Greenfield: The First Casualty of Culture War is Free Speech

The First Casualty of Culture War is Free Speech Standing for the anthem is the new counterculture. September 29, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Don’t like millionaire black nationalists in the NFL refusing to stand for the anthem?

The same left that decided James Damore didn’t have freedom of speech at Google now insists that football players have it at the NFL. Never mind that the Google engineer was unknown until his firing while NFL players are celebrities whose behavior is televised nationwide to audiences of millions.

The left’s recent reunion with free speech came after vocally insisting that free speech was harmful, hurtful and racist. And the reunion didn’t last long. Right after insisting that the right of NFL black nationalists not to stand for the anthem was free speech, the left pivoted to accusing those players still standing for the anthem of “white supremacy”.

The First Amendment protects unpopular speech as much as it protects popular speech. But popular speech doesn’t need much protecting. It’s unpopular speech that has to be defended.

And the nature of unpopular speech has changed. The anthem protests are a sign of how much.

When standing for the anthem becomes unpopular speech while demeaning it is popular speech, then the old measures of what kind of free speech needs defending no longer look anything like they used to.

Standing for the anthem has become the new counterculture. The question is, how do we protect it?

The biggest threat to free speech isn’t really government action. At least not right now. The Obama era saw ugly crimes against free speech that ranged from the arrest of a filmmaker for a YouTube video offending Muslims to eavesdropping on reporters to using the DOJ to investigate jokes about Obama.

But the real free speech threat was a crowdsourced culture war which manufactured its own social sanctions. The culture war is the collision between a secular leftist value system that its followers seek to forcefully impose on the entire country and the existing system of American values. When these two sets of opposing values collide, as they do when conservative speakers come to campus, Christian photographers refuse to participate in gay weddings or a tech company employee questions diversity, the most obvious victim is free speech. But free speech is always the first casualty of the culture war.

Speech is the lifeblood of culture. To win a culture war, you have to shut the other side up.

In the first phase of the culture war, the left seized the commanding heights of the media. Movies, television, music, newspapers and radio were consolidated into a network echoing the same ideas. This was largely done without any compulsion though victims of the old Fairness Doctrine might disagree. Outliers like conservative talk radio remained, but much like FOX News, they highlighted the homogeneity of the rest of the media. Everyone was getting the same set of political ideas all the time.

And, most impressively, a massive propaganda machine had been built without any of the brutality of the old USSR. Instead the machinery of capitalism had created a monopoly constantly spewing socialism.

But the old infrastructure model was quickly disrupted by the arrival of the internet.

The media coup had monopolized speech by monopolizing infrastructure. If you had enough licenses, printing presses and broadcasting facilities, you didn’t have to forcibly silence anyone. They just couldn’t be heard over the roar of your media machine.

The internet broke that model. Anyone could speak to millions with a site, a blog and a tweet.

Control was quickly reasserted. The media’s old stable brands were diversified with millennial internet brands. BuzzFeed and CNN might be wildly different in style, but they were vehicles for the same political message. The left still had the advertising industry connections and the networks to dominate messaging. Its entertainment side was expert at commodifying cool.

But the internet in general, and social media specifically, had altered the power relationship.

CNN and the New York Times didn’t care if you disagreed with them. You could try writing letters to the editor. You might even summon a small protest outside their headquarters. And it wouldn’t shake their monopoly over speech in any way. But speech on the internet is crowdsourced. The algorithms can be rigged, and occasionally are, but individuals still have too much choice and too much voice.

You couldn’t talk back to your TV. But you can talk back to CNN. And people can hear you.

The second phase of the culture war can only be won by controlling everyone’s free speech. The media has been trying to rig the game at the big tech company level. It’s gotten Facebook and Google to agree to political censorship under the guise of fighting “fake news” with “fact checking”. But even the term “fake news”, once the banner headline of the media’s censorship crusade, was hijacked by Trump.

Once upon a time, derailing a media narrative in such a short time would have been nearly impossible.

And that’s why the second phase of the culture war is underway. The internet has made it impossible to proceed with the culture war without destroying free speech. It’s why the New York Times is running serial anti-free speech pieces (even while condemning President Trump for threatening free speech).

The only way for the left to win the second phase is to either fundamentally change the structure of the internet so that it more closely resembles its old media model or to silence everyone who opposes it.

Changing the internet is an ambition that the American left now shares with leftist regimes like the People’s Republic of China. But even with the consolidation of the internet in the hands of a handful of big companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, it remains an improbable project. The hysteria over election tampering doesn’t just serve the purposes of the Dem coup plot against Trump. It also creates a casus belli for political “fake news” censorship and deeper changes to individual agency on the internet.

If China and (ironically) Russia ever get their dream of a completely censorable internet, it will be the left that built it for them as part of a plot against free speech disguised as a xenophobic political panic.

