"We are well into week two of a sprawling and largely trivial national debate over free speech, incitement, culture, and the media. This conversation has been cynically deployed by opponents of free speech to punish workers, fire academics, and cancel speakers, and it's been done while maintaining that this is the way to best protect freedom, democracy, and free expression. Clearly, either the First Amendment has swallowed itself, or the country has turned it upside down."
"If there is something instructive about this moment, if there is something good that can come of this moment, it is stripping away all the rhetorical illusions, and the national inertia we've had, because we've just assumed for so long that we are all just defenders of free speech. This moment is making it very clear what we've gotten wrong about that, and how really serious and deadly a time this is right now."
A sprawling national debate over free speech, incitement, culture, and media has been deployed cynically to punish workers, fire academics, and cancel speakers while claiming to defend freedom, democracy, and expression. Calls to criminalize speech coexist with free-speech rhetoric, revealing a fundamental contradiction in contemporary First Amendment politics. Consolidation of control over major media outlets intensifies the problem and amplifies misleading political claims. The current environment strips away rhetorical illusions about universal defense of speech and creates a dangerous, potentially deadly atmosphere for public discourse.
Read at Slate Magazine
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