The Silencing (2 page)

ONE

REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE

              
Who ever knew Truth put to the wors[e] in a free and open encounter?

              
—JOHN MILTON

I
n the fall of 2014, the historic all-women’s Smith College held an alumnae event to explore the place of free speech within the liberal arts tradition. Smith president Kathleen McCartney introduced a four-person panel that included three graduates of the prestigious university with the exhortation, “We want to have fearless encounter with new ideas. I think that’s what is truly at the heart of a liberal arts education.”

The panel was gamely titled, “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts.”
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Wendy Kaminer, an alumna and liberal feminist First Amendment expert, dove right in to condemn the proliferation of campus speech codes that prohibit language that makes people uncomfortable. The former long time American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) board member raised the issue of Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, which some have argued should be banned from classrooms for its use of racial epithets. Panelist Jaime
Estrada, a recent Smith grad working for the University of Pennsylvania Press, interjected, “But it has the n-word, and some people are sensitive to that.”

Kaminer replied, “Well, let’s talk about the n-word. Let’s talk about the growing lexicon of words that can only be known by their initials. I mean, when I say, ‘n-word,’ or when Jaime says ‘n-word,’ what word do you all hear in your head?” Members of the audience replied by saying the full word. Kaminer said, “You all hear the word n--ger in your head? See, I said that, nothing horrible happened.” Estrada disagreed: “I mean, it depends on who you are in the audience, something horrible happened in their head.” The event continued seemingly without incident, and the panelists disagreed civilly, including Kaminer and Estrada.
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This is how the discussion was reported in the
Mount Holyoke News
: “Students, faculty and alumnae of Smith College were shocked this past week to find out that a Smith graduate made racist remarks when speaking at an alumnae panel in New York City on Sept. 22.”
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The
Smith Sophian
, the campus paper, ran a story headlined, “Backlash Follows Use of Racial Slur at NYC Panel.” The paper also published a transcript of the event, which, lest we forget, was comprised of alumnae and staff of Smith College, not members of the Ku Klux Klan, that blared at the top: “Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.” It’s not clear why the warning was necessary, as the newspaper censored the transcript so that any word that could potentially offend the fair ladies of Smith was removed. At one point, the transcript reads, “Kathleen McCartney: . . . We’re just wild and [ableist slur], aren’t we?” Yes, the word “crazy” was censored.
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Smith students protested. Someone wrote “Impeach Kathy” on the sidewalk outside the Smith president’s home in chalk. Coeds donned black and observed a moment of silence on the campus lawn to take a stance against “racialized violence, criminalization of black bodies, failed
institutional memory, microaggressions, and the vast and even unnamable issues that work against people of color every day.” One student compared Kaminer’s comments to a 2012 incident when a student of color received a hate note slipped under her door. Smith responded to the outcry over Kaminer’s attempt to explain how free speech works by holding a panel on anti-blackness.
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The Student Government Association put out a letter asserting that, “If Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.”
⁶

Jordan Houston, the
Smith Sophian
’s opinions editor, accused McCartney of blithely sitting on a panel that turned into an “explicit act of racial violence” and complained that Kaminer was allowed to speak “uncensored.” Houston quoted from a statement by the Social Justice & Equity Committee ’14–’15, saying McCartney’s behavior “implicitly suggested that hate speech is permissible at Smith” and she failed in her “responsibility to speak up when another white person says something racist.”
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Never mind that the New York City panel didn’t even occur at Smith—which is located in Massachusetts—nor was it geared to students. Most importantly: nothing racist was uttered.

Certainly people may disagree about whether Kaminer should have used such provocative language to make her point. But to portray her comments as “hate speech” or “racialized violence” or as having made even one person “unsafe” is not just absurd. It’s a chilling attempt to silence free speech. So much for the “fearless encounter with new ideas” McCartney advocated.

The repurposing of Kaminer’s comments into an act of violence should not be dismissed as a one-off incident from bizarro land. Casting disagreement as a physical attack or “hate speech,” or any host of socially taboo behaviors, has become a central tactic in an ever expanding campaign to silence speech. Kaminer’s real crime was to vigorously challenge the alarming trend toward censorship on campuses. Rather than arguing with her on the merits, her opponents set about the process of delegitimizing her by tarring her as a racist.

Who were her opponents? Many think they were liberals. That’s partly right. The people who cast Kaminer as a modern-day Bull Connor were almost definitely ideologically liberal. But most likely the majority of the attendees and participants at the Smith alumnae event were liberal as well, the difference being that they were able to disagree without demonizing.

