The Silencers

[Valin]

City Journal:

Fred Siegel

August 16, 2016

 

The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, by Kimberly Strassel (Twelve Press, 396 pp., $30)

 

I Find that Offensive!, by Claire Fox (Biteback Publishing, 179 pp., $14.95)

 

The intense polarization of American life was captured in 2008 by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, a product of Chicago’s big-city pugilistic politics. Referring to the Republican opposition, he told a Philadelphia fundraiser that “if they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.” In The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Speech, Kimberly Strassel, a Wall Street Journal columnist, shows that Obama’s rhetoric was more than just a metaphor. Strassel presents a richly reported account of the political weaponry Obama and his allies have used to silence their conservative foes.

 

Strassel’s chapters on the politicization of the IRS in Obama’s hands make for a striking summary of Chicago skullduggery. In 2012, an election year, the IRS, led by liberal operative Lois Lerner, systematically sidelined conservative (often Tea Party) organizations. The broadest and deepest scandal in IRS history is more than three years old, but there is little chance that Obama’s Chicago-ized Justice Department will hold anyone accountable. Strassel also discusses the attempts led by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Dick Durbin of Illinois to criminalize criticism of the standard-issue UN position on climate change. The senators insist that manmade climate change is a matter of “settled science.” But climate is always changing, and science is never settled.

 

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In I Find that Offensive!, Claire Fox of the British Institute of Ideas explains why the left-liberal disdain for free expression has taken hold in academia. In the United States, free-speech advocates such as F.I.R.E (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) point to the misuse of title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which banned discrimination based on sex, as the source of the problem. In recent years, the Obama Justice Department has unilaterally expanded Title IX’s ambit to include speech that might cause offense.

 

Title IX has proved a useful mechanism for American academic censors, but the bigger problem, Fox makes clear, is that British and American academics have turned against the Enlightenment ideal of reasoned debate. One of the many virtues of Fox’s book is that by drawing on developments in both England and America, she shows that speakers are being shunned and free speech repressed, on both sides of the Atlantic, without the need of a Title IX to justify the tomfoolery. Shorn of a commitment to reason, young campus snowflakes came to believe that a verbal lashing could do the same kind of damage as a whiplashing. Fox also found a curious conjuncture between precious young neo-Victorian women who demand “safe spaces” and Muslim students who insist on the right not to be offended by the secular strictures of science.

 

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