Kristalnacht for radicals

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  America was never great.

• The Founders were wealthy white men and as such, guilty as charged.
• Successful people got that way by robbing unsuccessful people. 
• Alger Hiss was framed.
• Every white man is a closet racist
• Socialism works if only the right people could be found to run it, etc. etc.

These shibboleths fuel the progressive-socialist enterprise championed today by A.O.C. and her “squad.” Three of the four front-runners for the Democrat(ic) party’s presidential nomination are missionaries. 

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Add to that the latest: “Everything You Think You Know About ‘Free Speech’ Is A Lie.”

So reveals The Nation magazine in yet another scoop rivaling most lurid space alien sightings recounted in supermarket checkout line. (Dig the snarky quotes surrounding ‘Free Speech’!) The eyebrow raiser in the current issue promises to reveal “How far-right operatives manufactured the ‘crisis’ of free speech with books, think tanks and billions of dollars.” 

Yep, the First Amendment, that touchstone of our democratic process, is yet another tool of Trumps, Kochs, and various tiki torchbearers. Who knew? 

Author P.E. Moskowitz is who knew. The felicitously named Mr. Moskowitz is responsible for a new screed titled The Case Against Free Speech. 

Surely “The Case” deserves an honored place on every radical’s book shelf alongside Rules for Radicals and the Communist Manifesto. It comes along at a most propitious time for Leftists, being that wherever opposing views are allowed to be heard, their side comes up short.

Go ahead heckle; they’re only Nazis

The solution, then, is to choke off free speech. Something that Freedom Inc., YGB, and Progressive Dane here in Madison learned long ago. Now they have intellectual permission. Because anyone who disagrees is a Nazi, a Klansman, a racist cisgendered gun nut. The Nation writes:

Nothing in the First Amendment prevents citizens (members of Antifa or otherwise) from interrupting someone’s protest. Nor does it guarantee police protection for white nationalists. It only limits the ability of Congress from passing laws that interfere with speech. …. Most leftists I talk to … wish that police departments would not spend vast amounts of resources protecting Nazis, something that they have no legal mandate to do.

Are … Antifa tactics a violation of free speech? We limit protest all the time, and give the state permission to limit the speech of countless people without much of a fuss. I’d argue, for example, that mass incarceration and the disappearing of immigrants is a much bigger threat to free speech than the confrontation of Nazis on the streets.

“Nazis on the streets.” There it is, Mr. Moscowitz. We will defeat the Nazis by being more like the Nazis.

Antifa without the masks

More chilling is officialdom’s tacit approval of censorship, especially on campuses like the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The suppression of free speech on campuses today isn’t a reaction to Trump or some alleged systemic injustice, at least not really, says Ross Douthat. 

The New York Times columnist is promoting a book by former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence. 

“In endless pronouncements of tiresome sweetness, the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today insist on the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” Kronman writes.

Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings …

They stress the need to respect and honor the feelings of others, especially those belonging to traditionally disadvantaged groups, as an essential means to this end. In this way they give credence to the idea that feelings are trumps with a decisive authority of their own. That in turn emboldens their students to argue that their feelings are reason enough to keep certain speakers away.

• Before an idea can be evaluated on its intrinsic merits, it must first be considered in light of its political ramifications.
• Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness.
• Before a student can think and talk for himself, he must first announce and represent his purported identity.
• Before a historical figure can be judged by the standards of his time, he must first be judged by the standards of our time.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: If a conservative speaker somehow does manage to trespass the public square, you have The Nation’s permission to stone that him into silence. Probably a Nazi.

What do YOU think?