Devine: Feast on free speech this Thanksgiving – New York Post

As families gather for Thanksgiving in our polarized era, theres no shortage of advice about how to cope with the crazy Trump-lover in your family.

Your angry uncle wants to talk about impeachment. What do you do? go the headlines.

Theres nothing like a constitutional crisis to spice up the holidays.

Of course, the abhorrent relative in these scenarios is always a conservative but, for the sake of argument, not to mention reality, lets say it equally could be a progressive.

It might be your newly politically correct college kid home for Thanksgiving break from Ohio who has decided its her moral duty to re-educate the family.

Believe it or not, leftists can be obnoxious, too.

The polite way to maintain harmony used to be to avoid any discussion of politics or religion around the dinner table. But there may be a better way.

A timely new documentary about free speech that opens next week in New York argues that its crucial for the health of our nation to expose yourself to ideas you dislike and learn how to disagree respectfully.

No Safe Spaces stars conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager and libertarian comedian Adam Carolla.

While they disagree a lot, theyre also friends. Carolla explains their odd-couple pairing early on, saying hes always asked: Why are you friends with Dennis Prager? You have nothing in common . . .

He comes from the East. I come from the West. He comes from religion. I come from atheism . . . He comes from college and knowledge. I come from tomfoolery and sports. And yet we both share a little something called common sense in values [which] should trump everything. It should trump LGBT . . . It should trump Chicano . . . It should trump black. It should trump Trump.

They trace the origins of cancel culture on campus back to 2013, when students started demanding speech codes and trigger warnings.

It evolved into violent protests stopping campus speeches by right-wing agitators such as Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos, and the less easily pigeonholed psychology professor Jordan Peterson and red-pilled liberals such as Dave Rubin and Bret Weinstein.

What they have in common, along with Prager and Carolla, is theyve been banned or hounded off campuses, often violently.

We see violent protests at UC Berkeley, the epicenter of campus free speech in the 60s, where students now riot to shut down speech that offends them.

Conservative students are shown being punched in the face, abused and ostracized for expressing politically incorrect ideas.

Isabella Chow, a student senator at UC Berkeley last year when she abstained from a vote affirming gender fluidity because she is a Christian, says the backlash shocked her.

Hundreds of protesters demanded she be removed from the senate, and she was booted out of every student organization and voted out of every student club.

It was difficult to hear accusations of people calling me a bigot and a hater.

But its not just conservatives falling victim. Liberals who inadvertently break increasingly capricious speech codes also are being shut down.

If you have any spark of individualism in you, anything about you thats interesting or different, they will come to destroy that, too, warns liberal talk show host Rubin.

Weinstein was a liberal professor hounded out of The Evergreen State College in Washington state after refusing to take part in a 2017 stunt requiring all white people stay away from campus for the day. This was anathema to me as a liberal, he says.

When violent protests against him paralyzed the college, police said they could not protect him.

He warns that Evergreen is just a preview.

This is going to spread into every quadrant of society . . . Evergreen is describing a future that is rapidly approaching.

Toward the end of No Safe Spaces, Prager polls a group of college students on their support for free speech, and finds theyre evenly split. One student declares she draws the line at Nazis.

It couldnt have been a better opening for Prager to explain that free speech is valuable only if it protects offensive, obnoxious views.

It is our trial-and-error way of sorting out good ideas from bad. Since you cant stop people secretly holding bad thoughts, silencing them just pushes bad ideas underground, where they fester and grow more virulent.

Allowing bad ideas free expression allows them to be mocked and countered with good ideas.

Im a Jew, says Prager, and Nazis killed 6 million Jews . . . so I have a real hatred of Nazis. But I feel they should be able to speak freely in America because if we say to the Nazis today, You cant speak, well say to a non-Nazi tomorrow, You cant speak either. And we hope, if everyone speaks, that good ideas win.

So speak your mind to your family today in good-natured fashion and give thanks that you live in a country where good ideas still have a chance.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Proof, again, that theyre the Finest

After a summer of taking abuse, its worth noting that the NYPD is the unofficial social safety net for New Yorkers.

Take Officers Ricardo Roman and Samuel Baez, of the 10th Precinct in Chelsea, who bought a homeless man a suit, glasses and a haircut last month so he could interview for jobs.

Wilfredo Falman Jr., 34, scored work at Kobrick Coffee Co., a cafe in the Meatpacking District.

He urges New Yorkers to give thanks for the officers: They have helped me see the police in a different light.

By Wednesday, Falman had raised $2,463 on GoFundMe, of which his lawyers, the Khan Johnson firm, say he has donated half ($1,172.34 minus costs) to the GLS Memorial Fund, which provides tuition assistance to relatives of police officers.

Feel free to criticize AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is furious at critics who dismiss her policies as free stuff.

These are public goods . . . So I never want to hear the word or the term free stuff ever again, the socialist Democratic congresswoman ranted at a Green New Deal town hall in the Bronx this week.

Who made AOC language boss? We say free stuff because it describes unfunded policies for tuition-free college, Medicare for all and public housing for anyone who wants it.

She doesnt like the phrase free stuff because everyone knows there is no such thing. Someone has to pay for it and, eventually, if you pluck the golden goose enough, it dies.

Wealth creators move to greener pastures, you lose your tax base and any ability to fund even the most worthwhile public projects.

Who could forget it was AOC and friends who drove Amazon out of New York, along with its 25,000 jobs?

Of course, in AOCs utopia, who needs a job when theres free stuff to be had? Can someone please pay for a study tour of Venezuela?

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Devine: Feast on free speech this Thanksgiving - New York Post