Losing Free Speech Would be a Costly Mistake

 

Free speech as protected in the First Amendment does not protect “Hate Speech,” or so says Howard Dean. This is kind of funny as my remembrances were that unpopular speech was exactly the speech the First Amendment was meant to protect, and “Hate Speech” would most certainly be very unpopular. The proof of this is exactly what is playing out at University of California, Berkley Campus, often referred to as the home of free speech. It was at Berkeley in the 1960’s that freedom of speech was first tested and protected with the anti-war movement. It was back during this tumultuous time when the five rights delineated in the words of the First Amendment: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. Seems simply stated though courts have recognized that certain logical limits should be applied to “Freedom of speech” such as yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire as such could lead to bodily harm. Causing bodily harm was an important limitation to most rights; you could continue any right up to the point of harming another soul. As distressing as it might be to hear honest and actual “Hate Speech,” it has been a right defended time and again as this is exactly the speech which is protected which is largely behind the reason that the ACLU defends the rights of the American Nazi Party to march and speak in public in the famous Skokie Case which occurred in Ohio.

 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes formulated the clear and present danger test for free speech cases. In that case, Socialist Party of America official Charles Schenck had been convicted under the Espionage Act for publishing leaflets urging resistance to the draft. Schenck appealed, arguing that the Espionage Act violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. In Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Schenck’s appeal and affirmed his conviction. This conviction continued to be debated over whether Schenck went against the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the Court, explained, “the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”* Included in these evils would be bodily harm to individuals or a group of individuals. This is real and measurable harm, not like some other qualifiers in our society where it comes down to the desired opinion of the individual in question.

 

The problem with Howard Dean goes further than denying protections of the First Amendment to “Hate Speech” in his definitions. Mr. Dean defines “Hate Speech” in this case as the upcoming scheduled speech by conservative journalist Ann Coulter. We at BTC do not agree with Miss Coulter on any number of her positions but defend her right to speak to the group which invited her and anyone else who desires to hear her speak. But, Howard Dean desires that a committee of like-minded people such as himself be appointed to decide what constitutes “Hate Speech” and thus ban that which they disapprove. Should such be permitted, then how long before we are facing 1984 and Big Brother Watching for INGSOC (English Socialism) and its trinity of newspeak; “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” These were considered “double-plus-good” and deviating and becoming emotional was considered you’re becoming a threat which is very much “double-plus-ungood.” This was presumably the Achilles Heel of INGSOC and the loose thread that if pulled hard enough, everything would unravel. Mr. Dean believes that the little snowflakes attending University of California Berkeley cannot handle reality given at face value. It is the leftist indoctrination and the permitting of the college indoctrination keeping these snowflakes, otherwise called students, from ideas which their professors would consider to be outside their own message and thus as “Hate Speech.” This would be when the professors inform the easily influenced snowflakes that they can escape Ms. Coulter and her viscous “Hate Speech” by running to their designated safe zone. This begs the question of what are they afraid of?

 

Ann Coulter

 

