The Handleshaus blog has collected a list of individuals who have been “bullied and badgered, pressured and purged.” While many of them are on the right, more than a few are on the left and lot are simply apolitical victims of PC enforcers, who got blindsided and never know what hit them.
I have said it before but it bears repeating: one of the worst aspects of today’s intellectual climate is the eagerness with which people seek to win political and philosophical debates by trying to blacklist their opponents or get them fired. These days, it seems, not too many people have the same attitude towards their opponents that Thomas Jefferson had to his political enemies, as he expressed so eloquently in his First Inaugural Address:
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it."
While I am old enough to remember the seventies when liberals were fond of quoting Voltaire’s dictum, “I disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," it is nevertheless true that most of the censoring and hectoring these days is done by left-wing thugs. In response to this, I have noticed one disconcerting trend among my fellow conservatives, that they apply Saul Alinsky’s Rule Number Four - “make the enemy live up to their own book of rules” - to their ideological enemies with a bit too much eagerness.
Personally, I am old fashioned enough to prefer Jefferson and Voltaire to a grubby acolyte of Al Capone, and believe free speech is a matter too important to be endangered by partisan score-settling. We need to start championing free speech, and that means for everybody, even our ideological enemies.
http://www.barrelstrength.com/2014/01/16/purged/
We are on the same page, Cincinnatus.
Posted by: TMDenton | January 22, 2014 at 12:14 PM