The Silencing Page 3
Harvard psychology professor and bestselling author Steven Pinker invoked the critical role free speech plays in a democratic system in a 2014 speech. We acquire knowledge through a “process that Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation,” said Pinker. “We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The ‘conjecture’ part of this formula, of course, presupposes the exercise of free speech. We offer conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.”
The illiberal left seeks to short-circuit this process. They don’t want to defend their views, nor do they want to allow forums for other people to present views that are at odds with the conclusions they have drawn on an array of issues. Sometimes, the mere suggestion of holding a debate is cast as an offense.31
Pinker singled out university campuses for their hostility to free speech, likening them to the worst authoritarian regimes in history. “It may seem outlandish to link American campus freedom—which by historical and global standards is still admirably high—to the world’s brutal regimes,” Pinker said.
“But I’m here to tell you that the connection is not that far-fetched. This morning I woke up in Oslo, after having addressed the Oslo Freedom Forum, a kind of TED for political dissidents. I met people who escaped from North Korea by walking across the Gobi desert in winter; people who were jailed for a single tweet; people whose families were thrown in prison because of their own political activity. These stories put the relatively minor restrictions on campus speech in perspective. But the American commitment to unfettered speech, unrivaled even by our democratic allies in Europe, stands as a beacon of inspiration to the world’s dissidents, one of the few features of the American brand that still commands global admiration. At least one speaker at the Forum singled out speech codes and other restrictions on expression in the United States as a worrisome development.”32
The behavior of the illiberal left flies in the face of decades of jurisprudence forged by liberal Supreme Court Justices who argued for an expansive view of the First Amendment and treated free speech as a precious commodity to be guarded jealously. “Those who won our independence believed . . . that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in 1927. “The path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”33 This does not become less true outside of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr.—a liberal lion known for his outspoken progressive views—was perhaps the strongest First Amendment advocate of the modern era. Appointed in 1956, Brennan participated in 252 free speech cases during his thirty-four-year tenure on the Court. In 88 percent of these cases, Brennan sided with the free speech claim.34 In New York Times v. Sullivan, likely Brennan’s most well-known free speech opinion, he wrote: “We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open . . .”35
The illiberal left does not share this commitment. Their burgeoning philosophy in favor of government power to curtail freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is troubling. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a graduate of one of the nation’s most elite law schools, the University of Virginia—said in a September 2014 interview of those who deny climate change, “I wish that there were a law you could punish them under.”36 Accusing the libertarian Koch brothers of “treason” for disagreeing with his view of climate change, he said they should be “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He asked rhetorically, “Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.” Kennedy’s penchant for arguing for state action against those who do not share his view of climate change is not new. In 2007, he said in a speech at Live Earth that politicians who are “corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company” had committed treason and needed to be treated as traitors.37 In 2009, he deemed certain coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared that one company’s CEO “should be in jail . . . for all of eternity.”38
In a 2014 speech, Floyd Abrams, one of the nation’s top First Amendment scholars, himself a lifelong liberal, noted, “It stuns me how many people—educated people, including scholars—seem to believe that the First Amendment should be interpreted as nothing but an extension and embodiment of their generally liberal political views.”39 He told me in an interview, “It is accurate to say that . . . conservative jurists have moved strongly in the direction of more First Amendment protection and liberal jurists have moved markedly in the other direction.” Abrams founded the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School and noted that of the liberal legal scholars who come to his center, most view the First Amendment as an impediment to progressive policy goals. He says, “Their definition of liberalism is so imbued with their devotion to egalitarianism that they are willing to pay some First Amendment prices to get there.”
