Greg Lukianoff defines "cancel culture," documents its existence and urges that we not give in to its perpetrators who claims that it does not exist:
A culture of censorship—of shaming, shunning, and attempting to destroy people’s lives for ideological reasons—exists in America, and Americans have a name for it: cancel culture.Let’s not abandon that name in a vain attempt to please the people most responsible for perpetuating the problem.
Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. The following is an excerpt from is recent article (at FIRE): "Social justice requires free speech."
Prevailing political power has always been antagonistic to social justice and has sought relentlessly to restrict speech advocating social justice. That is why social justice has always required speech to nurture and grow its movements.
That was true for the nascent labor movement in the early 20th century; the anti-war movement around 1917 (and again in the 1970s); the birth control movement around 1916, when Margaret Sanger distributed informational leaflets on the streets of New York; the movement to gain the right of women to vote; the anti-lynching movement when the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) used the only weapons she had — articles and speeches — to rally opposition to the epidemic of lynching; and, in our time, the gay rights and civil rights movements. All of them and others depended critically on speech rights, and all would have been extinguished without speech rights. That is why John Lewis (1940-2020) said that “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”
Progressives forget that at their and our peril.
From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):
“Scholars Under Fire: 2021 Year in Review” documents last year’s attempts to penalize scholars for speech and research that, even when controversial, is protected by the First Amendment. FIRE documented 111 attempts to target scholars for their speech in 2021, all of which have been added to FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database. This reflects a dramatic increase from 30 attacks against scholars in 2015.
“Even one attack on free speech is one too many,” said FIRE Research Fellow Komi German, one of the report’s authors. “Our colleges should be built on the foundation that differences of opinion should give rise to debate and discussion — not sanctions and firings. If you asked someone which country had 111 scholars targeted in 2021, they might guess an authoritarian regime like China or Russia, not a democratic nation like the United States.”
Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. Here is an excerpt from his new article, "Social Justice Requires Free Speech."
"Hosannas for publishing Burt Neuborne’s scintillatingly clear and powerful piece on the danger of allowing universities to punish faculty for sloppy or obnoxious speech.
Along with David Cole’s excellent piece in The New York Review of Books, and Erwin Chemerinsky’s spirited piece on the Ilya Shapiro case at Georgetown, all three did a great job of explaining the distinction between supporting the right of someone to speak and disagreeing vigorously and loudly with what they say.
Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee book cover I have long regarded the failure to understand that distinction as one of the two major obstacles to widespread public support for free speech, and all three pieces do a superb job of explaining it."
When Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson passionately agree on a topic, it's time to stop and take notice. I despise the U.S. government's prosecution of Julian Assange. He has exposed marmongers and war criminals who remain free (many of them are even celebrated in the "news"). Matt Orfalea has compiled a mashup of concurring opinions across the political spectrum. Does the rule of law mean anything to Joe Biden? He could stop this insanity in an instant. The fact that he won't (and that Trump didn't) leads to a very dark place, the story of the great power of non-elected government officials and the power of the exorbitantly monetized U.S. spy state.
