Panelists: Noam Chomsky
Moderator: Mark White
Description: Noam Chomsky offers his thoughts on what defines the left and on the enduring principle of free speech. Noam Chomsky is a longtime scholar, author, teacher, intellectual, activist and social critic.
Noam Chomsky is a longtime scholar, author, teacher, intellectual, activist and social critic.
One of the hallmarks of today’s woke left is to conflate speech with violence. Fearful of the ‘harm’ that might be experienced from hearing certain words, the woke left has become widely confused about the issue of free speech in general and between speech and literal, physical violence.
In New Zealand this week, Posie Parker was assaulted as she tried to speak–a mob surrounded her and forced her off the stage and ultimately out of the country. The group that prevented her from speaking has taken to social media to declare a great victory.
In the abstract, people mostly agree that book banning is a bad thing. The Nazis did us the favor of being very clear about it and literally burning books, but there are rarely cases that are so unambiguously wrong.
In our current culture, it is more common that reading certain books may be punished rather than the books themselves being outright banned. This more subtle form of social control encourages one of the most insidious threats to freedom–the tendency in all of us to self-censor what we read, think and say.
If you want to fan the flames of fascism, keep doing things like this, Penn State students!
Several days ago Penn State, a top-ranked U.S. research university, known for its football team and its programs in engineering, business, and marketing, began trending on social media for something entirely different.
The event was to feature Gavin McInnes, cofounder of the right-wing organization Proudboys and comedian, provocateur Alex Stein. Student opinion was very strongly against allowing these individuals to speak, and violent protests developed.
Recently, Oklahoma University contributed their own stark example of how the core values of free speech and critical thinking are being misunderstood and misapplied in the spheres of what we call ‘higher education’.