Cornell Law School professor Steven H. Shiffrin is a leading scholar of the First Amendment and co-author of a widely used First Amendment casebook.40 He is also an evangelist for the new progressive view of the First Amendment. Shiffrin gave a 2014 lecture called “The Dark Side of the First Amendment” in which he proclaimed, “The First Amendment is at odds with human dignity” and complained that racist speech was protected despite “its undermining of racial equality.”41 University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner expressed a similar contempt for free speech when he wrote in Slate, “For the left, the [First] amendment today is like a dear old uncle who enacted heroic deeds in his youth but on occasion says embarrassing things about taboo subjects in his decline.” The time had come to put the nutty uncle back in the attic. Posner was writing in the wake of the riots in the Middle East attributed to a YouTube video. He expressed dismay that the U.S. government was prevented by U.S. law “from restricting the distribution of a video that causes violence abroad and damages America’s reputation.” As he wrote, “The rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment.”42
Posner and Shiffrin are influential legal scholars and they are not alone in their views. Their intolerance of free speech that leads to what they deem the wrong policy conclusions or offends the wrong people is frankly typical of the illiberal left. Today’s progressive legal policy is less likely to treat the First Amendment as a bulwark against government infringement on the free expression of Americans than a roadblock to a progressive ideological agenda. “What’s coming up through the pipeline should have everyone who cares about freedom of speech very concerned,” FIRE’s president Greg Lukianoff, a graduate of Stanford Law School, told me in an interview. “I’m afraid that a lot of these more tenuous theories that law schools have come up with—that have grown up on campuses—that allow them to punish speech they dislike, while protecting speech they like are going to have increasing presence on the bench at every level and, I’m afraid, eventually on the Supreme Court.”
The more suppressive view of free speech seems to be gaining currency more broadly, especially among younger Americans. According to the 2013 First Amendment Center annual survey, “This year there was a significant increase in those who claimed that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting individual rights.” The older you are, the less likely it is that you believe the First Amendment’s protections are too robust. Only 23 percent of people over sixty and 24 percent of those between forty-six and sixty hold that sentiment. But an astonishing 47 percent of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds say the First Amendment goes too far, and 44 percent of thirty-one- to forty-five-year-olds agree.43
If younger Am
ericans are that accepting of government interference in speech, then how much more tolerant will they be of unofficial silencing?
AGE OF UN-ENLIGHTENMENT
The illiberal left isn’t just ruining reputations and lives with their campaigns of delegitimization and disparagement. They are harming all of society by silencing important debates, denying people the right to draw their own conclusions, and derailing reporting and research that is important to our understanding of the world. They are robbing culture of the diversity of thought that is so central to learning and discovery.
It’s sadly ironic that so many of the illiberal left view themselves as rational, intellectual, fact-based thinkers and yet have fully embraced a dogmatic form of un-enlightenment. Deviating from lefty ideology is equated to heresy and academic inquiry is too often secondary to ideological agendas. The illiberal left insert ideologically driven statistics into the media and academic bloodstream and then accuse anyone who questions them of diabolical motives. When researchers make discoveries supporting the wrong ideological conclusion, the character assassination and intimidation begin.
In a 2011 speech, then-University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who describes himself politically as a “liberal turned centrist,” explained, “If a group circles around sacred values, they’ll evolve into a tribal-moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” The illiberal left likes to accuse conservatives and religious people of doing this, but ignores the central role it plays in their own determination to reinforce their ideological beliefs. Haidt pointed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan who was labeled a racist for a 1965 report he produced as assistant secretary of Labor in the Kennedy administration. The report rang alarm bells about the rise of unmarried parenthood among African Americans, and called for government policies to address the issue. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the Black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed,” Haidt said. “Only in the last few years have sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along. Sacralizing distorts thinking. Sacred values bind teams together, and then blind them to the truth. That’s fine if you are a religious community. . . but this is not fine for scientists . . . .”44
Haidt believes that the fact that conservatives are underrepresented by “a ratio of two or three hundred to one” in social psychology “is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering.” Allowing for more diversity of ideological thought would lead to “better science and freer thinking,” concluded Haidt. This argument doesn’t just apply to academia. It applies to any facet of society where non-liberal views are deemed out of bounds.
When people are afraid to express their opinions because they’ve seen other people treated as deviants deserving of public shaming or worse, they will be less likely to speak freely. This already happens in newsrooms and academia, where people hide their religious or political views in water cooler conversation for fear of discrimination, or ultimately just opt out of the hostile work environments altogether. “We are hurting ourselves when we deprive ourselves of critics, of people who are as committed to science as we are, but who ask different questions, and make different background assumptions,” Haidt noted.
In preparing for his speech, Haidt searched for conservative social psychologists to interview, and was only able to find two, both of them graduate students, who came close to fitting the bill. “Both of them said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet,” Haidt reported, noting that one of the not-liberal social scientists was in the room as a participant in the conference. Haidt shared an e-mail from one of the heretics: “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, thereby, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.” These stories are commonplace, as is the desire for the academics to remain unnamed. Conservative and orthodox Christian professors have told me chilling stories of intimidation, harassment, discrimination, denial of tenure, and more, but they are not included in this book because all were too fearful to go on the record lest it further alienate them from the members of the illiberal left who hold their academic and professional futures in their hands.
