Fair enough. But I will cut them a little slack, since they need education in the finer points of countering fascist narratives. It's not like they have a whole TV network feeding them their talking points every day.
Fair enough. But I will cut them a little slack, since they need education in the finer points of countering fascist narratives. It's not like they have a whole TV network feeding them their talking points every day.
They're college students. Free speech norms (and the importance thereof) should have been part of high school civics, and "don't feed the trolls" should have been hammered into their heads since they were old enough to google "boobs". How much more education do they need?
Okay, let's really talk about feeding trolls. You know what fascist trolls really want? It's not just to provoke the left into acting intolerantly. It's to provoke the left into acting intolerantly, and then have "moderates" respond predictably by talking about civility and moderation and "letting all voices be heard."
So instead of everyone focusing on the fact that the Federalist Society is a well-funded right-wing astroturf tool of fascism, we're here talking about civility and the finer points of the First Amendment.
Trolls have more than one goal, and you might be feeding them without even realizing it.
Did they teach you that in high school civics class?
"They meant well to shut down speech and be a mob because it was mean fascist speech." Um, no. The braying mob shutting down speech ARE the fascists. That's definitional.
You're getting "predictable" responses because they are the correct responses to the argument of "suppressing speech is ok as long as it's the right kind of speech"
Except I never said suppressing speech is ok as long as its the right kind of speech.
My point, let's be clear, is simply this: there ARE good guys and bad guys in this situation. The bad guys did what the bad guys always do, flex their bullying power; the good guys chose a dumb response, anger and shouting down, which fell right into the bad guys' trap.
The secondary point I made, which you have now helped me demonstrate, is that the trap laid by the bad guys not only traps their obvious opponents, it also traps "neutral" bystanders who want to appear "reasonable."
By this logic, people advocating for threats and the eradication of others are just as legitimate as those who want them left alone and want peace. This didnтАЩt work with the Nazis and it wonтАЩt work here either. Some boundaries about what is acceptable need to be set.
You are mistaking protection of speech and strong free speech norms with endorsement or approval of the speech in question. It's not a matter of who is "legitimate" or not. It's a matter of that historically whenever any group has been given unilateral power to decide who is and isn't "legitimate" that has resulted in acute human suffering, and I don't believe we are any more advanced today than we were any of the other times in the past to know for sure what speech is or isn't "legitimate" or to keep our governments and other levers of power under control enough to give them the authority to decide that either.
Consider that I find your views on suppressing speech to be abhorrent and dangerous. Is the world better of if I am able to restrain you from speaking your views? Arguably yes. And yet there is always a possibility that you're right, after all enlightenment thought processes haven't been the default for most of history, or even a good part of the modern age. So what if you were right? By forcibly suppressing your speech, the discussion will never happen. The status quo will continue and the world will be worse off as you imagine.
On the other hand, you could be wrong. But if I suppress your ability to speak, again this discussion and debate will never be had. Other people who think the same as you, or even who are on the fence may never hear a robust (or even this mediocre) defense of free speech values. In such a world, people with your views might eventually become a majority because with no articulated defense of free speech, it could become viewed as a relic of "old white men", and that majority might even change the laws eliminating free speech and again we'd be worse off.
Or moving out of the very abstract into the more concrete, one doesn't have to go back very far to find us jailing, fining or suppressing people for:
* advocating against the draft (Schenck v. United States)
* establishing communist organizations (Whitney v. California)
* advocating the "violent overthrow of the government" by way of distribution of the Communist Manifesto (Dennis v. United States)
* general communist advocacy including at times "violence" (Yates v. United States)
* calling law enforcement officers fascists (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire)
* "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] tumultuous or offensive conduct" (Cohen v. California)
* "endeavoring to arouse the Negro people against the whites, urging that they rise up in arms and fight for equal rights" (Feiner v. New York)
* Selling erotica (Roth v. United States)
* Selling more erotica (Miller v. California)
* Saying 7 words (FCC v. Pacifica Foundation)
* Distributing "obscene or indecent" messages to anyone under 18 (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union)
* Publishing material that depicts "depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion" (Beauharnais v. Illinois)
* Taking out an ad criticizing the police (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)
* Antagonizing a judge (Sacher v. United States)
* Antagonizing the police (Hess v. Indiana)
* Criticizing a congressman (Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus)
* Lying about military service (United States v. Alvarez)
* Protesting wars (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District)
Not all of those cases went in the way of maximal freedoms, but in every single one of those cases, the people who were suppressing the speech thought it was dangerous, or abhorrent or otherwise illegitimate. In many cases, it's likely the speaker themselves was viewed that way. Back to those communist/socialism cases specifically and that was viewed by all "right thinking people" at the time as about as bad as being a Nazi. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that's for each individual listener to decide, not for some authority from on high to forcibly stop.
