by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
RightNetwork.com<\/p>\n
Every time a crazy person perpetrates irrational mayhem, we immediately start demanding explanations that gratify our ideological assumptions. For liberals, something in the environment drives people to such acts. Bad childrearing, poverty, bullying at school, violent movies or video games, or bigotry and prejudice are variously trotted out as the source of the violence. The more obvious explanation \u2014 that the perpetrator is insane, or an evil free agent \u2014 is categorically dismissed as simplistic and old-fashioned, redolent of archaic superstitions like religion.<\/p>\n
So it was no surprise that the rampage in Tucson that left six dead and Congressman Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded was followed by analyses filled with the usual received wisdom, unexamined bad ideas, and incoherent judgments that are passed off as sophisticated commentary, but that in fact are assertions of ideological and political preferences.<\/p>\n
For example, the liberal media attempted to pin the attack on \u201crightwing\u201d political speech that generated a \u201cclimate of hate,\u201d as Paul Krugman wrote. It took only a few days for commentators to point out the hypocrisy of such a charge coming from a political cohort that demonized the Tea Party movement as hate-filled, racist tools of the Republican Party, and that had spent eight years fantasizing about assassinating George Bush and accusing him of getting American soldiers killed to fill the coffers of the oil industry and the Halliburton corporation.<\/p>\n
Nor was it seemly, without any knowledge of the killer\u2019s politics or motives, to jump to the conclusion that he was rabid conservative fired up by immigration and Obamacare. Coming from people constantly touting their superior intelligence and preference for \u201cnuanced\u201d and \u201ccomplex\u201d thinking, it was hard to take seriously the crude psychology whereby political metaphors somehow infected the mind of the killer and like a puppet-master drove him to murder. It quickly became clear that such analyses were nothing more than partisan attacks, ones so shameless that even the President in his memorial speech had to distance himself from them.<\/p>\n
Repudiated, albeit weakly, by the President in his speech, these analyses quickly disappeared, and the New York Times, chief instigator of such libels, was praising the President\u2019s calls for moderation and civility.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a more insidious bad idea that in part spawned such political libels and goes beyond partisan opportunism. Lurking behind these assertions of a link between political rhetoric and violence is the new category of social crime called \u201chate speech.\u201d Policing this alleged offense now permeates our society, and so it will still be around long after the commentary on the Giffords shooting has faded away.<\/p>\n
The idea of \u201chate speech\u201d arises out of an identity politics predicated on victimization. Certain minorities, women, adherents of some religions, and homosexuals \u2014 all deemed to be the victims of white bigotry and prejudice \u2014 have to be given extraordinary protections from anything thought to reinforce social, economic, and political structures that reflect that bigotry, including language. Moreover, this damage control must extend to the feelings of these victims, lest they internalize these oppressive structures and damage their self-esteem, thus limiting further their ability to succeed and achieve full equality and justice.<\/p>\n
The problems with this dubious concept are myriad and obvious. For one, like the multicultural ideology it serves, this notion of whole groups deserving of special protection is contrary to our political order, which locates rights, worth, and responsibility in the individual. Second, it rests on the simplistic therapeutic notion that self-esteem is the key to behavior and well-being, which means that guarding against hurt feelings becomes a societal obligation. In addition, \u201chate speech\u201d can be vague and arbitrary, depending on the \u201ckaleidoscopic shades of grievance, injury, and ego that make up the subjective sensibilities of the \u2018victim,\u2019\u201d as Charles Sykes puts it. Finally, this notion in practice is a tool of partisan politics, its standards not applied impartially but reserved for the minority clients of liberalism \u2014 just what we saw in the aftermath of the Giffords shooting. No progressive frets over \u201chate speech\u201d directed at Republicans, white males, CEO\u2019s, heterosexuals, or Christians.<\/p>\n
The worst effect of the \u201chate speech\u201d phenomenon, however, is that it necessarily leads to censorship and the weakening of the right to free speech. This \u201cideological stance,\u201d Wendy Kaminer writes, \u201creflects the morally immodest assumption that right thinking people can rightly discern and should be empowered to define the legal limits of acceptable discourse for everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is precisely what liberals have been trying to do with all their talk about \u201ccivility\u201d and their decrying of \u201can atmosphere filled with hate and murderous rhetoric,\u201d as Jesse \u201cHymietown\u201d Jackson wrote on\u00a0The Huffington Post<\/em>. They want to control speech by putting certain kinds of rhetoric, or even certain metaphors, out of bounds. But metaphors don\u2019t kill people, people kill people.