Another possibility is that the change is driven by the nature of speech in the age of the internet. Having a speaker come to a campus is no longer primarily about allowing people on campus to hear the speaker's ideas. If students want to hear the ideas of, say, Ben Shapiro, there are thousands of videos and recordings on YouTube and every podcasting service. Having him speak on your campus is arguably more about symbolism -- showing that a critical mass of students support him -- than about allowing students the chance to hear his ideas.
Students today may simply take for granted that everybody has all the access they need to all the ideas they could possibly want to be exposed to, and not perceive the shutting down of a speaker in the same way that earlier generations did.
I wonder if the internet has also undermined in their minds some of the Enlightenment/humanism thinking behind free speech doctrine. The marketplace of ideas is supposed to winnow out the bad ideas -- the answer to bad speech being more speech. Watching what people have done with all the “more speech” of the internet might shake one’s confidence in such belief.
It’s pretty clear saying aggressively dumb things is a better path to engagement, so I think this isn’t just a motivator, it’s a factually grounded motivator.
I would propose an analogy drawing from the scientific method: anybody can pull examples from the past where the consensus view of the majority of working scientists turned out to be wrong. How then is anyone to know if the current answer is right or will itself be superseded by future discoveries?
The answer is that nobody knows with absolute certainty. The scientific method doesn't guarantee that a hypothesis is "correct". What it does suggest is that there is a correlation between time and "rightness". The longer people think about a problem, research it and--critically--debate it the closer humanity gets to the truth.
> anybody can pull examples from the past where the consensus view of the majority of working scientists turned out to be wrong. How then is anyone to know if the current answer is right or will itself be superseded by future discoveries?
By being an expert. But that's not a public-square debate. That's a debate that plays out in academic journals over the course of years between the very very few people qualified to seriously debate the issue at the highest levels. *Academic* debate works much better than commons debate, because academics have a trained sense of smell within their field to detect bullshit and the skills to prove that it is bullshit and the time to actually develop that proof. The public has none of those things.
There are plenty of examples from history where the experts turned out to be wrong, and that was realized *by experts looking at new data or new proposals about that data*, not (in general) by the public.
What I'm advocating is for open-mindedness within your own field of expertise, where the rewards of examining new ideas are high and the risk of being misled is low, and being pretty closed-minded in favor of expert consensus everywhere else.
Except for the times that an outsider turned out to be right?
Look, science is not a democracy. The validity of any hypothesis is not measured by the number of scientists who back it, or their credentials. That is a fallacy called "an appeal to authority".
If you want to play the odds and guess that most of the time the experts are right you will probably do okay. But that is all it is--playing the odds--and that is no guarantee that any consensus opinion is correct.
The Wright Brothers were not experts in the field of aeronautics when they made groundbreaking empirical discoveries, specifically overturning the previous measurements for the coefficient of air pressure. They were bicycle makers.
The most recent example is the Global War on Terror when the “experts” told us we must kill them over there because Islam gives terrorists superpowers. So that is why I agree with the Biden administration making the point about Islamaphopia—we sacrificed 7000 of our best and brightest while flushing $5 trillion down a toilet in large part because of Islamaphopia…to say nothing about the several hundred thousand innocent Muslims we slaughtered.
"academics have a trained sense of smell within their field to detect bullshit and the skills to prove that it is bullshit and the time to actually develop that proof"
The reproducibility crisis is a result of outside incentive pressure, and even while subject to it, expert consensus has remained by far the most reliable indicator of truth.
The problem is that the woke folks who are freaking out about bad ideas proliferating in an environment of free speech have some terrible ideas themselves.
As one of the people Nate is complaining about, this is a component, but for me it was really two things:
* Trump and everything that followed him, and
* Discovering that my nominally-small-l-liberal social group was in fact full to the brim of people who think black people are genetically inferior, a position that is quietly extremely popular among the small-l-liberal bloggerati (e.g. rationalists) and semi-openly promoted by libertarian elites (e.g. Paul Graham).
It prevents the spread of harmful ideas. Nate is right that I am promoting a kind of censorship. Not true government censorship in the sense of suppressing the speech of private citizens on their own time - I think that's too dangerous even in the times in which we live today - but in the sense of "using every private and semiprivate means to suppress active misinformation". (As an example, if my state did not make it illegal to do so, I would not knowingly hire a Republican.)
Even a very, very smart person is not immune to misinformation. Expose them to enough, and dress it up cunningly enough, and they'll succumb eventually even if they are intelligent and rational. It is, to me, a kind of intellectual hygiene to prevent disease.
As for how that relates to my examples: I saw my small-l-liberal tech-libertarian friend group, which prided itself on being open to outsiders and controversial ideas, be taken over by "race realists" to the point that it is now a majority view (about 60-40 when I left two years ago, and I imagine it has continued to grow since) in that community. They actually had to leave Reddit before they got CoonTown'd, it got so bad. And a big part of why, in my view, is that they let bad-faith actors into the group. They allowed them to push a deliberate, malicious agenda under the guise of open debate, and the group was transformed as a result.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread: I believe in debate, and I do not think you can have it when the well is being poisoned. Excluding conservatives protects debate. Insofar as it looks like destroying it, it's just acknowledging the destruction already wrought by conservatives.
Please consider this: when you deny someone their say, you are radicalizing them.
You are driving them underground and guaranteeing that they will express those ideas in more damaging ways; denying yourself the opportunity to change their mind or yours; pushing them away from moderating voices.
All this, in a futile effort to prevent the spread of harmful ideas, a task you will fail. Consider that, even in the most repressive regimes in history, "harmful ideas" have flourished. You may slow the spread of those ideas, perhaps even make them taboo in your social group, but you will not stop them from spreading.
Take a few minutes to think about the history of censorship, which has only ever had the effect of showing people who has power, never convinced people of which thoughts are good and bad.
It might radicalize them, but they've *already* radicalized to an absurd degree on their own. When they're already storming government buildings with the explicit intent to kill the Vice President to prevent the finalization of a democratic result, I really think we're past the point of radicalization.
It might drive them away from moderating voices, but they weren't listening anyway. You know how I know that? Because, as a former Republican, when *I* started moderating, I tried to show what I learned to my former comrades, and they didn't want a thing to do with it. I wasn't even a liberal at the time, just a southern Republican who thought hey, maybe that whole Confederacy thing was actually kinda bad!
And suppression has absolutely worked in many cultures and times, with legacies that last decades. It hasn't *always* worked, but it certainly works plenty.
In any case, risks or not, I don't see that I have much choice. Small-l-liberalism is what got us where we are, with democracy in mortal peril and half the country in the grip of a mad post-truth death cult. So that's out. If you have another alternative, I'd be happy to hear it, but as far as I can tell this is just going to be a "not who is right, but who is left" conflict and I am pretty interested in winning it.
We already agree that some ideas are harmful and should be shunned.
I assume that you would have a problem with inviting a Nazi to speak about how we should exterminate the lesser races. Even if you wouldn't, the overwhelming majority of people would. And once you agree with that, you've already agreed with the premise. As Jack Sparrow would say, you've already agreed to my proposal in principle, and now we're just haggling over price.
Yes, there is danger in this idea, and it can go too far. I don't claim it doesn't carry risks, and there are versions of it (particularly restricting *private* speech governmentally) that I would oppose. But I think the situation we're in is so dangerous that we're approaching a Godzilla Threshold of actions to prevent the rise of fascism in the west.
I used to hold a similar view of conservative and right-wing ideology when I was young. The idea that walking off wrongthink was the only reliable way to prevent obviously bad ideas from spreading appealed immensely to me, even as it isolated me further from anything challenging my beliefs.
Frankly, I don’t think the point of view you are expressing is uncommon. It is, in fact, the exact same tactic Elon Musk has articulated about leftist thought; when Musk states that “wokism is a mind virus” that must be contained, he is fundamentally saying the same thing that you are: some bad ideas poison the well. Those ideas must be quarantined, or they will infect us, subordinating our logical pursuit of truth to their overwhelming mimetic potency. Are you willing to accept that analogy, or do you think that somehow does not apply in your case?
Surely there is nothing more conducive to continued polarization than this enthusiastic support for siloing. I suspect your former friend group is left worse off by your withdrawal from their company. I have no doubt you are worse off. I look back on my time as an enthusiastic r/SandersForPresident poster, virulently urging moderators to ban anyone who challenged my beliefs, as the most craven and most intellectually bankrupt time of my adult life.
Have you considered the possibility that people who bring up cognitive disparities do so in order to convince the post-Obama left that identity politics is not recreational, and is in fact dangerous and counter-productive?
Look at Nate’s awful take on NPIs—it actually gained traction!?! I think Buddha has it right—the path to enlightenment is nothing in your brain. Ipso facto—knowledge is the enemy of true enlightenment because in the end knowledge is a construct like everything else on earth.*.
*I just made up the stuff about Buddha and enlightenment. ;)
Someone, somewhere, might believe that. But it's a lie. The right to -be in a space- and -say words out loud- is powerful. The woke cadres understand this basic fact very well. It's why they show up and spit on speakers whose views they reject. They understand that physically removing all opposing viewpoints from "their" space is necessary to the survival of their warped, insular, simplistic worldview.
I think they view it as their message of disagreement in a battle of ideas.
The most degrading response to some conservative groups invitation to one of these lightning rod speakers would be to just ignore it as irrelevant. The conservative groups inviting these people mostly don’t want to sit through the speech anyhow: drawing protests was the whole point and taking that away is the winning strategy.
I would venture that some of the audience for these types of speakers are students and individuals who are genuinely interested in learning about what the speaker has to say.
Leaving them alone is I think the perfect solution because it allows them to exchange ideas in peace.
If you want to attract a lot of attention to yourself, pull in plenty of people on both sides who otherwise couldn't have cared less otherwise and pour more gasoline onto the fire: feel free to protest the protest.
I think the free exchange of ideas among students is more important. The fact that some issues are too controversial to discuss is problematic, especially when issues include unresolved policy issue.
I had a friend who thought Justice Thomas' legal philosophy was natural law not original intent. This is super interesting and consequencial, but even discussing natural law is dismissed out of hand by many academics and their pupils. How do we have policy debate if the other side's philosophical grounding is below discussing?
If liberals oppose censoring the views they don't like off Youtube or demonetizing them to try to get them removed form the internet?
Then this falls apart.
Oh, and that's what the Washington Post article was about' where Liberals opposed free speech; not campus speakers, but censoring on the internet itself.
So it really is as simple as "The political left now opposes free speech".
Good article/analysis. I've taught free speech at UC Santa Cruz for almost two decades. For the past five years, there has, without question, been less support for free speech. Anecdotally, I think the pendulum is swinging back in response to book bans in Florida and overreach of cancel culture. Ultimately, however, what I tell people is that it isn't that the students don't support speech but that they don't believe in the institutions responsible for protecting speech (ie courts, universities and governments). If you see no role for precedent, then why would you support opposing speech -- a version of #5. If institutions are corrupt, then protecting the speech you hate, will not protect the speech you love.
What an interesting comment, thank you for your perspective! Like almost everything going wrong in politics right now, it comes from eroding trust across the board. Cooperative behavior requires trust in reciprocity. Why nobody trusts anything or anybody anymore is the trillion dollar question of our time that, I believe, will be the great hurdle to achieve the next level of societal enlightenment. That question will eventually be answered, but the price is unknown and that's the scary part.
Well that is what is so toxic about the identity politics and hatred of patriotism etc. (to be clear I hated patriotism myself until ~2020.
For a society this big to work people need to buy into a shared collective mythos and feel they are fundamentally the same and fundamentally working on the same project. We have lost that, and one of the major surrogate religions is actively cultivating a very splintered view of people that drives people apart instead of pulling them together.
Combine that with the total bankruptcy of respect (which is totally deserved) by our major political parties/politicians and institutions, and it jsut isn't a recipe for the country holding together long term. There will be blood sadly, which makes me scared for my kids.
The political process is currently just a total catastrophe.
Also a very interesting take, thank you. But to think one level more abstract, why is it that "patriotism" is inherently more good than "identity politics?" I agree that a shared "mythos" of cultural values is critical for cooperations within a group, but those structures and values can themselves be arbitrary. Patriotism taken to the extreme becomes nationalism and we only need to look at the early 20th century to see the consequences of that. We shouldn't pretend that the "patriotism" of the late 20th century / early 21st century was good for everybody.
The problem is not just that "we don't have a shared mythos," but that fundamentally we can't agree on what a "good" shared mythos is. China and Russia both seem to have a pretty coherent shared mythos and it's working well for their internal cohesion, but unfortunately I think those mythos are unjust for everybody outside their group.
Maybe it's not possible for a society to function without anything but an arbitrary mythos of "us vs them." But my hope is that after we get over this bloody confrontation that you're alluding to, civilization will find a more equitable way to define what shared vision should drive us as a collective.
>that "patriotism" is inherently more good than "identity politics
I don't think it is about what is "inherently good" so much as just what is needed to make a country of 300 million people work as a community. "Fuck this place" is not a message that is going to lead to much interest in helping people who are only connected to you by also being members.
I always viewed stuff like the pledge, and standing for the Anthem at sporting events as brainwashing (and it is). What I have come to see as I have gotten older is that a lot of people NEED that brainwashing.
As for identity politics being "bad', its because it is divisive and emphasizes separateness instead of human commonality. It is a huge step backwards, and is really only there because the left made a bunch of promises in the 60s and 70s about what their policies would accomplish, and they mostly failed.
The way forward is the fucking 90s era colorblindness we had. That was the right path, yes some social problems would *perhaps* take longer to equilibriate (I don't even think this is true), but at least it wouldn't tear the country apart in the process.
I like Edgar Schein's assessment that culture is about a balance between external adaptation (i.e., how your group adjusts to external stimuli) and internal instigation (how the group can be brough together and better coordinate).
The entire idea is more elaborate than just these factors but from this perspective the idea that patriotism is more important than some other principle might only be true in the context of the need for internal integration (i.e., patriotism is important right now because we face a crisis of legitimacy in our government). At another point in time, say when we need to adapt rapidly to external forces, blind patriotism (i.e., Team Merica $%@# yah) may not be as helpful if it prevents us from learning and adapting.
The K-Town in the city where I live has a creation myth. Years ago when the first Korean immigrants arrived the neighborhood they settled in was largely African American. Racial tensions ran high. The matter was resolved when a hundred Korean men armed themselves with knives, bats and clubs and brawled with the locals in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. The Koreans drove off their opponents and subsequently the neighborhood underwent a rapid demographic shift.
That's why identity politics is problematic. When everyone has the same identity, say in S. Korea or Japan, in group versus out group is not an issue. In a genuinely diverse country it's completely the opposite.
Deeming some books inappropriate for school libraries is not "banning" them. (Any parent who wishes to expose their kids to such material can still do so, if they think it's important.) It is, frankly, common sense that some things are just not okay for young kids. If you disagree, then I assume you'd be okay with, say, a KKK recruiting manual in school libraries? Or how about a book promoting virginity before marriage and the evil nature of homosexuality? Those should be in there too, right? You don't want to be a book-banner, do you?
It's actually not axiomatically true that teachers and librarians should have the final decision for what books are in their libraries.
An alternative model would be that the taxpayers who fund said library and the parents involved in said school district to decide what books should be in their libraries.
Whether one is better or not is debatable, but that's the point--it's a debate. Just because something HAS been done doesn't mean that it is common sense that it be continued forever.
Letting some outraged parents cancel a couple books is probably fine. But I certainly wouldn't want random average people deciding what goes into any library, public, private, or school. People who aren’t themselves avid readers have terrible tastes.
Playboy Magazine is banned nationwide and has been banned ever since it was published... At least by the new left-wing definition of "banned" which means "not available in public school libraries".