Whatever happened to "stand up to bullies?" I guess that fighting back is just bad american values. Far better to give the bullies whatever they want as soon as you can or else you might be undermining their first amendement rights.
Or do only these things apply when its the liberals fighting back? Hmmmm.....
Nothing happened to it. Stand up to bullies. But proportional force is also called for. One doesn't get to shoot their bullies because they called them a "four eyes". Heck I'm sure our recent president thought many a media organization were being bullies. I don't know about you but I'm awful glad we have strong free speech rules and norms that prevented him from shutting down everyone and everything that didn't kowtow to him.
Well sure, if there's one thing extremists of all types can agree on, it's those damn moderates and their calls for civility and free speech that are the true problem.
Or less sarcastically, the reason we're talking about "civility" and the finer points of free speech is because actual incivility and suppression of free speech took place. If we wanted to discuss well funded advocacy of fascism, there are many ways to do that without using actual fascism to accomplish it. In the hierarchy of "things that are important to stop" actual suppression of free speech is higher on the list than advocacy of suppressing free speech.
It's funny how I keep getting comments that I'm advocating suppression of speech. That's telling. That shows how effective this trolling tactic is. The bullies get sympathy because they were shouted down, just as they hoped they would be, because they knew it would actually increase the reach of their sick message. It's so easy, and so many otherwise intelligent people fall for it every time.
My original most made very clear I believe the protesters chose a dumb tactic. Shouting down the bully doesn't work. Humiliating the bully with mockery works. One of the reasons it works is because it humor gets to the heart and truth of the matter, and when "neutral" observers are compelled by humor to laugh at the bully, it deflates the bully's power instantly. The neutral observer realizes that the person they were giving the benefit of the doubt to does not deserve it--that they're simply a bully who deals in lies and aggression.
And once again--the protesters' response was the wrong tactic, but an understandable one. They feel that they and their friends and loved ones are under attack--and they are correct. The bullies we are talking about are sadists who want to inflict pain on vulnerable people simply to score political points and fleece money off of rubes.
They don't have a whole TV network? Sorry, was MSNBC founded this morning? I guess that (to a lesser extent) CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN are also brand new? I just this second invented late-night comedy and forged from raw geneseed the likes of John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers. I might have also just founded every major news and opinion page in the nation and peopled them with every over-educated, overly affluent midwit in existence, with the (lukewarm) exception of the Wall Street Journal. I'm god, is my point.
And here we go, predictably. "But what about MSNBC?!!" False equivalencies are the lifeblood of fascist propaganda. Sorry, but Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson. Not even close. You aren't comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with strychnine.
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they donтАЩt. The main problem is that progressives donтАЩt communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people donтАЩt automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual тАЬfascistsтАЭ end up looking reasonable, not just to тАЬWWCтАЭ but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now arenтАЩt тАЬbetter luck next timeтАЭ as it might have been in the 1980s. When youтАЩre facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like тАЬthey meant wellтАЭ donтАЩt cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is тАЬ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.тАЭ
The second is тАЬpeople who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the leftтАЩs social and economic agenda) are тАШbullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,тАЩ and donтАЩt deserve the right to free speech.тАЭ
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because itтАЩs adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
тАЬI hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.тАЭ
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
TheyтАЩre a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and MurdochтАЩs NY Post. I wouldnтАЩt lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but theyтАЩre also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think itтАЩs probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, IтАЩd say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said TuckerтАЩs point was that the тАЬrightтАЭ at the time (and even less now) doesnтАЩt have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless itтАЩs a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. тАЬThey worry about things like making sure they spell a personтАЩs name rightтАЭ. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didnтАЩt then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede TuckerтАЩs point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And thatтАЩs why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use тАЬleft leaningтАЭ msm as their main source for reliable information.
Fair enough. But I will cut them a little slack, since they need education in the finer points of countering fascist narratives. It's not like they have a whole TV network feeding them their talking points every day.
They're college students. Free speech norms (and the importance thereof) should have been part of high school civics, and "don't feed the trolls" should have been hammered into their heads since they were old enough to google "boobs". How much more education do they need?
