I Need to Find a Dark Room

In that dark room, there should be either a brick wall or a pail of water, it doesn't matter which. I shall then proceed to either smash my head or dunk it until the lights go dim and this poisonous world recedes into the cool, blessed darkness.

Washington Post: When 'free speech' becomes a political weapon

First of all, I'd like to point out one tiny detail: THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT OF FREE SPEECH. If you thought the title of the article was perhaps unnecessarily hyperbolic, well, you'd be wrong. The entire thing is a dog's breakfast of unsupported tropes, lefty shibboleths and insane leaps of "logic".

The author of this garbage is the Douglas Family Chair in American culture, history, and literary and interdisciplinary studies at Skidmore College. IOW, a credentialed idiot. She atarts:

Here’s the dilemma college presidents face in the fall: Either uphold free speech on campus and risk violent counterprotests, or ban conservative provocateurs and confirm the “freedom of speech” crisis on campuses. Either way their institution’s legitimacy is undermined.

Or they could, you know, support BOTH side's right to demonstrate, chant, march, pamphleteer etc..and crack heads if either one gets violent.

I can't quote the whole thing, and selected excerpts won't do it justice, but I'll try.

But that doesn’t diminish the extent to which the alt-right and conservatives are using “free speech” to attack and destroy colleges and universities, which have long promoted different variations of the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties.

Actually, this sentence is pretty accurate. The problem is that " the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties" is poison. It's wrong. It's EVIL. So yeah, maybe using free speech to attack and destroy it is a pretty good idea. It's the entire reason the 1st Amendment was created in the first place.

She spends a good deal of time talking about the 1950s and resistance to the Communist Party of the US, and even seems to admit that CPUSA needed to be opposed:

So anticommunist liberals made a series of arguments that justified denying communists these rights on account of their disingenuous intentions and totalitarian ideology. Most famously, liberal activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that communists hid behind the First Amendment to attack liberal democracy, using it as a shield as they sought to destroy the democratic system that upheld those rights.

But then she follows it up with this doozy of a paragraph.

Schlesinger understood there weren’t enough communists in the United States to actually foment revolution. But there were enough to divide progressive forces and thus create an opportunity for conservative Republicans to take power and repeal the New Deal, which he believed would in turn destabilize American capitalism and possibly tilt the balance of international power to the Soviets. Liberals would be chumps to let a principled commitment to “freedom of speech” undercut the pragmatic goal of political survival, which was the only way to ensure progress in civil rights and social welfare.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it" logic at it's finest. So CPUSA needed to be opposed because it was interfering with the sacred leftist agenda, never mind that it was interfering by advocating for taking it to it's logical conclusion, which was anathema to most Americans and might make them resist the sacred cows of the left.

There's more, but it's all just unhinged lunacy. Read the whole thing, but I warn you, your brain will be reeling afterwards.

Democracy Dies in Delusion.

(P.S. I just saw an open thread go up, I put it back in draft because OM didn't know I was writing this one.)

posted by WeirdDave at 03:46 PM

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