This is a clear headed and even handed takedown of the illicit tactics of both the Left and Right partisans. This is why I donate monthly to FIRE - you and FIRE are doing important work (that used to be done by the ACLU before they got taken over by the Wokesters). Thank you for this piece!
The ALCU specifically stated that they won’t defend certain speech if it “harms” marginalized communities. That is literally the opposite of them doing good work.
Okay, do you have the source for that? Good is a subjective qualifier.Just say that they're not enforcing the first amendment equally. And not fighting for civil liberties equally... but I wonder if there's more to it.And there's stuff you're not being told
"Woke" is generally understood to be the adoption of neo-Marxist ideologies like critical race and gender theory, as well as intersectionality and "anti-racism", under the guise of "fairness" and "just being kind" which is why people who haven't actually investigated the details of it don't understand how insidious its impact has been.
Okay how? You've yet to touch on antonio Gramsci. The long march through institutions and how their coped did and marcuse's repressive tolerance.
And you didn't exactly give any examples or how college is floated. The idea of giving minority students lower standards in order to help racial equity or something.
You're going to have to bring in bigger proofs and more support for your argument.If you're gonna win anybody over as do I.
Come up with specifics. Examples and also a lot of other ties and other things.
I think I could stand to learn more about the subject.And in order to, you know, better criticize "woke".
What line? They can't even take credit card companies to task when they debank people. The trump administration's executive order spares visa and mastercard.
Tech dirt and mike mansnick... Are doing a far better job of calling out the illnesses going on.
Always brilliant to see principled defense of free speech, I think this is some of your best writing Greg, and I've been reading you a long time. I was honestly hopeful that the right's response to the left's excesses when it came to free speech would be to double-down on free speech, but no such luck.
I am curious if your thoughts on the Colbert/Tallarico/CBS thing have changed, given CBS's comments on what happened.
FWIW I don't think it changes the analysis--CBS and Colbert disagree on what exactly the network told the show, but whatever that advice was, CBS based it on messages coming from Carr, and it chilled the show's speech. Whether the Late show was specifically directed not to do something, or was warned that it might have to do other things in order to do something, is secondary to whether CBS was motivated by a fear that the Late Show's interview could get the network in trouble with the government.
Good luck. Parm-Reg is inedible except maybe as dust, and even then the salt will kill you, unlike your writing, which is both delicious and nutritious. Carry on.
This reminds me of then Governor Schwarzenegger saying (I paraphrase from memory) “The Republicans are mad at me. The Democrats are mad at me. I must be working for the people!” Stay the course FIRE.
One quibble, I'd say it's not fallacious or wrong to ignore arguments on the basis they are being made in bad faith. True, it doesn't make the arguments wrong but we all have limited time and attention and if you treat every argument that the Holocaust didn't happen or that there were many incidents if Jews poisoning medevil wells as seriously as you treat good faith arguments you couldn't get anything done.
It's tempting to say that no, we are justified in dismissing those arguments without listening because they are so implausible. But that is only true after you consider motives -- is this something that the author wouldn't say without strong evidence of would ideology push them to it anyway.
Fundamentally I agree something is wrong here but it is the fact that we are so quick to presume bad faith motives not that we respond to their existence.
I fundamentally agree with you but we (mostly meaning academics like myself) also need to realize that protecting free speech is hard at the best of times and it just isn't realistic to think that democratic majorities in conservative states would continue to fund institutions they see as shills for their political opponents.
That's not an excuse merely a fact. And I think if academics can come to appreciate the fact that their academic freedom depends on presenting themselves to the public as fair brokers it will do a lot to help this situation. Specifically it will create a reason that academics can use to explain why they are publicly raising points for the 'other' side in public (the journals are fine but the public only hears the evidence on one side).
Ok, you've convinced me that "malicious compliance" can be a tool in the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress. However, I'm not quite ready yet to abandon it entirely. Is it always wrong?
Let's make up this hypothetical scenario: an updated university style guide asks that black should be replaced by African American. You notice that the astronomy news feed now contains sentences like "the supermassive African American hole at the center of our galaxy...."
Would it be fair to state that this is either human error or malicious compliance?
