is medically harmful.15 Certainly, prolonged stress can cause depression, weaken the immune system, and cause measurable harm to many bodily systems.
This is a reasonable position, and it led her to her thesis: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
Barrett also makes clear that human beings are perfectly equipped to deal with short-term stress caused by “fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch, or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.” She even gave an anecdote about a time her students refused to engage in a mock debate defending eugenics for the sake of understanding how science has been misused in the past. She actually brought in an African American colleague to argue for the merits of eugenics, while she debated him. (They switched sides halfway through to show the students how civil discourse is supposed to work.)
This is all well and good. However, Barrett lost me when she argued that the opinions of speakers such as Yiannopoulos offer no public benefit and therefore don’t qualify for free speech protections—while Murray’s opinions were “only offensive” and therefore worthy of debating.
The issue with this position is twofold: First, like Baer, Barrett is suggesting someone (presumably some elite group of highly educated persons) should weigh the content of speech, decide whether or not it has merit, then decide whether there is anything “to be gained from debating” it. This is the same prior restraint that has been continuously ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Second, she’s equating the stress someone might feel by listening to a speech by Yiannopoulos with the kind of stress caused by being in a prolonged abusive relationship or imprisonment. This completely ignores the fact that Yiannopoulos’s speech is a voluntary event. Students who do not agree with or do not wish to debate him are welcome to do something else with their time.
Along those lines, as Dr. Pamela Paresky pointed out in a rebuttal of Barrett’s piece on the website psychologytoday.com, Barrett is ignoring the fact that stress isn’t felt universally, and it’s largely in the eye of the beholder. Paresky argues that Barrett’s position can actually lead to more harm because some people may feel more stress simply by being told they might. According to Paresky:
If one person tells herself that listening to a speaker is going to be intolerable and harmful, it stands to reason that the experience will be more stressful for her than it will be for the person who tells herself it will be illuminating, or an opportunity to defeat a bad idea. (Or a chance to take a nap…)16
Make no mistake, the argument that words are violence is a poor attempt by the elites to grant themselves authority over speech. Violence is violence, speech is speech. It would do all Americans well to remember that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt us.
THE THOUGHT POLICE
, KILLING INNOVATION
College campuses have always been a battleground for freedom of speech. However, the effort to silence ideas is expanding to America’s private sector—particularly in our growing tech industry. Since President Trump took office, American businesses have experienced incredible growth. Now is not the time to stifle that growth in the name of political correctness.
Consider the firing of former Google engineer James Damore, who was relieved of his post after circulating an internal memo in July 2017 expressing grievances about Google’s hiring practices, diversity programs, and how “Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”17
Central to Damore’s essay is the assertion that some of Google’s attempts to close the gender and racial gaps in its company’s employment were discriminatory and actually served to worsen relations among employees.
Certainly, Damore expressed some views in the memo about the biological and behavioral differences between men and women as they related to the workplace that were of questionable veracity—and this is the theme on which the elite media latched. However, he prefaced the entire document by saying:
I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.
These don’t seem to be the words of a disgruntled, mean-spirited, bigoted misogynist. They seem like the words of someone who wanted to start—and participate in—a real discussion. In fact, virtually every section of Damore’s more than 3,000-word essay included statements that acknowledged the harmful societal impact of bias, supported equality, and suggested ways to improve the company.
The elites skipped right over these comments. They also ignored Damore’s other main point: that Google alienated conservative employees and caused them to “feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility.”
Google caved under the elite media pressure (and maybe also the internal culture of conformity Damore had challenged) and fired Damore for writing and sharing the memo, saying it was offensive. He lost his job, not because he had failed as an engineer, but because he had expressed opinions which the media and Bay Area elite found offensive.
Another employee at tech-giant Apple, Denise Young Smith, was spared a public firing—but she did have to apologize after she suggested that people of the same ethnicity and gender could still have diversity of opinion. Specifically, she was criticized for suggesting that white people could have diverse ideas. Ironically, Smith, who is black, was the vice president of inclusion and diversity for Apple.
She was pilloried by the elite thought police for suggesting that “there can be 12 white blue-eyed blonde men in a room and they are going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”
Despite spending 20 years at the company, Smith resigned from Apple in November 2017, roughly a month after sending her apology.
It’s not a huge surprise that the left-leaning American tech industry is a bastion of PC culture; however, some in its ranks are warning that the deep ideological undercurrents in Silicon Valley are chasing away talent.
