LINDA GREENHOUSE
An Indecent Burial
A recent campaign finance ruling by the Supreme Court shows the extent to which the free speech claim has become an engine of deregulation.
For the opposite of free speech is regulated speech. Therefore, a move toward free speech is indeed deregulation.
It’s just odd that someone feels the need to point this out.
There are an awful lot of people out there who would like to regulate everything, not just speech but thought too: for our own good, of course.
When did Charles Hawtrey start writing for the New York Times?
“a move towards free speech”??
There was free speech – for all reasonable purposes – in the fifties. You didn’t lose your job , get fined or go to prison as you do now.
The current generation has supinely let free speech go. Along with a lot of other things. .
For the opposite of free speech is regulated speech. Therefore, a move toward free speech is indeed deregulation.
It’s just odd that someone feels the need to point this out.
The Hard Left has often claimed that the only way to have free speech is to suppress popular points of view so that the unpopular ones would be able to find space in the market place. Usually this is given a racial or gender tinge these days – we need to suppress White men’s voices to make the world safe for the marginalised women and Gays to speak.
So yes, they do need to point it out. Because for two generations Western intellectuals have been educated to believe the exact opposite – in the best War is Peace intellectual tradition.
Important principles? Like, perhaps, the First Amendment?
The Left only likes free speech if it has a monopoly on it.