Okay, let's really talk about feeding trolls. You know what fascist trolls really want? It's not just to provoke the left into acting intolerantly. It's to provoke the left into acting intolerantly, and then have "moderates" respond predictably by talking about civility and moderation and "letting all voices be heard."
So instead of everyone focusing on the fact that the Federalist Society is a well-funded right-wing astroturf tool of fascism, we're here talking about civility and the finer points of the First Amendment.
Trolls have more than one goal, and you might be feeding them without even realizing it.
Did they teach you that in high school civics class?
"They meant well to shut down speech and be a mob because it was mean fascist speech." Um, no. The braying mob shutting down speech ARE the fascists. That's definitional.
You know, I'm getting so many predictable responses like this, I wonder if I need to rebut them or just leave them up as proof of my point.
The trolls at FedSoc won this round, that's for sure. Not only did the protesting students fall into the trap, so did all the apologists for fascism.
You're getting "predictable" responses because they are the correct responses to the argument of "suppressing speech is ok as long as it's the right kind of speech"
Except I never said suppressing speech is ok as long as its the right kind of speech.
My point, let's be clear, is simply this: there ARE good guys and bad guys in this situation. The bad guys did what the bad guys always do, flex their bullying power; the good guys chose a dumb response, anger and shouting down, which fell right into the bad guys' trap.
The secondary point I made, which you have now helped me demonstrate, is that the trap laid by the bad guys not only traps their obvious opponents, it also traps "neutral" bystanders who want to appear "reasonable."
By this logic, people advocating for threats and the eradication of others are just as legitimate as those who want them left alone and want peace. This didnтАЩt work with the Nazis and it wonтАЩt work here either. Some boundaries about what is acceptable need to be set.
You are mistaking protection of speech and strong free speech norms with endorsement or approval of the speech in question. It's not a matter of who is "legitimate" or not. It's a matter of that historically whenever any group has been given unilateral power to decide who is and isn't "legitimate" that has resulted in acute human suffering, and I don't believe we are any more advanced today than we were any of the other times in the past to know for sure what speech is or isn't "legitimate" or to keep our governments and other levers of power under control enough to give them the authority to decide that either.
Consider that I find your views on suppressing speech to be abhorrent and dangerous. Is the world better of if I am able to restrain you from speaking your views? Arguably yes. And yet there is always a possibility that you're right, after all enlightenment thought processes haven't been the default for most of history, or even a good part of the modern age. So what if you were right? By forcibly suppressing your speech, the discussion will never happen. The status quo will continue and the world will be worse off as you imagine.
On the other hand, you could be wrong. But if I suppress your ability to speak, again this discussion and debate will never be had. Other people who think the same as you, or even who are on the fence may never hear a robust (or even this mediocre) defense of free speech values. In such a world, people with your views might eventually become a majority because with no articulated defense of free speech, it could become viewed as a relic of "old white men", and that majority might even change the laws eliminating free speech and again we'd be worse off.
Or moving out of the very abstract into the more concrete, one doesn't have to go back very far to find us jailing, fining or suppressing people for:
* advocating against the draft (Schenck v. United States)
* establishing communist organizations (Whitney v. California)
* advocating the "violent overthrow of the government" by way of distribution of the Communist Manifesto (Dennis v. United States)
* general communist advocacy including at times "violence" (Yates v. United States)
* calling law enforcement officers fascists (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire)
* "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] tumultuous or offensive conduct" (Cohen v. California)
* "endeavoring to arouse the Negro people against the whites, urging that they rise up in arms and fight for equal rights" (Feiner v. New York)
* Selling erotica (Roth v. United States)
* Selling more erotica (Miller v. California)
* Saying 7 words (FCC v. Pacifica Foundation)
* Distributing "obscene or indecent" messages to anyone under 18 (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union)
* Publishing material that depicts "depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion" (Beauharnais v. Illinois)
* Taking out an ad criticizing the police (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)
* Antagonizing a judge (Sacher v. United States)
* Antagonizing the police (Hess v. Indiana)
* Criticizing a congressman (Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus)
* Lying about military service (United States v. Alvarez)
* Protesting wars (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District)
And many many many many others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_the_First_Amendment#Freedom_of_speech
Not all of those cases went in the way of maximal freedoms, but in every single one of those cases, the people who were suppressing the speech thought it was dangerous, or abhorrent or otherwise illegitimate. In many cases, it's likely the speaker themselves was viewed that way. Back to those communist/socialism cases specifically and that was viewed by all "right thinking people" at the time as about as bad as being a Nazi. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that's for each individual listener to decide, not for some authority from on high to forcibly stop.
