Newspeak Is Now

Does anyone still doubt that we have entered the world of Orwell’s 1984?  If so, consider this example of Newspeak that is being embraced across the political spectrum.

     On many of our more prestigious college and university campuses, free speech is under serious attack.  The campus left—which, on many campuses, is almost everyone—has decided that dissenting voices are simply not to be tolerated.  Whatever the left doesn’t want to hear is labeled “hate speech.”  It “triggers” people, producing debilitating fear or hysterical outbursts.  If the awful speech cannot be prevented, we must provide “safe spaces” for those who are traumatized by the knowledge that bad things are being said.

     The growing resistance to free speech has manifested itself in a number of interesting ways in recent years.  Every year, there are the “disinvitation” games.  After graduation speakers are announced, students demand that controversial speakers—like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—be “disinvited.”   (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) maintains a very interesting disinvitation database that documents over a decade of these controversies.)  At Emory and several other schools, merely displaying Trump slogans during the campaign was perceived to be a threat.  Students reported feeling unsafe; one thought there was a KKK rally on campus, and another expected shootings to begin any moment.

     Lately, this resistance to free speech has grown more violent.  At Middlebury and Evergreen, students disrupted the schools operations and attacked faculty members.  Other schools have seen violence and threats; Berkeley, of course, never misses an opportunity for a riot.

     This violence is not particularly surprising.  US political culture is coming apart, and I expect we will see a lot more violence, on campuses and elsewhere, before we resolve some of the conflicts that Trump’s election has inflamed.  What is a bit surprising is the rationale that the protestors commonly offer for their violence.  Protestors insist (contrary to numerous Supreme Court rulings) that free speech does not include hate speech.  Hate speech, they insist isn’t really speech at all, but actual violence.  But “hate speech” is just the label du jour for whatever speech the protesters don't want to hear.  (This concept functions much like “socialism” does for the right; it denotes pretty much anything of which one disapproves.)    Silencing such speech, by violence if necessary, is actually protecting free speech.  There you have it:

Speech Is Violence.  Violence Is Speech.

     The left is certainly not alone in its rejection of free speech.  The right has a long history of trying to silence those with whom it disagrees—leftists, feminists, homosexuals, people who aren’t white enough, and so on and on.  But I really cannot recall anyone on the right defending beatings or lynchings as an exercise of free speech.  The NRA’s latest recruiting video, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that they have embraced this Newspeak.   The video concludes that “our” only option is “to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”  There it is again:  lies (speech) are violence, while a clenched fist speaks the truth.

     This video is an excellent piece of agitprop.  The progression of images, with the voiceover account of all the awful things “they” do, evokes a sense of social collapse.  The narration uses emotionally loaded language (e.g., “assassinate real news”) to equate protest with violence.  The “truth” is to be enforced with a “clenched fist.”  One could not ask for a clearer call to violence.

     We’re in deep doo-doo, I think.  While we wait for it to get deeper—not a long wait, I think—here is a bit of humor that brings together guns and unacceptable speech in a way that ought to offend lots of folks.