This is not the kind of world we want. Educated people, noted Pinker in extolling the virtues of free speech, “should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not necessarily stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.”45
But as this book will demonstrate, the left’s commitment to free speech is collapsing. In its place, the illiberal left is executing a campaign of coercion and intimidation. I call it “The Silencing.”
TWO
DELEGITIMIZING DISSENT
He that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
—IAGO, SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO
In the illiberal attack on free speech, victory is silence. Any person who dissents from the illiberal left’s settled dogma is viewed as an enemy to be delegitimized, demonized, and dismissed. Once political and ideological opponents are viewed through the lens of a “take no prisoners” mentality then no type of character assassination is off limits.
Former CNN host and NBC Weekend Today co-anchor Campbell Brown experienced this firsthand. An accomplished journalist for two decades, Brown won widespread acclaim and an Emmy as part of a team covering Hurricane Katrina. After leaving journalism, she became an education reform advocate, founding the nonprofit Partnership for Educational Justice in 2014 to challenge teacher tenure rules that protect underperforming educators.1
Teachers unions and their illiberal left allies quickly deemed Brown public enemy number one. Rather than debating Brown and challenging her arguments, the illiberal left began a delegitimization campaign. Brown was no longer an accomplished woman, nor was her desire to improve the education system sincere. No, she was a nefarious right-wing bimbo under the control of conservative men lurking in the background. It started in 2012, when Brown wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal criticizing teachers unions for protecting teachers guilty of sexual misconduct from getting fired.2 In a Twitter exchange, Brown asked president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten about the issue. Weingarten responded and ultimately accused Brown of having a secret agenda. “Campbell did not want to be balanced. She’s married to Romney advisor Dan Senor,” Weingarten tweeted.3 In other words, Brown was a mindless parrot who adopted her Republican husband’s political views. As Campbell responded, “Wow, no sexism here. Sad.”
The teachers union–affiliated Alliance for Quality Education set up a website (RealCampbellBrown.com) depicting Brown as a stringed puppet holding a GOP sign and wearing a “1%” button. The tagline below her image read, “Right wing. Elitist. Wrong about Public Schools.” The website also claimed she was a registered Republican.
Brown told me she has donated to five political campaigns, all Democrat. She explained that she was a political independent throughout her journalistic career. To vote in the New York City primary, she registered as a Democrat, then later as a Republican to vote in a different primary. In their attempt to portray Brown’s organization as a front for the Republican Party, the illiberal left ignored not only her publicly accessible donations to Democratic campaigns, but also that Brown had recruited notable Democrats, including former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesperson Ben LaBolt, to work for her organization.4 Then there was the inconvenient fact that the organizati
on’s chairman was David Boies, who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore.5
Diane Ravitch, an education historian and professor at New York University, invoked a favorite delegitimization tactic by chauvinistically dismissing Brown for her beauty and portrayed her as an empty-headed interloper into the education debate. “[Brown] is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about teaching and why tenure matters,” Ravitch told the Washington Post. “I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic, even if what she has to say is total nonsense.”6 Never mind that Boies, Gibbs, and LaBolt all believed that same “nonsense.”
The voices portraying a professional woman as a bimbo and appendage of her husband belong to liberals who are supposed to be advocates for human dignity, respecters of women, and protectors of free speech. They chose to drag an accomplished journalist and earnest advocate through the mud. Infuriated by her audacity to question policy darlings like teacher tenure, they used sexist and dishonest labels to try to shut her up.
Opponents of Brown’s new endeavor saw her as the “new Michelle Rhee,” the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor whose dedication to reforming failing schools led her to support vouchers and other reform efforts opposed by teachers unions. “As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers,” Rhee explained in a Daily Beast piece called “My Break with the Democrats.” When the Washington Post asked about her position on renewing a D.C. voucher program, she knew that “as a good Democrat,” she was supposed to say “no.” Instead, she decided to talk directly to parents in an effort to make a fully informed decision. “After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program,” she said. “People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.”7 It’s normal for political parties to close ranks when one of their members deviates from a key policy position. This doesn’t make it right, but it’s not unique to liberals or Democrats. What sets the illiberal left apart are their campaigns to delegitimize people who deviate on even one issue by openly engaging in racist and sexist attacks, all the while presenting themselves as the protectors and representatives of all women and non-white people.