Liberals' Response to Dissent: 'Shut Up'

[Joe Cooper]

"'Shut up,' he explained." That's a sentence from Ring Lardner's short
story "The Young Immigrunts." It's an exasperated father's response from
the driver's seat to his child's question, "Are you lost, Daddy?"

They also can be taken as the emblematic response of today's liberals to
anyone questioning their certitudes. As with the father in the story,
it's a response that indicates uneasy apprehension -- the fear that they
have no good answer.

It was not always so. Today's liberals, like those of Lardner's day,
pride themselves on their critical minds, their openness to new and
unfamiliar ideas, their tolerance of diversity and differences. But often
that characterization seems as defunct as Lardner, who died far too young
in 1935.

Consider the proliferation of speech codes at our colleges and
universities. The website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education sets out the speech codes at 400 of the nation's largest and
most prestigious institutions of higher learning. The liberals who run
these institutions -- you won't find many non-liberals among their
faculties and administrations -- have decided to limit their students'
First Amendment right of freedom of speech.

One would have thought that universities would be the last place to limit
free speech. The American Association of University Professors was
founded a century ago this year precisely to champion free speech on
campus.

That was then and this is now. We are told that speech codes are
necessary because some students may be offended by what others say. In
recent years we have been warned that seemingly innocuous phrases may be
"micro-aggressions" which must be stamped out and that "trigger
warnings" should be administered to warn students of possibly upsetting
material.

Sadly, students join in on the fun. They demonstrate to block speeches on
campus of people such as George Will, Condoleezza Rice and IMF head
Christine Lagarde. They musn't let any dissenting voices or dissident
ideas be heard! This is liberalism at work in America today.

Fortunately, there are dissenters. FIRE has brought successful lawsuits
against some codes and has persuaded some universities to drop their
codes. The University of Chicago recently issued a strong statement
supporting free speech on campus. So did former Chicago adjunct law
instructor Barack Obama.

But colleges and universities remain largely no-go territory for those
who disagree with prevailing campus opinions. A notable exception is
Liberty University, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose mostly
conservative students in great numbers listened politely and attentively
to a speech by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. It was quite a
contrast with places like Harvard.

Even beyond the campus, liberals are eager to restrict free speech. This
is apparent in some responses to those who argue that global warming may
not be as inevitable and harmful as most liberals believe, and that while
increased carbon emissions would surely raise temperatures if they were
the only factor affecting climate, some other factors just might be
involved.

Many liberals won't hear of this -- and don't want anyone else to,
either. Some extremists call for global warming "deniers" (a word used to
suggest kinship with those who deny the Holocaust occurred) to be
imprisoned or even executed as heretics. Democratic Sen. Sheldon
Whitehouse has called for criminal investigation of global warming theory
critics under the federal anti-racketeering statutes.

Whitehouse is not the only Democratic senator who is determined to stamp
out the free speech of those who disagree with him. In September 2014, 54
Democratic senators voted to amend the First Amendment of the
Constitution to allow Congress and state legislatures to set
"reasonable" limits on how much candidates can raise and spend during
their campaigns and how much individuals and corporations could spend to
influence elections.

This was an attempt to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision in
Citizens United v. FEC, which Barack Obama denounced a few weeks later in
his 2010 State of the Union message and which Hillary Clinton has been
denouncing in debates and on the stump. The case involved government
efforts to bar distribution of a movie critical of Clinton during the
2008 campaign.

When Justice Alito asked the deputy solicitor general whether the
government could ban a book that expressly backed or opposed a candidate,
the answer, after some uncomfortable stammering, was yes, they could.

In the 1930s liberals expressed outrage over Nazi book burnings in
Germany. Today, liberals' response to opposition is that of Lardner's
lost parent: "Shut up," they explain.

Source: http://bit.ly/1MCJ3Az

--
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"Never underestimate the willingness of white progressives to be offended
on behalf of people who aren’t and to impose their will on those who
didn’t ask for it." (Derek Hunter)

"Liberals never argue with one another over substance; their only dispute
is how to prevent the public from figuring out what they really
believe." (Ann Coulter)