Those who were once the guardians of free speech have now become its mortal enemies.
Certainly the most reliable thing about mainstream media actors is their unalloyed leftism. We as conservatives know that they’re going to be against us at every turn, even reporting in bad faith in order to score points or protect their fellow progressives. But just below that knee-jerk hatred for everything right of center, we’ve also counted on them to be First Amendment absolutists — which is to say, defenders of free speech at all costs.
We can hear them now: Suckerrrrrs!
As John Tierney writes in City Journal, “After the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol … progressive journalists … identified a new root cause of mob violence: free speech. They’ve cheered the social-media purge of conservatives and urged further censorship of ‘violent rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation.’ It’s a remarkably self-destructive move for a profession dependent on freedom of speech, but the journalists now dominating newsrooms aren’t thinking long-term — and can’t imagine being censored themselves. The traditional liberal devotion to the First Amendment seems hopelessly antiquated to young progressives convinced that they’re on the right side of history.”
Speaking of history, leftists were always in favor of free speech before they were against it. Their favorite free speech cliché, in fact, goes back more than a century: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
It’s a beautiful quote, both pithy and principled, and often falsely attributed to Voltaire, who himself was a strong civil libertarian. And though we’re not certain where the quote was born, we do know where it died: on our nation’s college campuses. Was it mere coincidence that this was where the one-time radicals of the ‘60s had become the tenured professors of the ’80s? And might it be that these leftists now found free expression to be both inconvenient and unnecessary, since they already enjoyed academic freedom? In its place, our universities ushered in political correctness and promptly reversed the First Amendment gains made by the Free Speech Movement begun at Cal-Berkeley in 1965. It was a violent death.