Amazing how the magazine did so well for decades, considering it has always been "banned".
You've defined the problem: Serious issues--government censorship, in this case--are having their names coopted by cultural issues that are unrelated.
"Banning a book" and saying "I don't want my taxpayer dollars used to purchase this book" are not at all the same issue. Likewise, it is not "banning a book" to have parents in a district say "that isn't the curriculum we want for our children."
The real issue is not book bans. No books are being banned by the right. The issue is a culture war where government institutions (libraries and schools) are the battle grounds for two different competing sets of values. It would be more honest if we could call it what it is.
As it's happening at a government level, and involves trying to stop other people from seeing 'obscene' material, I am comfortable with words like banning and censorship, even though they also have other meanings.
If Nate went through and deleted this post for saying the word gay, I would call that banning/censorship as well, even though obviously it is within his rights.
Great example...I suspect much of the Republican support for free speech comes is grounded in a lack of trust. Conversely, now that the left has largely dominated the mechanism that enforce what is misinformation, etc. they may find the idea of policing speech more attractive. Kind of a reverse of the 1970's.
It is kind of funny seeing the hippies of the 1970s defending the FBI (my mom's friend from college was a communist and it was great fun to hear her talk about how the FBI was stalking her), while the conservatives want to blow it up.
You do realize in 2000 Republicans advocated for an illegal immigrant boy to be made a citizen and remain with his American kidnappers instead of being sent home to his father???
Are you talking about Elian Gonzalez? Not sure that that has to do with this conversation but the massive over-generalization in your description of the situation makes me wonder if you truly understand that situation (the generous conclusion) or if you are simply trolling (the ungenerous conclusion). Either way I really don't care...
Lol, you are a Bush/Cheney supporter!!! You supported Bush stealing the 2000 election and then lying us into an asinine war all the while selling us out to China!!! Lololololol!! You suck!!
I agree and would add some additional nuance to this hypothesis. I think many of these young people view themselves in a type of information war where the other side (i.e. Fox News, social media, etc.) has continuously broken the rules and conventions. If free speech to them is being weaponized then they view there response as the only logical one (fighting fire with fire).
Something that I have heard a lot from friends who are less libertarian/pro-free-speech than I am, is the difference between "speech" and "platform". That point of view goes something like this:
You can say whatever you want and shouldn't be arrested for it.
However, you can't come into my living room and say things that I don't like without me, potentially, kicking you out. (This seems obviously true -- it is my living room). What if the neighborhood bar that suddenly decides to host "We Hate Black People And Love Nazis" night -- are you obligated to keep drinking there? (Probably not -- it is your money) Is it OK to let the owner know why? What if you get together with your friends and let everyone in the neighborhood know why?
Is talking shit on Twitter more like publishing a newspaper (fine, whatever) or hosting Nazis in the neighborhood bar (eeeh there are consequences)? (Is Twitter like the US Government or like a bar?) What about inviting a speaker to campus? It is easy to argue that anyone is free to espouse controversial ideas and publish a podcast on them without a campus invitation. The speech is free. Whether the university should provide them with a platform is a different story, especially since university tuition is ludicrously high and a lot of it goes to student groups.
I think that's where some of the disagreement lies. When I was in college a decade ago, I was mostly busy doing math stuff. I agree that it is a slippery slope, but seems worth mentioning.
Isn't the whole point of a university to court controversy though? By that logic campuses should go out of their way to seek out and invite controversial speakers because the goal is to expose young minds to a wide and diverse set of viewpoints.
Universities exist to seek truth, not controversy. Seeking controversy can be a means to seeking truth, but you should no more invite someone promoting crank social views to a university than you would invite someone claiming to have a perpetual motion machine or a philosophers' stone.
When and if conservatives have positions that aren't just blatant lies or own-the-libs grievance, we can talk. Right now, they don't.
How do you determine a position is a lie? "Children are better off in a two parent family. We therefore we should promote marriage and make divorce less convenient." This position is pretty conservative. The first part is not a lie, but an empirical position you could discuss for hours. The second half are policy positions that are supportable. This is controversial, a matter of public policy and not obviously a lie. I could go all day: "Porn should be less accessible to children", "we should prioritize high skill immigrants"... There are plenty of reasonable conservative policy discussion. You can disagree, but you're naive to wholesale dismiss views other than your own as lies.
When conservatives were just arguing those things, I didn't have the beliefs I have now. But that's not what modern conservatives are prioritizing and they're not the identifying beliefs - both from my perspective and from conservatives' - of modern conservatism.
That's the core of my response - the rest of this post is just to explain why I have something of a problem even with that older brand of conservatism.
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Even when the things you listed were being argued, the seeds of the hypocrisy and bad faith that have become malignant today were very much present. "Promote marriage" never meant "support people in their efforts to love one another", it meant "shit on the gays and people who have premarital sex" for reasons that had nothing to do with empirical questions and everything to do with religious fanaticism.
Literally everyone with any attention to politics (which I assume includes everyone in this comment section) knows exactly what "family values" means (and it has nothing to do with family, speaking as a person thrown out of my family in their name).
As a one-time conservative myself, the reason I am now a die-hard progressive is not that I ceased believing in these values. I still do. I believe in love, in family, in virtue, in self-improvement, in realistic thinking, in hard work, in prosperity. I don't drink, I don't use marijuana, and I would discourage my friends and children from doing so in cases where I thought my input was appropriate. I want financial responsibility and good management of resources and excellence in business. All of this, stated in that language, makes me sound like Mitt Romney.
The difference is that I REALLY believe in those things. I don't believe in them as a way to sneer at people who are unloved, or to look down on families that struggle, or to denigrate those who have not yet developed virtue. I want to think realistically as a way to help others, not as a way to justify the latest tax cut for my buddies and cut welfare to those who need it. I believe in hard work in service to my community and prosperity for everyone, not the secular prosperity gospel that has rotted American culture away since Reagan.
My loathing for conservatives, even the Romney kind, comes from the slow realization throughout my adult life that my efforts to promote these values had been twisted to turn them to someone else's benefit. I didn't abandon the values. I just got some integrity in following them.
I'm a humanist, in the tradition of the OG progressives of the early 1900s, in that my goal is to promote the means of human flourishing in the same way that a gardener promotes the growth of their garden. And a garden blooms best when it's properly watered and fertilized, not when you let the weakest plants wither and die.
Basically you assume bad faith and burn down a strawman. No wonder you can't have dialogue. Your political and ethics are indeed in conflict with conservatives, but there is also common ground.
I don't think loathing suits anyone's politics. There is an appropriate tension in politics between progressing and conserving, liberty and structure. I can end up on another side of an issue while recognizing the tension that would lead someone to an opposing view. Dehumanizing a political opponent leads to the worst atrocities
I don't assume bad faith, I'm just not blind to evidence of it. My bias, if anything, is AGAINST listening to evidence of it, which is why I had to learn this lesson over and over and over before it stuck.
> There is an appropriate tension in politics between progressing and conserving, liberty and structure.
Yes, and our ability to find that balance is harmed by the interference of those dedicated to poisoning the well for their own ends.
I am interested in finding that balance. And I have spent years trying to find it in ways that included conservatives. I even included them after the way they responded when I came out, because I really, really believed in open-mindedness. And without exception, I would find that they had betrayed my trust. This has now happened to me no less than four times, in different states, with different brands of conservative, on different issues, and with different iterations of myself.
Despite massive effort, often at massive personal cost, I have yet to ever gain anything of value from their inclusion, and I have been misled into many terrible things by it over the years.
And at the same time as I realized this, I watched conservatives demonstrate on a national stage just what they've demonstrated on my personal one.
Loathing is different from my object-level view here. My object level view is, I think, well-informed by the facts. But the hate? That I cultivate for my own good, to protect myself from ever being enough of a fool to listen to them again.
Do you want rape to be up for debate? Do you want murder to be up for debate? Do you want slavery to be up for debate?
The fact is some issues are not worth talking about because the correct standpoint has already been decided. Drudging around in the mud to see “what we can gain” from hearing regressive & backwards ideology that has no place in public discourse is completely pointless.
Isn’t there a concern that by declaring these issues exempt from public debate that you invest them with a rhetorical weight they don’t deserve? Why surround such settled issues with a false aura of suppressed truth? Opponents of rape or slavery have no need to fear debate, nor I contend do proponents of women’s bodily autonomy or of trans people’s civil rights and personal liberty. When I see campus leftists shutting down certain points of view, I see fear where there should often be confidence (and in some cases less clear cut than leftists think where there should be more openness.)
"Do you want rape to be up for debate? Do you want murder to be up for debate? Do you want slavery to be up for debate?"
Yes. Because it is up for debate. Look at the radicals who want to rationalize or excuse the slaughter of innocents on October 7. Like it or not it is being debated and to pretend otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand.
Plenty of ideas are challenged. But challengers *lose*, and you don't have to repeat the same, failed, challenge a million times to know that it's wrong. No one seriously tests perpetual motion machines, and no one should, because we have *already* tested them ad nauseam and they do not work. We can safely reject them, short of the presence of truly overwhelming evidence, and even in that context we should remain skeptical.
Or, if you want to be mathematical about it: the expected value of a challenge to beliefs is (probability of success in the challenge) times (value of such a success) minus (cost of the challenge). The probability of success is tiny, and the cost is large.
First, that is not how science works. There are plenty of prominent physicists who toy around with the idea of perpetual motion machines for a variety of reasons. Consideration of a "what if" scenario is one widely practiced method for looking at things in a new light, testing one's own understanding, etc.
Secondly new physicists keep on being born because new human beings are constantly being born. They have every right to look around, examine the world and decide for themselves what they think is real and valuable. If you want to forfeit in the contest of ideas where you present your world view and argue as to its merits, be my guest. I am skeptical that will convince anyone.
I'm happy to present my worldview. I do so, often. I just have no interest in assisting my enemies in promoting theirs.
If Liberty University wanted to invite me there to talk about the trans experience, I'd go in a heartbeat. Spoiler alert: they won't.
As for physicists toying with perpetual motion machines occasionally: there is a very big difference between an expert who is well-equipped to detect even the worst falsehoods, and a layperson who, even if they were the smartest person on Earth, is not equipped to do so across every field.
"Wrong" and "operating in deliberate bad faith" are different things.
If a doctor gave a lobotomy in 1952, they were probably wrong to do so. But the belief that it was right was one a reasonable person could have held in light of available evidence. (And by the way, if you think "one a reasonable person could have held" is an too broad of a standard, keep in mind that it is already the standard we use for criminal negligence, fraud, etc.).
But if a doctor who liked giving lobotomies suppressed evidence they didn't work, or fabricated evidence they did, or put crazy people who happen to not like lobotomies on TV 24/7 to draw an association between the two, or had a radio show in which they talked about how lobotomies were the best (but then made it clear that that was just entertainment when called out in court), that's a different matter. That's not being wrong, that's bad faith. Its goal is not to debate or persuade but to manipulate and mislead.
As for how a way-out-of-mainstream belief could become mainstream: that's a matter for *expert* debate, among people who can recognize a crank lobotomy study for what it is and who are aware of countervailing evidence. It is not a matter for education of students who are not experts in a field and who do not have those defenses.
It's like if someone claimed the COVID Vaccine would prevent infection and prevent spread; we should silence them for spreading knowingly wrong information.
They were wrong, it was known from the start it was wrong; and they lied.
That is easily Understood, thanks for the clarification.
Now... what is the proper method to silence the current POTUS and FDA of the United States for this?
What?
I just showed they match your definition of what you want silenced.
They absolutely made that false claim in public, multiple times.
How could you possibly oppose silencing them?
Uneducated people might believe them; which is wrong!
Then why don’t universities invite White Supremacists and Serial Rapists on campus to espouse their views? If you’re so concerned about students seeing “a variety of perspectives” why not give a platform to the most hateful and disgusting people alive?
Obviously you aren’t going to be in favor of that, because platforming evil people that espouse dangerous rhetoric is very bad for public image and not worth the risk that some clueless student might actually buy into their lies.
I think the problem is reasonable people disagree on what is evil and dangerous, so you have to be comfortable creating the institutional structure for your ideological opponents to ban your preferred speech as evil and dangerous.
No one was claiming it wasn't dangerous. But you know what else is dangerous? The rise of a neofascist movement openly dismantling democracy in your country. The latter is FAR more dangerous than the former, and demands extreme measures to prevent it.
Because, as a general matter, nobody at the University is interested in what those people have to say, so they don't get invitations.
The controversy here is not "whether universities should seek out and invite random people with views that 99% of the population views as evil." It is "whether universities should bar some members of their communities from inviting people they want to hear speak because other members of their community see those speakers' ideas as very bad."
If some student group wants to invite Nick Fuentes so they can debate him, go ahead.
Congrats, you just showed me a failure of the American justice system, that makes me hold to my ideals further. Just about every single young leftist like myself would view that as an atrocity of history in this country. My generation will make sure not to repeat the failures of those that came before us. If it scares you that a Nazi group won’t be allowed to demonstrate in a future run by Gen Z, I think you’re part of the problem.
That's kind of a stretch though. For example, my parents would argue that the point of _my_ university experience was to teach me useful skills, which is why they paid so much of my tuition. :)
My parents have a fairly narrow view of things, I suppose, but ... also ... I don't know that inviting Flat Earth YouTubers to campus would have helped my education much. I am glad that I got to watch their videos on youtube, it was good fun at 2am. Did you know that some mountains used to be really, really torn trees?!
Your parents have the wrong idea about higher education. What is useful about studying Middle English, or Sanskrit, or poetry?
If "useful skills" are the metric then who cares if humanities departments wither and die? Nobody needs to know who Sartre is to work in HR at a major corporation. Just get rid of all of the schools except for engineering, computer science and business. They teach useful skills up the wazoo.
I actually find poetry and Sartre (but also Hemingway) to be ludicrously useful in the world of written online communication. Beyond that, humanities provide a shared point of reference and teach us to analyze events and the stories that people tell about those events. Those are, in fact, skills. It is not just generic "well-roundedness". (And uh, humanities-related jobs also do exist)
I've never learned Middle English though. Got nothing to say that one. :)
Which specific curriculum? Honestly, in the broad sense, I have absolutely no opinion on Middle English or Sanskrit in and of themselves, I'm sorry to say. They were not required classes for me, certainly. What was your experience with them?
Is this a joke? The point of a university is to get a education, full stop. When I took physics classes they didn’t invite flat-earthers to come speak to gin up some kind of manufactured “controversy”. I would say a small fraction of a percent of any student’s university education will touch on actually controversial topics. The problem is that 99% of media coverage is about stupid bullshit controversies, basically manufactured by attention-seeking media personalities (e.g. many popular Substack authors). Christ. Did you go to college? Or just completely forget what it was like? It feels like every asshole writing about “woke college blah blah” has either not gone to college or assumes that every university has gone through some kind of Maoist cultural revolution in the last 5 years. Maybe the reason young people on the left are turning against “free speech” because they’re tired of noxious, meanspirited shit being shoved down their throats all the time under the guise of “exposing them to a wide and diverse set of viewpoints” when they’re just trying to get a fucking education.
Getting an education is being exposed to crazy shit. And the issue is not flat earthers being invited to an undergrad class, it's flat earthers being unable to invite a speaker to campus for an extracurricular event.
That's a good point that I hear a lot, but I also think it's a little bit of a deflection from the real discussion. I think most people can agree on tolerating speech (even really bad speech) as something that should at least be legal and not cracked down upon by the state. And generally, most people will agree that it's legally ok for people to restrict the speech of others to some extent inside their own home or business.
