The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right
The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right
www.newsweek.com
The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right
174 comments
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What?! The people who ban books are a threat to free speech?
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"I don't think freedom is simply doing what you want. I believe freedom is simply being able to love without fear"
That always stick with me and makes me wonder what heavy conservatives think of that line
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No fucking shit
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I'm glad this was in politics. Because it's certainly not news
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- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion, please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
Wow. The updoinks.. Such quality discourse and amazing insight!
How is this entire sub not considered a giant circle tug?
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You're right that it wasn't a very high quality post, but with this topic, what else is there to say? Conservatives have been pretending they're free speech warriors while at the same time very publicly banning books. It's so obvious that there isn't really anything to discuss.
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Because the post articulated what the majority of us already knew. That as always has been, the repression in this country comes from the conservatives. The very definition of a liberal philosophy would be against a threat to free speech. When conservatives complain their rights are being trampled on, it's normally their "right" to harm some group or person that they do not like. A liberal wouldn't say you aren't allowed to have a negative view of such person, but may consider it flawed, but wouldn't say you have a right to harm that person because you don't like them. Conservatives want to control what you can say, think, and do, to only what fits in a world that makes them comfortable, and feel better about themselves.
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What they want is freedom to control reality. What Republicans say, every day is not real, they don't live in reality. What they want is not free speech, they have that more than ever. What they want is to dictate reality to the rest of us.
All conservative are bad, acab as it were.
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I think what they want is as many big-money donors as they can get, for which they require as many reliable Republican votes as they can get, for which they require Trump, for which they are required to give prima facia credence to whatever misinformation Trump is pushing on any given day.
It didn't always used to be like this, but that was a long time ago.
Trump didn't create his voter base -- he stole it, from Rush Limbaugh, Bill Reilly, Glen Beck, Alex Jones, and all those other millionaires who spent decades feeding working-class conservatives daily servings hate for huge profit.
And in all of history, who has been the conservative pundits' all-time number-one biggest and best favorite target for this hate? It has to be Barack Obama. (Our first Black president. Coincidence?)
Trump didn't create his voter base, but he has owned it outright for going on a decade now, starting way back with his entirely bogus claims against President Obama's citizenship. It didn't matter that the claims were bogus -- all that mattered is that they were against Obama, in an outright demeaning (and overtly racist) way. Dittoheads and O'Reilly fans ate that shit up.
Now here we are, eight or nine years later, and Trump still owns it. Only now, instead of feeding that voter base, and growing it with strongman posturing and punitive policy, he's using it exclusively to try to save his own skin. And at this point, the only way Trump saves himself is in an alternate reality, with alternate facts.
Now Trump lies to save himself, and half of congress has to play along or risk losing their own reelections. Thanks Obama.
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I've found a pretty effective argument when dealing with right wingers at this point. I simply say that only one side is banning books and it's theirs, and I stick only to that. It's indefensible. They can try to twist it, say it's just protecting kids, and I will continue to say "Only the republicans are banning books". It's the end of discussion. Its shoving in their face that there is a clear line in the sand that republicans have crossed, and there is nothing they can say that would change that.
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Fucking guns kill a lot more kids than books .
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But guns don't turn kids GAY, checkmate pew pew pew
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Bbbbut it's in the constitution
If the constitution said we had to sacrifice children to make God happy, they'd defend it till the end of time
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Yep. When's the last time you saw a drag queen beat a kid to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird?
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No we only need to protect them from liberal ideas! You see, nithing us more American than dying to a good honest made in the US bullet from a proud American gun, during second term at elementary school. But imagine if those kids would have read Marlon Bundo, a book about a male bunny that likes another male bunny as more than just friends, and everyone around being supportive?! That shit is dangerous!
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Ooof, I’m stealing this. This is great. Bravo.
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So you can't think of any reason to ban books? Do you have any examples of a book that was banned recently by conservatives that clearly should not have been banned? What do you think about the following being in school libraries: page from Gender Queer (NSFW)?
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Right wing hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. At the end of the day it's just a form of entitlement.
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Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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As a non native speaker, I do not get the meaning of this post? And a lot of others. The word entitlement seems to have changed it's meaning. What does it mean today?
according to wiktionary:
entitlement (countable and uncountable, plural entitlements)
- The right to have something, whether actual or perceived.
- Power, authority to do something.
- Something that one is entitled to.
- (politics) A legal obligation on a government to make payments to a person, business, or unit of government that meets the criteria set in law, such as social security in the US.
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This is the definition I am using:
The belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.
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They'll ban books and then whine that they're being oppressed when people point out that they're scared of ideas.
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Pretty much
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Are the Antifa in the room as we speak?
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Every conservative accusation is a confession.
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Something, something, fuck their feelings?
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Always has been though??
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Always have been. The term has been already tainted with bigotry and violence.
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Duh.
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Free speech for me but not for thee!
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Always has been
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Typical bothsideism in the comments of that site as per usual. Would love to see those bothsiders on an article stating the opposite of this one.
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I'm a massive bothsider, I tolerate (and don't tolerate, depends really) either, both, neither, however you wanna say it...
