Professor: Left Wing Snowflakes Get Some Things Right About Free Speech. Fact Check: Totally False. – Townhall

Is free speech something that should be redrawn? With Ann Coulters scheduled speech at Berkeley cancelled today due to security concerns, were once again seeing the ugly face of the Left shutting down constitutionally-protected rights for the sake of safe spaces and political correctness. Yet, thats the whole point of college, immersing in things that areoutside your comfort zone, right?My political philosophy professor in college was an avowed anarchist and we all turned out okay. Yet, Ulrich Baer, the vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity, and professor of comparative literature at New York University, decided to bring us an explanation for why its okay to chip away at the Bill of Rights. The New York Times published his op-ed and its only something that the snobby elite in the urban bastions of America could argue in support ofsquashing free speech: Its a public good that constantly needs redrawing (they say) [emphasis mine]:

Instead of defining freedom of expression as guaranteeing the robust debate from which the truth emerges, Lyotard focused on the asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments. His extreme example was Holocaust denial, where invidious but often well-publicized cranks confronted survivors with the absurd challenge to produce incontrovertible eyewitness evidence of their experience of the killing machines set up by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Not only was such evidence unavailable, but it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that had systematically denied their humanity.

Lyotard shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good. Some things are unmentionable and undebatable, but not because they offend the sensibilities of the sheltered young. Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencers visit as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In todays age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the Internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generations oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth. We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.

Right, theres the Left using the most extreme example to characterize the whole issue as if every conservative thats being protested is denying thatthe Holocaust ever happened. Thats not whats happening. Its students who just dont want to hear other views because theyre, in the words of Bill Maher, f**king babies. Moreover, the whole notion that the parameters for free speech needs to be redrawn is absurd. The First Amendment is quite explicit in outlining what the Founders intended it to be used for in this country of ours. Perverting that to give yourself various political escape hatches to shut down conservatives is cute at best and abjectly stupid at worst.

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community, wrote Baer.

Thats precisely wrong. And there is value for inviting some of the most insane people to speak. Since you brought up Nazis, lets say a typical national socialist addresses a college, offends people, denies the Holocaust, thinks Adolf Hitler is the best leader in the world, and feels that anyone who isnt Aryan is the scum of the Earth worthy of extermination. It would be brutal. It would be rough, but theres nothing to gain from this? You couldnt glean that maybe there should be another discussion about the sordid history of anti-Semitism? Maybe discuss at length the Holocaust; listing the endless amounts of evidence that shows the Third Reich tried to purge the entire continent, and eventually the world, of these people? All of which ends with the same result: Nazis are wrong and they have a history that is downright evil. Why do people still carry Nazi beliefs? Is it due to a lack of education? Is it because racism persists in families who hold such views? Can the cyclebe broken with more speech, more tolerance, and more outreach of some sort? If anything, having a Nazi whackovisit campus is a great way to remind us the horrors committed in the name of this ideology to avoid it from ever happening again. And I frankly think that history lessons tend to serve the public good.

The National Review took Baerto the woodshed for this piece as well. But the Right has also found some unlikely allies in this fight, like the American Civil Liberties Union. Liberal Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine is also disconcerted with this faction that he branded the illiberal left. And yes, he also criticized Baer:

But what kinds of speech should be shut down on these grounds? Baers definition is rather vague.

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Nearly all American politicians in both major parties support some limits on legal immigration, and some measures to enforce those laws. Virtually all of them define some human beings as unworthy of legal standing a position Baer insists does not deserve to be defended in public at all. Perfectly cogent arguments can and have been made that, say, Hillary Clinton advocates systemically racist policies or that Bernie Sanders encourages sexism. The ability to associate disagreeable ideas with the oppressor, and to quash free speech or other political rights in the name of justice for the oppressed, is a power without any clear limiting principle. Historically, states that rule on that basis tend to push that power to its farthest possible limit.

In other words, the end of free speech as we know it, coupled with the entrance of an Americanized Cultural Revolution that would make Mao proud. This is what were fightingand it shouldnt be just conservatives. Any free speech loving American should be horrified at the progressive intolerance that spreading through American academia like a brushfire.

Phew: There's Not Going To Be A Government Shutdown

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Professor: Left Wing Snowflakes Get Some Things Right About Free Speech. Fact Check: Totally False. - Townhall