But I think beyond that the more meaty argument is about what _should_ be done with regards to restricting free speech in those businesses? You can say a website legally has the right to remove content it doesn't agree with, but still think they should still keep it there out of a principled belief in free speech as an idea, and not just a law. Similarly, a workplace or campus might have valid methods to limit speech, but can choose not to exercise them. And not everywhere should necessarily even be the same either. I think probably its more ok for a person's home or a local place like a bar to be more of a "safe space" where they don't have to engage with that, but maybe something like a campus or a social media website, maybe they should just have their policies to protect free speech more than they legally have to.
I recently transferred from the university of massachusetts to the university of southern mississippi and the general attitude difference is like night and day. The peer pressure for conformity and the sheer intolerance for anything confrontational I encountered in Massachusetts was bewildering. At USM political engagement is much lower and as such there’s wayyy less vitriol in general, not to mention that southern hospitality means that you’ll probably at least be allowed to finish expressing your opinion before hearing a rebuttal (rather than interruption and insults)
I was in college when debates about teaching “creation science” were raging. I attended invited talks by creationists. I think I learned more from those talks and the discussions they sparked than I did from all the bio classes I took (I was a bio major). Understanding creationism helped clarify for me what makes scientific knowledge unique and why that matters.
I really can’t think of a better way to learn about a topic than to grapple deeply with criticism of that topic. If students never have to confront opposing views I think they are losing out big time.
I think a major reason this is becoming more of a problem now is technology. Gen Z grew up with social media and there is a ton of toxicity on there. When kids hear free speech they picture the vitriol their racist uncle spews on Facebook or the millions of anonymous posts on on the many Reddit spinoffs.
Agreed, I’d also say that the social norms of the pre-internet age, including those around free speech, have been wrecked by the vitriol you describe. There was a vacuum for awhile as to what the new norms would be and while I wouldn’t say they’re set in stone, we seem to have entered a world in which “you may make the rules for speech on your discord/subreddit/social media platform” has seeped into the real world. Not to say there wasn’t reason for it, but that attitude is pernicious in settings like universities.
These reasons for lower free speech support seem largely true to my post-college demographic peers (millennials) too!
However, here two additional reasons that play an important role.
1. Social media and digital chatrooms structurally encourage less tolerance for free speech.
Community moderation involves banning and punishing speech that doesn't fit with the guidelines. For Twitch, Discord, and Reddit chats, not doing good enough community moderation can result in bans for the streams/rooms themselves. This encourages a mindset that 'some speech is not acceptable'. Those who agree with the rules, or see them as good for the community, will naturally see them as good to apply elsewhere, to larger communities or to real life ones.
In the past, few would be exposed to situations where they're actively 'moderating' what others say, outside of the Thanksgiving table or perhaps at the work water cooler. But now, the younger generations (Millennials, Zoomers, Alpha) are growing up thinking about this all the time -- and through a lens that doesn't encourage a lot of free speech friendliness.
I've noticed that right-wing online groups and movements tend to be more 'okay' with free speech, but instead police their communities with harrassment and death threats. While slower to ban for having heterodox opinions, moderators from those areas are also more likely to simply admit that their ban was based on annoyance rather than the user breaking any defined rules. I wonder if this is how Elon Musk can see himself as a free speech absolutist, but also feel comfortable deplatforming people for petty personal reasons.
2. Corporations don't support free speech at all, and these values reflect onto workers that have fewer protections and more exposure.
This isn't about the rules that Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and others enforce on their users. Nor is it about legal liability that corporations face for disciminatory speech -- along with cell phone recording tech that makes proof much easier to capture. Nor is it about increased DEI and inclusivity initiatives, that can include sharp punishments for those that get on board. All of those seem symptomatic, downstream!
Instead, the issue is that companies already can fire at-will for saying things critical of the company or acting poorly on social media. My generation was taught that even to get hired, social media profiles should be turned private, or fully santized of any objectionable content to get a job. This was all true in the 2000s already, during the rise of social media. It's more true today now that tech literacy has expanded to older generations.
If a person can lose their livelihood at any time for saying something critical of the company publicly -- or even being too annoying internally -- or really, for any reason! -- then that again creates an understanding that "free speech isn't really valued in practice".
The friends I have that are most uptight about policing speech (most likely to shut down topics they don't like, and advocate for sharper speech limits) are those that work in service professions. They directly talk to customers daily who could complain about them and get them fired -- requiring careful, constant self-policing of speech. These are also often very exposed jobs, with at-will contracts where they can be easily fired. They might not even be full-time employees, working on contracts or as part of a gig economy -- if the company dislikes them, they are easily replaced.
My right-leaning friends tend to direct their ire at 'woke' policies for putting them at risk if they speak up about their perspectives, especially if they're critical of diversity or inclusion initiatives. On the other hand, my left-leaning friends tend to like that they have a little bit of protection -- if they speak in very inclusive and generically 'not bad' ways, then this can protect them from getting fired as easily. But, say, try to start a union at Amazon or Starbucks, or openly discuss corruption or abusive business practices, and it doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you're on. Further, if those diversity or inclusion initiatives are being abused to favor certain internal factions, then again, pointing this out doesn't matter if it's from right or left. It's the same as the well known fact that if you complain about your boss to HR -- even for justified reasons -- you'll find yourself fired for 'unrelated' reasons soon after.
The left-leaning perspective seems to be that if they don't get free speech -- and only the thinnest protections by corporations -- then it's not all that important to fight to protect it for others. If anything, online people being obnoxious and threatening those very thing protections is something to oppose and deplatform. The right of 'free speech' doesn't apply at all to them personally, and likely never will, at least when it comes to their jobs or public online profiles.
Brilliant take. Thank you for sharing. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, this is the true nuanced discussion of free speech in the modern age I was disappointed in Nate for not providing.
I appreciate that! I think Nate's take is natural for his libertarian, centrist political position. He's also noted in other places he has a VERY open policy towards policing his spaces, being willing to get into scraps and not minding harrassment bombing -- though he has expressed annoyance at the quality of conversation on his pieces sometimes.
With that said, I should note I basically agree with his reasons 1-5.
The weakest is point 5, about hypocrisy. The issue is that there is a major (right-leaning) group whose interest in free speech, and purported support of it, is mostly because they see themselves as the current victim. Florida and Elon Musk are the 2023 poster children. I don't see their simultaneous support of "free speech" while banning books or posts they don't like as hypocritical, per se... but rather that "free speech" has a secondary definition, as an antonym of "political correctness" / "wokeness" / "cosmopolitanism" -- even when that includes censorship.
Ryan Coonerty's comment up above gets at this issue a bit! Some entities which claim to support free speech simply don't in the way that people like Nate care about. I don't know if I'd think of that as hypocrisy, but it certainly fuels antipathy towards the idea of 'free speech' when it's being used in that secondary way.
I'm skeptical about #2 - being circumspect on the job is not a new experience. Thirty years into adulthood, I've never known anyone that thought or acted as if they could exercise unfettered free speech at work.
Edit - to clarify, I'm skeptical that this *distinguishes* today's college students and younger people, not doubting that they feel it.
I think you're right that it's not at all new! This is just how businesses work.
I think I mistakenly conflated blue collar with union work. For example, salt of the earth factory workers, miners, and police officers have often been known to have bawdy talk behind the scenes. That still gets caught on camera now and then. I don't think one would do that if they felt an intense risk of their comments getting them fired. Same for, say, the military, or athletic teams, where that kind of talk is just expected, part of the culture. These professions still have expectations on respect for hierarchy and not to badmouth publicly or snitch, but it's more accepted (anecdotally) to have terrible opinions and thoughts and to share them with coworkers.
So the bigger explanatory factor is likely the shift towards increasing service and office jobs -- white collar work. Increasing numbers of people employed in that profession -- and thus, increasing reflection of those values towards free speech out in the wild. Customer service jobs have always required a lot more self-policing and discretion. White collar work can vary, with some workplaces being much more permissive or restrictive of certain speech. High exposure to lawsuits, to organized customer backlash, and to recording technology that can cause said lawsuits and backlash are all encouraging more restrictive corporate policies, which I think then reflect onto the worker ethos.
But, it seems to be especially customer service friends, at least in my personal life, that have the most free speech restrictive perspectives. And they are the most policed themselves. Maybe there's an alternate explanation for that?
Ah yes, I this seems like a fruitful avenue! Changes to the types of jobs people work does seem likely to influence their attitudes about confrontational or offensive speech.
But a mystery remains. If I understand correctly, the process you're describing implies that the people in question is internalizing the boss' norms, so to speak.
In my experience, the more restrictive a workplace is, the less people like it and the more likely they are to rebel against its rules off-hours. Maybe people are making a virtue of necessity; their workplace behavior is so restricted that they need to behave as if it were their idea just to have any dignity. I don't think this theory has legs, generally, in American workplaces, because most people have plenty of room to breathe outside of work. But it may apply to very insular social environments, like colleges and universities.
I think this is the main root of the problem, and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. Whether rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that liberals right now control most of the levers of power, and that censorship right now would broadly be censoring views like racism, homophobia, misogyny etc., so opinion on censorship largely lines up with whether people think their views fall on the liberal side of those topics or not.
Unfortunately, while I do think most people believe "free speech" is a virtue in principle, and there are some portion of the population who views that as a strict principle that should always be adhered to, most people who promote free speech the loudest do it only when it is in their own political interests, and will quickly abandon it once they don't need it anymore. Even as Republicans currently promote free speech as they believe they are losing the culture war, in places where they do have power (like Florida) they have little interest in protecting the free speech of those who express views they consider bad, and instead they take the same position as the campus liberals from this survey that "safety" as they see it is more important.
I suspect that a lot of that perception comes from the fact that liberals hold a lot of the levers of what you might call "petty" power. The average person's dealings with authority figures are the HR department at their work, not an investment-bank board, and petty bourgeois occupations are the core of half the democratic base these days.
So even though very few people actually running the world are progressive, people's personal boss often is, which "feels" much more like direct power.
Someone else quoted Ezra Klein as stating that, whichever side you're on, it feels like the other side is winning because the progressives control cultural power while the republicans control political power. I think that's closest to being right.
I was thinking the same. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement tried to promote speech that wasn’t being allowed on campuses by the administration (those that held the power).
I also think that the legal expansion of what is free speech (ie Citizens United, Alvarez, 303 Creative) has diluted free speech as a value. If money, lies, and discrimination are free speech maybe it isn’t a value worth protecting.
In terms of lies, I was specifically referring to the US v. Alvarez case where the Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor act, which made it criminal to present yourself as a military person when you did not serve. Striking down a law on free speech grounds that criminalized telling lies about your military service could be interpreted as sanctioning the right to lie as a part of free speech.
I didn’t say that lies should be censored. I was giving one of many possible reason some people might not feel as strongly about the right to free speech.
BTW there is ample social science research evidence that demonstrates how hard it is to counter misinformation and lies with truth after the lie or misinformation has been spread.
So it's not that free speech is in trouble, it's that there is no diversity of thinking from the Left. The most telling charts above showed me what I already knew -- conservatives are open to hearing on controversial view points (conservative or liberal), but the liberal side is absolutely not open to conservative controversial view points.
"Free speech" is too subjective to me, because from the Left's side there is nothing wrong with shutting down controversial speakers because those speakers are pushing ideas which are anti-social at best, violent at worst. If you were to ask a Left leaning person in this view point if they are attacking "free speech" they would say they aren't, they are shutting down "hate" speach and this is absolutely legal. Free speech is speech which is acceptable. What you need to do is ask them how they feel about controversial speakers. That might actually break into their posture, but not the word "free". They have no concept of "free". "Free" is not as important as "safe" to them.
I don't know how you got that from this data. Personally, I think there is some diversity in thinking on the left, but very often it's within its own Overton window that is not representative of the broader population (which is also often true on the right). Various echo chambers online and in real life have made it so that you can fraternise almost exclusively with people who broadly share almost all the same opinions as you, and views outside of this group are never even discussed as they are totally verboten in day-to-day life. To many on the left, a 15 week abortion ban or a return to legalised slavery are both kind of equally unthinkable views, despite the fact that one clearly has far more widespread support than the other, because each one will get about the same exposure as a serious subject worth discussing in most leftist spaces.
“there is no diversity of thinking from the Left...the liberal side is absolutely not open to conservative controversial view points.”
I didn’t gather from this that there was a demonstrated significant diversity of thinking on the right or significant openness to liberal viewpoints, or that the Left was monolithic in its thought. Just a difference in the extent people with wrong opinions should be permitted a campus forum to express them. And for the most part those conservative opinions were from students in the ideological minority.
It would be interesting to see how often conservative universities like Liberty U or Harding U have liberal and or non-religious speakers on campus.
I’m totally in favor of allowing Stephen Miller be allowed to speak on campus. I’m absolutely not open to anything that malevolent piece of shit has to say. If you’re in the minority opinion group on campus, that might help you appreciate the value of free speech even for people you think are totally wrong.
Having said that, it might be the case that conservative students ARE more open to other points of view. I don’t know one way or the other.
It’s some evidence. I would like to see more conservative opinions when they’re in the majority. A significant openness to having opposing views on campus at schools like Harding or Liberty U would make a better case for it.
Totally speculating here, but as a liberal myself, my guess is that this comes down to two factors:
1) There is a consensus among young liberals that certain ideas (e.g. denial of trans rights) are so utterly abhorrent that they must be actively fought by any and all means.
2) On top of that, young liberals believe that those ideas may well be implemented in the near future.
As a test of (1), I would propose that researchers include a question along the lines of:
"Race-based slavery should be re-established in the United States"
My hypothesis is that you'd see equal numbers of opposition among liberal and conservative students, with liberals putting it in the same "bin" with the others, while conservatives would consider it a uniquely horrific outlier.
Giving trans care to minors is illegal in many states, and red-state legislatures are well on their way to TRAP-style restrictions removing trans care for adults, too. There's no more fundamental trans right than the right to transition care.
The ability to treat consenting teenagers (the earliest medical intervention is at the onset of puberty; any acceptance of younger trans kids is purely social) who, empirically, are very likely to benefit from that treatment and very unlikely to be harmed by it, yes.
But thank you for the case in point about the level of debate you're bringing to the table. Can't imagine why we wouldn't want to invite you to just scream the word "mutilate" rather than look at any of the actual evidence.
> And yet hospitals keep getting caught mutilating them ever earlier.
Cite an example - literally any example - of surgical intervention on a trans patient prior to puberty at any major medical institution. The very earliest I am aware of is top surgery on physiologically-female people at around 14, and even that is exceptionally rare.
That aside, of course we're moving care earlier. It works. It causes no harm. And earlier intervention is better both in terms of the person suffering for less time and in terms of the person being more able to mature as their preferred sex. Why *wouldn't* we move care earlier in that context?
> Who can consent to sex, alcohol, or smoking, but according to you can consent to having themselves mutilated.
Alcohol and smoking are known to lead to serious negative health outcomes and, unlike most risky behaviors, actively make stopping the risky behavior more difficult. I'm not sure how I feel about the law there, exactly, but I certainly have no problem discouraging teenagers from engaging in addictive substances (and I don't think that's remotely comparable to trans care, which substantially IMPROVES long-term outcomes). Hell, I'm a borderline teetotaler, I don't even think we should encourage drinking in adults.
Sex is more complicated, but in general I'm pretty permissive about teenagers having safe sexual contact with one another. And the law certainly permits minors well below the age of majority to consent to sex with one another everywhere in the US I'm aware of. Even then, the law is primarily there to prevent predatory behavior on the part of adults; there is no obvious risk of predation when it comes to trans adolescents.
There's a reason the normal phrase is "consenting adults" and there's a reason "consenting teenagers" still need parental consent for basically anything important that hasn't been declared a "human right" by the left (abortion / trans care primarily).
We're talking about medical consent here, not sexual, and medical consent of a teenager of normal development and intelligence is absolutely considered relevant in standard, uncontroversial medical ethics.
