Free Speech and Privilege

There are occasions, in the halls of public discourse, where high-concept exposition turns into farce, where an author’s grand ideas depict a lack of self-awareness so monumental that it defies belief.

Consider a deeply self-important op-ed by K-Sue Park, published in yesterday’s New York Times. Ms. Park, described as “a housing attorney and the Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law,” contends that the principle of free speech, one very clearly and succinctly protected in the Constitution, requires certain foundations that, if absent, justify its abandonment.

Park selects as a guiding example the ACLU’s defense of the free speech rights of Nazi-wannabes. She asserts that the defense of hate groups’ speech rights serving to defend all speech rights is fine in theory (emphasis added), but that the realities of the nation’s current state supersede the theoretical. Free speech, we are to believe, requires a level playing field. The defense of free speech, we are to believe, should be measured by an equality-of-outcome metric, that is to say, if defending the free speech rights of hate groups actually allows those hate groups to say hateful things, then the defense is unjustified and improper.

She then goes on to assert that money and speech are connected (this may come as a shock to the lefties who still, occasionally, foam at the mouth over the Citizens United ruling). Then, things turn into the aforementioned farce. Park asserts that cultural and structural forces serve to diminish the freedom of speech of “marginalized communities.”

Really? When was the last time a member of a “marginalized community” complained that it’s dangerous to voice an opinion? Oh, yes, when that opinion runs contrary to the social-justice playbook. When that person doesn’t stay on the plantation. When that person says something that isn’t party-line liberal. Rendering that opinion, by the way, disqualifies someone from membership in the “marginalized community.” See: Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Ann Coulter, and every other non-white-male who’s ever voiced a conservative opinion.

Meanwhile, talk to any conservative member of a non-marginalized community living in a blue state. Ask him (or her – just to remind readers that this blog follows the non-gender-specific form) if he’s comfortable openly talking opinions or politics among friends, neighbors and peers.

Ask business owners or corporate CEOs if the fear of blowback for saying something unpopular doesn’t affect what they say.

Ask someone who might speak out against removal of Confederacy statues if he feels immune to the inevitable accusations and aspersions that would ensue.

Then, Park has the temerity to suggest that left-wing academics are a “marginalized community,” facing harassment over voicing opposition to hate speech. Allow me a moment to guffaw before I point out, quite unnecessarily, that academia is a cocoon of echo-chamber safe-space for left-wing opinions.

The subtext in all this is clear: There are correct opinions, and incorrect opinions. It is the former that deserve 1A protection, not the latter.

Then, there is Ms. Park’s message that, in essence, freedom of speech is itself “privilege.” Meanwhile, blogger Kristen Tea asserts that ‘”staying out of politics” or “being sick of politics” is privilege in action,’ that not voicing an opinion is “privilege.”

So, voicing an opinion is privilege, and not voicing an opinion is privilege. Catch-22 and Kafkaesque, no? What is one to do? How should we behave so as not to draw the ire of the Parks and Teas of the world?

Fortunately, that’s easy. All you have to do is voice the correct opinion. No one’s going to call you out for privilege, even if you fit the “privileged” demographic, if you say the right words and do the right things. As comedian Bill Hicks observed, “you are free to do as we tell you!”

Of course, if you do that, you’re not really voicing an opinion. You’re simply conforming to what the social justice scolds assert is the proper viewpoint. Even if you agree 100% with that viewpoint, if you accept the previous assertions that both opining and not opining are acts of “privilege,” you are accepting that you do not, in fact, have actual freedom of speech (As a parallel, say that on election day, you find only one candidate on the ballot and know that, if you do not vote for that candidate, you will suffer consequences. Tell me – did you actually exercise your right to vote?).

If you don’t play along, you will be denigrated, called names, scolded, and informed of your wrongness. Your reasoning, your explanations (if they’re listened to or even acknowledge at all) won’t matter, because your nonconformity is itself the “fatal” transgression.

There can be no meeting of the minds here, because there is no desire on the scolds’ part to consider any differing viewpoints.

This is, by the way, why Trump won the presidency.