After weeks of footdragging,
writes
Benny Huang on the Constitution website in disgust (thanks for the link,
Maggie),
the University of California at Berkeley finally allowed conservative
commentator Ben Shapiro to speak on campus on September 14th—albeit after charging the event organizers an unconstitutional “security fee.”
The Left’s sick attempt to deploy the heckler’s veto to silence this
articulate, thoughtful man did not rule the day as it did last April
when Ann Coulter was prevented from speaking on campus. Thank goodness for small victories.
Amazingly, no one died. No one was even hurt, though if someone had
been hurt it would not have been Shapiro’s fault. It would have been the
fault of whoever perpetrated the violence, probably one of those
well-known proponents of “love” and “tolerance,” wearing a mask and
swinging a club. But you wouldn’t have known how harmless the whole
thing was from talking to the protesters, many of whom chanted “Speech is violence” outside the venue.
Speech is violence? No, it isn’t. Speech is speech. Violence is
violence. They’re [two] very different things. That’s something we all
should have learned as children but alas, some of us apparently didn’t.
When Shapiro had his chance to speak he let the protesters outside
know how foolish they sounded.
“The idea is that if I attack your ideas,
if I say that you have bad ideas, what I am really doing is attacking
you personally. I’m attacking your identity. I’m aggressing
you. You might require counseling. This is the philosophy of
microaggressions. My words are violence. Even the term ‘microaggression’
suggests that it is an aggression against you, right? Microaggressions.
I am aggressing you. It’s an act of violence. As NYU social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said, ‘Microaggressions are small
actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious
intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless.’ …And
the thing is that microaggressions are actual violence. This is why you
see the dolts outside shouting that speech is violence, because they
think that I am actually doing them violence when they don’t hear me.
But if they would hear me, then presumably I would be doing them
violence and they would need counseling, and if they act with violence
it’s because it’s in response.”
Thank you, Mr. Shapiro, for exposing one of the insidious reasons
that leftists push the “speech is violence” trope. Calling someone
else’s words “violence” is an attempt to justify one’s own violence as
an act of self-defense. Sure, people on the Left break people’s faces with bicycle locks
but people on the Right started it. They wore MAGA hats, or they
opposed affirmative action, same-sex marriage, abortion, or whatever,
which means that they threw the first “punch.” And even though the
“punch” was entirely rhetorical that doesn’t make it any less real. Actual bone-crushing violence on the part of the Left is therefore an
understandable reaction to rhetorical violence from the Right.
But there is another reason the Left pushes this “speech is violence”
nonsense. If speech is truly violence then it must be restrained. We
wouldn’t entertain the notion of a First Amendment right to walk around
hacking off people’s limbs with a machete, would we? Of course not. If
mere words are somehow indistinguishable from a physical attack because
both can wound then we have an obligation to gag people.
Sounds like the end of the First Amendment as we know it. Might that be the point?
It should be noted here that the protesters outside Shapiro’s event
didn’t just come up with this idea on their own. It’s being spoon-fed to
them in their courses. They’re learning this anti-constitutional,
cultural Marxist garbage at a taxpayer-funded institution.
In light of “Free Speech Week,” an event that was supposed to feature a
number of dissenting conservative voices, students and faculty debated
whether the right to invite such speakers should be protected. According
to the New York Times,
“At Berkeley, there are both unequivocal voices championing the
importance of free speech, no matter how inflammatory, and professors
who say lines need to be drawn on campuses. These professors argue that
the First Amendment needs to be reassessed for reasons that include the
rise of internet trolling and cyberbullying and that some scientific
research now shows that hateful speech can cause physical pain. There are faculty members who explicitly reject violence as a way to counter hateful speech, and others who say it is acceptable if used against what are perceived as fascist intruders.” (Emphasis added [by Benny Huang].)
And there you have it—speech is violence and shall be met with more
violence. It’s okay to punch Nazis and everyone who doesn’t think like a
Berkeley social justice warrior is basically a Nazi, whether openly or
crypto.
“Words can be like rape — they can destroy you,” said Berkeley Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Really?
Like rape? These people are impossible to parody. Free speech is not
rape and if it were we would be morally obligated to repeal the First
Amendment and to do penance for permitting it to stand for more than two
centuries. Scheper-Hughes continued: “The Supreme Court is behind the
times. The First Amendment deserves to be re-looked at.”
“Re-looked at.” “Reassessed.” These are code words for what the Left
has done to other parts of the Constitution—the free exercise clause,
the Tenth Amendment—which is to render them dead letters via judicial
perversion. What they really want—and what they would openly advocate if
they weren’t despicable liars—is to repeal the First Amendment. But
repealing amendments is difficult, especially one that has been as
traditionally cherished as the First, so they look to the courts to
neuter it instead. It’s a tactic that has worked well in the past.
But Scheper-Hughes is wrong when she says that the Court is “behind
the times.” Historically speaking, free speech is a relatively new
concept and in that regard SCOTUS is very much ahead of the times.
According to free speech advocate Flemming Rose, the Danish editor most responsible for Jyllands Posten’s 2006 publication
of a series of controversial (to say the least) cartoons depicting
Mohammed, speech was considered a form of violence until modern times.
He writes in his excellent book “The Tyranny of Silence”:
“Until the 17th
Century, words and actions were treated identically throughout Western
Europe. Verbal expressions of deviant or unorthodox notions in religious
matters was taken to be a physical attack on the Church, its members,
and God. Speaking out in favor of political change or against the
existing order was perceived as incitement to rebellion or treason.
Exactly the same was true of totalitarian societies of the 20th Century.”
It’s clear that when we stop distinguishing between speech and
violence we are actually backsliding to a time when suffocating
orthodoxy reigned supreme. It’s downright medieval. Giving up
on free speech means admitting that our grand experiment in free minds
and the free exchange of ideas has actually been a failure. We’re saying
that we need an authority to determine and enforce right thinking, as
well as to ferret out and punish wrong thinking. I’m sure the campus
Left sees themselves as that authority and they’re probably right. They
run academia and they decide what’s out of bounds. But what if they lost
that power? Would they still like censorship so much? I doubt it. Then
they’d find out how it feels to be forcibly silenced—in other words, to
be the kind of “marginalized groups” they pretend to be now.
Free speech is the foundational idea of a classically liberal
society. We learn that while some people’s ideas may rub us the wrong
way, may even make our blood boil, those people have a right to their
ideas just as we have a right to ours. Free speech is a reciprocal
agreement among members of a society that each will tolerate the others’
words. Things change when someone crosses the line into violence. If
there is truly no distinction between speech and violence then we cannot
have a classically liberal society. We must start locking each other up
for our ideas, a proposition that has gained considerable support in
places like Canada and Western Europe that delude themselves into
believing that they are still free.
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