Why exactly would I argue the right hasn't adopted the cancel culture playbook and cranked it to 11? That is a VERY "both sides" statement... This is arguably a "both sides" article, a "both sides" point.
If anything, id point out that all the pissing and moaning is silly, because the shit the right is doing is coming straight out of the lefts playbook. The fact that they're feeding you your own shit sandwich doesn't equate to them not serving shit for lunch... It's still shit...
Moderate/centrist = the other team...
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The hell they are. Where are the "leftists" banning books? Banning speech? Maybe for racial slurs, but what are some other examples? Where are they making it illegal for people to get healthcare?
No.
What liberals are trying get rid of are people being assholes, being openly racist, disallowing a person's actual right to choose something for themselves that affects no one else, disallowing children knowledge, restricting what teachers are allowed to teach.
There is no both sides here. Period. End of story.
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They didn't adopt the playbook, they wrote it.
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In the U.S., yes, at this moment the major threats to free speech are coming from the so-called "right". Forbidding teaching black history, LGBT issues, etc. A few years ago, lest we forget, it was Obama cracking down on the OWS protests and trying to prosecute Julian Assange and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Before that it was the GOP again pushing the PATRIOT Act and trying to ban Grand Theft Auto. They did it for a long time with the Red Scare. That of course, basically kicked off in response to Stalin, who was doing his own purges of opponents and censorship. Pre-war, it was Hitler, Mussolini and Franco worst of all, but was happening in the U.S. too. That all goes back even further to the Comstock laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts, you name it. There isn't some magical quality about the directions "left" and "right" by which bad people in power in government under that label don't want to silence their opponents. There is a tendency for what we call "the right" - this kind of more-or-less fascist, religious based, emotionally charged, etc. set of ideologies - to respond more eagerly to calls to silence or brutalize opponents, because they are by and large a good bit dumber at the end of the day.
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The Right Wing strategy is to simply claim you are being censored or treated unfairly so that people who don't know what you're doing give you a little more leg room.
Take that leg room and use it to advance your most extreme positions, go back to claiming you're being treated unfairly if anyone calls you on it.
The final step is that you must accuse anyone actually being censored or treated unfairly off pulling this bullshit.
The Right were never free speech advocates, and if you still think they were, try using the word "cisgender" and the word "removed" on Twitter, and tell me which one gets you banned first.
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Take note that this is an engaging title. I'd like to see more political science discussion in this community. These opinion pieces are part not a good part of the internet. They're made for sharing and being consumed on social media.
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One does not need to invoke or debate political theory to understand the end game of Conservatives and Republicans. It's part of their ethos, and it's well defined.
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Always has been.
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If you believe your partisan opponents are the only enemies of freedom, then you're already in chains.
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Freedom and free speech are not the same thing.
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always. every time. this is not surprising to anyone . people who act like this is untrue, or surprising, make me sick to my stomach.
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Also, water is wet.
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And before someone says water isn't wet: cohesion
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Duh
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We been knew
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What, no way, that's craaazy...
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Since 2020, we've seen hundreds of "anti-CRT" and "Don't Say Gay" bills; thousands of book bans; efforts to defund libraries; campaigns to silence faculty, erode academic freedom, and gut university independence; laws that disenfranchise voters, criminalize protest, outlaw reproductive freedom, and seek to erase trans kids; the Jim Crow-styled expulsions of Black officials; a potential pardon for a convicted murderer because he killed a #BLM protester; and organized threats and harassment targeting DEI officials.
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Free speech might only be able to achieve online, and make sure you remain ANONYMOUS
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That used to be true, but if you use a word that Corpos feel "damaging to their brand", you're kicked off before you can say "But I..."
Kind of like how when Elon Musk "Brought free speech back to twitter" he immediately banned anyone who made fin of him.
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...but, but, but they are the party for patriots and small government! They always talk about freedom-this, and liberty-that.
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oh shit this posted in politics. this may be biased
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Posts like this show what a lame circlejerk lemmy is. It's much more aggressively tribal garbage than reddit was, which was already pretty lame. How lame of a person you must be to go on a forum and agree with a bunch of other losers about the same things endlessly? Go outside and talk with people who disagree with you. You might learn something.
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And what did your post add?
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🦗 🦗 🦗
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I like hearing all sides of an argument. What say you?
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The politics group is just left-wing talking points and circle jerking. They're just as nasty as a lot of religious fundamentalists.
Be warned.
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how make everyone centrist tutorial 2023 updated fast
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It's nice to see that /c/politics and it's denizens are just an exact clone of /r/politics and is still full of circlejerking
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What? No. The authoritarian right and left are all about free speech when out of power and all about clamping down on it when they are in power. Both are the same. Both are nasty and authoritarian.
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As a centrist, let me tell you the truth - a threat to free speech is coming from both far ends of political spectrum.
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As a centrist
Hahahaha, good one.
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I know, right! You can't be a centrist if you adopt any right wing politics, that's just a disguised MAGA nutjob.
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No, I completely agree. I'm center left and see a lot of this coming from the left too. I was surprised to see all the agreement that it's only from the 'right', it is totally both, without question.
More people should adopt deeper models of politics, like six or nine axis models because that's how you really get at the features that drive censorship and limiting free speech.
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Completely agree. Thank you.
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174 comments