You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Home Front: Culture Wars
The lies we were told about who would silence free speech
2017-04-30
The lie we were told as kids was this: The end of American liberty would come at the hands of the political right.

Conservatives would take away our right to speak our minds, and use the power of government to silence dissent. The right would intimidate our teachers and professors, and coerce the young.

And then, with the universities in thrall, with control of the apparatus of the state (and the education bureaucracy), the right would have dominion over a once-free people.

Some of us were taught this in school. Others, who couldn't be bothered to read books, were fed a cartoon version of the diabolical conservative in endless movies and TV shows. The most entertaining of these were science fiction, sometimes with vague references to men in brown shirts and black boots goose-stepping in some future time.

Women would become handmaids, subjugated and turned into breeders. And men would be broken as well. The more lurid fantasies offered armies of Luddites in hooded robes, hunting down subversives for the greater good.

But the lie is obvious now, isn't it?

Because it is not conservatives who coerced today's young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak.

The left did that.
Posted by:Beavis

#6  There is a notion that only the right can be authoritarian. It predates the 20th century, but so do most of the ideas of the left.
Posted by: Iblis   2017-04-30 21:06  

#5  And administrators sit by and watch, afraid to anger those mobs.

They can say they're afraid. But that doesn't prove they're not complicit.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2017-04-30 15:33  

#4  If you listen closely, you can hear a sound of rivets popping as the seams of the ship of state slowly are opened by the sedition that is the left in all its guises...
Posted by: NoMoreBS   2017-04-30 15:30  

#3  Related.

"Purity (formerly 'Litmus') Tests" seem to be becoming a Leftist norm.
Posted by: Blossom Unains5562   2017-04-30 13:58  

#2  "If this goes on"
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2017-04-30 13:15  

#1  Cassandra Kass, as usual, hits it out of the park.
Posted by: Blossom Unains5562   2017-04-30 13:13  

00:00