I know you've been on the 'universities have been hostile to conservatives' beat for years. That phrasing is exquisite; virtually irrefutable, because, surely, some universities have been hostile to some conservatives, somewhere. But let me grant it as a general truth even if not universally acknowledged. I'm curious where high profile, influential, conservatives at elite universities factor in your analysis. Like, Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law. Heck, law schools generally. Heck, Notre Dame (home of Patrick Deneen). Heck, U Chicago economics and poli sci depts, historically. You can find some cons at all the biggies; like the Maidenform lady, they turn up in the darndest places. Notice, in humanities and sociology depts: not so much! But universities aren't just humanities and sociology departments, *thank the gods*.
I don't say this is dispositive of your wider claim. I do wonder how scary it ever really was.
(I can think of one way it could be considered very scary: looking at how many of the creeps of the New Right elite, all the way up to Babyface Vance-ster, attended elite U's -- and wondering how many of these creatures are reactionaries in the grand old Buckley tradition, despite the career trajectories those diplomas undoubtedly turbocharged)
They are very consistent in defending the speech of everyone. They will defend and have defended drag shows because texas a n m tried to ban them and that texas, an m is actually the target of another lawsuit.
It's not just one side of the beat that they're drumming, unless you can prove otherwise... unless you can prove that they're Mat tabbi.
It's amusing to hear you elevate the Left's rhetoric into abstract, impartial analysis and that of the Right into pure, juvenile ad-hominems. This, while for the last 50 years the erudite and superior "party of tolerance" has been calling Republicans "Hitler", "Nazi", Trump himself a "pedophile" and "rapist", and anyone even a micrometer right of center(or let's be honest, what used to be the actual center) "fascist". This in itself (along with anything attributed to the NYT) makes me wonder why I should bother reading this piece.
That aside, the question of whether gender ideology should appear in a class about Greek history or philosophy is valid. My understanding is that the professor was told that this subject was better suited to a gender studies curriculum. That would depend upon the way the subject was presented. Since blue states appear to champion state power over federal in the case of ICE detention and Sanctuary Cities, surely one could understand that a state which has chosen to reject DEI in education has a say in whether transgender ideologies are inserted into every educational presentation possible, much in the same way Netflix does.l ( When they're not portraying 17th Century Empresses as Black. So much for historical accuracy.)
This subtle indoctrination tactic works much the same way your article does: just present your own subversive bias as the enlightened intellectual progress of the Left, while portraying any who disagree as crass, name-calling swine who have the temerity to reject your pearls--even if they are cheap knockoff.
Plato wasn't censored. Neither was any discussion of transgenderism. The point is that they should be taught within the bounds of particular curriculum. The only thing that is limited here is the ability to shoehorn particular political agendas into places they don't belong and a lost chance to shove another unasked-for Progressive doctrine into the curriculum of malleable young minds who assume they are getting an undiluted Classical education.
I wasn’t trying to be patronizing or snarky. That you thought so says more about you than me. I was genuinely amazed that someone could have such a remarkably different reaction to the same essay I had just read. People are different. If the way I expressed that offends you, my apology. No offense was intended.
They wouldn't have to be patronizing if you were going to bat for the current president.That has been taking an axe to a lot of free speech... and yet Matt tabbi is totally silent.
I guess they don't care about that part of the censorship industrial complex.
Studio LEISA, you're missing the point by a mile (complaining about Netflix "portraying 17th Century Empresses as Black. So much for historical accuracy.")
The point is to stop seeing color as definitive. Can't we finally let color-based discrimination just die because (to be historically accurate) our Constitution for about 160 years has emphasized that discrimination "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" is contrary to our Constitution?
But as Lukianoff points out in the piece, the gender studies curriculum was shut down at that university, so your suggestion is a moot one. Rather than trying to stop an ideology from being discussed (which is blocking free speech), why couldn't the state instead insist that the counter-arguments are included in context as a condition of getting state funds?