The issue of parental consent for trans care is more complicated. Most trans teenagers getting care have supportive families (they wouldn't be able to access it otherwise), so it's normally not at issue. But cases where they don't fall (at least for me) into a difficult area of medical ethics regarding to what extent a parent can deny their child effective care.
That extent is clearly not zero (we do not, say, require all parents to provide a medically-recommended diet to their children), and it is clearly not infinite (we can and do prosecute parents for negligence when they do sufficient harm to their children by failing to pursue care). It is, for me, in the same camp as a family of Jehovah's Witnesses denying their child a blood transfusion. I think you can make an argument for that degree of parental rights, but I don't think that argument has much to do with trans people on an object level (it's more of a disagreement over to what extent a parent has a right to be a crappy parent).
Biden got elected at least in part *because* free speech was restricted w/r/t the Hunter Biden laptop story; that's your answer to "what changed in 2020 to make liberals like censorship more?"
My general sense is that most liberals legitimately believe that the information they are censoring is “misinformation.” I am not excusing liberals from making bad decisions, but this is to say that I don’t think liberals thought of the Hunter Biden laptop incident as a victory for censorship as much as they regarded it as a piece of misinformation to be quashed, without too much thought.
Yeah people are great at self delusion, which is why you want to be careful what tools you give them. Setting up a formal or informal MINTRU isn’t a good idea.
Something about this doesn't pass the smell test, to me? A quarter of "Very Conservative" students would oppose letting a Pro-lifer speak? A third want to prevent the "Anti-BLM" speaker? I'm not saying FIRE had some agenda. It just seems off.
What others said, plus there could be some "low data sample" anomalies. FIRE interviewed roughly 100 students per university. If only 3-5% identify as "Very Conservative", then it only takes 1 student saying "prevent" to make up 20-33%.
It wouldn't shock me that there are a non-negligible portion of conservative students who generally feel like they are in enemy territory on a campus and try to keep their opinions to themselves and generally don't want guests who will cause trouble.
One thing I would add is that at UPenn much of the donor anger is driven by the fact that the president of the university choose NOT to prevent a controversial Palestinian activist from speaking at a campus event. They very clearly would have preferred a much more repressive free speech position from university admin.
It seems like there’s a big tent “anti-ivy league” coalition with sub-groups who have preferred policy outcomes that are diametrically opposed. Interesting to see how this plays out.
I think context matters here. There's a lot of anger, for example, that university presidents were quick to condemn police killings during the BLM hysteria (or any other political issue of the day) but have been tardy in issuing statements on October 7. In other words the charge is hypocrisy.
I agree, there are a multitude of reasons driving the anti-ivy sentiment hence the big tent. I’m speaking to a particular cohort that believes admin has been derelict in curbing antisemitism and cite: meek Oct. 7 response, allowing anti-Semitic Palestinian speaker, allowing student protests. 2/3 things here are free speech absolutist in nature and are the exact things that some donors are angry about.
I understand the charge of inconsistent censorship but, the policy change that some donors are advocating for is more ubiquitous censorship not less!
I’m not sure, but Nate seems to believe that they are fed up free speechers:
“Still, if I were one of those donors, I’d say “great, and now we’re going to hold you to it. The next time you stray from your commitment to free speech — particularly when it comes to students or faculty who express conservative or centrist viewpoints — we’re going nuclear, permanently ending all contributions to the university and telling all our rich friends to do the same.”
My point is that I think he’s overgeneralizing the ask from donors. Some are punishing schools for being too repressive while others are punishing them for not being repressive enough. From a distance it looks exclusively like the former but on closer inspection it’s a messy coalition.
Once upon a time in this country the anti-porn coalition was made up of fundamentalist Christians and radical feminists. Yeah, they had a common interest/goal but there weren't too many similarities beyond that.
Agreed, but what exactly is the common cause between rich donors who want more speech restriction and free speech absolutist who want less? They seem diametrically opposed.
as children, my fellow Gen Zers and I were taught that freedom of speech simply means “the government can not prosecute you for things you say.”
This is a barebones definition of free speech, and I think it’s the best way of defining it. It seems today that controversial figures want to use “freedom of speech” to merely mean “freedom from consequences over saying hateful/incorrect things.”
I think you would be hard pressed to find even the most radical leftist/liberal students advocating for “we should put racists in prison” or “spreading disinformation should be considered a criminal act”
I believe that’s why young people are so willing to restrict so-called “freedom of speech”, because quite simply we do not believe anything other than criminally charging people for speech would count as a “restriction on free speech”.
Young people, including me, also subscribe to the idea of the “paradox of tolerance” which is that in order to truly preserve a tolerant society, we must be intolerant of intolerance and remove those attempting to spread hate in the public domain from said domain.
Because at the end of the day, what is more important? Freedom to say hateful things or the freedom FROM being subjected to hateful discourse? I don’t want to live in a world where rape is up for debate. I don’t want to live in a world where murder is up for debate, and I refuse to be expected to “hear out” those that are sharing clear and dangerous ideologies. A country where the free speech rights of Nazis, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other extremists are restricted is a country I would find safer and healthier to raise children in than one where they are allowed space in the public discourse. If that is “anti-free speech” then “free speech” quite simply is not a virtue to hold up without question.
This is a woefully inadequate definition of free speech. If you look at what Greg Lukianoff (of FIRE) has said, he makes a distinction between the limited nature of free speech law and the critically important, broader free speech *culture* that has, bumpily but doggedly, allowed the US and most Western democracies to thrive relative to backward, nin-Western places. A major purpose of free speech law is to help buttress a free speech culture, and you just want to throw the latter in the garbage and declare that freedom is never being emotionally or intellectual uncomfortable and that you and your comrades are the chosen ones.
And sorry, but you can miss me with the tolerance paradox schtick. Who decides what is tolerant and intolerant? That argument is always trotted out by people who preeningly declare themselves to be the arbiters of tolerance and goodness. It's your version of "discrimination is OK when we do it because we are the righteous."
I expressed that the legalistic approach is too narrow and that we should think about free speech as a culture that allows for free discourse and civil disagreement since that's what the legal definition undergirds in the first place. In the unlikely event that you are actually interested, I mentioned Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, who speaks well on this. Here is a discussion he had with Reason mag where he talks about this more holistic view of free speech and the need to see free speech as more than just "the government can't punish you":
Beyond that, I'd encourage you to think about our history in America and the West more broadly. Think about both the distant and recent past where we collectively have recognized the value of open debate, of not shouting down our opponents while they speak, and engaging with the merits of an argument rather than insisting that something just not be debated. And think about the times we have failed to live up to those ideals. It's pretty clear that free speech and open discourse carries the day. Cheers.
The culture of “refusing to shout down our opponents and treat them as rational actors” has allowed for Slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and now Trumpism to hold serious space in public discourse. I see no benefits in the corrupt and disgusting history of America, which is why I’m in favor of radically restricting the so called “freedom” to spew hate and fear-mongering and nonsense. You can whine all you want, but the rest of Gen Z agrees with me and we will gladly put you with the rest of those that we view on the wrong side of history. It’s a changing world, better get with the times instead of being left behind.
It's a bit rude of you to assume your fellow Gen Zers are as uninformed as you are. You can just say "I personally learned [incorrectly] that freedom of speech means...".
Personally I blame Randall Munroe for that dumb cartoon
The "Karl Popper quote" you're referring to is a misrepresentation of a footnote in a book he wrote, in which he was paraphrasing Plato. The concept it's his philosophical framework is nonsense - you're quoting an Instagram meme.
Explain to me then with your overwhelming “Rationalist69” wisdom how Germany purged themselves of Nazi ideology post WWII with “tolerance” if the paradox of tolerance is “a nonsense” framework.
Such a weak attempt at invalidating the core point, what does it matter where a platitude comes from if it’s true?
A military defeat, the Nuremberg trials, and The Marshall Plan? Also, if we're running with the idea, doesn't look like banning Hitler from giving speeches had the defeating impact you might've expected.
It was about subjecting your views to constant interrogation, where the paradox involved *those who would shut down debate*. It's not an expansionist game in which you find ways to label views you dislike of being intolerant of others in some broad sense. Then it became a cartoon version around the 'punch a Nazi' thing and people interpreted that as Popper's idea.
"The left thinks that the right’s intent is to make dissent illegal. Therefore, they don’t have to “fight fair” either."
This is just justifying authoritarianism by asserting the other side is authoritarian, e.g. the usual excuse for authoritarianism. And if we take this seriously as being their view, and follow the logic of your meme, then anyone would already be thoroughly in the clear to shut down the left's dissent - they want to make dissent illegal (as they believe the right wants to make dissent illegal). But all of this is just posturing nonsense to create excuses for censorship, so let's dismiss all of it.
"Making trans a mental illness [...] are steps towards making them illegal as well."
This is nonsense, trans status is already marked as a mental condition when it comes to making medical treatments available. The concept that proper classification of a lightly understood phenomenon is off-limits is absurd, and not respectable. This is why arguments on the trans side tend to be so poorly thought out.
For that matter, abortion has always involved a side concerned for what they consider to be unborn life. I'm not agreeable with that, but the notion discussing this is off-limits is, again, just excusing authoritarianism.
I think we all survived your thought experiment, we can survive debates.
The difference being, I think, that the conservative viewpoints are strongly contrary to the left but still widely held on the right. A better left one would maybe be:
"13 is a suitable age to begin gender transition"
or
"Parents should not have final say over what is taught in the classroom."
or some other relevant but highly charged present issue.
The problem with this survey and the argument you're making is that the 3 conservative examples of "free speech" would all lead to violence against people (particularly oppressed people), whereas the 3 liberal examples would have no suche effects. Conservative speech has actually encouraged extremist violence in the United States. People who want to deplatform these ideas, and think that college campuses in particular should actively denounce these ideas, are not just against conservative ideas because they disagree with them; they are against them because these ideas actually encourage violence.
First, there are people who would argue that abortion is violence against an unborn child. I don't personally hold that opinion, but you should think about how that complicates your declaration.
Second, you are making this sweeping claim that has no clear linkage to reality. Saying that I think BLM is a hate group != advocating violence against black people. That's just a bizarre reach grounded in a twisted worldview where groups that claim oppression may never be criticized no matter how they behave. And that's dumb.
But third, people can make any kind of claim and then someone else could use that claim as a reason to pursue violence. It makes the violence wrong; it doesn't mean the speech should be prohibited. That would mean that literally any statement any violent criminal ever heard as motivation in their effed up head should be banned. Which is absurd.
You cannot be an advocate for free speech without embracing the right of people to exercise free speech, regardless of how violently you may disagree with them.
Given the very real potential for physical violence between supporters of Israel and Palestine would you be comfortable banning rallies from campus, regardless of who they support?
Your example of Israel / Palestine is a fantastic one, but fundamentally I have to disagree with your premise that "You cannot be an advocate for free speech without embracing the right of people to exercise free speech, regardless of how violently you may disagree with them." There are indeed limits to people's right to express free speech and "totally unrestricted free speech" is a pretty philosophically defenseless position. Even the US at it's most "free" point made direct threats of violence or calls to violence illegal, for obvious reasons.
I also disagree with Jeff's take that "believing abortion should be illegal" is equivalent to a call for violence. "Abortion should be illegal" and "people who give abortions should be killed" are completely different positions.
I don't mean to claim that slander/libel/etc. are Constitutionally protected. As an analogy, the 2nd Amendment doesn't allow citizens to purchase rocket launchers without significant government oversight. I think however there is a broad consensus that any restrictions should be as light as possible.
Ha! I think Nate's post is in fact proof of the opposite of "broad consensus" ;)
Alas, I agree with you as does Nate it seems. I think the thing Jeff was trying to get at however was that speech that calls directly for violence should be banned, which I think you hopefully agree with. It's just that I think he's conflating "calls directly for violence" and "leads to violence." Every position has at least a few crazies willing to commit violence on it's behalf and distinguishing between those two things is critical and unfortunately, also very hard to do legally and politically.
In terms of consensus there obviously is none for the college set. That's a relatively small percentage of the population overall however and from what I recall there is still wide (although shrunken) support for free speech at the national level.
There's a significant body of 1st Amendment case law from the USSC, some of it dealing with what constitutes a threat and what is protected by free speech. I don't see why that shouldn't be the golden standard when deciding what to allow on campus, or anywhere else for that matter.
in passing I will note that Gen Z and Millennials lose their virginity at a later age compared to previous generations. They have fewer sexual partners by the time they reach age 25. They are less likely to indulge in binge drinking or recreational drug use. They are less likely to move across the country for career, leaving behind family and friends. If your impression is that the younger generations are more conformist and more conservative than those that came before there may well be some justification for that belief.
Another possibility is that the change is driven by the nature of speech in the age of the internet. Having a speaker come to a campus is no longer primarily about allowing people on campus to hear the speaker's ideas. If students want to hear the ideas of, say, Ben Shapiro, there are thousands of videos and recordings on YouTube and every podcasting service. Having him speak on your campus is arguably more about symbolism -- showing that a critical mass of students support him -- than about allowing students the chance to hear his ideas.
Students today may simply take for granted that everybody has all the access they need to all the ideas they could possibly want to be exposed to, and not perceive the shutting down of a speaker in the same way that earlier generations did.
I wonder if the internet has also undermined in their minds some of the Enlightenment/humanism thinking behind free speech doctrine. The marketplace of ideas is supposed to winnow out the bad ideas -- the answer to bad speech being more speech. Watching what people have done with all the “more speech” of the internet might shake one’s confidence in such belief.
It’s pretty clear saying aggressively dumb things is a better path to engagement, so I think this isn’t just a motivator, it’s a factually grounded motivator.
And quite possibly a Nice Big Juicy Bigger Speakers Fee for some?
I would propose an analogy drawing from the scientific method: anybody can pull examples from the past where the consensus view of the majority of working scientists turned out to be wrong. How then is anyone to know if the current answer is right or will itself be superseded by future discoveries?
The answer is that nobody knows with absolute certainty. The scientific method doesn't guarantee that a hypothesis is "correct". What it does suggest is that there is a correlation between time and "rightness". The longer people think about a problem, research it and--critically--debate it the closer humanity gets to the truth.
> anybody can pull examples from the past where the consensus view of the majority of working scientists turned out to be wrong. How then is anyone to know if the current answer is right or will itself be superseded by future discoveries?
By being an expert. But that's not a public-square debate. That's a debate that plays out in academic journals over the course of years between the very very few people qualified to seriously debate the issue at the highest levels. *Academic* debate works much better than commons debate, because academics have a trained sense of smell within their field to detect bullshit and the skills to prove that it is bullshit and the time to actually develop that proof. The public has none of those things.
So there are no examples from history where the experts turned out to be wrong?
You have a funny idea as to how science works.
I wouldn't call it funny. I call it elitist . . .
There are plenty of examples from history where the experts turned out to be wrong, and that was realized *by experts looking at new data or new proposals about that data*, not (in general) by the public.
What I'm advocating is for open-mindedness within your own field of expertise, where the rewards of examining new ideas are high and the risk of being misled is low, and being pretty closed-minded in favor of expert consensus everywhere else.
Except for the times that an outsider turned out to be right?
Look, science is not a democracy. The validity of any hypothesis is not measured by the number of scientists who back it, or their credentials. That is a fallacy called "an appeal to authority".
If you want to play the odds and guess that most of the time the experts are right you will probably do okay. But that is all it is--playing the odds--and that is no guarantee that any consensus opinion is correct.
The Wright Brothers were not experts in the field of aeronautics when they made groundbreaking empirical discoveries, specifically overturning the previous measurements for the coefficient of air pressure. They were bicycle makers.