The people who smeared Kaminer as a racist and who routinely demonize those who express the “wrong” views, are what I call the “illiberal left.” They are most prevalent on college campuses and in the media—not insignificant perches from which to be quashing debate and dissent—but their tentacles are expanding into every sector of society. They consider themselves liberals, but act in direct contradiction to the fundamental liberal values of free speech, debate, and dissent. What distinguishes them from mainstream liberals and your average Democrat (who shares many of the illiberal left’s policy inclinations) is not so much
what
they believe, but
how
they believe it. Most people who reside on the left side of the political spectrum can tolerate difference of opinion without turning into authoritarian speech police. They can either engage or ignore people with whom they disagree. They are not moved to, for example, call for jail time for their ideological opponents as environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did for the Koch brothers. More on that later.

The illiberal left, on the other hand, believes that people who express ideological, philosophical, or political views that don’t line up with their preferences should be completely silenced. Instead of using persuasion and rhetoric to make a positive case for their causes and views, they work to delegitimize the person making the argument through character assassination, demonization, and dehumanizing tactics. These are the self-appointed overlords—activists, university administrators, journalists, and politicians—who have determined what views are acceptable to express. So, shut up—or else.

Left-leaning writer Fredrik deBoer has called it the “We Are All Already Decided” phenomenon. It “presumes that the offense is not just in thinking the wrong thing you think but in not realizing that We Are All
Already Decided that the thing you think is deeply ridiculous,” he wrote in April 2014. “This is the form of argument . . . that takes as its presumption that all good and decent people are already agreed on the issue in question.”
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It goes without saying that “good and decent people” are politically and ideologically liberal. The illiberal left hunts down heretics, dissidents, and run-of-the mill dissenters to not only silence them, but make examples of them for the rest of society.

Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.”

With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act.

This illiberal effort relies on an arsenal of delegitimizing terms. The mushrooming silencing lexicon now includes the terms “mansplaining,” “whitesplaining,” and “microaggression.” The 99.9 percent of humanity that identifies with the gender identity, male or female, assigned at birth are derided as “cisgendered.” These various terms are meant to silence any
person who labors under the defect of “privilege,” a moving target that seems to apply to whomever the illiberal left is up to demonizing that day. While the favored targets have been mostly conservatives and orthodox Christians, the illiberal left has been branching out. Just ask Bill Maher, who flipped in an instant from liberal darling to hate-filled bigot when he expressed a fraction of the disdain for Islam that he’s routinely demonstrated toward Christianity.

On campuses there are speech codes, so-called “free speech zones,” and a host of “anti-discrimination” policies that discriminate against people who dissent from lefty groupthink. Christian and conservative groups have been denied official university status by student government organizations for holding views not in line with liberal dogma. The illiberal left’s attempts to control the public debate are frequently buttressed by a parade of childish grievances. They portray life’s vagaries as violations of their basic human rights and demand the world stop traumatizing them with facts and ideological views that challenge their belief system. They insist colleges provide “trigger warnings” on syllabi to prevent them from stumbling upon a piece of literature that might deal with controversial or difficult issues that could upset them. Frequently, the illiberal left will invoke the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a devastating and serious illness, to characterize reading or hearing something they find upsetting or offensive. They’ve described such disparate experiences as reading
The Great Gatsby
, seeing a statue of an underwear-clad man, or passing an anti-abortion demonstration as potentially lethal to their psychological well-being.

The illiberal left yearns for a world sanitized of information that offends them. So why not just tune out the views they don’t like? They can’t. They are authoritarians at heart; they know what Americans should think and what information they should consume. So they launch petitions to have particular views censored from newspapers.
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They try to get columnists fired for expressing the wrong views.
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The illiberal left has maniacally maneuvered to delegitimize the Fox News Channel, unable to
abide the existence of
one
news network critical of the president. High-ranking White House officials were the face of this effort, telling anyone who would listen that Fox News was “not really a news station” and not “legitimate.”
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These top government officials were joined in their illiberal campaign by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America (MMFA), which enjoys the support of some of the Democratic Party’s top donors.
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At one point, Media Matters’ CEO David Brock told
Politico
that the organization’s ninety-person staff and $10 million annual budget was dedicated to the purpose of waging “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”
¹³
against Fox News. A leaked MMFA memo for liberal donors detailed a strategy to destroy Fox that included plans to assemble opposition research on Fox News employees.
¹⁴

In 2014, the outside world got a peek at the illiberal left’s staging area—academia—with a spate of high-profile 2014 commencement speech cancelations and forced withdrawals. These were spurred by the protests of lefty students and professors outraged that someone who held views with which they disagreed, such as support for the Iraq War or capitalism, would be allowed to deliver a commencement address. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), college campuses are becoming ever more intolerant of opposing views. FIRE found that during the twenty-two years between 1987 and through 2008, 138 protests of planned campus speeches led to 62 incidents of an invited guest not speaking. Yet in just six years—2009 through 2014—151 protests have caused the cancelation of 62 speeches on campuses across the country. Since 2000, conservative speakers were targeted with nearly twice the frequency as liberal speakers (141 vs. 73 attempts respectively).
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