Sony brass might be cotton candy, but they're iron men compared with the American college student

Liberal, open societies are always vulnerable to encroachments from illiberal forces with sufficient motivation, whether it’s the totalitarians in Pyongyang, the ones in Riyadh, or the ones in Cambridge, Mass. That’s especially true when elites lose their confidence in such liberal principles as free speech and freedom of conscience. As soon as you accept the premise that a person’s right to free speech (or a professor’s ability to conduct his class) is circumscribed by another person’s “right” not to be offended, then you have jettisoned principle entirely, and all that’s left is brute-force negotiation — a situation in which the partisans of liberty and humaneness always find themselves lamentably outnumbered. And if we’ve learned anything from the waning days of Harry Reid, during which Senate Democrats attempted to repeal the First Amendment, it is that our own elites do not have very much confidence in traditional American liberalism.

And that’s the strange thing: The same people who are forever insisting that we need to have “an honest, open dialogue” about this, that, and the other are at the same time working tirelessly to ensure that we cannot have an open, honest dialogue about anything at all: no jokes about brutal and homicidal dictators, no open discussions of criminal law, no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — not without a warning label. All of this is an invitation to mockery, assuming we have permission to mock from Dear Leader.