The Woke Mob Slavering After Tucker Carlson’s Job Are Proving Him Right
The utilitarian logic, that we must turn down the volume on some people before they do it to us, has no end. After all, who gets the remote?
By T. Elliot Gaiser
June 22, 2020
A decade ago, I got a hard lesson in practical freedom. My summer boss — then and now a famous media personality — told me and the other interns that if we ever disagreed with him on any subject, he would debate us then and there, proof of his commitment to freedom of thought and speech.
I took him on one day about a controversy in the news. He gave me the floor, then respectfully mopped it with me. Today, he holds the opposite position on that issue, loudly taking up my old position in recent months. Perhaps someone more persuasive came along. The practical freedom we had to reason together worked.
As turmoil has swept our streets and Facebook feeds, however, we’ve lost sight of the importance of our free speech culture: Human beings are both fallible and redeemable, so words can change minds and reorient hearts.
But following horrific images of callous death mingled with riots, too many Americans are learning the wrong lesson about how we need to respond: Say the wrong thing, or fail to say the right thing, and you might find yourself canceled, life ruined, with no hope of redemption from your 15 minutes of shame. While the formal First Amendment remains, the practical freedom to speak slips away.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/22/the-woke-mob-slavering-after-tucker-carlsons-job-are-proving-him-right/