Do you really think it's a good idea to put conditions on speech? At that point, we would be having the creationist argument come up. We would have the institution clause come up I would think
In his piece on DEI, Lukianoff states "As FIRE has argued, there’s a difference between legislative efforts to tamp down on DEI bureaucracy and attempts to limit or prohibit what can be taught or discussed in class. In keeping with our First Amendment principles, we are constantly monitoring legislation across the country to ensure that efforts to rein in campus DEI bureaucracies don't burden academic freedom or free expression."
Right, there's a difference between having d e I as gospel, and then trying to suppress any other idea and then d e I actually, you know, existing... and now we have people trying to make sure to extinguish talking about d e I in any positive light, and that is wrong as well.
Because my point is that I don't see what transgenderism has to do with Plato. It's possible that there is a valid reason for this, but more likely it is just another attempt to put yet another agenda where it doesn't belong. The state already has a policy against DEI in curriculum (implying it is a gratuitous inclusion for the sake of ideology rather than historical significance.) If this subject is so important, perhaps another class could be created, but the "gender studies" curriculum, as you say, has been discontinued. There are places that teach such classes if this is of vital importance to a student. There is no obligation for every university to teach every subject, and the choices offered by this particular university reflect the choices of the majority of the population of the state. I am more disturbed by the fact that the vast majority of the faculty of 99% of every university in the US are self-described Democrats or Marxists. No one seems concerned about that in the least, so I think the entire article is moot.
Also, what transgenderism has to do with Plato is called "Myth of the Androgyne" which appears in Plato's "Symposium" - Lukianoff addressed this specifically in the essay so how did you miss it if you actually read it instead of skimmed it?
It's actually 23% of faculty who want other professors to be woke like they are (according to the ERI piece on DEI from 2024), but if the other 77% are either conservative or open to conservative viewpoints being presented, then it's not as dire as you make it sound (which I suppose is how you justify shutting down DEI discussion rather than counter-programming it?)
Do you think that we who want to free academia from Leftist strangleholds (all strangleholds of course, but the Leftism is the main tyrant today) could use government power or incentives in ANY way to bring back open thought and freedom of expression?
Instead of banning certain ideas, can we ban banning? Can we punish retaliatory actions made against anyone who engages in unpopular speech?
A question about jawboning: hasn't this always been a tacit aspect of the US presidential office?
Nixon was notorious for leaning on stations critical of the Vietnam war, and seems to have been directly responsible for the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers (and I believe also had a role in the cancellation of Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hee Haw, all of which were popular at the time).
Likewise, Obama reportedly put pressure on media companies to remove "false balance", while the Biden administration pressured social media and search companies to supress scientific voices it didn't want heard. The chief difference between these previous administrations and the current Trump administration in this regard seems to be Trump's utter lack of subtlety.
It seems to me optimistic to expect that the presidency will avoid exercising influence in this way. Aren't we in a new grey area here in terms of Rule by Executive Orders (which are not laws, per se), an ambiguous quasi-legal regime that more-or-less came into being with the Obama administration, and has accelerated ever since?
Relatedly, the booting of Missouri vs Biden at the Supreme Court seems to send a worrying message that even when tacit censorship from the Executive causes significant harms, it may still be permissible. How is it possible now to even conceive of reigning in such Executive Branch excesses in without fighting a battle on so many fronts that defeat becomes all but inevitable...?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a US President who was a principled defender of free speech. I just don't see it happening, in large part because it never has. And I wonder whether it may be necessary to refocus the free speech issue philosophically in order to make the political battlefield more tractable, in the sense of getting to a place where the majority of citizens at least (if not the politicians) have clear and defensible ideals for free speech.
Thanks for the engaging essay,
Chris.
PS: I found the Play-Doh/Plato visual gag irresistibly silly in this one!
"one of Hedwig’s creators even popped up in the Times’ reader comments on my essay to talk about it" I've looked at the comments but I'm not seeing it. Can you link to?
The most infuriating aspect of this idiotic snafu is that Symposium has nothing to do with transgender ideology. It is a discussion of love and the relationship between physical beauty and spiritual aspiration (I can see it being accused of “lookism”, of course). The story told by Diotima about the original humans cut into two by Zeus is an allegory of love, in which every person is searching for their missing half. Since homoerotic attraction was normal and acceptable in Ancient Greece, the allegory explains why some people are attracted to the opposite sex and some to their own. It is about sexual preference and has nothing to do with gender. Is Texas now objecting to mentioning the fact that some people are gay?
