Free speech, free expression, and the simple right to go about your business without being subjected to attempts at brainwashing or the equivalent of a political inquisition have been under attack for years at colleges and universities, and more recently in the workplace.
Most Americans don't appreciate the seriousness of the threats because, as Tucker Carlson explained in his opening monologue on Wednesday, the press rarely covers them — and when they do, they usually side with the oppressors.
For years, student-based sites like The College Fix and Campus Reform have documented outrageous actions committed by college profs, administrators, and far-left students targeting free speech and conservative thought. Center-right outlets in general have only occasionally noticed some of what's going on.
Visits to the student-based sites' home pages indicate that each has stories which should be but have not been covered by local or national establishment press outlets.
During the Vietnam War era, the press heavily covered college campus demonstrations and violence because it could portray the students involved as heroically overthrowing the supposedly evil establishment. Now that former college radicals have become the establishment, the press has mostly ignored their outrageous statements and actions, giving them virtually free rein to consolidate their academic thought control.
Everyday campus radicalism has pushed thousands of radicalized graduates who don't genuinely believe in freedom of speech, expression, or even thought into workplaces around the country. Their most frightening influence is in deep-blue Silicon Valley. This takes us to Carlson's monologue and follow-up interview with John Daniel Davidson of TheFederalist.com.
After opening with a recap of the press's tumultuous first-year relationship with President Donald Trump, Carlson noted that journalists are wallowing in their victimhood because a Republican President is finally pushing back hard against their serial mistreatment of Republicans, conservative politicians, and others who hold conservative viewpoints. The host correctly noted that the press is ignoring the serious threats to free speech and expression occurring right under their turned-up noses:
Transcript (bolds are mine):
TUCKER CARLSON: The irony, of course, is that free expression really is under attack in this country at the moment, most journalists don't seem to care or even to notice it.
Heterodox views are shouted off campus, and often threatened with violence. Twitter routinely bans accounts for expressing viewpoints its executive oppose. Google tampers with its search results secretly to hide ideas it doesn't like and then fires employees who express those ideas.
And yet weirdly the media applaud all of this. They're not defenders of free expression. They're guardians of orthodoxy, elite orthodoxy.
Carlson then spoke with Davidson about the press's seeming determination to ignore the very real threats:
Transcript:
(Snip 1)
CARLSON: It seems weird to me that they're ignoring the actual crisis in free expression, which is real.
So I've been in the workforce for 26 years. There's never been a time in my lifetime where more people were fired more quickly for expressing their opinions in the workplace. This is an epidemic. I don't ever see coverage of that. Why?
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Well, like you said before, the press chooses not to see that, because all the people who are getting fired have the "wrong" views. You know, you look back to the firing of Brendan Eich at Mozilla —
CARLSON: Yes.
DAVIDSON: — as kind of a canary in the coal mine. You know, that seemed like a long time ago, but that was a harbinger of things to come, that are very widespread with organizations like Facebook and Twitter that are essentially media organizations now, that function like media organizations —
CARLSON: Yes.
DAVIDSON: — that have these draconian policies where they're obviously censoring views that they don't like. They obviously don't really care about free expression —
(Snip 2)
DAVIDSON: ... — and it's troubling to see just how disinterested they are, and uninterested they are, in the issue at all.
(Snip 3)
DAVIDSON: (The press) does not see itself as the guardians of free speech, the guardians of common Americans holding power accountable. They see themselves as, you know, as you say protectors of the status quo.
At Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that disinterest in guarding free speech has extended to helping foreign governments suppress and ban objectionable views and users.
Brendan Eich's "crime," for those unfamiliar with the story, is that he was discovered in 2014 to have donated $1,000 to the campaign for California Proposition 8 in 2008. Prop 8 sought to preserve the one-man, one-woman definition of marriage, and passed by a margin of 4.5 percent.
Eich's forced resignation as CEO of Mozilla was indeed "a harbinger of things to come," aided and abetted by an establishment press which routinely refuses to report newsworthy authoritarian actions on campus and in the workplace — because that neglect advances the leftist causes they overwhelmingly support.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