The most recent example is the Global War on Terror when the “experts” told us we must kill them over there because Islam gives terrorists superpowers. So that is why I agree with the Biden administration making the point about Islamaphopia—we sacrificed 7000 of our best and brightest while flushing $5 trillion down a toilet in large part because of Islamaphopia…to say nothing about the several hundred thousand innocent Muslims we slaughtered.
As far as I can tell the Biden administration has given the green light to the Israelis to depose Hamas.
"academics have a trained sense of smell within their field to detect bullshit and the skills to prove that it is bullshit and the time to actually develop that proof"
What about the reproducibility crisis?
The reproducibility crisis is a result of outside incentive pressure, and even while subject to it, expert consensus has remained by far the most reliable indicator of truth.
The problem is that the woke folks who are freaking out about bad ideas proliferating in an environment of free speech have some terrible ideas themselves.
As one of the people Nate is complaining about, this is a component, but for me it was really two things:
* Trump and everything that followed him, and
* Discovering that my nominally-small-l-liberal social group was in fact full to the brim of people who think black people are genetically inferior, a position that is quietly extremely popular among the small-l-liberal bloggerati (e.g. rationalists) and semi-openly promoted by libertarian elites (e.g. Paul Graham).
But how does imposing content restrictions on campus speakers address those problems?
It prevents the spread of harmful ideas. Nate is right that I am promoting a kind of censorship. Not true government censorship in the sense of suppressing the speech of private citizens on their own time - I think that's too dangerous even in the times in which we live today - but in the sense of "using every private and semiprivate means to suppress active misinformation". (As an example, if my state did not make it illegal to do so, I would not knowingly hire a Republican.)
Even a very, very smart person is not immune to misinformation. Expose them to enough, and dress it up cunningly enough, and they'll succumb eventually even if they are intelligent and rational. It is, to me, a kind of intellectual hygiene to prevent disease.
As for how that relates to my examples: I saw my small-l-liberal tech-libertarian friend group, which prided itself on being open to outsiders and controversial ideas, be taken over by "race realists" to the point that it is now a majority view (about 60-40 when I left two years ago, and I imagine it has continued to grow since) in that community. They actually had to leave Reddit before they got CoonTown'd, it got so bad. And a big part of why, in my view, is that they let bad-faith actors into the group. They allowed them to push a deliberate, malicious agenda under the guise of open debate, and the group was transformed as a result.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread: I believe in debate, and I do not think you can have it when the well is being poisoned. Excluding conservatives protects debate. Insofar as it looks like destroying it, it's just acknowledging the destruction already wrought by conservatives.
Please consider this: when you deny someone their say, you are radicalizing them.
You are driving them underground and guaranteeing that they will express those ideas in more damaging ways; denying yourself the opportunity to change their mind or yours; pushing them away from moderating voices.
All this, in a futile effort to prevent the spread of harmful ideas, a task you will fail. Consider that, even in the most repressive regimes in history, "harmful ideas" have flourished. You may slow the spread of those ideas, perhaps even make them taboo in your social group, but you will not stop them from spreading.
Take a few minutes to think about the history of censorship, which has only ever had the effect of showing people who has power, never convinced people of which thoughts are good and bad.
It might radicalize them, but they've *already* radicalized to an absurd degree on their own. When they're already storming government buildings with the explicit intent to kill the Vice President to prevent the finalization of a democratic result, I really think we're past the point of radicalization.
It might drive them away from moderating voices, but they weren't listening anyway. You know how I know that? Because, as a former Republican, when *I* started moderating, I tried to show what I learned to my former comrades, and they didn't want a thing to do with it. I wasn't even a liberal at the time, just a southern Republican who thought hey, maybe that whole Confederacy thing was actually kinda bad!
And suppression has absolutely worked in many cultures and times, with legacies that last decades. It hasn't *always* worked, but it certainly works plenty.
In any case, risks or not, I don't see that I have much choice. Small-l-liberalism is what got us where we are, with democracy in mortal peril and half the country in the grip of a mad post-truth death cult. So that's out. If you have another alternative, I'd be happy to hear it, but as far as I can tell this is just going to be a "not who is right, but who is left" conflict and I am pretty interested in winning it.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Well that makes sense, stop "harmful" ideas, just the bad ones of course.
Because we all know that WrongThink is DoublePlusUnGood.
That is a vital thing to know, I'm just curious what the next step of the Orwell Instructional Manual says about a proper society.
We already agree that some ideas are harmful and should be shunned.
I assume that you would have a problem with inviting a Nazi to speak about how we should exterminate the lesser races. Even if you wouldn't, the overwhelming majority of people would. And once you agree with that, you've already agreed with the premise. As Jack Sparrow would say, you've already agreed to my proposal in principle, and now we're just haggling over price.
Yes, there is danger in this idea, and it can go too far. I don't claim it doesn't carry risks, and there are versions of it (particularly restricting *private* speech governmentally) that I would oppose. But I think the situation we're in is so dangerous that we're approaching a Godzilla Threshold of actions to prevent the rise of fascism in the west.
I used to hold a similar view of conservative and right-wing ideology when I was young. The idea that walking off wrongthink was the only reliable way to prevent obviously bad ideas from spreading appealed immensely to me, even as it isolated me further from anything challenging my beliefs.
Frankly, I don’t think the point of view you are expressing is uncommon. It is, in fact, the exact same tactic Elon Musk has articulated about leftist thought; when Musk states that “wokism is a mind virus” that must be contained, he is fundamentally saying the same thing that you are: some bad ideas poison the well. Those ideas must be quarantined, or they will infect us, subordinating our logical pursuit of truth to their overwhelming mimetic potency. Are you willing to accept that analogy, or do you think that somehow does not apply in your case?
Surely there is nothing more conducive to continued polarization than this enthusiastic support for siloing. I suspect your former friend group is left worse off by your withdrawal from their company. I have no doubt you are worse off. I look back on my time as an enthusiastic r/SandersForPresident poster, virulently urging moderators to ban anyone who challenged my beliefs, as the most craven and most intellectually bankrupt time of my adult life.
The difference is, Elon isn't trying to restrict woke thought on twitter though.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-twitter-cisgender-slur-b2438972.html
C’mon...
**walling off, not walking off (in the first paragraph)
Have you considered the possibility that people who bring up cognitive disparities do so in order to convince the post-Obama left that identity politics is not recreational, and is in fact dangerous and counter-productive?
Look at Nate’s awful take on NPIs—it actually gained traction!?! I think Buddha has it right—the path to enlightenment is nothing in your brain. Ipso facto—knowledge is the enemy of true enlightenment because in the end knowledge is a construct like everything else on earth.*.
*I just made up the stuff about Buddha and enlightenment. ;)
Someone, somewhere, might believe that. But it's a lie. The right to -be in a space- and -say words out loud- is powerful. The woke cadres understand this basic fact very well. It's why they show up and spit on speakers whose views they reject. They understand that physically removing all opposing viewpoints from "their" space is necessary to the survival of their warped, insular, simplistic worldview.
" and not perceive the shutting down of a speaker in the same way that earlier generations did."
Then why do it at all?
I think they view it as their message of disagreement in a battle of ideas.
The most degrading response to some conservative groups invitation to one of these lightning rod speakers would be to just ignore it as irrelevant. The conservative groups inviting these people mostly don’t want to sit through the speech anyhow: drawing protests was the whole point and taking that away is the winning strategy.
I would venture that some of the audience for these types of speakers are students and individuals who are genuinely interested in learning about what the speaker has to say.
Leaving them alone is I think the perfect solution because it allows them to exchange ideas in peace.
I think it’s best to leave them alone. I don’t think listening is a high priority for many of the people involved though.
The only way to find out is to show up yourself.
So you’re saying if Gays Against Groomers want to hold a rally, ignore it and let all 12 of them rally themselves silly?
Yup.
If you want to attract a lot of attention to yourself, pull in plenty of people on both sides who otherwise couldn't have cared less otherwise and pour more gasoline onto the fire: feel free to protest the protest.
I think the free exchange of ideas among students is more important. The fact that some issues are too controversial to discuss is problematic, especially when issues include unresolved policy issue.
I had a friend who thought Justice Thomas' legal philosophy was natural law not original intent. This is super interesting and consequencial, but even discussing natural law is dismissed out of hand by many academics and their pupils. How do we have policy debate if the other side's philosophical grounding is below discussing?
Easy enough to find out.
If liberals oppose censoring the views they don't like off Youtube or demonetizing them to try to get them removed form the internet?
Then this falls apart.
Oh, and that's what the Washington Post article was about' where Liberals opposed free speech; not campus speakers, but censoring on the internet itself.
So it really is as simple as "The political left now opposes free speech".
It would be worth asking questions like “would you date a person who thought X”
Good article/analysis. I've taught free speech at UC Santa Cruz for almost two decades. For the past five years, there has, without question, been less support for free speech. Anecdotally, I think the pendulum is swinging back in response to book bans in Florida and overreach of cancel culture. Ultimately, however, what I tell people is that it isn't that the students don't support speech but that they don't believe in the institutions responsible for protecting speech (ie courts, universities and governments). If you see no role for precedent, then why would you support opposing speech -- a version of #5. If institutions are corrupt, then protecting the speech you hate, will not protect the speech you love.
What an interesting comment, thank you for your perspective! Like almost everything going wrong in politics right now, it comes from eroding trust across the board. Cooperative behavior requires trust in reciprocity. Why nobody trusts anything or anybody anymore is the trillion dollar question of our time that, I believe, will be the great hurdle to achieve the next level of societal enlightenment. That question will eventually be answered, but the price is unknown and that's the scary part.
Well that is what is so toxic about the identity politics and hatred of patriotism etc. (to be clear I hated patriotism myself until ~2020.
For a society this big to work people need to buy into a shared collective mythos and feel they are fundamentally the same and fundamentally working on the same project. We have lost that, and one of the major surrogate religions is actively cultivating a very splintered view of people that drives people apart instead of pulling them together.
Combine that with the total bankruptcy of respect (which is totally deserved) by our major political parties/politicians and institutions, and it jsut isn't a recipe for the country holding together long term. There will be blood sadly, which makes me scared for my kids.
The political process is currently just a total catastrophe.
Also a very interesting take, thank you. But to think one level more abstract, why is it that "patriotism" is inherently more good than "identity politics?" I agree that a shared "mythos" of cultural values is critical for cooperations within a group, but those structures and values can themselves be arbitrary. Patriotism taken to the extreme becomes nationalism and we only need to look at the early 20th century to see the consequences of that. We shouldn't pretend that the "patriotism" of the late 20th century / early 21st century was good for everybody.
The problem is not just that "we don't have a shared mythos," but that fundamentally we can't agree on what a "good" shared mythos is. China and Russia both seem to have a pretty coherent shared mythos and it's working well for their internal cohesion, but unfortunately I think those mythos are unjust for everybody outside their group.
Maybe it's not possible for a society to function without anything but an arbitrary mythos of "us vs them." But my hope is that after we get over this bloody confrontation that you're alluding to, civilization will find a more equitable way to define what shared vision should drive us as a collective.
>that "patriotism" is inherently more good than "identity politics
I don't think it is about what is "inherently good" so much as just what is needed to make a country of 300 million people work as a community. "Fuck this place" is not a message that is going to lead to much interest in helping people who are only connected to you by also being members.
I always viewed stuff like the pledge, and standing for the Anthem at sporting events as brainwashing (and it is). What I have come to see as I have gotten older is that a lot of people NEED that brainwashing.
As for identity politics being "bad', its because it is divisive and emphasizes separateness instead of human commonality. It is a huge step backwards, and is really only there because the left made a bunch of promises in the 60s and 70s about what their policies would accomplish, and they mostly failed.
The way forward is the fucking 90s era colorblindness we had. That was the right path, yes some social problems would *perhaps* take longer to equilibriate (I don't even think this is true), but at least it wouldn't tear the country apart in the process.
I like Edgar Schein's assessment that culture is about a balance between external adaptation (i.e., how your group adjusts to external stimuli) and internal instigation (how the group can be brough together and better coordinate).
The entire idea is more elaborate than just these factors but from this perspective the idea that patriotism is more important than some other principle might only be true in the context of the need for internal integration (i.e., patriotism is important right now because we face a crisis of legitimacy in our government). At another point in time, say when we need to adapt rapidly to external forces, blind patriotism (i.e., Team Merica $%@# yah) may not be as helpful if it prevents us from learning and adapting.
The K-Town in the city where I live has a creation myth. Years ago when the first Korean immigrants arrived the neighborhood they settled in was largely African American. Racial tensions ran high. The matter was resolved when a hundred Korean men armed themselves with knives, bats and clubs and brawled with the locals in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. The Koreans drove off their opponents and subsequently the neighborhood underwent a rapid demographic shift.
That's why identity politics is problematic. When everyone has the same identity, say in S. Korea or Japan, in group versus out group is not an issue. In a genuinely diverse country it's completely the opposite.
No books have been banned in Florida.
Florida leads the country in number of books banned in public schools. Thanks for playing.
Deeming some books inappropriate for school libraries is not "banning" them. (Any parent who wishes to expose their kids to such material can still do so, if they think it's important.) It is, frankly, common sense that some things are just not okay for young kids. If you disagree, then I assume you'd be okay with, say, a KKK recruiting manual in school libraries? Or how about a book promoting virginity before marriage and the evil nature of homosexuality? Those should be in there too, right? You don't want to be a book-banner, do you?
The common sense thing is for teachers and school librarians to decide what books should be in their library.
Instead we seem to have a lot of people who don't actually read all the books.
It's actually not axiomatically true that teachers and librarians should have the final decision for what books are in their libraries.
An alternative model would be that the taxpayers who fund said library and the parents involved in said school district to decide what books should be in their libraries.
Whether one is better or not is debatable, but that's the point--it's a debate. Just because something HAS been done doesn't mean that it is common sense that it be continued forever.
Letting some outraged parents cancel a couple books is probably fine. But I certainly wouldn't want random average people deciding what goes into any library, public, private, or school. People who aren’t themselves avid readers have terrible tastes.
Which books are banned and is there such a thing as age appropriate reading material?
Playboy Magazine is banned nationwide and has been banned ever since it was published... At least by the new left-wing definition of "banned" which means "not available in public school libraries".
Amazing how the magazine did so well for decades, considering it has always been "banned".
The modern definition is: stocked by librarians and teachers, removed by the voters and the state.
You've defined the problem: Serious issues--government censorship, in this case--are having their names coopted by cultural issues that are unrelated.
"Banning a book" and saying "I don't want my taxpayer dollars used to purchase this book" are not at all the same issue. Likewise, it is not "banning a book" to have parents in a district say "that isn't the curriculum we want for our children."
The real issue is not book bans. No books are being banned by the right. The issue is a culture war where government institutions (libraries and schools) are the battle grounds for two different competing sets of values. It would be more honest if we could call it what it is.
As it's happening at a government level, and involves trying to stop other people from seeing 'obscene' material, I am comfortable with words like banning and censorship, even though they also have other meanings.
If Nate went through and deleted this post for saying the word gay, I would call that banning/censorship as well, even though obviously it is within his rights.
curriculum changes aren't book bans and any example you give i can find the book and buy it in florida
Could someone tell me which books are banned in Florida. Does anyone know?
You aren’t allowed to stock the script of Debbie Does Dallas volume 5 in elementary schools!
outrageous!
Great example...I suspect much of the Republican support for free speech comes is grounded in a lack of trust. Conversely, now that the left has largely dominated the mechanism that enforce what is misinformation, etc. they may find the idea of policing speech more attractive. Kind of a reverse of the 1970's.
It is kind of funny seeing the hippies of the 1970s defending the FBI (my mom's friend from college was a communist and it was great fun to hear her talk about how the FBI was stalking her), while the conservatives want to blow it up.
You do realize in 2000 Republicans advocated for an illegal immigrant boy to be made a citizen and remain with his American kidnappers instead of being sent home to his father???