And yet, why do you use the term transgender ideology, in the first place, when you have an ideology of your own?
And with the books that texas is banning, especially when it comes to student right?And the like they are openly being hostile to lgbtq individuals... but it sounds from your u org usage that you wouldn't be receptive to that possibility.
Especially when texas a and m banned drag shows and the fire rightly sued them for restricting such speech.
What does it even mean? Everybody has an ideology: you, me, and every single person on this planet. Some ideologies are right and some are wrong. Trans ideology is wrong. Banning books is also wrong because it prevents people from forming their own opinions and critiquing others.
We dont “ban books” we do make choices on curriculum and focus efforts to teach the appropriate subject matter based on the ability and readiness of the students ( adding in grade school, calculus in high school) .
Deciding the certain books are inappropriate based on the age, ability and focus of the students is perfectly fine.
Evaluating how and who makes those decisions be done at the at the most local level ( closest to the classroom) .
We dont need laws for every situation. We need character and judgement in individuals with authority.
We are not talking about school kids but about college students. As a university professor, I know that students not only should be able to handle Plato but HAVE to be able to handle Plato if they are to receive quality education. The Symposium is a foundational text of Western civilization. You cannot skip the foundation if you are to develop robust general knowledge and critical thinking. I would actually teach in high school as well.
This is a clear headed and even handed takedown of the illicit tactics of both the Left and Right partisans. This is why I donate monthly to FIRE - you and FIRE are doing important work (that used to be done by the ACLU before they got taken over by the Wokesters). Thank you for this piece!
Stephen Colbert. 🤣🤣🤣 serious. 🤣 sorry. He’s always been a stooge.
Oh not this crap again... the aclu is indeed doing good work. And sometimes the woke actually has a point.
They're suing the trump administration for infringements on speech... in fact, can you even define what woke means?
The ALCU specifically stated that they won’t defend certain speech if it “harms” marginalized communities. That is literally the opposite of them doing good work.
Okay, do you have the source for that? Good is a subjective qualifier.Just say that they're not enforcing the first amendment equally. And not fighting for civil liberties equally... but I wonder if there's more to it.And there's stuff you're not being told
https://reason.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech
"Woke" is generally understood to be the adoption of neo-Marxist ideologies like critical race and gender theory, as well as intersectionality and "anti-racism", under the guise of "fairness" and "just being kind" which is why people who haven't actually investigated the details of it don't understand how insidious its impact has been.
Okay how? You've yet to touch on antonio Gramsci. The long march through institutions and how their coped did and marcuse's repressive tolerance.
And you didn't exactly give any examples or how college is floated. The idea of giving minority students lower standards in order to help racial equity or something.
You're going to have to bring in bigger proofs and more support for your argument.If you're gonna win anybody over as do I.
Come up with specifics. Examples and also a lot of other ties and other things.
I think I could stand to learn more about the subject.And in order to, you know, better criticize "woke".
great work as usual, sir. i am grateful FIRE is holding the line.
What line? They can't even take credit card companies to task when they debank people. The trump administration's executive order spares visa and mastercard.
Tech dirt and mike mansnick... Are doing a far better job of calling out the illnesses going on.
Always brilliant to see principled defense of free speech, I think this is some of your best writing Greg, and I've been reading you a long time. I was honestly hopeful that the right's response to the left's excesses when it came to free speech would be to double-down on free speech, but no such luck.
I am curious if your thoughts on the Colbert/Tallarico/CBS thing have changed, given CBS's comments on what happened.
FWIW I don't think it changes the analysis--CBS and Colbert disagree on what exactly the network told the show, but whatever that advice was, CBS based it on messages coming from Carr, and it chilled the show's speech. Whether the Late show was specifically directed not to do something, or was warned that it might have to do other things in order to do something, is secondary to whether CBS was motivated by a fear that the Late Show's interview could get the network in trouble with the government.
Thanks for those details. I appreciate them.
Good luck. Parm-Reg is inedible except maybe as dust, and even then the salt will kill you, unlike your writing, which is both delicious and nutritious. Carry on.
