Column
Not All Opinions Matter
The ‘both sides’ myth will end up killing vulnerable Americans
Let’s say it again, once and for all: Free speech doesn’t mean that you get to say whatever you want, wherever you want, without consequence. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism, and whether your opinion is bad, boring, or brilliant — no one is required to listen to it, or to give you a platform.
I make this clarification because while police across the country are violently attacking peaceful protesters — actual state suppression of speech — powerful people are working hard to characterize disinterest or criticism as some kind of horrific rights violation.
In just the last week, Ivanka Trump bemoaned “cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination,” because a Kansas college rescinded their invitation for her to give a digital commencement address; Sen. Tom Cotton accused leadership at the New York Times of “surrender[ing] to a woke child mob” after editors apologized for running Cotton’s op-ed calling for the use of military force against anti-racist protesters; famed Harry Potter author JK Rowling called the backlash against a series of her transphobic tweets, “woman-hate;” and New York Magazine writer Andrew Sullivan was turned into a free-speech martyr because his editors simply weren’t interested in…