Sam Altman, the president of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote on his blog in December 2017 that he “felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco”18 because political correctness had run amok on the West Coast.
The thrust of his short essay—for which he was widely criticized—was that “restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones.”
This seems like a fairly reasonable position to take in America—except, apparently, in San Francisco.
Altman said he knew people in “pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension” who were leaving the Bay Area because the intolerant political climate had become “toxic.” Critics of his departing colleagues had argued that human beings harm the environment; therefore, those who wanted to try to extend human life were unethical.
Political correctness, he said, “ends up being used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims.” He posited that if the space transport company SpaceX had been founded in San Francisco it “would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1 percent.”
Altman got into trouble with the elites because he “inelegantly” suggested in a footnote to the post that homophobic comments online aren’t likely to convince reasonable people to hate homosexuals, but banning speech which is deemed controversial could prevent or hinder societal progress.
In a clarification he posted the next day, he stressed that “the biggest new scientific ideas, and the most important changes to society, both start as extremely unpopular ideas,” and we must be able to tolerate them.
Altman is exactly right. If we do not return to the foundational principle of freedom of speech and expression in America, which welcomes new ideas (even bad or zany ones) for debate, we will pay dearly for it. At this moment in our history, we are facing numerous watershed moments in computing, medicine, space exploration, and all manner of technological achievement.
If our innovators are walking on eggshells and unable to pursue new ideas for fear of consequences by the thought police, we will decline as a society and be eclipsed by our global competitors who are less concerned about hurt feelings.
NO LEGISLATIVE ANSWER
The trickiest part about preserving and restoring freedom of speech is there is no obvious legislative fix. The law (the First Amendment) is already on the side of freedom of expression, so there is not much Congress can meaningfully do to protect it further. The proponents of silence know they are unlikely to get rid of the First Amendment—but they have been diligently working to culturally change the way Americans think about it.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, is in the perfect position to ensure that the law of the land is properly executed and not being infringed.
To this end, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in September 2017 that the Department of Justice (DOJ) would start filing legal briefs in court cases across the country involving students whose rights to free speech had been infringed. Such briefs will allow the DOJ to speak in support of such claimants without technically being part of the case.
The first such case, according to U.S. News and World Report, involved a student at a Georgia College who was barred from handing out Christian-themed fliers on campus. He has sued, rightly claiming his First Amendment rights had been trampled.19
Sessions announced that the DOJ would seek to support the Georgia student during a speech at Georgetown Law. During his speech, he noted, “freedom of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack.”
He went on to say:
The American university was once the center of academic freedom—a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas. But it is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.
Hopefully, the DOJ’s decision to come to the defense of silenced students will cause colleges and institutions of higher learning across the country to think twice before imposing restrictive speech policies.
Even if some of the more ardently PC colleges hold out, the administration could find more direct ways to defend the rights of speakers on campus.
In February of 2017, after “150 agitators… threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at law enforcement, started fires with Molotov cocktails and broke windows of the building where Yiannopoulos was set to speak at UC Berkeley,”20 President Trump suggested that he might seek to withhold federal funding from schools that do no
t protect speakers from such violence.
In many ways, President Trump is the best person to combat the efforts of the elites because he has been relentlessly fighting his own culture war since he entered public life. He is totally unafraid to speak his mind—and he will quickly defend the rights of those the elites are trampling.
Trump supporters can follow the lead of the president and the attorney general. They can help fund conservative student activist groups. They can help finance student lawsuits. They can demand that their alma maters have conservative faculty and host conservative speakers. They can join together to endow conservative professorial chairs and student internships (the Bill Buckley program at Yale is a model of this kind of pro-conservative engagement on a liberal campus).
Freedom of speech is the foundation of all our freedoms and it must be protected and cherished as such.
CHAPTER SIX
THE COMEBACK OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY, PART 1—CUTTING RED TAPE
The bureaucracy is the anti-Trump coalition’s favorite weapon.
For the Left, it is the primary vehicle through which to subvert the will of the people by using regulations to control almost every aspect of our lives.
For members of the economic and political establishment, the regulations which the bureaucracy creates and enforces are an important tool for gaining market share and amassing power. Corporate interests use their lobbying muscle to create regulations that shut out their competitors—usually smaller, start-up companies that cannot afford the lobbyists. Likewise, for members of the political establishment, the ability to manipulate regulations on behalf of their donors keeps a steady stream of campaign cash flowing in.
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