Whatever happened to "stand up to bullies?" I guess that fighting back is just bad american values. Far better to give the bullies whatever they want as soon as you can or else you might be undermining their first amendement rights.
Or do only these things apply when its the liberals fighting back? Hmmmm.....
Nothing happened to it. Stand up to bullies. But proportional force is also called for. One doesn't get to shoot their bullies because they called them a "four eyes". Heck I'm sure our recent president thought many a media organization were being bullies. I don't know about you but I'm awful glad we have strong free speech rules and norms that prevented him from shutting down everyone and everything that didn't kowtow to him.
A braying mob is not inherently fascist, not according to the "definition" anyway.
Well sure, if there's one thing extremists of all types can agree on, it's those damn moderates and their calls for civility and free speech that are the true problem.
Or less sarcastically, the reason we're talking about "civility" and the finer points of free speech is because actual incivility and suppression of free speech took place. If we wanted to discuss well funded advocacy of fascism, there are many ways to do that without using actual fascism to accomplish it. In the hierarchy of "things that are important to stop" actual suppression of free speech is higher on the list than advocacy of suppressing free speech.
It's funny how I keep getting comments that I'm advocating suppression of speech. That's telling. That shows how effective this trolling tactic is. The bullies get sympathy because they were shouted down, just as they hoped they would be, because they knew it would actually increase the reach of their sick message. It's so easy, and so many otherwise intelligent people fall for it every time.
My original most made very clear I believe the protesters chose a dumb tactic. Shouting down the bully doesn't work. Humiliating the bully with mockery works. One of the reasons it works is because it humor gets to the heart and truth of the matter, and when "neutral" observers are compelled by humor to laugh at the bully, it deflates the bully's power instantly. The neutral observer realizes that the person they were giving the benefit of the doubt to does not deserve it--that they're simply a bully who deals in lies and aggression.
And once again--the protesters' response was the wrong tactic, but an understandable one. They feel that they and their friends and loved ones are under attack--and they are correct. The bullies we are talking about are sadists who want to inflict pain on vulnerable people simply to score political points and fleece money off of rubes.
They don't have a whole TV network? Sorry, was MSNBC founded this morning? I guess that (to a lesser extent) CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN are also brand new? I just this second invented late-night comedy and forged from raw geneseed the likes of John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers. I might have also just founded every major news and opinion page in the nation and peopled them with every over-educated, overly affluent midwit in existence, with the (lukewarm) exception of the Wall Street Journal. I'm god, is my point.
C'mon man.
And here we go, predictably. "But what about MSNBC?!!" False equivalencies are the lifeblood of fascist propaganda. Sorry, but Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson. Not even close. You aren't comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with strychnine.
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they donтАЩt. The main problem is that progressives donтАЩt communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people donтАЩt automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual тАЬfascistsтАЭ end up looking reasonable, not just to тАЬWWCтАЭ but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now arenтАЩt тАЬbetter luck next timeтАЭ as it might have been in the 1980s. When youтАЩre facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like тАЬthey meant wellтАЭ donтАЩt cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is тАЬ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.тАЭ
The second is тАЬpeople who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the leftтАЩs social and economic agenda) are тАШbullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,тАЩ and donтАЩt deserve the right to free speech.тАЭ
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because itтАЩs adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
тАЬI hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.тАЭ
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Bouie is not merely "scrutinizing" it. This is part of a larger attempt at discrediting the Enlightenment through a left identitarian frame, as made clear by Liam Kofi Bright: https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2022/04/why-i-am-not-liberal.html
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
TheyтАЩre a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and MurdochтАЩs NY Post. I wouldnтАЩt lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but theyтАЩre also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think itтАЩs probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, IтАЩd say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said TuckerтАЩs point was that the тАЬrightтАЭ at the time (and even less now) doesnтАЩt have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless itтАЩs a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. тАЬThey worry about things like making sure they spell a personтАЩs name rightтАЭ. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didnтАЩt then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede TuckerтАЩs point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And thatтАЩs why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use тАЬleft leaningтАЭ msm as their main source for reliable information.
If we got rid of the electoral college, this wouldnтАЩt be a discussion. The grand Putin party would be a footnote.