Yep its anarcho-tyranny: if our Leftist ruling elite supports you and your activities, you can do whatever you want; otherwise …”step out of line and the Man is coming to take you away!”
Even as I write this, I can feel the Overton Window shifting. Let the record show that when a death squad descended on Pamela Geller’s event in Texas with the aim of killing Geller for speaking freely, the “mainstream” response was to provide the death squad with golden parachutes of sophistry and moral equivalence. It was the finest of East Coast intellectual output.
I’ve lost count of how many sophistic articles have been published so far, but surely one of the most egregious came from Noah Feldman, JD, PhD, at Bloomberg View. In opening paragraphs so glib they seem to have oozed out of some used car salesman’s Brylcreemed pompadour, Feldman writes:
It’s easy to be distracted by the condemnation of the crime, which should be absolute. No verbal provocation can justify killing.
But it’s also easy to be distracted by the First Amendment.
Why do people write this kind of thing? What compels someone to consider a case of attempted terrorist murder, arising from the “provocation” of cartoons, and then devote all his forensic acumen to saying, essentially, “Hey! Look over there!”
I wrote last week that the enemies of free speech are slowly nudging their target into the identity-politics framework. In this worldview, there are Oppressors and the Oppressed, and the roles are irreversible. It’s all narrative: the interlocking assumptions that determine how people interpret real-world events. The identity-politics framework sees American society (all of Western civilization, in fact) as a structure, a machine expertly tuned to produce benefits only for the Oppressor. Some people always win; some always lose. Thus Geller is the real aggressor, even when she’s being shot at. The death squad was merely reacting to overwhelming forces within the structure.
This is the basic logic behind most of our contemporary debate, such as it is, on everything from free speech to immigration to race riots to voter ID laws. There are hard and soft versions of it. Some people come right out and say that the Oppressed should use violence against their Oppressors. This group is often very theoretical, using the unwieldy concepts and jargon they learned in their cultural studies courses. You see them at places like (of course) Salon and The Nation and the post-Peretz New Republic.
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