The scandal of free speech

To which one can only reply: tranny-tranny-tranny; Muhammad-Muhammad-Muhammad; de-da-da-da. Free speech—at least speech that is truly free—is always a scandal to someone or other. Chill out and deal with it.

But deal with it we won’t. People forget just how radical is the idea of free speech. For more that 2,000 years—between, say, the executions of Socrates and Giordano Bruno —the story of the West was the story of killing blasphemers. Enlightenment began when we started to repent the practice; modernity survives under the shield of the First Amendment and equivalent laws in the free world. But the arrows always keep coming.

I doubt the Charlie Hebdo murders will do much to shake loose the array of campus speech codes or change the incentive structures for their enforcers in sundry administrative offices and multicultural-affairs departments.