Whoever dominates culturally and owns the winning narrative always detests free speech. The weaker side that is trying to rebel against the hegemony will champion free speech because that’s the only hope to fight off the hegemonic narrative.
This is why the mantle of free speech champions has been passed from left to right.
You are welcome, NYTimes, for solving the great mystery that’s been puzzling you so much.
I took away from that that freedom of speech is something that people like to the extent and only to the extent it suits their interests to do so.
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(The linked article that is).
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Just a note here since the NYT is so much into rewriting history. I remember the 1977 Skokie Nazi March case and it was most definitely not a left-right issue. There were people on the left and right who supported the right of the nazis to march and who didn’t.
Trying to fit it into modern left-right narratives makes no sense whatsoever.
I’d refine what you said: It’s less about who’s “winning” the cultural narrative and more about how confident people are about their ability to convince others. Modern pseudo-progressives have to sign onto and pretend to believe all sorts of patent nonsense and so of course they’re backing off of free speech because the only way to convince yourself that “woman”isn’t a a biological identity but an individualized inner essence with no connection to anatomy or chromosones is to prevent people from presenting other points of view.
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There’s definitely something here. Modern progressivism has, indeed, devolved into believing a set of clearly crazy ideas that cannot be defended with any sort of logic. It’s blind, irreflective, screaming faith.
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I remember the Skokie march, and how in its aftermath a number of screamingly angry liberal Jews resigned their membership in the ACLU in disgust. It seems that those progressives believed in unfettered free speech, no matter how odious, except when their own ox was being gored.
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I just can’t get over the fact that so many “liberals” (some of whom are actually intelligent) believe that speech can be “literal violence.”
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There was recently this big blowup where a woman accused somebody who talked back to her sharply at a Q&A session of “verbal rape.” That was the actual expression. Some people have no shame.
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…and the New York Times thanks you so much for reminding them a simple Occam’s Razor, logic, and common sense approach can often render the most accurate and reasonable conclusion to why certain phenomenon exists.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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