Are you talking about Elian Gonzalez? Not sure that that has to do with this conversation but the massive over-generalization in your description of the situation makes me wonder if you truly understand that situation (the generous conclusion) or if you are simply trolling (the ungenerous conclusion). Either way I really don't care...
Lol, you are a Bush/Cheney supporter!!! You supported Bush stealing the 2000 election and then lying us into an asinine war all the while selling us out to China!!! Lololololol!! You suck!!
I agree and would add some additional nuance to this hypothesis. I think many of these young people view themselves in a type of information war where the other side (i.e. Fox News, social media, etc.) has continuously broken the rules and conventions. If free speech to them is being weaponized then they view there response as the only logical one (fighting fire with fire).
Something that I have heard a lot from friends who are less libertarian/pro-free-speech than I am, is the difference between "speech" and "platform". That point of view goes something like this:
You can say whatever you want and shouldn't be arrested for it.
However, you can't come into my living room and say things that I don't like without me, potentially, kicking you out. (This seems obviously true -- it is my living room). What if the neighborhood bar that suddenly decides to host "We Hate Black People And Love Nazis" night -- are you obligated to keep drinking there? (Probably not -- it is your money) Is it OK to let the owner know why? What if you get together with your friends and let everyone in the neighborhood know why?
Is talking shit on Twitter more like publishing a newspaper (fine, whatever) or hosting Nazis in the neighborhood bar (eeeh there are consequences)? (Is Twitter like the US Government or like a bar?) What about inviting a speaker to campus? It is easy to argue that anyone is free to espouse controversial ideas and publish a podcast on them without a campus invitation. The speech is free. Whether the university should provide them with a platform is a different story, especially since university tuition is ludicrously high and a lot of it goes to student groups.
I think that's where some of the disagreement lies. When I was in college a decade ago, I was mostly busy doing math stuff. I agree that it is a slippery slope, but seems worth mentioning.
Isn't the whole point of a university to court controversy though? By that logic campuses should go out of their way to seek out and invite controversial speakers because the goal is to expose young minds to a wide and diverse set of viewpoints.
Universities exist to seek truth, not controversy. Seeking controversy can be a means to seeking truth, but you should no more invite someone promoting crank social views to a university than you would invite someone claiming to have a perpetual motion machine or a philosophers' stone.
When and if conservatives have positions that aren't just blatant lies or own-the-libs grievance, we can talk. Right now, they don't.
How do you determine a position is a lie? "Children are better off in a two parent family. We therefore we should promote marriage and make divorce less convenient." This position is pretty conservative. The first part is not a lie, but an empirical position you could discuss for hours. The second half are policy positions that are supportable. This is controversial, a matter of public policy and not obviously a lie. I could go all day: "Porn should be less accessible to children", "we should prioritize high skill immigrants"... There are plenty of reasonable conservative policy discussion. You can disagree, but you're naive to wholesale dismiss views other than your own as lies.
When conservatives were just arguing those things, I didn't have the beliefs I have now. But that's not what modern conservatives are prioritizing and they're not the identifying beliefs - both from my perspective and from conservatives' - of modern conservatism.
That's the core of my response - the rest of this post is just to explain why I have something of a problem even with that older brand of conservatism.
-----
Even when the things you listed were being argued, the seeds of the hypocrisy and bad faith that have become malignant today were very much present. "Promote marriage" never meant "support people in their efforts to love one another", it meant "shit on the gays and people who have premarital sex" for reasons that had nothing to do with empirical questions and everything to do with religious fanaticism.
Literally everyone with any attention to politics (which I assume includes everyone in this comment section) knows exactly what "family values" means (and it has nothing to do with family, speaking as a person thrown out of my family in their name).
As a one-time conservative myself, the reason I am now a die-hard progressive is not that I ceased believing in these values. I still do. I believe in love, in family, in virtue, in self-improvement, in realistic thinking, in hard work, in prosperity. I don't drink, I don't use marijuana, and I would discourage my friends and children from doing so in cases where I thought my input was appropriate. I want financial responsibility and good management of resources and excellence in business. All of this, stated in that language, makes me sound like Mitt Romney.
The difference is that I REALLY believe in those things. I don't believe in them as a way to sneer at people who are unloved, or to look down on families that struggle, or to denigrate those who have not yet developed virtue. I want to think realistically as a way to help others, not as a way to justify the latest tax cut for my buddies and cut welfare to those who need it. I believe in hard work in service to my community and prosperity for everyone, not the secular prosperity gospel that has rotted American culture away since Reagan.
My loathing for conservatives, even the Romney kind, comes from the slow realization throughout my adult life that my efforts to promote these values had been twisted to turn them to someone else's benefit. I didn't abandon the values. I just got some integrity in following them.
I'm a humanist, in the tradition of the OG progressives of the early 1900s, in that my goal is to promote the means of human flourishing in the same way that a gardener promotes the growth of their garden. And a garden blooms best when it's properly watered and fertilized, not when you let the weakest plants wither and die.
Basically you assume bad faith and burn down a strawman. No wonder you can't have dialogue. Your political and ethics are indeed in conflict with conservatives, but there is also common ground.
I don't think loathing suits anyone's politics. There is an appropriate tension in politics between progressing and conserving, liberty and structure. I can end up on another side of an issue while recognizing the tension that would lead someone to an opposing view. Dehumanizing a political opponent leads to the worst atrocities
I don't assume bad faith, I'm just not blind to evidence of it. My bias, if anything, is AGAINST listening to evidence of it, which is why I had to learn this lesson over and over and over before it stuck.
> There is an appropriate tension in politics between progressing and conserving, liberty and structure.
Yes, and our ability to find that balance is harmed by the interference of those dedicated to poisoning the well for their own ends.
I am interested in finding that balance. And I have spent years trying to find it in ways that included conservatives. I even included them after the way they responded when I came out, because I really, really believed in open-mindedness. And without exception, I would find that they had betrayed my trust. This has now happened to me no less than four times, in different states, with different brands of conservative, on different issues, and with different iterations of myself.
Despite massive effort, often at massive personal cost, I have yet to ever gain anything of value from their inclusion, and I have been misled into many terrible things by it over the years.
And at the same time as I realized this, I watched conservatives demonstrate on a national stage just what they've demonstrated on my personal one.
Loathing is different from my object-level view here. My object level view is, I think, well-informed by the facts. But the hate? That I cultivate for my own good, to protect myself from ever being enough of a fool to listen to them again.
Seeking controversy is how one determines the truth. Any idea that is unchallenged is one that is untested.
The primary purpose of the battle of ideas is to challenge one's own assumptions, and that is a task that never ends.
Do you want rape to be up for debate? Do you want murder to be up for debate? Do you want slavery to be up for debate?
The fact is some issues are not worth talking about because the correct standpoint has already been decided. Drudging around in the mud to see “what we can gain” from hearing regressive & backwards ideology that has no place in public discourse is completely pointless.
Isn’t there a concern that by declaring these issues exempt from public debate that you invest them with a rhetorical weight they don’t deserve? Why surround such settled issues with a false aura of suppressed truth? Opponents of rape or slavery have no need to fear debate, nor I contend do proponents of women’s bodily autonomy or of trans people’s civil rights and personal liberty. When I see campus leftists shutting down certain points of view, I see fear where there should often be confidence (and in some cases less clear cut than leftists think where there should be more openness.)
You don't think proponents of women's bodily autonomy have anything to worry about? Have you been living under a rock for the last year and a half?
"Do you want rape to be up for debate? Do you want murder to be up for debate? Do you want slavery to be up for debate?"
Yes. Because it is up for debate. Look at the radicals who want to rationalize or excuse the slaughter of innocents on October 7. Like it or not it is being debated and to pretend otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand.
lol Zionist cope
Plenty of ideas are challenged. But challengers *lose*, and you don't have to repeat the same, failed, challenge a million times to know that it's wrong. No one seriously tests perpetual motion machines, and no one should, because we have *already* tested them ad nauseam and they do not work. We can safely reject them, short of the presence of truly overwhelming evidence, and even in that context we should remain skeptical.
Or, if you want to be mathematical about it: the expected value of a challenge to beliefs is (probability of success in the challenge) times (value of such a success) minus (cost of the challenge). The probability of success is tiny, and the cost is large.
First, that is not how science works. There are plenty of prominent physicists who toy around with the idea of perpetual motion machines for a variety of reasons. Consideration of a "what if" scenario is one widely practiced method for looking at things in a new light, testing one's own understanding, etc.
Secondly new physicists keep on being born because new human beings are constantly being born. They have every right to look around, examine the world and decide for themselves what they think is real and valuable. If you want to forfeit in the contest of ideas where you present your world view and argue as to its merits, be my guest. I am skeptical that will convince anyone.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4125661-high-school-boys-are-trending-conservative/
I'm happy to present my worldview. I do so, often. I just have no interest in assisting my enemies in promoting theirs.
If Liberty University wanted to invite me there to talk about the trans experience, I'd go in a heartbeat. Spoiler alert: they won't.
As for physicists toying with perpetual motion machines occasionally: there is a very big difference between an expert who is well-equipped to detect even the worst falsehoods, and a layperson who, even if they were the smartest person on Earth, is not equipped to do so across every field.
So you only censor conservatives and block debate because they're wrong.
And once they are correct they will be permitted to debate.
But they are blocked from debating to convince anyone they are correct until they have already convinced everyone they are correct?
Glorious. I didn't know the author of Catch-22 was still alive, how old are you?
"Wrong" and "operating in deliberate bad faith" are different things.
If a doctor gave a lobotomy in 1952, they were probably wrong to do so. But the belief that it was right was one a reasonable person could have held in light of available evidence. (And by the way, if you think "one a reasonable person could have held" is an too broad of a standard, keep in mind that it is already the standard we use for criminal negligence, fraud, etc.).
But if a doctor who liked giving lobotomies suppressed evidence they didn't work, or fabricated evidence they did, or put crazy people who happen to not like lobotomies on TV 24/7 to draw an association between the two, or had a radio show in which they talked about how lobotomies were the best (but then made it clear that that was just entertainment when called out in court), that's a different matter. That's not being wrong, that's bad faith. Its goal is not to debate or persuade but to manipulate and mislead.
As for how a way-out-of-mainstream belief could become mainstream: that's a matter for *expert* debate, among people who can recognize a crank lobotomy study for what it is and who are aware of countervailing evidence. It is not a matter for education of students who are not experts in a field and who do not have those defenses.
Okay, I think I understand.
It's like if someone claimed the COVID Vaccine would prevent infection and prevent spread; we should silence them for spreading knowingly wrong information.
They were wrong, it was known from the start it was wrong; and they lied.
That is easily Understood, thanks for the clarification.
Now... what is the proper method to silence the current POTUS and FDA of the United States for this?
What?
I just showed they match your definition of what you want silenced.
They absolutely made that false claim in public, multiple times.
How could you possibly oppose silencing them?
Uneducated people might believe them; which is wrong!
Isn't it?
Then why don’t universities invite White Supremacists and Serial Rapists on campus to espouse their views? If you’re so concerned about students seeing “a variety of perspectives” why not give a platform to the most hateful and disgusting people alive?
Obviously you aren’t going to be in favor of that, because platforming evil people that espouse dangerous rhetoric is very bad for public image and not worth the risk that some clueless student might actually buy into their lies.
I think the problem is reasonable people disagree on what is evil and dangerous, so you have to be comfortable creating the institutional structure for your ideological opponents to ban your preferred speech as evil and dangerous.
No one was claiming it wasn't dangerous. But you know what else is dangerous? The rise of a neofascist movement openly dismantling democracy in your country. The latter is FAR more dangerous than the former, and demands extreme measures to prevent it.
Don't you see?
We had no choice but to become a police state!
We feared our enemies might make us a police state after all...
Only by becoming a police state could we avoid that!
"Not inviting people we think are lying" is a pretty damn far cry from "a police state".
Because, as a general matter, nobody at the University is interested in what those people have to say, so they don't get invitations.
The controversy here is not "whether universities should seek out and invite random people with views that 99% of the population views as evil." It is "whether universities should bar some members of their communities from inviting people they want to hear speak because other members of their community see those speakers' ideas as very bad."
If some student group wants to invite Nick Fuentes so they can debate him, go ahead.
Agree 100% imagine Nazis wanted to march in Illinois.
Horrific and everyone would oppose that, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie
Maybe think again...
We've done this already, I'm sorry nobody educated you on how it went.
Congrats, you just showed me a failure of the American justice system, that makes me hold to my ideals further. Just about every single young leftist like myself would view that as an atrocity of history in this country. My generation will make sure not to repeat the failures of those that came before us. If it scares you that a Nazi group won’t be allowed to demonstrate in a future run by Gen Z, I think you’re part of the problem.
Every single SCOTUS Justice and the Founding Fathers ALL had it wrong?
Only young people who haven't experienced any Authoritarian Rule (like you demand) know the truth that Authoritarian rule is good?
Wow... Just wow.
Congratulations on being all knowing at such a young age.
Amazing talent there, truly impressive.
That's kind of a stretch though. For example, my parents would argue that the point of _my_ university experience was to teach me useful skills, which is why they paid so much of my tuition. :)
My parents have a fairly narrow view of things, I suppose, but ... also ... I don't know that inviting Flat Earth YouTubers to campus would have helped my education much. I am glad that I got to watch their videos on youtube, it was good fun at 2am. Did you know that some mountains used to be really, really torn trees?!
Your parents have the wrong idea about higher education. What is useful about studying Middle English, or Sanskrit, or poetry?
If "useful skills" are the metric then who cares if humanities departments wither and die? Nobody needs to know who Sartre is to work in HR at a major corporation. Just get rid of all of the schools except for engineering, computer science and business. They teach useful skills up the wazoo.
I actually find poetry and Sartre (but also Hemingway) to be ludicrously useful in the world of written online communication. Beyond that, humanities provide a shared point of reference and teach us to analyze events and the stories that people tell about those events. Those are, in fact, skills. It is not just generic "well-roundedness". (And uh, humanities-related jobs also do exist)
I've never learned Middle English though. Got nothing to say that one. :)
So you've got no objection to cutting Middle English from the curriculum? Or Sanskrit? Since they're not very useful what's the loss?
Which specific curriculum? Honestly, in the broad sense, I have absolutely no opinion on Middle English or Sanskrit in and of themselves, I'm sorry to say. They were not required classes for me, certainly. What was your experience with them?
*tall trees. Sorry about that.
Is this a joke? The point of a university is to get a education, full stop. When I took physics classes they didn’t invite flat-earthers to come speak to gin up some kind of manufactured “controversy”. I would say a small fraction of a percent of any student’s university education will touch on actually controversial topics. The problem is that 99% of media coverage is about stupid bullshit controversies, basically manufactured by attention-seeking media personalities (e.g. many popular Substack authors). Christ. Did you go to college? Or just completely forget what it was like? It feels like every asshole writing about “woke college blah blah” has either not gone to college or assumes that every university has gone through some kind of Maoist cultural revolution in the last 5 years. Maybe the reason young people on the left are turning against “free speech” because they’re tired of noxious, meanspirited shit being shoved down their throats all the time under the guise of “exposing them to a wide and diverse set of viewpoints” when they’re just trying to get a fucking education.
Getting an education is being exposed to crazy shit. And the issue is not flat earthers being invited to an undergrad class, it's flat earthers being unable to invite a speaker to campus for an extracurricular event.
That's a good point that I hear a lot, but I also think it's a little bit of a deflection from the real discussion. I think most people can agree on tolerating speech (even really bad speech) as something that should at least be legal and not cracked down upon by the state. And generally, most people will agree that it's legally ok for people to restrict the speech of others to some extent inside their own home or business.