Why thank you! And if dying of salt be my fate, so be it!
This reminds me of then Governor Schwarzenegger saying (I paraphrase from memory) “The Republicans are mad at me. The Democrats are mad at me. I must be working for the people!” Stay the course FIRE.
One quibble, I'd say it's not fallacious or wrong to ignore arguments on the basis they are being made in bad faith. True, it doesn't make the arguments wrong but we all have limited time and attention and if you treat every argument that the Holocaust didn't happen or that there were many incidents if Jews poisoning medevil wells as seriously as you treat good faith arguments you couldn't get anything done.
It's tempting to say that no, we are justified in dismissing those arguments without listening because they are so implausible. But that is only true after you consider motives -- is this something that the author wouldn't say without strong evidence of would ideology push them to it anyway.
Fundamentally I agree something is wrong here but it is the fact that we are so quick to presume bad faith motives not that we respond to their existence.
I fundamentally agree with you but we (mostly meaning academics like myself) also need to realize that protecting free speech is hard at the best of times and it just isn't realistic to think that democratic majorities in conservative states would continue to fund institutions they see as shills for their political opponents.
That's not an excuse merely a fact. And I think if academics can come to appreciate the fact that their academic freedom depends on presenting themselves to the public as fair brokers it will do a lot to help this situation. Specifically it will create a reason that academics can use to explain why they are publicly raising points for the 'other' side in public (the journals are fine but the public only hears the evidence on one side).
Ok, you've convinced me that "malicious compliance" can be a tool in the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress. However, I'm not quite ready yet to abandon it entirely. Is it always wrong?
Let's make up this hypothetical scenario: an updated university style guide asks that black should be replaced by African American. You notice that the astronomy news feed now contains sentences like "the supermassive African American hole at the center of our galaxy...."
Would it be fair to state that this is either human error or malicious compliance?
I know you've been on the 'universities have been hostile to conservatives' beat for years. That phrasing is exquisite; virtually irrefutable, because, surely, some universities have been hostile to some conservatives, somewhere. But let me grant it as a general truth even if not universally acknowledged. I'm curious where high profile, influential, conservatives at elite universities factor in your analysis. Like, Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law. Heck, law schools generally. Heck, Notre Dame (home of Patrick Deneen). Heck, U Chicago economics and poli sci depts, historically. You can find some cons at all the biggies; like the Maidenform lady, they turn up in the darndest places. Notice, in humanities and sociology depts: not so much! But universities aren't just humanities and sociology departments, *thank the gods*.
I don't say this is dispositive of your wider claim. I do wonder how scary it ever really was.
(I can think of one way it could be considered very scary: looking at how many of the creeps of the New Right elite, all the way up to Babyface Vance-ster, attended elite U's -- and wondering how many of these creatures are reactionaries in the grand old Buckley tradition, despite the career trajectories those diplomas undoubtedly turbocharged)
They are very consistent in defending the speech of everyone. They will defend and have defended drag shows because texas a n m tried to ban them and that texas, an m is actually the target of another lawsuit.
It's not just one side of the beat that they're drumming, unless you can prove otherwise... unless you can prove that they're Mat tabbi.
None of that answered my question. Nor did I claim FIRE beat one side of a drum. Perhaps you didn't understand my post?
It's amusing to hear you elevate the Left's rhetoric into abstract, impartial analysis and that of the Right into pure, juvenile ad-hominems. This, while for the last 50 years the erudite and superior "party of tolerance" has been calling Republicans "Hitler", "Nazi", Trump himself a "pedophile" and "rapist", and anyone even a micrometer right of center(or let's be honest, what used to be the actual center) "fascist". This in itself (along with anything attributed to the NYT) makes me wonder why I should bother reading this piece.
That aside, the question of whether gender ideology should appear in a class about Greek history or philosophy is valid. My understanding is that the professor was told that this subject was better suited to a gender studies curriculum. That would depend upon the way the subject was presented. Since blue states appear to champion state power over federal in the case of ICE detention and Sanctuary Cities, surely one could understand that a state which has chosen to reject DEI in education has a say in whether transgender ideologies are inserted into every educational presentation possible, much in the same way Netflix does.l ( When they're not portraying 17th Century Empresses as Black. So much for historical accuracy.)