But the easier course is still crowdsourced censorship under the guidance of the media network.

Surveys show that the generation that came of age in the wild and open spaces of the internet is also the most illiberal when it comes to free speech. Growing up screaming at each other in YouTube comments sections and Xbox Live tournaments has made for touchiness, not tolerance.

The culture war of identity politics is a natural fit for the most diverse and narcissistic generation whose greatest skill is still being nasty to other people on the internet while playing the heroic victim.

If you’re going to crowdsource censorship, it helps to keep your censors personally invested. And that’s what identity politics does. It also doesn’t hurt that some of the worst violations of the Constitution in the last several generations were enacted in the name of fighting bigotry. If you are going to end free speech, the best flag to fly is still anti-racism. And if you’re going to demean the anthem, do it by claiming to be the victim of racism even when you’re a privileged black nationalist celebrity who sees more money in one year than most working people of any race will ever see in an entire lifetime.

The quiet reshaping of the national culture is no longer an option. The culture war uses harassment, shaming and even violence to silence speech by those it opposes and to impose its speech instead.

It’s not just about silencing those you don’t like. It’s about creating a safe space in which your views are the only ones that can be heard. Professional victimhood is the pose of professional victimizers. And the best evidence of that is how easily they turn to violence when they don’t get their own way. Social justice crybullies go from shouting, “I can’t breathe” to wrapping their hands around their victim’s necks.

The culture war is a conflict between two sets of values. These values are meaningful and personal. Like the anthem, they stir our hearts, command our respect and embody the best of us.

And the left wages its culture war by attacking American values while demanding respect for its own.

The anthem must be disrespected, but Black Lives Matter can’t be criticized. Piss Christ must be displayed in museums, but don’t you dare wear a sombrero for Halloween. Speakers who praise Hamas and call for the murder of Jews are welcome on campus. But there’s no room for thinkers who praise free enterprise.

The left doesn’t reject free speech because it’s a bunch of easily triggered “snowflakes”. It rejects free speech because it wants absolute power. And the first step is killing a free and open society.

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An excellent article, and thanks for posting. The wars for the Internet began quite some time ago, and this site, FR, has been in the front lines from the outset. On a broader scale these very same wars began the first time someone in government decided that only government could own a printing press. He lost that one. It was tried again in many places, most successfully in the Soviet Union, which lost the war to samizdat anyway. Now once more the totalitarian impulse raises its head for another try.

The old media model, at least in the countries where the Internet arose, was and remains heavily corporate, and it is through the corporation that the latest attempt at control is operating. Google's "don't be evil" has become a joke; Facebook is openly deleting entire threads and users its proprietors don't like, Twitter is currently a red-hot battleground. But so long as there is competition, so long as all of those corporations fear that a competitor will arise, then they know they cannot manage the necessary monopoly on opinion. But with the State's help, they can, and it is that marriage that has so corrupted the conventional media entirely out of recognition and into the monolithic monster it has become.

"Hate Speech is not protected" means simply that whoever gets to define Hate Speech has the monopoly in hand. No wonder every totalitarian heart beats to its cadence. That can squelch the competition, that can solidify political power in the hands of an elite few. It's an excellent working definition of tyranny and it cannot be allowed.

Conservative pundits could help by reminding listeners that freedom of speech is freedom of governmental intrusion

The football players have the legal right to kneel during the Anthem but everyone else has the right to say they are seditious in doing so. The NFL has the right to fire them.

It is not fun to watch Hannity scuffle through a debate and not get this basic concept

One wonders whether he is neglecting it for ratings or if he is an idiot

“Free speech” is NOT free...a lot of people died so we can have it.

The main advice Americans should heed is, USE IT, OR LOSE IT”.

Sitting on your thumb and watching the ANTIFA crowd take over, is the best way to lose your freedom of speech.

USE IT, OR LOSE IT.

” The same left that decided James Damore didn’t have freedom of speech at Google now insists that football players have it at the NFL.”

Here is the key to understanding the left, they do or say whatever advances their agenda TODAY. It can be the opposite of what they did or said yesterday as long as it helps them today. That’s why they can be against free speech one day and for it the next. Same for women’s issues, the environment, etc.

This is the genius of Greenfield... He sees what's 'obvious' that none of us have really quite seen or understood until he explained it... Yes, it's why they fear us - it's why they've brought out the metaphorical long knives... we are a threat.

This is how the left has always won in the Culture War.

Take something good, twist the meaning into an abomination to suit their own wants, then hammer all opposition with the mutated thing.

This is also why “conservatism” is dying out as a managed ideology. “Conservatives” fall for this every. damn. time.

[snip] Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. [/snip]

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple: Our Culture, What’s Left Of It
interviewed by Jamie Glazov | Frontpage | August 31, 2005
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7445

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