Free Speech Under Attack - Censorship in 2023
Today, in 2023, free speech is under attack from all sides. By this I mean that the “left” has made it clear that “insults” (especially against Jews, homosexuals, transgenders, blacks, women, immigrants, any “minorities”, Muslims, etc.) will not be tolerated. Unfortunately, these people believe that every group or individual gets to decide what is or is not an “insult”, with the result being that free speech no longer exists in the West because of this extreme “political correctness”, as I call it.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. Disproportionate punishments are routinely meted out to targets of public shaming by institutional leaders conducting "panicked damage control". We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, thinkers, philosophers, politicians, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. In the last half decade, a number of figures have been shamed online for making comments considered offensive by some, including on topics of race, gender and sexuality. In some cases, employers took action against the individual after sustained and targeted criticism.
Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.
People are being hounded for perceived moral slip-ups. It has become a modern-day witch-hunt of political correctness which has the most chilling effect on free speech and freedom of opinion. For example, in June 2020, the New York Times' opinion editor resigned amid outrage over a piece by a Republican senator calling for military forces to be sent to cities where anti-racism protests had turned violent. And in January of that same year, publisher Flatiron Books cancelled author Jeanine Cummins's tour after her novel American Dirt was strongly condemned for stereotypical descriptions of Mexicans.
During the recent covid-19 pandemic and surrounding debates, an older white American, who was simply trying to participate in the debate about how to avoid being infected with covid, threw out the idea that perhaps black Americans had higher rates of covid because they didn’t wash their hands as often as white Americans. This was just an idea, and democracies work when people are allowed to express their ideas, and debate them. Science works when scientists form a hypothesis around an idea and then test it. Unfortunately, the response from society to this man’s idea was to so demonize him that he was fired from his job and could not find another, was branded the worst sort of racist, and was ostracized and harshly “punished” by society at large. Anyone defending him was also punished and made to appear to be a racist of the worst kind.
This is such a good example of what is wrong with America and the world today: censorship pervades all facets of society, and freedom of speech, opinion and association is being abridged more and more each year. A “litmus test” of “political correctness” is being applied to anyone who participates in societal and political debates, and American society is becoming increasingly polarized – namely because absolute freedom of speech is no longer allowed. When people criminalize criticism, as certain groups of people have been doing in America for a half-century or more now, then polarization increases and society moves towards battle and civil war, rather than towards the peaceful co-existence that absolute freedom of speech allows.
Various politicized groups are now censoring free speech on any issue that upsets their belief structures, so much so that there is now a severe restriction of the debate about scores of cultural, social, economic and political issues – important issues which are on most people’s minds today.
Recent outcries on “racial justice” and “social inclusion regarding people who choose non-mainstream sexual and gender orientations” have fueled a stifling of open debate. There now exists a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and a blinding moral certainty over very controversial issues. The “politically correct” do not want a debate, they want blind obedience to and acceptance of their points of view.
On the right of the political spectrum, free speech is also under attack, with environmentalists and serious ecologically-minded scientists being censored, so that what they say or report does not harm powerful interests and businesses like the fossil fuel industry, or orthodox religion, etc.
Science needs the freedom and liberty to search for the Truth without fear of censorship or reprisal if the Truth does not fit with the ideological, political, economic, or religious beliefs of those who have and wield Power.