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A common thread that runs through many of the issue around free speech and the freedom of expression in our Canadian society is the application of the rules and making sure they apply to everyone in the same manner. If our institutions could stand up and once again treat equality before the law as a meaningful statement it would solve many of the problems we’ve been having. The long shadow of Herbert Marcusé’s Repressive Tolerance has made the enforcement of our laws regarding protest apply only to one category of protester. Demonstrations and gatherings perceived to be “on the right” are subject to the full letter of the law, while most activity from the Left – especially the activist Left – seems to fly underneath the authorities radar. This permissiveness has emboldened the radical left and they will continue to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in society because of lack of equanimity when enforcing the rules of our society.
We have very clear rules when it comes to protests, demonstrations, and freedom of expression in Canada – what we need is a return to a the just application of those rules to all parties in our society.
Greg Lukianoff in this excerpt looks at the encampment situation that is developing on many college campuses in the United States and how free speech is being used and abused within that context.
GREG LUKIANOFF: Since October 7th we’ve definitely seen a combination of clearly protected speech by pro-Palestinian students—speech that we’ve proudly defended because we are a nonpartisan organization; we will always defend people regardless of the content of their speech—but we’ve also seen an awful lot of assault, we’ve seen a lot of shout-downs, we’ve seen a lot of vandalism, and we’ve seen a lot of unprotected speech. It’s been accelerating for several months now.
Probably one of the worst places for this phenomenon has been Columbia University in New York City. What happened over the weekend, with the crackdown on the encampments that they had there, was interesting from a free speech standpoint, partially because you don’t have a First Amendment or free speech right to camp out on campus grounds. You have a protest right. But generally, every school in the country has rules that basically say, “No, you can’t camp here. You can’t turn this into your own encampment.” They just haven’t been enforcing them. So Columbia, to a degree, is paying the price for not actually fairly enforcing their rules, going far back.
Now, do I think that in the course of this, there are students engaged in protected speech who are getting in trouble? I have very little doubt that there are. And we want to know about those cases. But we’ve also seen, particularly at Columbia, examples of assault. Certainly examples of students being blocked and surrounded. Also, students engaging in things that, by pretty much any definition, would count as discriminatory harassment, which is a severe, persistent, and pervasive patterns of behaviour that a reasonable person would understand is discriminatory. And that’s something that we’ve seen, unfortunately, all over the country.
Now at Yale, we even know the student who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, and she had to go to the hospital for it. That obviously isn’t protected. I think that there was a chance for a lot of these schools to prevent a lot of this from escalating by simply, fairly, and evenly enforcing their rules from the very beginning. But in a lot of cases, they simply didn’t.
One thing that readers really need to understand is that if you care about free speech on campus, you need to know that last year was the biggest year for deplatforming in recorded history, that we know of, on American college campuses. Deplatforming includes getting speakers disinvited and shout-downs. Yet this year, 2024, is going to blow 2023 out of the water, even just from shout-downs. And that has overwhelmingly come from pro-Palestinian students. Some of them have engaged in violence, including at Berkeley where they chased off an IDF speaker, for example, several weeks ago.
I want to meet the people who thought this was – somehow – a good idea.
I’m not sure in which world this is “being kind”. Because it certainly isn’t “kind” to the females being forcibly confined with violent males in female prison.
“What it means
Over 80% of gender diverse offenders with sexual offence
histories were trans-women. Sexual offending indicators
showed that the majority of these offences were committed
while living as their biological sex, and that the highest
proportion of victims were children or female. In addition, a
majority of this sub-group caused death or serious harm to
their victim(s). Most of these offenders also had a history of
abuse and trauma. Due to these factors, gender diverse
offenders with sex offence histories present unique
operational considerations for institutional placement and
correctional programming.”
Controversial topics are hard to talk about. What makes the process even more difficult is when one side, for whatever reason, decides that disagreeing with their position is equivalent to you *hating* their position.
The disagreement=hate confab is almost an exclusive feature of attempting to dialogue with someone on the Left of the political spectrum. I hesitate to use the Left/Right distinction though because the terms are not describing the political reality we now inhabit. Perhaps authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian might be a better way to describe positions these days.
Authoritarians whether on the Left or the Right seem to have a built in predisposition to thinking that their choice is the moral choice and that somehow by questioning their assertions you are questioning their morality or ethics.
It really isn’t that, at least not a first. One must grapple with the argument the person makes not the morality or ethics the person in question happens to hold.
An easy example is a person stating the fact that women, exclusively, are adult human females. The simple action of stating a fact can lead to accusations of hatred, discrimination, and even bigotry.
How does that even work? My hypothesis is that when you encounter the disagreement=hate trope the person that you are dealing with isn’t willing to put the thought or effort in to make a reasonable counter-argument. It is much easier to simply dismiss statements and thoughts that do not comport with what you hold to be true than do the work to properly refute them (also the statement in question may be closest to the truth and thus more accurate than your worldview).
Another issue is that your interlocutor may rate highly on the authoritarian scale. Woke ideologies like transgender ideology are totalizing, for them to reach their final stage *everyone* has to believe in the ideology. The utopian magic can’t happen until everyone is ideologically congruent thus wrong-thinkers must be converted or removed from the equation. If you are speaking against gender ideology -for the converted it simply must be “hate” – because the ideologue is convinced that their position is not only factually correct, but morally and ethically correct as well. Thus, the problem lies in you, not them as they have deep insight into the question, that gives them access to the “truth” and speaking against this “truth” must be hateful in nature.
It isn’t.
Being able to interrogate and critique ideas is part of the bedrock of a free society. We need to be able to objectively look at what people say and determine for ourselves the value of their arguments. Doing this now in society can be challenging precisely because questioning the orthodoxy is often misconstrued as “hatred”, thus speech and debate must be kept in check to stop the “hate” if one is to follow the reasoning from those who seek to limit speech in our society.
Limiting speech is such a completely terrible idea and we should really pause and consider the nature of so called progressive movements that advocate for the censure of speech in society.
To illustrate how deep the ‘social-justice’ mindset has permeated the cultures of the West, consider the following – Watch the video, and then try to imagine a white person saying the same thing. Would the reactions be different? Are your expectations different?
Coleman argues that we should do our best not to judge people on their immutable characteristics, but rather the content of their character.
How does a once venerated public institution fall into disrepute? Let’s find out the how and why.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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