And if we don’t fight these snowflake kids and the entitled professors who support them, if we don’t insist that the views they are suppressing get heard, then we are ringing the death knell of civil society. With their safe spaces and trigger warnings, they stifle intellectual debate, protesting even the appearance of anyone whom they happen to disagree with. Today's lefty college students, goes the narrative popularized in a 2015 Atlantic article, “ The Coddling of the American Mind,” are insulating themselves from opinions they don’t like. The narrative that has emerged in recent years is familiar: College campuses have become ground zero for a new generation of intolerant leftists. TO UNDERSTAND THE origins of the free-speech movement, its priorities, and its funding, you have to start not at today’s social media battlefields, but at college campuses.
#Animus vox youtube free#
It is by and large funded by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers, who whip up anger about the “intolerant left” in order to stymie opposition to their social, economic, and political agenda.Īt a time when the far right has declared war on dissent, protest, and the press in much of the world-from Orban's Hungary to Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel to Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil to Donald Trump's United States-the cover that the false prophets of free speech give to demagogues could not be more dangerous. But there's a more serious and troubling dynamic at play: The “free speech movement,” including not only online pundits but also think tanks, academics, activist groups, and their mainstream popularizers, has always been about free speech for the right-and suppressing the speech of everyone else. It's easy to dismiss the outrage and inconsistency of online free-speech warriors who profit off of controversy. Indeed, IDW members and their acolytes have repeatedly fought against allowing those they disagree with a platform to speak. Crowder’s defenders have also neglected to mention that he once went with a camera crew to the workplace of a commenter he disagreed with, harassing them and trying to get them fired.
These figures-who self-identify as classical liberals, conservatives, and libertarians-say that their project is completely non-ideological: It's just about giving everyone a fair hearing.īut these same free-speech warriors went mum earlier this month when one of their own, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, met with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who has bragged about making Hungary “ an illiberal state, a non-liberal state,” and has provoked mass protests for cracking down on academic freedom.
#Animus vox youtube Offline#
You've probably heard their arguments before: They claim to be opposed to censorship, “no-platforming” (when people are excluded from online or offline forums because of the views they express), and any attempts to discourage the open expression of ideas. Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and other pundits who have made their name online for defending free speech-particularly those organized under the umbrella of the so-called “ Intellectual Dark Web,” or IDW-have made Crowder a martyr of a pernicious war on civil discourse. The incident set a certain set of free-speech warriors ablaze. Crowder had been called out by Vox journalist Carlos Maza for a long history of homophobic abuse, including calling Maza “a lispy queer” and selling T-shirts that say “Socialism Is for Fags.” You'd be forgiven for thinking that, following the outcry of politicians and commentators over YouTube’s temporary decision to demonetize the videos of conservative pundit Steven Crowder, who makes money from the ads provided by YouTube’s platform.
There is a war on free speech, and the front lines are YouTube ads.
Charles Koch speaks in his office at Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas.
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