Two men on business trips met in a bar in Paris, one was American, and one was Russian. They got into a friendly argument about who’s country had more freedom. The American said that the U.S. was freer because he, a mere businessman, could get to see the President, look him in the eye, say, “President Biden, you are the worst President ever,” and he would not have to then fear any repercussions. The Russian countered. He said, “I, too, am just a businessman, but I could get to see Putin and I could look him in the eye, and I could say, “President Biden is the worst President ever.”
The point of this old story is, of course, that all countries allow people to say what’s popular. The mark of a free country is that it allows you to say what’s unpopular.
More and more, it appears that, by this measure, America is becoming less free.
There are recent instances that are examples of this trend. People are being punished for saying things that others consider unpopular. Importantly, it is not the government that is punishing them. Their employers are. But the concern has to be that once people begin to accept the private suppression of speech, how long will it take before this attitude translates into law?
You are probably familiar with the instances I’m talking about. One of them involves Whoopi Goldberg. She said that the Holocaust was not about race. First, let’s assume the obvious – that this is a very, very stupid thing to say. Jews are not a race, but Hitler thought that they were. That, alone is despicably racist. Whoopi followed up by saying that the Holocaust was instead about “man’s inhumanity to man,” which is certainly true, but misses the point. That couldn’t overcome her mistake. It also couldn’t overcome the raucous objections emanating from those who rightfully detest the absence of freedom represented by the Holocaust but feel that the way to preserve that freedom is to punish the people who disagree with them. It is especially ironic that Ms. Goldberg voiced this opinion on a show called, “The View.” Maybe they should change the show’s name to, “The Only View.”
It also says something about our country that we are so worried about the political influence of a woman named “Whoopi.”
Another of these instances has been less well publicized. It involves an administrator at Georgetown Law School, a guy named, Ilya Shapiro. He had been scheduled to become a senior lecturer and the Executive Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He had the unmitigated gall to express the opinion on Twitter that President Biden would nominate not “the objectively best pick” for the Supreme Court, but a “lesser” Black woman. The Law School suspended him. My God, the man should be shot!
I surely disagree with any view that a Black woman could not be the “objectively best pick”, if that’s even what Mr. Shapiro meant, and I don’t think he did. But assuming that it is what he meant, why can’t he say it? Let’s assume the worst, that this statement demonstrates that Shapiro is a racist. In fact, when Georgetown hired him, they knew he had controversial views. He is a prominent Libertarian. Not all Libertarians are racists, of course, but it’s not as if the Law School was hiring a middle-of- the-roader. Now, I hate racists, but, again, we undermine the essential tenet of our freedom if we only allow the expression of ideas that we don’t detest.
Times have changed. They let me graduate from the Georgetown Law School and you should have heard some of the shit that I said.
And compare what those penalized people said to what is otherwise said by people who rightly aren’t penalized. I’m thinking today of an Evangelical Sunday telecast that I fell upon as I was roaming around the dial. The thing is called the “Inspiration Ministries.” The star was this Minister whose name I don’t recall and don’t want to, who was literally telling his audience that if they sent him $1000, then God would solve all of their problems. I’m not making this up. It wasn’t a movie, it was real. That guy is allowed to spew his sacrilegious fraudulent bile, and he should be. But if he can, how can anyone justify shutting down Whoopi and Ilya?
The examples I have used here come from the left shutting down what they consider wrong. This is what the right calls, “cancel culture.” The left has no monopoly on “cancel culture.” A Tennessee teacher was recently fired for teaching that white privilege is a fact of life, and School Boards all over the country are preventing the teaching of Critical Race Theory. What, after all, is education all about? Isn’t it to learn how to think or is it just to learn what society wants you to think? And the right goes even further than that. They don’t just want to shut their opponents up, they want to “Lock Them Up.”
There are some people whose opinions I greatly respect. None of them are named, “Whoopi,” but one of them is named, “Mohandas”. He was called, “Mahatma.” Mr. Gandhi’s opinion about all of this is worth remembering, “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” You can say that again.
We were right 