Therein lies the secret. One could ask the professors exactly what is it that they and Howard Dean are so afraid the children in their care might hear, dissenting opinions and arguments backed up with convincing facts and references to refute the lies they have been foisting on impressionable minds such that they can indoctrinate them and fashion them into fellow leftists. This education format is dangerous as it instills a singular outlook on the world which lacks the fullness of depth and only allows for understanding the leftist outlook. This leaves these students unprepared for the real world and the demands it will throw their way. Unfortunately, many of these delicate flowers find themselves a job in the middle of a flower patch full of fellow flower power advocates and never leave their comfort zone. Others will often need to lose a few jobs before they start to realize that there is an entire world out there just waiting for them to study and learn of other opinions which permeate the workplace. They will find that there really are men and women with diverse ideas and concepts which their college indoctrination did not prepare them for and unless they begin to receive such as potentially valid and weigh everything testing the concepts against the real world finding new ideas which work as well or better than what they had learned, they will live a life restricted and void of the ability for comparative reason. Once they are freed to become whomever they eventually define themselves as being, their lives will grow from that point. What is so pathetic is that in all too many instances, especially in the soft sciences, the outlook in such a college atmosphere is limited to singular leftist opinions integrated so as to replace any normative lesson with one based on a strictly limited leftist outlook. With “Trigger Warnings” and “Micro-Aggressions” (whatever in the world these are) demanded to be placed on any material which might shake up their world, the snowflakes are restricted to living life in their leftist cocoon. Many of these students tend to be hard sciences-challenged as they cannot accept that there are such items as correct and incorrect results. They have been taught that it is the effort that matters and not the correct answer. These sensitive and fragile egos cannot handle having to produce actual results as reaching the correct value in an answer has become more subjective in this new world being foisted upon all too many college students. What is remarkable is today’s speech police demanding the banning of all speech which contradicts or questions any of the leftist ideologies, were the very people demanding open and free speech be upheld when their speech was the undesirable ideas. When their ideas were the ones challenging the status-quo, the demand was to honor the spirit of the first amendment and permit all speech. Now that theirs is the established speech and the former status-quo has become the challenging speech, these former guardians of the freedoms of the First Amendment become stuffy old fuddy-duddy holders of the line, they now demand that only “Approved Speech” which will not hurt their little future indoctrinated leftist army by forcing them to think. You need understand one principle of this new age, groupthink must be maintained and all speech which counters groupthink must be banned and kept from ever reaching the ears of their subjects. That is the truth; they are no longer students in these institutes of higher indoctrination but are merely subjects there to be programmed and sent out in an as-is condition and most companies are required to retrain college graduates on how to perform their jobs. Remedial training at many technical companies includes simple algebra and geometry problems, as such skills were never taught effectively from kindergarten on through college. Other subjects no longer taught in anything resembling a rational or reasoned manner and especially not the traditional manner are such little items as history including, American history, Ancient History, Modern History, Civics, English, and any of the Humanities. Many classes now avoid inclusion of any men, especially white men and never any white men who had slaves. This makes the coverage of the founding of America rather different from traditional teaching of the subject. English no longer believes that any of the traditional white male authors or their compatriots such as Mary Shelley as she committed the crime of co-writing with men of her era. Other authors considered too Christian or traditional include William Shakespeare, Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Brothers Grimm, Alexandre Dumas, Aesop or even the story of Beowulf as it is too simplistic depicting good and evil and degrades women as Grendel’s mother is shown as evil despite her only crime presumably was being a woman, or so the argument is made. There are hundreds of authors, composers and masters of the arts who are now considered unworthy simply because they expound on the ideals of good and evil and the Judeo-Christian, white male perspective even if they may have been women as it is the good and evil ethics of Judeo-Christianity they cannot couch. When your belief system is that all things are in all ways equal you have no belief system, you have a cop-out refusing to experimentally compare and contrast one set of ideas against another and judge which one is more erudite, more morally correct, and honors humankind treating all equal (or as equal as such treatment was due people in the period in which one lived as it is completely unfair to judge a person from 1776 or from 1492 or from 92 or before that sometime BCE such as around 1050 BCE, approximately when King David conquered Yerushalayim and made it the Capital City of Israel from that time forward through time).

 

The willingness of the professors of the colleges and universities to deign whether anything or anyone is worthy of attention solely if they measure up to the standards of the modern secular humanist leftist version of quality is Stalinesque. Their idea of equality is no better than Charlemagne had a handle on it as the Inquisition followed him across the continent of Europe and felled many an innocent, thus is the reality when one utilizes an arbitrary system in deciding whether one is worthy of life or consideration. Students today are not even required to read philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Homer, Jules Verne, Ernest Hemingway, Bram Stoker, Isaac Asimov, Carl von Clausewitz or others. Instead, many classes only read often solely from obscure poets and writers from Africa and Asia with recent additions in many schools of Quranic based education in the public schools, apparently there is no separation of Mosque and State as there is Temple, Church, Synagogue and state, respectively. The classics in writing, music and art are considered now to be poisonous to student sensitivity. They are simply taught that their entire heritage, providing their heritage came from a Judeo-Christian basis, is to be destroyed and discarded as retaining any piece of Judeo-Christian ethics is a thought crime for which one will face ridicule and be ostracized. All that our modern society is built upon is taught to be contaminated and rotting through and through and the sooner we allow refugees from across the third world, the place of variety and where there are beautiful ideals to be explored and exalted as they are completely foreign to Western thought and custom and thus they must be superiorly equal, the sooner our societies can grow under new influences which will be simply wonderful, or so it is promised. I never thought that this phrase could ever actually fit in an article about modern society, but it can be said that as all civilizations and all philosophies are claimed to be equal but Judeo-Christianity and Eurocentric histories are to be considered to be of a lesser nature and to be cast down because some civilizations, some philosophies, some religious writings, some traditions are simply more equal than others and these are the ones which have nothing to do with Western culture and the developed world’s actual roots. The university campus is a self-hating reactionary place where normative thought is considered gauche and to be rejected with everything to do with Judeo-Christian history and development as that is the wrong path for the future. Really?

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

* Our thanks to WikiPedia for the previous examples from the life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.