Wellesley Faculty Says Free Speech Infringes on Liberty

The left doesn’t use fixed definitions, but rather uses propaganda terms that can be twisted and manipulated into anything they need them to be at any given time. It’s like there isn’t a single leftist in the world who owns a dictionary.

The latest example of this is actually a retread of a classic: professors at Wellesley College are claiming that non-politically correct speech is an abridgment of liberty:

In a faculty listserv message obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the two-year-old Presidential Commission on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity said the recently invited Laura Kipnis and previous controversial speakers were exhausting students with their offensiveness.

The six faculty on the women’s college commission cited the left-wing historian Jelani Cobb’s theory that certain ideas “impose on the liberty of another” if the person hearing those ideas is “relatively disempowered”:

There is no doubt that the speakers in question impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley. We are especially concerned with the impact of speakers’ presentations on Wellesley students, who often feel the injury most acutely and invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments. Students object in order to affirm their humanity. This work is not optional; students feel they would be unable to carry out their responsibilities as students without standing up for themselves.

Apparently referring to campus reactions to Kipnis — the subject of a two-month Title IX “inquisition” at Northwestern University, where she teaches film — the commission members said “dozens of students” have told them “they are in distress as a result of a speaker’s words.”

What the professors should have done was tell these children to shut up and deal. Not everyone in life is going to give a flying fig about how they feel about things.

If my words are capable of imposing on someone else’s liberty simply because they dislike them, then I should be able to make the exact same claim, correct? If it’s dehumanizing to claim that someone needs to get a job or should be deported because they entered the country illegally, then isn’t it dehumanizing to compare me to a Nazi?

We’re all guaranteed equal protection under the law per the Constitution, and that’s because the Constitution is intended to protect our natural rights. If mere words can be claimed as an abridgment of liberty, then everyone can make that claim against everybody, and all free speech is canceled out. So no more complaints about which pronoun I must use, no more claiming that those who own guns are violent criminals in waiting, no more accusations of racism based on a policy disagreement, and so on.

See how that works?

The reality is that when the left makes these claims, they never think about how their ideas are dead on the drawing board. They never think about how authoritarian these policies are. They simply assume they get to be the ones in charge of vetting what can and can’t be said.