I talk with New York Times columnist David French about attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech, “the worst way to deal with educational controversies,” the culture war evolution on the right, and the world’s best and most effective political message.
Watch it here.
Also check out an acerbic post by Ken White, the law blogger known as Popehat, who takes on the recent shouting down of a conservative judge at Stanford Law School and makes a convincing case for “Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once.” The whole thing is full of great observations and great lines, but I particularly liked this one.
Law students also persist in imagining that they invented the world. They believe they discovered that free speech laws and norms protect awful speech and awful people. They believe they discovered the plea “yes, but what you don’t understand is that this speech is really bad.” They believe that they are so self-evidently right, good, trustworthy, and noble that it’s obvious that we should let them decide who talks and who doesn’t. And they are too hubris-swollen—not too stupid, but too drunk with self-righteousness—to see that exceptions to free speech have always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be. They’re too full of themselves to see that “let a crowd decide who is allowed to speak” is a horrific norm to promote with grotesque historic resonance. Some of them will grow out of this.
White makes the case that the conservative judge in this case is also an obnoxious culture warrior and criticizes our tendency to embrace dubious “free speech heroes.” But he reminds all of us that “A-holes have a right to speak.”
I may have Bowdlerized that a bit, but I recommend that you go read the whole thing.
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"We Make Men Free"