But I think beyond that the more meaty argument is about what _should_ be done with regards to restricting free speech in those businesses? You can say a website legally has the right to remove content it doesn't agree with, but still think they should still keep it there out of a principled belief in free speech as an idea, and not just a law. Similarly, a workplace or campus might have valid methods to limit speech, but can choose not to exercise them. And not everywhere should necessarily even be the same either. I think probably its more ok for a person's home or a local place like a bar to be more of a "safe space" where they don't have to engage with that, but maybe something like a campus or a social media website, maybe they should just have their policies to protect free speech more than they legally have to.
I recently transferred from the university of massachusetts to the university of southern mississippi and the general attitude difference is like night and day. The peer pressure for conformity and the sheer intolerance for anything confrontational I encountered in Massachusetts was bewildering. At USM political engagement is much lower and as such there’s wayyy less vitriol in general, not to mention that southern hospitality means that you’ll probably at least be allowed to finish expressing your opinion before hearing a rebuttal (rather than interruption and insults)
Yeah we did some of this at my college and it was great.
I was in college when debates about teaching “creation science” were raging. I attended invited talks by creationists. I think I learned more from those talks and the discussions they sparked than I did from all the bio classes I took (I was a bio major). Understanding creationism helped clarify for me what makes scientific knowledge unique and why that matters.
I really can’t think of a better way to learn about a topic than to grapple deeply with criticism of that topic. If students never have to confront opposing views I think they are losing out big time.
I think a major reason this is becoming more of a problem now is technology. Gen Z grew up with social media and there is a ton of toxicity on there. When kids hear free speech they picture the vitriol their racist uncle spews on Facebook or the millions of anonymous posts on on the many Reddit spinoffs.
Agreed, I’d also say that the social norms of the pre-internet age, including those around free speech, have been wrecked by the vitriol you describe. There was a vacuum for awhile as to what the new norms would be and while I wouldn’t say they’re set in stone, we seem to have entered a world in which “you may make the rules for speech on your discord/subreddit/social media platform” has seeped into the real world. Not to say there wasn’t reason for it, but that attitude is pernicious in settings like universities.
Alternately, we know our racist uncle is in fact quite representative of conservative ideals.
1000%
THIS.
These reasons for lower free speech support seem largely true to my post-college demographic peers (millennials) too!
However, here two additional reasons that play an important role.
1. Social media and digital chatrooms structurally encourage less tolerance for free speech.
Community moderation involves banning and punishing speech that doesn't fit with the guidelines. For Twitch, Discord, and Reddit chats, not doing good enough community moderation can result in bans for the streams/rooms themselves. This encourages a mindset that 'some speech is not acceptable'. Those who agree with the rules, or see them as good for the community, will naturally see them as good to apply elsewhere, to larger communities or to real life ones.
In the past, few would be exposed to situations where they're actively 'moderating' what others say, outside of the Thanksgiving table or perhaps at the work water cooler. But now, the younger generations (Millennials, Zoomers, Alpha) are growing up thinking about this all the time -- and through a lens that doesn't encourage a lot of free speech friendliness.
I've noticed that right-wing online groups and movements tend to be more 'okay' with free speech, but instead police their communities with harrassment and death threats. While slower to ban for having heterodox opinions, moderators from those areas are also more likely to simply admit that their ban was based on annoyance rather than the user breaking any defined rules. I wonder if this is how Elon Musk can see himself as a free speech absolutist, but also feel comfortable deplatforming people for petty personal reasons.
2. Corporations don't support free speech at all, and these values reflect onto workers that have fewer protections and more exposure.
This isn't about the rules that Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and others enforce on their users. Nor is it about legal liability that corporations face for disciminatory speech -- along with cell phone recording tech that makes proof much easier to capture. Nor is it about increased DEI and inclusivity initiatives, that can include sharp punishments for those that get on board. All of those seem symptomatic, downstream!
Instead, the issue is that companies already can fire at-will for saying things critical of the company or acting poorly on social media. My generation was taught that even to get hired, social media profiles should be turned private, or fully santized of any objectionable content to get a job. This was all true in the 2000s already, during the rise of social media. It's more true today now that tech literacy has expanded to older generations.
If a person can lose their livelihood at any time for saying something critical of the company publicly -- or even being too annoying internally -- or really, for any reason! -- then that again creates an understanding that "free speech isn't really valued in practice".
The friends I have that are most uptight about policing speech (most likely to shut down topics they don't like, and advocate for sharper speech limits) are those that work in service professions. They directly talk to customers daily who could complain about them and get them fired -- requiring careful, constant self-policing of speech. These are also often very exposed jobs, with at-will contracts where they can be easily fired. They might not even be full-time employees, working on contracts or as part of a gig economy -- if the company dislikes them, they are easily replaced.
My right-leaning friends tend to direct their ire at 'woke' policies for putting them at risk if they speak up about their perspectives, especially if they're critical of diversity or inclusion initiatives. On the other hand, my left-leaning friends tend to like that they have a little bit of protection -- if they speak in very inclusive and generically 'not bad' ways, then this can protect them from getting fired as easily. But, say, try to start a union at Amazon or Starbucks, or openly discuss corruption or abusive business practices, and it doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you're on. Further, if those diversity or inclusion initiatives are being abused to favor certain internal factions, then again, pointing this out doesn't matter if it's from right or left. It's the same as the well known fact that if you complain about your boss to HR -- even for justified reasons -- you'll find yourself fired for 'unrelated' reasons soon after.
The left-leaning perspective seems to be that if they don't get free speech -- and only the thinnest protections by corporations -- then it's not all that important to fight to protect it for others. If anything, online people being obnoxious and threatening those very thing protections is something to oppose and deplatform. The right of 'free speech' doesn't apply at all to them personally, and likely never will, at least when it comes to their jobs or public online profiles.
Brilliant take. Thank you for sharing. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, this is the true nuanced discussion of free speech in the modern age I was disappointed in Nate for not providing.
I appreciate that! I think Nate's take is natural for his libertarian, centrist political position. He's also noted in other places he has a VERY open policy towards policing his spaces, being willing to get into scraps and not minding harrassment bombing -- though he has expressed annoyance at the quality of conversation on his pieces sometimes.
With that said, I should note I basically agree with his reasons 1-5.
The weakest is point 5, about hypocrisy. The issue is that there is a major (right-leaning) group whose interest in free speech, and purported support of it, is mostly because they see themselves as the current victim. Florida and Elon Musk are the 2023 poster children. I don't see their simultaneous support of "free speech" while banning books or posts they don't like as hypocritical, per se... but rather that "free speech" has a secondary definition, as an antonym of "political correctness" / "wokeness" / "cosmopolitanism" -- even when that includes censorship.
Ryan Coonerty's comment up above gets at this issue a bit! Some entities which claim to support free speech simply don't in the way that people like Nate care about. I don't know if I'd think of that as hypocrisy, but it certainly fuels antipathy towards the idea of 'free speech' when it's being used in that secondary way.
I'm skeptical about #2 - being circumspect on the job is not a new experience. Thirty years into adulthood, I've never known anyone that thought or acted as if they could exercise unfettered free speech at work.
Edit - to clarify, I'm skeptical that this *distinguishes* today's college students and younger people, not doubting that they feel it.
I think you're right that it's not at all new! This is just how businesses work.
I think I mistakenly conflated blue collar with union work. For example, salt of the earth factory workers, miners, and police officers have often been known to have bawdy talk behind the scenes. That still gets caught on camera now and then. I don't think one would do that if they felt an intense risk of their comments getting them fired. Same for, say, the military, or athletic teams, where that kind of talk is just expected, part of the culture. These professions still have expectations on respect for hierarchy and not to badmouth publicly or snitch, but it's more accepted (anecdotally) to have terrible opinions and thoughts and to share them with coworkers.
So the bigger explanatory factor is likely the shift towards increasing service and office jobs -- white collar work. Increasing numbers of people employed in that profession -- and thus, increasing reflection of those values towards free speech out in the wild. Customer service jobs have always required a lot more self-policing and discretion. White collar work can vary, with some workplaces being much more permissive or restrictive of certain speech. High exposure to lawsuits, to organized customer backlash, and to recording technology that can cause said lawsuits and backlash are all encouraging more restrictive corporate policies, which I think then reflect onto the worker ethos.
But, it seems to be especially customer service friends, at least in my personal life, that have the most free speech restrictive perspectives. And they are the most policed themselves. Maybe there's an alternate explanation for that?
Ah yes, I this seems like a fruitful avenue! Changes to the types of jobs people work does seem likely to influence their attitudes about confrontational or offensive speech.
But a mystery remains. If I understand correctly, the process you're describing implies that the people in question is internalizing the boss' norms, so to speak.
In my experience, the more restrictive a workplace is, the less people like it and the more likely they are to rebel against its rules off-hours. Maybe people are making a virtue of necessity; their workplace behavior is so restricted that they need to behave as if it were their idea just to have any dignity. I don't think this theory has legs, generally, in American workplaces, because most people have plenty of room to breathe outside of work. But it may apply to very insular social environments, like colleges and universities.
I would think the pivot of free speech from progressive to conservatives would be at least somewhat explained by who has the power to censor?
When conservatives controlled the “cultural heights”, progressives wanted free speech
Now progressives have the power, they don’t care about free speech anymore, but conservatives suddenly do
In 1997, after Ellen came out as gay, ABC put a parental advisory at the start of each episode if I can trust Wikipedia. Things have changed
I think this is the main root of the problem, and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. Whether rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that liberals right now control most of the levers of power, and that censorship right now would broadly be censoring views like racism, homophobia, misogyny etc., so opinion on censorship largely lines up with whether people think their views fall on the liberal side of those topics or not.
Unfortunately, while I do think most people believe "free speech" is a virtue in principle, and there are some portion of the population who views that as a strict principle that should always be adhered to, most people who promote free speech the loudest do it only when it is in their own political interests, and will quickly abandon it once they don't need it anymore. Even as Republicans currently promote free speech as they believe they are losing the culture war, in places where they do have power (like Florida) they have little interest in protecting the free speech of those who express views they consider bad, and instead they take the same position as the campus liberals from this survey that "safety" as they see it is more important.
I suspect that a lot of that perception comes from the fact that liberals hold a lot of the levers of what you might call "petty" power. The average person's dealings with authority figures are the HR department at their work, not an investment-bank board, and petty bourgeois occupations are the core of half the democratic base these days.
So even though very few people actually running the world are progressive, people's personal boss often is, which "feels" much more like direct power.
Someone else quoted Ezra Klein as stating that, whichever side you're on, it feels like the other side is winning because the progressives control cultural power while the republicans control political power. I think that's closest to being right.
I was thinking the same. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement tried to promote speech that wasn’t being allowed on campuses by the administration (those that held the power).
I also think that the legal expansion of what is free speech (ie Citizens United, Alvarez, 303 Creative) has diluted free speech as a value. If money, lies, and discrimination are free speech maybe it isn’t a value worth protecting.
what's a lie ? shouldn't it be combated with a truth rather than censored ?
In terms of lies, I was specifically referring to the US v. Alvarez case where the Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor act, which made it criminal to present yourself as a military person when you did not serve. Striking down a law on free speech grounds that criminalized telling lies about your military service could be interpreted as sanctioning the right to lie as a part of free speech.
I didn’t say that lies should be censored. I was giving one of many possible reason some people might not feel as strongly about the right to free speech.
BTW there is ample social science research evidence that demonstrates how hard it is to counter misinformation and lies with truth after the lie or misinformation has been spread.
So it's not that free speech is in trouble, it's that there is no diversity of thinking from the Left. The most telling charts above showed me what I already knew -- conservatives are open to hearing on controversial view points (conservative or liberal), but the liberal side is absolutely not open to conservative controversial view points.
"Free speech" is too subjective to me, because from the Left's side there is nothing wrong with shutting down controversial speakers because those speakers are pushing ideas which are anti-social at best, violent at worst. If you were to ask a Left leaning person in this view point if they are attacking "free speech" they would say they aren't, they are shutting down "hate" speach and this is absolutely legal. Free speech is speech which is acceptable. What you need to do is ask them how they feel about controversial speakers. That might actually break into their posture, but not the word "free". They have no concept of "free". "Free" is not as important as "safe" to them.
I don't know how you got that from this data. Personally, I think there is some diversity in thinking on the left, but very often it's within its own Overton window that is not representative of the broader population (which is also often true on the right). Various echo chambers online and in real life have made it so that you can fraternise almost exclusively with people who broadly share almost all the same opinions as you, and views outside of this group are never even discussed as they are totally verboten in day-to-day life. To many on the left, a 15 week abortion ban or a return to legalised slavery are both kind of equally unthinkable views, despite the fact that one clearly has far more widespread support than the other, because each one will get about the same exposure as a serious subject worth discussing in most leftist spaces.
“there is no diversity of thinking from the Left...the liberal side is absolutely not open to conservative controversial view points.”
I didn’t gather from this that there was a demonstrated significant diversity of thinking on the right or significant openness to liberal viewpoints, or that the Left was monolithic in its thought. Just a difference in the extent people with wrong opinions should be permitted a campus forum to express them. And for the most part those conservative opinions were from students in the ideological minority.
It would be interesting to see how often conservative universities like Liberty U or Harding U have liberal and or non-religious speakers on campus.
"Just a difference in the extent people with wrong opinions should be permitted a campus forum to express them."
How is that not indicative of an openness to alternative viewpoints?
I’m totally in favor of allowing Stephen Miller be allowed to speak on campus. I’m absolutely not open to anything that malevolent piece of shit has to say. If you’re in the minority opinion group on campus, that might help you appreciate the value of free speech even for people you think are totally wrong.
Having said that, it might be the case that conservative students ARE more open to other points of view. I don’t know one way or the other.
I mean, one set of students doesn't want speaker X on campus under any circumstances.
The other guys are open to letting him or her speak, regardless of how they feel about the content of that speech?
How is that not prima facie evidence of greater openness in the second group compared to the first?
It’s some evidence. I would like to see more conservative opinions when they’re in the majority. A significant openness to having opposing views on campus at schools like Harding or Liberty U would make a better case for it.
The degree of openness is seemingly what this poll is examining.
Totally speculating here, but as a liberal myself, my guess is that this comes down to two factors:
1) There is a consensus among young liberals that certain ideas (e.g. denial of trans rights) are so utterly abhorrent that they must be actively fought by any and all means.
2) On top of that, young liberals believe that those ideas may well be implemented in the near future.
As a test of (1), I would propose that researchers include a question along the lines of:
"Race-based slavery should be re-established in the United States"
My hypothesis is that you'd see equal numbers of opposition among liberal and conservative students, with liberals putting it in the same "bin" with the others, while conservatives would consider it a uniquely horrific outlier.
Legit question: what trans rights are being denied?
Their right to force everyone else to affirm their delusions.
Giving trans care to minors is illegal in many states, and red-state legislatures are well on their way to TRAP-style restrictions removing trans care for adults, too. There's no more fundamental trans right than the right to transition care.
> Giving trans care to minors is illegal in many states,
So the right to sterilize and mutilate children, got it.
The ability to treat consenting teenagers (the earliest medical intervention is at the onset of puberty; any acceptance of younger trans kids is purely social) who, empirically, are very likely to benefit from that treatment and very unlikely to be harmed by it, yes.
But thank you for the case in point about the level of debate you're bringing to the table. Can't imagine why we wouldn't want to invite you to just scream the word "mutilate" rather than look at any of the actual evidence.
> The ability to treat consenting teenagers
Who can't consent to sex, alcohol, or smoking, but according to you can consent to having themselves mutilated.
> the earliest medical intervention is at the onset of puberty
And yet hospitals keep getting caught mutilating them ever earlier.
> Can't imagine why we wouldn't want to invite you to just scream the word "mutilate"
How dare people call a mutilation a "mutilation".
