The atmosphere on campuses has gotten repressive enough that comedian Chris Rock no longer plays colleges. Citing examples such as University of California at Berkeley students trying to bar an appearance by Bill Maher because of his anti-Muslim jokes, Rock told New York that he “stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative… Not in their political views—not like they’re voting Republican—but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody… You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”
As my Reason colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written, progressives may well come to rue the day they signed on to laws forbidding controversial speech based on the speaker’s perceived motivations. A Brooklyn graffiti artist was charged with a hate crime because her message criticized the NYPD and a professor lost a tenured position at the University of Illinois because his anti-Israel comments were labeled “hate speech.”
In America, these are the sorts of incursions against free speech and a truly unregulated marketplace of ideas that will persist and likely grow long after the dead in Paris are forgotten (just as Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s ghastly murder has been). We will likely never face the explicit limits on speech, religion, and association imposed by European countries, but we are kidding ourselves if we think similarly effective repression cannot happen here.
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