History is being rewritten and no one seems to notice.
We concur ….
ATL write..
The most successful perversion of the American constitutional order over the last 60 years is almost assuredly the largely unchallenged effort to rewrite the free speech debate. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board released the latest salvo in this decades-long endeavor, bashing Yale Law School students for protesting at student events. It’s been a long strange trip from 1968 Berkeley to 2022 Yale, but here we are.
Back in the 1960s, the fight for free speech meant standing up for protestors disrupting campus to be heard on the important issues of the day. It meant demonstrating against the Vietnam War or standing up for equality on campus. Reactionary politicians ran against the idea of free speech. Ronald Reagan ascended to the California governorship pledging to “clean up” Berkeley by cracking down on this unfettered freedom of speech.
But somewhere along the way, the conservative movement realized it’s a lot easier to redefine speech than fight it.
A group of protesters disrupted a recent Yale Federalist Society event. According to the WSJ, “A hundred or so students heckled and tried to shout down the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance.” Anyone familiar with the protests of the 1960s or, well, anything about the history of the First Amendment for the first 200-some-odd years of the country would identify the protestors as the embodiment of free speech on campus.
In fact, the Simpsons have graced television long enough that we can see how, in the 1990s, everyone understood the visual grammar of what free speech looked like.
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