The Adult Crybabies Demanding That The World Be Remade Into A Giant Nursery School
Increasingly, at campus after campus, speakers who don't parrot progressive talking points are shouted down.

Who's doing the shouting? Privileged brats who take free speech and the other immense benefits of democracy for granted. What do they prioritize? The fact that they or somebody they are (paternalistically!) advocating for might disagree with, dislike, or have hurt feelz over what's being said.

This hurt feelz style of living comes out of the po-mo sector of the humanities -- and specifically, the Victim Olympics that is intersectionality.

Julian Vigo at Quillette:

It is not surprising that the vast amount of hokum presented to humanities students as 'knowledge' has in recent years produced a sort of academic 'blowback,' with student-clients being armed with a rhetoric of social justice which stipulates that facts are inconvenient and complaints about micro-aggressions and triggered emotions are said to merit serious attention.

Want to meet somebody who values our civil liberties? Talk to somebody who grew up in Cuba, the USSR, or some other such paradise for free speech and due process.

Bizarrely, even a law school dean is clueless about what free speech means. When law prof Josh Blackman was prevented from speaking -- about free speech! -- by CUNY students who shouted him down, CUNY Law School Dean Mary Lu Bilek's response was to defend the protesters who disrupted the event.

Law School Dean Bilek even characterized their screeching tantrums -- including a law student yelling, "Fuck the law!" (hello, genius!) -- as free speech.

Um, no, dear. I'm not a lawyer; merely a person who follows a few lawyers on Twitter; but even I know that exercising free speech and stopping another from exercising theirs are not the same thing.

The students who came to hear Blackman had a right to hear him -- and the students who didn't want to have him heard had the right to protest outside his talk or write op-eds or debate his speaking there in countless civilized, non-speech-disrupting ways.

The fact that this happened at a law school, and that the disruption of speech was supported by its dean, signals how serious the problem is.

Brendan O'Neill writes at Spiked about what's going on in the greater culture -- and how it's the left that's abandoned civil liberties:

The consequences of the left's vacating of the field of free speech will be dire and will be felt for many years, not only on the left itself but across the political sphere.

To those of us who know that Western leftists were often at the forefront of struggles for greater political and cultural freedom in the 20th century - whether they were agitating against McCarthyite censorship of communist ideas, or setting up the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s, or arguing against the idea that 'video nasties' warped minds and therefore should be banned - it feels tragic that many leftists now agitate for the blacklisting or destruction of 'offensive' ideas and culture.

When they call for far-right marches or speakers to be banned, leftists repeat the censoriousness of McCarthyism. (Indeed, the House Un-American Activities started as a purge of fascism from America before moving on to communism.) When some on the left fret that lads' mags or 'sexist' songs like 'Blurred Lines' or old books that contain the word nigger will unleash readers' and viewers' base instincts and potentially destabilise society, they echo the stiff, Christian censorship radicals once opposed. When leftists brand as 'phobic' - that is, irrational - anyone who thinks a man cannot become a woman, they repeat the terrible thing that was once done to them: they brand those who hold views they find difficult or offensive as 'ill', unstable, a threat to society.

He writes about how "alarming" it is "to hear some on the left argue that we need censorious legislation to protect ethnic-minority groups from 'hate speech'":

This is one of the most common arguments for the control of speech today: the idea that unfettered speech leads to the expression of prejudiced ideas and that this could damage the self-esteem of certain groups. It is such a racially paternalistic argument, setting up white liberals, essentially, as the defenders of black people from psychic harm. 'Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has creased to exist', said [Frederick] Douglass.

The historic struggle of marginalised groups to be autonomous, to think for and speak and live for themselves, is throughly undermined by the new leftist dogma that presents such groups as easily wounded by words and thus in need of the social protections of censorship. Here, the left rehabilitates the racial infantilisation that drove earlier moralists' belief that blacks should be exposed to some ideas but not to others, for their own good.

...The left embrace of censorship promotes the idea that individuals are either wicked or weak, either dangerous creatures who must be controlled or fragile creatures who must be protected. It promotes suspicion and distrust of humankind. Of course it does. The call for censorship is always motored by an elitist fear and loathing of the public, whether of their dangerous beliefs or their fragile souls that might be polluted beyond repair by dangerous beliefs. Indeed, this is why many on the Western left have gone from being generally favourable towards freedom towards being highly suspicious of it - because more broadly they have lost faith in ordinary people and warmed more and more to the state, which they now see as a more trustworthy social agent than those tabloid-reading, Brexit-voting lower orders. The story of the left's embrace of censorship is a really a story of its growing estrangement from the people.

Freedom of speech is the greatest humanist ideal. To believe in this freedom is to believe other people are just as capable as you are of using their moral muscles to decide for themselves what is a good idea and what is a bad one. It is to trust your fellow citizen more than the state. It is believe that a free, open public sphere is the best bet we have of arriving at the truth, coming up with new and daring ideas, and challenging those who would sow hate with their false beliefs. Freedom of speech doesn't harm society; it is censorship that does that, by infantilising the public, empowering the state, stifling experimental thought, and cultivating a Stalin-like climate of constant 'calling out' and finger-pointing against heretics. When the left argues that freedom of speech is dangerous and censorship is a social good, it is entirely and perfectly wrong.

Right fucking on.

Spiked via @JoWilliams293