Free Speech

Matt Welch | 1.7.2025 1:22 PM

There is a plausible theory of the case for the dramatic rise in illiberal, speech-stultifying wokeness in America beginning a dozen or so years ago: that it's largely a bottom-up, millennial affair.

"In late 2013," Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), explained in Reason's January 2022 issue, "there was an explosion in censorship that was student-led….The generation hitting campuses in 2013 had been educated by the graduates of…activist education schools. In some cases they were literally the children of the students who had pushed for (or at least were OK with) speech codes in the '80s and '90s."

Tuesday's 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre—when a dozen staffers of the satirical antiauthoritarian weekly, including some of France's most beloved cartoonists, were gunned down by Islamists claiming offense at the depiction and mockery of their religion's prophet—is a timely reminder that the West's free speech knees got wobbly long before the millennials hit middle school. And it was political leaders, not stinky college kids, who led the retreat.

The late Jimmy Carter was a noteworthy case in point. On March 4, 1989, less than three weeks after the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a million-dollar bounty on the head of author Salman Rushdie for the supposed blasphemy of critically depicting Muhammad in the novel The Satanic Verses, Carter, less than a decade out of the White House, authored a remarkably awful New York Times op-ed under the headline "Rushdie's Book Is an Insult."

"While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important," Carter to-be-sure'd, "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility. This is the kind of intercultural wound that is difficult to heal."

Thus was introduced an almost impressive number of moral and rhetorical sleights of hand that have since the fatwa bedeviled liberalism's discourse in the face of direct murderous threats: the unconvincing throat-clear, the literary/social criticism prompted not by intellectual curiosity but by physical violence, the touristic and condescending assumption of blanket offense, the unidirectional sacralization of "beliefs," the euphemistic downplaying of the heckler's veto........

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