The Heckler's Veto

I wrote about the dastardly and cowardly acts of the administrations at Brandeis University and Rutgers University when they refused to follow through on their honorary degrees and scheduled speeches from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Condoleezza Rice, respectively. Those blog entries are in April and May of this year, I think.

Now comes forward the skilled practitioners of the “heckler’s veto” to limit free speech about North Korea (“The Interview” movie hubbub) and of course anything that is critical of Muslims. And these, like the demonstrators regarding Ferguson, come with a persuasive motive for anyone violating their edicts—death.

We expect extremely biased speech from certain politicians, from the Ku Klux Klan and racists like Al Sharpton. And we expect them to try to stifle free speech. We cannot accept such attacks on free speech from those who are the stewards of our universities.

We must resist. Imagine living in a totalitarian regime where we are not allowed to speak. Huge problems. Don’t succumb to the arguments they invent, cited here in an article you can look up on the internet, “Free Speech’s Shrinking Circle of Friends”:

Law professors have concocted influential concepts like “outsider jurisprudence,” “critical race theory,” “critical feminist theory, and “storytelling” theory to define some kinds of politically incorrect speech as not speech at all, but “mechanisms of subordination.”

The First Amendment is a fragile freedom, easily damaged by the loudest and the most violent.