Freedom of Speech

Original photo courtesy of the PSU Vanguard

I don't keep it a secret that I am still a student attending university. If you read my Twitter profile (Yes, follow me) you'll see that I'm a graduate student finishing a doctorate in public policy. I attend Portland State University, the site of two recent Trump rallies that turned into riots instigated by communists on the #RegressiveLeft. Everything I learned about the #RegressiveLeft was from my time as a social justice warrior.

One of the things I've learned is that the far left is hostile to freedom of speech.  This isn't a profound observation now but in my time in the far left I and my peers believed that we were stalwart defenders of free speech. Only the Right was hostile to speech, in our view, as evident by their opposition to pornography, video games and music they didn't like. Today opposition to those things is the sole province of the left, not the right, with maybe the exception of pornography. When I was a leftist I would've agreed with the idea that 'speech is free but it comes with consequences,' though I wasn't a supporter of no-platforming, which is itself not a new phenomenon.

There is a stock line that Leftists remember and recite without thinking: "freedom of speech only applies to the government." By this they mean that freedom of speech is only guaranteed against government censorship. This is of course absurd, as they love the Heckler's Veto. This is by definition a a redefinition of free speech because freedom of speech isn't only a value enshrined in the US Bill of Rights. No, freedom of speech is a cultural value that any democratic society requires to remain free. Yet many societies don't have free speech. One only has to look to what the leftists in Europe have done to see the effect of restricting free speech.

Power is not just in the hands of the state. There is a contextual side to power that these regressives purposefully overlook when they organize mobs to take over events and turn them into propagandizing sessions. In short, mobs have a lot of power and when mobs move to silence opposition they fail the most basic test of free speech. Freedom of speech includes the right to be heard. The purpose of free speech is to promote a dialogue. If you watch the video above you'll see heckler's using noise to silence those they disagree with at the PSU Trump rally in April.Some mocked the Trump supports with sarcastic 'I can't hear you' while banging on drums. It is only through the unhindered expression of unpopular ideas that our own ideas are challenged.

Of course, the typical Social Justice Warrior doesn't want their ideas challenged. As I've written about endlessly here, they are authoritarians (scroll through the articles to see what I've said on that subject). At its core, contemporary Leftism is a utopian movement and to achieve this utopia, like past attempts, they will stop at nothing. Even their own claimed non-violent views are malleable, as can be seen at the recent Trump rallies in California, where Trump supporters were assaulted by Sanders supporters.

This from the Catholic Herald sums up the authoritarian nature of the #RegressiveLeft beautifully:

The generic name for the well-organized leftist gangs is “antifas,” short for anti-fascists—an Orwellian irony if ever there was one, seeing that the antifas’ tactics are thoroughly fascist. When anti-Islamization groups such as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) hold peaceful rallies or candle-lit “evening strolls,” they are often met by much larger gangs of antifa thugs intent on shutting them down and shutting them up. If they’re lucky, the peaceful protesters are protected by the police, and, if they’re not lucky, they get beaten up.

At Portland State during the first attempt at a Students for Trump meeting, the campus police refused to show up, leaving the small group of pro-Trump supporters at the hands of the mob. Thankfully that didn't turn violent, unlike the second attempt at a meeting. The media and leftists say that Trump and others bear responsibility for violence at his rallies, which is utter nonsense. This view was beautifully destroyed by Robert Spencer, noted educator on Islam who is often targeted by the Left because he dares tell the truth about that 'religion of peace.' What the Left, especially younger Leftists, fails to grasp is that people are accountable for their actions. If someone is 'triggered' by speech into doing something violent the guilty party is the person who engaged in violent behavior, not the speaker. Rarely can someone be legally held to account for speech because the nature of action is that an actor has to make the decision to engage in behavior. Disagreeable speech cannot be used to justify violence regardless of what is said because in the end we are all responsible for our actions.

As an aside I can guarantee everyone reading this: if Ted Cruz were the front runner there would be a similar reaction to him. Why? Because the Left does not want the left-wing establishment governance of America challenged. That is the truth. A front running Ted Cruz would be met with violence for his opposition to gay marriage, transgendered bathroom access, or any number of other positions. Trump is the front runner and likely nominee and as such is the target of the Left despite his general moderate positions on most policy issues.

When violence is a hallmark of a political movement that movement is authoritarian by definition. Whether it was the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, or the myriad movements in South America against foreign occupation, these movements all have in common an outcome of authoritarian dictatorship. I doubt this will play out in the US and UK in a similar manner simply because culturally these forces are so far outside the mainstream that they are already being soundly rejected by the population. But it is a cautionary note that in this we may see similarities from other regressive movements from history.