QUESTION ASKED: Why does The New York Times want you to have less free speech?
What moralistic scolds like Marantz and his kind want is control. They want to monitor your speech so that they never feel uncomfortable, and so that only the views they agree with are heard. They yearn for fiats. They are certain that if they just shut you up, then some sort of social justice utopia will surely emerge. What they never seem to understand is that they’re next. For some reason, they always assume that they have immunity from the mob. Wise observers of our culture over the last few years know that no one is safe. Marantz and The New York Times are free to rail against free speech, but it is unwise to do so. Free speech is one of those sacred, fundamental rights that, once taken away, is impossible to get back.
Read the whole thing. The Times’ attitude is very much akin to Meryl Streep’s Hillary-esque “Chief Elder” character in the 2014 movie The Giver: “When people have the power to choose, they choose wrong. Every single time.” Best to let the Deep State take care of all those decisions for you. It’s for your own good, you know.
Related: Free Speech Is Killing Us — a Babylon Bee op-ed by Kim Jong Un.
Using “free speech” as a cop-out is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt. Yes, free speech is a glorious pastime of our wonderful, prosperous empire, but it’s not the only one. It must be held in tension with other values, such as equality, safety, good citizenship, worshiping me, and stamping out anyone who would be foolish enough to speak up against our utopia.
Look, I am not calling for repealing free speech entirely. What I’m arguing for is silencing those whose speech your majestic rulers—namely, me—find to be potentially seditious. Only when speech is carefully policed, with your betters determining what can be said and what cannot be said, can speech truly be “free.”
The intentionally satiric Babylon Bee shouldn’t give the Gray Lady any ideas for guest contributors, since they’ve already allowed Vladimir Putin to have a column there — on September 11, 2013. (Evidently, Bill Ayers couldn’t generate 500 words for them that year.)