This subtle indoctrination tactic works much the same way your article does: just present your own subversive bias as the enlightened intellectual progress of the Left, while portraying any who disagree as crass, name-calling swine who have the temerity to reject your pearls--even if they are cheap knockoff.
Plato wasn't censored. Neither was any discussion of transgenderism. The point is that they should be taught within the bounds of particular curriculum. The only thing that is limited here is the ability to shoehorn particular political agendas into places they don't belong and a lost chance to shove another unasked-for Progressive doctrine into the curriculum of malleable young minds who assume they are getting an undiluted Classical education.
Hmm. I wondered if I had read a different essay. So, I re-read it. No, I’m pretty sure this is the same essay. Your take is . . . remarkable.
Thanks for your adorable attempt at patronizing snarkiness, Greg. Keep working on it.
I wasn’t trying to be patronizing or snarky. That you thought so says more about you than me. I was genuinely amazed that someone could have such a remarkably different reaction to the same essay I had just read. People are different. If the way I expressed that offends you, my apology. No offense was intended.
They wouldn't have to be patronizing if you were going to bat for the current president.That has been taking an axe to a lot of free speech... and yet Matt tabbi is totally silent.
I guess they don't care about that part of the censorship industrial complex.
Studio LEISA, you're missing the point by a mile (complaining about Netflix "portraying 17th Century Empresses as Black. So much for historical accuracy.")
The point is to stop seeing color as definitive. Can't we finally let color-based discrimination just die because (to be historically accurate) our Constitution for about 160 years has emphasized that discrimination "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" is contrary to our Constitution?
But as Lukianoff points out in the piece, the gender studies curriculum was shut down at that university, so your suggestion is a moot one. Rather than trying to stop an ideology from being discussed (which is blocking free speech), why couldn't the state instead insist that the counter-arguments are included in context as a condition of getting state funds?
Do you really think it's a good idea to put conditions on speech? At that point, we would be having the creationist argument come up. We would have the institution clause come up I would think
In his piece on DEI, Lukianoff states "As FIRE has argued, there’s a difference between legislative efforts to tamp down on DEI bureaucracy and attempts to limit or prohibit what can be taught or discussed in class. In keeping with our First Amendment principles, we are constantly monitoring legislation across the country to ensure that efforts to rein in campus DEI bureaucracies don't burden academic freedom or free expression."
Right, there's a difference between having d e I as gospel, and then trying to suppress any other idea and then d e I actually, you know, existing... and now we have people trying to make sure to extinguish talking about d e I in any positive light, and that is wrong as well.
Talk about being screwed both ways to sunday.
Because my point is that I don't see what transgenderism has to do with Plato. It's possible that there is a valid reason for this, but more likely it is just another attempt to put yet another agenda where it doesn't belong. The state already has a policy against DEI in curriculum (implying it is a gratuitous inclusion for the sake of ideology rather than historical significance.) If this subject is so important, perhaps another class could be created, but the "gender studies" curriculum, as you say, has been discontinued. There are places that teach such classes if this is of vital importance to a student. There is no obligation for every university to teach every subject, and the choices offered by this particular university reflect the choices of the majority of the population of the state. I am more disturbed by the fact that the vast majority of the faculty of 99% of every university in the US are self-described Democrats or Marxists. No one seems concerned about that in the least, so I think the entire article is moot.
Also, what transgenderism has to do with Plato is called "Myth of the Androgyne" which appears in Plato's "Symposium" - Lukianoff addressed this specifically in the essay so how did you miss it if you actually read it instead of skimmed it?
It's actually 23% of faculty who want other professors to be woke like they are (according to the ERI piece on DEI from 2024), but if the other 77% are either conservative or open to conservative viewpoints being presented, then it's not as dire as you make it sound (which I suppose is how you justify shutting down DEI discussion rather than counter-programming it?)
But trump is an alleged pedophile, supporting the most racist and anti american and anti free speech policies.
Don't defend a tyrant.
