I thought we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech. Wasn't that a huge talking point 2-3 years ago? Didn't we bring back freedom of speech?
It's really depressing how the popular discourse around these topics so consistently fails to address any kind of bad-faith reasoning on topics like this.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
Freedom of speech is now defined as the person with the most power or who screams the loudest has the final say.
That is what happens when you elect a dictator.
It has been that way in the US since the supreme court decided that money is equivalent to speech. And the effects have been ramping up ever since. If there is only so much bandwidth in communication, then using money to monopolize airwaves directly reduces the speech of those who cannot afford the excessive cost that results. Monopolize here is used in the sense of dominating the available supply (of bandwidth) and bidding up the price.
Who is "we" here? I can't count how many times I've argued against just an apparently broadly-held view that free speech ends at the first amendment and isn't a general principle that should be practiced at, eg., universities. Looks like when I argued that here, I was told that I should pick a different term for the principle of free speech in order to disambiguate from the first amendment (they recommended calling it 'my personal content preferences').
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.