There's a reason states are passing laws banning these procedures and not even bothering to listen to your "debate".
> And yet hospitals keep getting caught mutilating them ever earlier.
Cite an example - literally any example - of surgical intervention on a trans patient prior to puberty at any major medical institution. The very earliest I am aware of is top surgery on physiologically-female people at around 14, and even that is exceptionally rare.
That aside, of course we're moving care earlier. It works. It causes no harm. And earlier intervention is better both in terms of the person suffering for less time and in terms of the person being more able to mature as their preferred sex. Why *wouldn't* we move care earlier in that context?
> Who can consent to sex, alcohol, or smoking, but according to you can consent to having themselves mutilated.
Alcohol and smoking are known to lead to serious negative health outcomes and, unlike most risky behaviors, actively make stopping the risky behavior more difficult. I'm not sure how I feel about the law there, exactly, but I certainly have no problem discouraging teenagers from engaging in addictive substances (and I don't think that's remotely comparable to trans care, which substantially IMPROVES long-term outcomes). Hell, I'm a borderline teetotaler, I don't even think we should encourage drinking in adults.
Sex is more complicated, but in general I'm pretty permissive about teenagers having safe sexual contact with one another. And the law certainly permits minors well below the age of majority to consent to sex with one another everywhere in the US I'm aware of. Even then, the law is primarily there to prevent predatory behavior on the part of adults; there is no obvious risk of predation when it comes to trans adolescents.
"consenting teenagers"
Totally not a groomer-adjacent phrase. Yikes.
There's a reason the normal phrase is "consenting adults" and there's a reason "consenting teenagers" still need parental consent for basically anything important that hasn't been declared a "human right" by the left (abortion / trans care primarily).
We're talking about medical consent here, not sexual, and medical consent of a teenager of normal development and intelligence is absolutely considered relevant in standard, uncontroversial medical ethics.
The issue of parental consent for trans care is more complicated. Most trans teenagers getting care have supportive families (they wouldn't be able to access it otherwise), so it's normally not at issue. But cases where they don't fall (at least for me) into a difficult area of medical ethics regarding to what extent a parent can deny their child effective care.
That extent is clearly not zero (we do not, say, require all parents to provide a medically-recommended diet to their children), and it is clearly not infinite (we can and do prosecute parents for negligence when they do sufficient harm to their children by failing to pursue care). It is, for me, in the same camp as a family of Jehovah's Witnesses denying their child a blood transfusion. I think you can make an argument for that degree of parental rights, but I don't think that argument has much to do with trans people on an object level (it's more of a disagreement over to what extent a parent has a right to be a crappy parent).
is pointing out european countries have backpedaled on permanently altering children hate speech ?
Biden got elected at least in part *because* free speech was restricted w/r/t the Hunter Biden laptop story; that's your answer to "what changed in 2020 to make liberals like censorship more?"
My general sense is that most liberals legitimately believe that the information they are censoring is “misinformation.” I am not excusing liberals from making bad decisions, but this is to say that I don’t think liberals thought of the Hunter Biden laptop incident as a victory for censorship as much as they regarded it as a piece of misinformation to be quashed, without too much thought.
Yeah people are great at self delusion, which is why you want to be careful what tools you give them. Setting up a formal or informal MINTRU isn’t a good idea.
and misinformation about trump , would they support censoring that ?
Something about this doesn't pass the smell test, to me? A quarter of "Very Conservative" students would oppose letting a Pro-lifer speak? A third want to prevent the "Anti-BLM" speaker? I'm not saying FIRE had some agenda. It just seems off.
Some amount of Lizardman constant, and some amount of people who simply don't care about free speech at all and just want campus to be quiet.
It's "very conservative" for a college campus, not the general population.
What others said, plus there could be some "low data sample" anomalies. FIRE interviewed roughly 100 students per university. If only 3-5% identify as "Very Conservative", then it only takes 1 student saying "prevent" to make up 20-33%.
It wouldn't shock me that there are a non-negligible portion of conservative students who generally feel like they are in enemy territory on a campus and try to keep their opinions to themselves and generally don't want guests who will cause trouble.
Great post as always.
One thing I would add is that at UPenn much of the donor anger is driven by the fact that the president of the university choose NOT to prevent a controversial Palestinian activist from speaking at a campus event. They very clearly would have preferred a much more repressive free speech position from university admin.
It seems like there’s a big tent “anti-ivy league” coalition with sub-groups who have preferred policy outcomes that are diametrically opposed. Interesting to see how this plays out.
I think context matters here. There's a lot of anger, for example, that university presidents were quick to condemn police killings during the BLM hysteria (or any other political issue of the day) but have been tardy in issuing statements on October 7. In other words the charge is hypocrisy.
I agree, there are a multitude of reasons driving the anti-ivy sentiment hence the big tent. I’m speaking to a particular cohort that believes admin has been derelict in curbing antisemitism and cite: meek Oct. 7 response, allowing anti-Semitic Palestinian speaker, allowing student protests. 2/3 things here are free speech absolutist in nature and are the exact things that some donors are angry about.
I understand the charge of inconsistent censorship but, the policy change that some donors are advocating for is more ubiquitous censorship not less!
Yes, but are these people self described free speech activists? Or are they pro-Israel types primarily?
I’m not sure, but Nate seems to believe that they are fed up free speechers:
“Still, if I were one of those donors, I’d say “great, and now we’re going to hold you to it. The next time you stray from your commitment to free speech — particularly when it comes to students or faculty who express conservative or centrist viewpoints — we’re going nuclear, permanently ending all contributions to the university and telling all our rich friends to do the same.”
My point is that I think he’s overgeneralizing the ask from donors. Some are punishing schools for being too repressive while others are punishing them for not being repressive enough. From a distance it looks exclusively like the former but on closer inspection it’s a messy coalition.
Once upon a time in this country the anti-porn coalition was made up of fundamentalist Christians and radical feminists. Yeah, they had a common interest/goal but there weren't too many similarities beyond that.
Agreed, but what exactly is the common cause between rich donors who want more speech restriction and free speech absolutist who want less? They seem diametrically opposed.
as children, my fellow Gen Zers and I were taught that freedom of speech simply means “the government can not prosecute you for things you say.”
This is a barebones definition of free speech, and I think it’s the best way of defining it. It seems today that controversial figures want to use “freedom of speech” to merely mean “freedom from consequences over saying hateful/incorrect things.”
I think you would be hard pressed to find even the most radical leftist/liberal students advocating for “we should put racists in prison” or “spreading disinformation should be considered a criminal act”
I believe that’s why young people are so willing to restrict so-called “freedom of speech”, because quite simply we do not believe anything other than criminally charging people for speech would count as a “restriction on free speech”.
Young people, including me, also subscribe to the idea of the “paradox of tolerance” which is that in order to truly preserve a tolerant society, we must be intolerant of intolerance and remove those attempting to spread hate in the public domain from said domain.
Because at the end of the day, what is more important? Freedom to say hateful things or the freedom FROM being subjected to hateful discourse? I don’t want to live in a world where rape is up for debate. I don’t want to live in a world where murder is up for debate, and I refuse to be expected to “hear out” those that are sharing clear and dangerous ideologies. A country where the free speech rights of Nazis, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other extremists are restricted is a country I would find safer and healthier to raise children in than one where they are allowed space in the public discourse. If that is “anti-free speech” then “free speech” quite simply is not a virtue to hold up without question.
This is a woefully inadequate definition of free speech. If you look at what Greg Lukianoff (of FIRE) has said, he makes a distinction between the limited nature of free speech law and the critically important, broader free speech *culture* that has, bumpily but doggedly, allowed the US and most Western democracies to thrive relative to backward, nin-Western places. A major purpose of free speech law is to help buttress a free speech culture, and you just want to throw the latter in the garbage and declare that freedom is never being emotionally or intellectual uncomfortable and that you and your comrades are the chosen ones.
And sorry, but you can miss me with the tolerance paradox schtick. Who decides what is tolerant and intolerant? That argument is always trotted out by people who preeningly declare themselves to be the arbiters of tolerance and goodness. It's your version of "discrimination is OK when we do it because we are the righteous."
*claims my definition of free speech is woefully inadequate*
*gets angry without providing any alternate definition*
lmao okay buddy 👍
I expressed that the legalistic approach is too narrow and that we should think about free speech as a culture that allows for free discourse and civil disagreement since that's what the legal definition undergirds in the first place. In the unlikely event that you are actually interested, I mentioned Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, who speaks well on this. Here is a discussion he had with Reason mag where he talks about this more holistic view of free speech and the need to see free speech as more than just "the government can't punish you":
https://reason.com/podcast/2022/06/08/greg-lukianoff-saving-culture-free-speech/
Beyond that, I'd encourage you to think about our history in America and the West more broadly. Think about both the distant and recent past where we collectively have recognized the value of open debate, of not shouting down our opponents while they speak, and engaging with the merits of an argument rather than insisting that something just not be debated. And think about the times we have failed to live up to those ideals. It's pretty clear that free speech and open discourse carries the day. Cheers.
The culture of “refusing to shout down our opponents and treat them as rational actors” has allowed for Slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and now Trumpism to hold serious space in public discourse. I see no benefits in the corrupt and disgusting history of America, which is why I’m in favor of radically restricting the so called “freedom” to spew hate and fear-mongering and nonsense. You can whine all you want, but the rest of Gen Z agrees with me and we will gladly put you with the rest of those that we view on the wrong side of history. It’s a changing world, better get with the times instead of being left behind.
Oh honey, good luck with all that.
It's a bit rude of you to assume your fellow Gen Zers are as uninformed as you are. You can just say "I personally learned [incorrectly] that freedom of speech means...".
Personally I blame Randall Munroe for that dumb cartoon
The "Karl Popper quote" you're referring to is a misrepresentation of a footnote in a book he wrote, in which he was paraphrasing Plato. The concept it's his philosophical framework is nonsense - you're quoting an Instagram meme.
Explain to me then with your overwhelming “Rationalist69” wisdom how Germany purged themselves of Nazi ideology post WWII with “tolerance” if the paradox of tolerance is “a nonsense” framework.
Such a weak attempt at invalidating the core point, what does it matter where a platitude comes from if it’s true?
A military defeat, the Nuremberg trials, and The Marshall Plan? Also, if we're running with the idea, doesn't look like banning Hitler from giving speeches had the defeating impact you might've expected.
Anyway, a good thread on what Popper actually meant: https://twitter.com/nathankw/status/1547568873771192321
It was about subjecting your views to constant interrogation, where the paradox involved *those who would shut down debate*. It's not an expansionist game in which you find ways to label views you dislike of being intolerant of others in some broad sense. Then it became a cartoon version around the 'punch a Nazi' thing and people interpreted that as Popper's idea.
"The left thinks that the right’s intent is to make dissent illegal. Therefore, they don’t have to “fight fair” either."
This is just justifying authoritarianism by asserting the other side is authoritarian, e.g. the usual excuse for authoritarianism. And if we take this seriously as being their view, and follow the logic of your meme, then anyone would already be thoroughly in the clear to shut down the left's dissent - they want to make dissent illegal (as they believe the right wants to make dissent illegal). But all of this is just posturing nonsense to create excuses for censorship, so let's dismiss all of it.
"Making trans a mental illness [...] are steps towards making them illegal as well."
This is nonsense, trans status is already marked as a mental condition when it comes to making medical treatments available. The concept that proper classification of a lightly understood phenomenon is off-limits is absurd, and not respectable. This is why arguments on the trans side tend to be so poorly thought out.
For that matter, abortion has always involved a side concerned for what they consider to be unborn life. I'm not agreeable with that, but the notion discussing this is off-limits is, again, just excusing authoritarianism.
I think we all survived your thought experiment, we can survive debates.
The difference being, I think, that the conservative viewpoints are strongly contrary to the left but still widely held on the right. A better left one would maybe be:
"13 is a suitable age to begin gender transition"
or
"Parents should not have final say over what is taught in the classroom."
or some other relevant but highly charged present issue.
Thank you for your input Joseph, I agreed with what you had to say too :)
The problem with this survey and the argument you're making is that the 3 conservative examples of "free speech" would all lead to violence against people (particularly oppressed people), whereas the 3 liberal examples would have no suche effects. Conservative speech has actually encouraged extremist violence in the United States. People who want to deplatform these ideas, and think that college campuses in particular should actively denounce these ideas, are not just against conservative ideas because they disagree with them; they are against them because these ideas actually encourage violence.
>lead to violence against people
I don't think that is remotely clear. You are just reading in your biases.
>Conservative speech has actually encouraged extremist violence in the United States.
So has leftist speech?
First, there are people who would argue that abortion is violence against an unborn child. I don't personally hold that opinion, but you should think about how that complicates your declaration.
Second, you are making this sweeping claim that has no clear linkage to reality. Saying that I think BLM is a hate group != advocating violence against black people. That's just a bizarre reach grounded in a twisted worldview where groups that claim oppression may never be criticized no matter how they behave. And that's dumb.
But third, people can make any kind of claim and then someone else could use that claim as a reason to pursue violence. It makes the violence wrong; it doesn't mean the speech should be prohibited. That would mean that literally any statement any violent criminal ever heard as motivation in their effed up head should be banned. Which is absurd.
You cannot be an advocate for free speech without embracing the right of people to exercise free speech, regardless of how violently you may disagree with them.
Given the very real potential for physical violence between supporters of Israel and Palestine would you be comfortable banning rallies from campus, regardless of who they support?
Your example of Israel / Palestine is a fantastic one, but fundamentally I have to disagree with your premise that "You cannot be an advocate for free speech without embracing the right of people to exercise free speech, regardless of how violently you may disagree with them." There are indeed limits to people's right to express free speech and "totally unrestricted free speech" is a pretty philosophically defenseless position. Even the US at it's most "free" point made direct threats of violence or calls to violence illegal, for obvious reasons.
I also disagree with Jeff's take that "believing abortion should be illegal" is equivalent to a call for violence. "Abortion should be illegal" and "people who give abortions should be killed" are completely different positions.
I don't mean to claim that slander/libel/etc. are Constitutionally protected. As an analogy, the 2nd Amendment doesn't allow citizens to purchase rocket launchers without significant government oversight. I think however there is a broad consensus that any restrictions should be as light as possible.
Ha! I think Nate's post is in fact proof of the opposite of "broad consensus" ;)
Alas, I agree with you as does Nate it seems. I think the thing Jeff was trying to get at however was that speech that calls directly for violence should be banned, which I think you hopefully agree with. It's just that I think he's conflating "calls directly for violence" and "leads to violence." Every position has at least a few crazies willing to commit violence on it's behalf and distinguishing between those two things is critical and unfortunately, also very hard to do legally and politically.
In terms of consensus there obviously is none for the college set. That's a relatively small percentage of the population overall however and from what I recall there is still wide (although shrunken) support for free speech at the national level.
There's a significant body of 1st Amendment case law from the USSC, some of it dealing with what constitutes a threat and what is protected by free speech. I don't see why that shouldn't be the golden standard when deciding what to allow on campus, or anywhere else for that matter.
> Saying something negative about an *organization* that is known to be fraudulent would lead to violence against oppressed people.
Absolutely wild.
At the very least say "they are against them because [they believe] these ideas actually encourage violence".
"Reason #3: The younger generation is risk-averse in general"
For anyone with more interest in this point Jon Haidt has a SS that delves into this topic in depth.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/
in passing I will note that Gen Z and Millennials lose their virginity at a later age compared to previous generations. They have fewer sexual partners by the time they reach age 25. They are less likely to indulge in binge drinking or recreational drug use. They are less likely to move across the country for career, leaving behind family and friends. If your impression is that the younger generations are more conformist and more conservative than those that came before there may well be some justification for that belief.