I’m beginning to suspect that the self-proclaimed liberals who protest scheduled talks on college campuses across the US are. in fact, conservative students working undercover to foster public disgust with the left. Some of these fiascos have to be staged. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a better way of shoring up conservative politics than by depicting liberals as a lot of hypersensitive scoundrels playing fast and loose with the First Amendment.
Residing as I do on the far left of the political spectrum (I don’t usually identify as “liberal,” simply because I personally have no use for the term outside of its economic sense), I’m perfectly content to leave the shameful business of censorship to my counterparts on the right. While they go to extreme lengths—including efforts to pass dubious legislation—to shut down critical discussion of Israel, for instance, it never occurs to me that we ought to respond in kind. They want to offer apologetics for atrocities? Great: There are few things more satisfying than laying waste to their spurious claims and exposing them as the vile demagogues that they are.
Suppression of speech is by definition, and without exception, undemocratic. It’s also, as I think most people intuitively understand, totally counterproductive. Just as employing the ad hominem betrays the unsustainability of one’s argument, attempting to suppress another person’s views, however offensive, is a reliable way to, as it…