<\/p>\n Attempts to codify \u201chate speech\u201d in law have been serially slapped down by the Supreme Court as infringements of the First Amendment. Yet the \u201chate speech\u201d threat to free speech remains. Colleges and universities, some two-thirds of them according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), enforce some sort of speech code that punishes free expression under the guise of protecting certain groups from hurt feelings. FIRE\u2019s \u201cspeech code of the month,\u201d from Marshall University, proscribes actions that create \u201cfear, stigma, disgrace, degradation, or embarrassment,\u201d and outlaws \u201cincivility or disrespect of persons.\u201d<\/p>\n As FIRE\u2019s Samantha Harris comments, \u201cYou can be punished for embarrassing someone. You can be punished for disrespecting someone. You can be punished for exhibiting prejudice, even perhaps in the form of an unpopular opinion on a controversial political or social issue. You can be punished for telling crude jokes. This policy covers so much speech that it seems there is very little speech for which Marshall University\u00a0can’t\u00a0<\/em>punish you.\u201d Needless to say, such illegal censorship in the presumed venue of what Matthew Arnold called \u201cthe free play of the mind on all subjects\u201d and the search for truth bespeaks the ideological corruption of the university, not to mention legitimizing the notion that free speech can be compromised if it serves some alleged social good.<\/p>\n A more sinister development has been the camouflaging of \u201chate speech\u201d prohibitions in the laws covering harassment. Sexual harassment and anti-discrimination laws leave it up to the victim to decide if harassment or discrimination has occurred based on his own subjective, arbitrary, or even neurotic feelings and perceptions. The effect is to inhibit speech through self-censorship, since institutions fearful of litigation will encourage people to err on the side of caution. Politically correct speech and euphemisms come to dominate, even at the expense of truth. Even the statement of simple fact, such as the theology of violent jihad in Islam, or the high homicide rates among black males, can be construed as \u201chate speech\u201d because somebody feels offended.<\/p>\n Whether as calls for \u201ccivility,\u201d or proscriptions of \u201chate speech,\u201d such attempts to control and limit free speech on the basis of amorphous feelings and subjective impressions threatens political freedom. Open discussion and deliberation uninhibited by fear of reprisal is the life-blood of democracy. As the Athenian playwright Sophocles put it, \u201cFree men have free tongues.\u201d Hurt feelings are a small price to pay for this essential right.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Every time a crazy person perpetrates irrational mayhem, we immediately start demanding explanations that gratify our ideological assumptions. For liberals, something in the environment drives people to such acts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,330,120],"tags":[217,1034,214,236,413,1036,1044,336,1018],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-13B","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":481,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-academic-establishment-goes-after-bruce-bawer\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":0},"title":"The Academic Establishment Goes After Bruce Bawer","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published\u00a0The Victims\u2019 Revolution, an expose of \u201cIdentity Studies\u201d in American universities. These are the programs predicated on the allegation that certain minorities in America, mainly women, gays, blacks, and Latinos, are victims\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-problem-of-assimilation\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":1},"title":"America’s Problem of Assimilation","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The current Supreme Court term has been dominated by the Constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare legislation better known as Obamacare. But the Court has recently heard another case, this one concerning the controversial Arizona immigration law passed in 2010. Though\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Immigration"","block_context":{"text":"Immigration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/immigration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2373,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-post-racialism\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":2},"title":"The End of Post-Racialism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com So much for Obama striking a new tone on race. President Obama\u2019s response during his press conference to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates \u2014 that the Cambridge police officer \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d despite Obama\u2019s confession that he didn\u2019t know what really had happened\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":3},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-president-stupid-the-referendum-on-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":4},"title":"It’s the President Stupid: The Referendum on Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years. This election was never just about policy \u2013\u2013 it was also about Barack Obama and the repudiation of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-unexamined-president-and-his-media-enablers\/","url_meta":{"origin":4067,"position":5},"title":"The Unexamined President and His Media Enablers","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate. In the liberal-left narrative, the \u201cbirther\u201d issue was always evidence of the Republican Party\u2019s fringe kookiness: as the\u00a0Daily Kos\u2019s Markos Moulitsas crowed, \u201cWhat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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