The Left’s War on Free Speech
By Stephen Calandrino
Imagine a group of Allied troops who had been cryogenically frozen during the war woke up today to the sound of someone screaming “Help! Nazis!”. They turn to see violent mobs of vagrants destroying property and assaulting innocent people for the high crime of attending a speech given by an openly gay, ethnically Jewish man named Milo Yiannopolous. Without a shed of doubt in their mind, they’d take the rioters for the Nazis, and handle them accordingly.
Today, however, the term ‘Nazi’ has somehow gone from meaning “violent monster with no tolerance for dissent” to “anyone who doesn’t think or say exactly what the regressive left tells them to think and say,”. This deeply disturbed mentality was on full display February 1st at UC Berkley, which was ironically once considered the free speech movement’s nirvana, when rioters attacked supporters of Milo, a conservative political and cultural commentator to discuss the concept of cultural appropriations. This is not the first time that Milo has been targeted for his opinions, which really aren’t that far outside the mainstream orthodoxy of conservatism, minus his humorous style and flamboyant rhetoric. Just a couple of weeks ago, here in D.C., violent thugs attempted to attack him and his supporters at his “Deplore-a-ball” which he was hosting in honor of President Trump’s inauguration. Meanwhile, The Left has attempted to justify their violence by tying Milo to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. However, anyone who has listened to Milo’s speeches or read any of his columns would know that besides Lena Dunham and Shaun King, there is no individual that Milo takes more pleasure in mocking than Richard Spencer. Yet no speaker, whether it be Milo, Bill Maher, Ann Coulter, DeRay, or even Spencer deserve to be met with violence when peacefully expressing their opinions.
The attack on free speech is not always as black and white as PC thugs committing acts of violence. Often it begins with “speech codes,” a blatant attempt to censor everything people say masked as tolerance. There are also the “safe spaces”, which are the biggest hypocrisy of them all. There never has been, nor shall there ever be, a space that was made safer due to the oppression of people trying to speak their minds. They may appear small and insignificant, but much like with any cancer, they must be destroyed immediately when they sprout up.
The Founding Fathers were very clear about freedom of speech, as the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly stated that no form of speech or expression shall be regulated against. Just imagine for a moment how dark of a place America would be if slave owners had made it illegal to say anything bad about them. Satirist at the time, including the great Benjamin Franklin, saw slave owners and the entire wicked institution as easy targets of ridicule due to its nature of being inhumane and hypocritical. Surely, many slave owners felt “triggered” whenever abolitionists opened their mouths. Fortunately, the Founding Fathers had the wisdom had no authority to decide what other people wanted to think or say. There lies the founding principal of America we must all fight to preserve, regardless of who is speaking.
Now imagine, if you will, that you are a student at a university that has a history of banning speakers, films, and theatrical performances if they fail to conform to a certain brand of religious orthodoxy. It should not be too hard to imagine such a place.