Do you think that we who want to free academia from Leftist strangleholds (all strangleholds of course, but the Leftism is the main tyrant today) could use government power or incentives in ANY way to bring back open thought and freedom of expression?
Instead of banning certain ideas, can we ban banning? Can we punish retaliatory actions made against anyone who engages in unpopular speech?
When will the Left apologize for triggering the Right’s fascist tendencies.
Dear Gregg,
A question about jawboning: hasn't this always been a tacit aspect of the US presidential office?
Nixon was notorious for leaning on stations critical of the Vietnam war, and seems to have been directly responsible for the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers (and I believe also had a role in the cancellation of Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hee Haw, all of which were popular at the time).
Likewise, Obama reportedly put pressure on media companies to remove "false balance", while the Biden administration pressured social media and search companies to supress scientific voices it didn't want heard. The chief difference between these previous administrations and the current Trump administration in this regard seems to be Trump's utter lack of subtlety.
It seems to me optimistic to expect that the presidency will avoid exercising influence in this way. Aren't we in a new grey area here in terms of Rule by Executive Orders (which are not laws, per se), an ambiguous quasi-legal regime that more-or-less came into being with the Obama administration, and has accelerated ever since?
Relatedly, the booting of Missouri vs Biden at the Supreme Court seems to send a worrying message that even when tacit censorship from the Executive causes significant harms, it may still be permissible. How is it possible now to even conceive of reigning in such Executive Branch excesses in without fighting a battle on so many fronts that defeat becomes all but inevitable...?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a US President who was a principled defender of free speech. I just don't see it happening, in large part because it never has. And I wonder whether it may be necessary to refocus the free speech issue philosophically in order to make the political battlefield more tractable, in the sense of getting to a place where the majority of citizens at least (if not the politicians) have clear and defensible ideals for free speech.
Thanks for the engaging essay,
Chris.
PS: I found the Play-Doh/Plato visual gag irresistibly silly in this one!
What do you mean new comfort?
Matt tabby points out a censorship industrial complex, but doesn't criticize trump for the same.
"one of Hedwig’s creators even popped up in the Times’ reader comments on my essay to talk about it" I've looked at the comments but I'm not seeing it. Can you link to?
We misremembered. he actually wrote us at FIRE by email!
The most infuriating aspect of this idiotic snafu is that Symposium has nothing to do with transgender ideology. It is a discussion of love and the relationship between physical beauty and spiritual aspiration (I can see it being accused of “lookism”, of course). The story told by Diotima about the original humans cut into two by Zeus is an allegory of love, in which every person is searching for their missing half. Since homoerotic attraction was normal and acceptable in Ancient Greece, the allegory explains why some people are attracted to the opposite sex and some to their own. It is about sexual preference and has nothing to do with gender. Is Texas now objecting to mentioning the fact that some people are gay?
And yet, why do you use the term transgender ideology, in the first place, when you have an ideology of your own?
And with the books that texas is banning, especially when it comes to student right?And the like they are openly being hostile to lgbtq individuals... but it sounds from your u org usage that you wouldn't be receptive to that possibility.
Especially when texas a and m banned drag shows and the fire rightly sued them for restricting such speech.
What does it even mean? Everybody has an ideology: you, me, and every single person on this planet. Some ideologies are right and some are wrong. Trans ideology is wrong. Banning books is also wrong because it prevents people from forming their own opinions and critiquing others.
We dont “ban books” we do make choices on curriculum and focus efforts to teach the appropriate subject matter based on the ability and readiness of the students ( adding in grade school, calculus in high school) .
Deciding the certain books are inappropriate based on the age, ability and focus of the students is perfectly fine.
Evaluating how and who makes those decisions be done at the at the most local level ( closest to the classroom) .
We dont need laws for every situation. We need character and judgement in individuals with authority.
We are not talking about school kids but about college students. As a university professor, I know that students not only should be able to handle Plato but HAVE to be able to handle Plato if they are to receive quality education. The Symposium is a foundational text of Western civilization. You cannot skip the foundation if you are to develop robust general knowledge and critical thinking. I would actually teach in high school as well.
I agree. Stopping this was insane. My point was legislators should stay out of it.