The Trouble with Banning Critical Race Theory
The Republican Party has decided to make critical race theory its current bugaboo, and academic freedom is likely to suffer for it.
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Politics
740 posts
Why I Am a Radical Moderate
I am a radical moderate. When I say I’m a moderate, I don’t mean that I’m a wobbly centrist who can’t make up his mind. Rather, I mean something akin…
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The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari
Sohrab Ahmari is a man searching for something bigger than himself to believe in. When he was very young, his family, leery of the Shia fundamentalism of their native Iran,…
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America Is Not a White Supremacist Nation
It has become fashionable in some left-wing circles to regard the US as a white supremacist state. Until about 2017, white supremacists were people who burned crosses on church lawns…
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The Golden Age of Slogans
Free speech suffocates when a requirement to parrot slogans constricts the free exchange of ideas and thoughts in the public square.
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Cancel Culture and the Free Speech Debates
In our public discourse, those who say things that are polemical, simplistic or polarizing tend to receive the most attention. But the world is complex, life is messy, moral intuitions…
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The Right to Remain Silent
But the danger [here] of words in their theoretical insignificance is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation where all sinks always, without hearing the “be silent” addressed to…
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The Lab Leak and Other Conspiracy Theories, Some Of Which Turned Out to Be True
Conspiracy theories are the new evil of our time—or so we thought. Over the past six months, there has been a unified drive from politicians and Big Tech to ban…
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The Free Speech Crisis Runs Deeper Than You Think
The question of whether freedom of speech is under threat has been a point of debate for several years now. Some have argued that the notion of a free speech…
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Free Speech, Civil Rights and the Moral Imperative of Persuasion
The guarantee of freedom of expression in the First Amendment to United States Constitution has never abridged a publisher’s right to determine what content he prints in his newspaper. Just…
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Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote!
In a recent episode of her podcast, Iona Italia expressed frustration about bad arguments against freedom of speech that she’s had to combat over and over again. I am therefore…
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Asking Utopians How: An Alternative Strategy for Defending Freedom of Speech
I used to be woke a good fifteen years before it was called that. You could call it proto-woke, but I called myself a post-Marxist, sometimes a postmodernist. Being a…
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Students Must Stand Up for Their Professors’ Free Speech
Whatever else they may be accused of, British students are not apathetic. On social media and online petition sites, they campaign for social causes and fight for equality. Every so…
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The Limits of Free Speech
Freedom of speech is a fundamental democratic right and a bedrock principle of enlightened society, but it has its limitations. Not only are there legal restrictions to free speech, such…
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What My Soviet Life Has Taught Me About Censorship and Why It Makes Us Dumb
A few years into my American life, I took a class on western thought. The only philosopher on the syllabus familiar to me was Karl Marx, and he wasn’t why…
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What Kinds of Liberal Freedoms Should Democratic Socialists Support?
One of the biggest controversies on the contemporary left today concerns the relationship between leftism and liberalism. People often use the word liberalism to refer to a location on the…
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From Parrhesia to Freeze Peach: The Demotion of Free Speech
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.—George Orwell, 1946 Let’s start with a pop quiz: when he wrote his…
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What If We’re Wrong?
What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move?
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