You Can't Censor Away Extremism (or Any Other Problem) - by Freddie deBoer - Freddie deBoer

You Can't Censor Away Extremism (or Any Other Problem) - by Freddie deBoer - Freddie deBoer

• Should we stop hate speech? What makes you think we can?

"When I was in grad school at Purdue these anti-abortion protesters would show up about once a semester.

...But I remember talking to someone I didn’t know about it, someone from another department. 

At one point he said “we’re going to no-platform them,” as casually as he might have informed me that he was stopping at Jimmy John’s on the way home. 

I thought, but did not say, what seemed like the obvious response: that we attended a university run by a pro-life president in a pro-life state with a pro-life governor and a pro-life legislature and a pro-life citizenry and that we were a bunch of powerless disorganized outsider academics who the local population didn’t much like and that if anyone was going to be “no-platformed” it was going to be us. 

But the thought had apparently not occurred to him, marinated in academia and I’m guessing very online. He was a progressive living in 21st century America and he assumed that those he chose to censor were those he could. 

This confidence is shared by many left-leaning people today, and it is typical of contemporary liberalism in its combination of arrogance and folly...Read all.