{"id":6325,"date":"2023-10-12T15:53:08","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T15:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=6325"},"modified":"2023-10-12T16:07:03","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T16:07:03","slug":"hard-to-win-over-wisconsinites-if-your-only-argument-is-shut-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=6325","title":{"rendered":"Hard to win over Wisconsinites if your only argument is \u2018shut up\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/hard-to-win-over-wisconsinites-if-your-only-argument-is-shut-up\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The American tradition of free speech runs up against rage at colleges, but there are signs of hope\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

It was startling, but surely not surprising, when protesters disrupted an online discussion<\/a> by a panel of black conservatives<\/a> at the University of Wisconsin-Madison last month.<\/p>\n

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\"Man<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThis happens all the time,\u201d said a panelist, Wilfred<\/a> Reilly<\/a>. \u201cAny time you try to do a campus speech, you get crowds of people trying to fight you.\u201d Organizers cut off the Zoom feed after one of the protesters began self-pleasuring on-camera. \u201cHe could also use some testosterone therapy,\u201d Reilly quipped.<\/p>\n

It was an in-the-flesh illustration, so to speak, of surveys that show a diminishing tolerance for free speech. A poll in September<\/a> found that nearly half of Democrats felt free expression is permissible \u201conly under certain circumstances.\u201d Bad enough that half of Republican respondents felt government should restrict \u201chateful\u201d words on social media; worse was that three-fourths of Democrats did.<\/p>\n

Such sentiment could be seen in the edge-of-panic huffing at UW-Madison last month over an itinerant preacher<\/a>, Cindy Smock<\/a>, who brought her TikTok-famous \u201cHo No Mo Revolution\u201d to a sidewalk outside the library. She urged passersby to give up libertine sex and drunkenness, salting the message with references to Cardi B\u2019s 2020 hit song<\/a> about bodily fluids<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This, the head of a campus \u201csex positivity\u201d group said to a campus newspaper, \u201cmarginalizes\u201d students who like having lots of sex. It was harmful<\/em>, she said. A student government leader told the same reporter that for authorities to not silence Smock attacks students\u2019 \u201cability to exist on this campus.\u201d Another campus commentator called<\/a> for Smock to be shouted down.<\/p>\n

That would mirror how UW-Madison protesters treated<\/a> a speech last October by commentator Matt Walsh, whose documentary \u201cWhat is a Woman<\/a>\u201d included interviews of transgender rights activists stumped by the question. That speech went on despite raging protests<\/a> with activists eating pages from a purloined Bible and chanting<\/a>, \u201cF*ck your system, f*ck your hate, we are not here for debate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t like? Don\u2019t listen.\u00a0<\/h4>\n

They\u2019re saying no to debate and, what is more, no to the customary American way of living in a free society where people say things you disfavor: not listening. It\u2019s not hard. Don\u2019t sign up for the webinar if you can\u2019t stand black conservatives calmly discussing policy. Don\u2019t stop by the woman preaching sexual continence if you don\u2019t want to hear it.<\/p>\n

Or offer a convincing alternative: Does a group named Sex Out Loud really feel it cannot outdraw puritan preachers on campus?<\/p>\n

Maybe not. Among leftist students and faculty, \u201cthe fragility is astonishing,\u201d said James \u201cDuke\u201d Pesta, an English professor at UW-Oshkosh. The more you surround yourself entirely with those who think like you, the less practice you have at debate and the more threatened you are by dissent, he said.<\/p>\n

This would explain the wish for authorities to purge the sidewalks and social media of dissent. It\u2019s not that someone doesn\u2019t want to hear black conservatives talk. It\u2019s that they don\u2019t want you<\/em> to hear them talk. You might listen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bad and the hopeful<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h4>\n

There are two conclusions to draw, as I see it. One is grim: If a shut-up ethic now prevails among leaders of student government, it soon will be incontestable in grown-up government. As UW\u2019s Thompson Center on Public Leadership found in a 2020 survey of undergrads<\/a>, about 40% of your future colleagues and leaders<\/a> felt the government should silence \u201cclimate change deniers,\u201d for example.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s why campus antics matter, why it\u2019s good that Pesta and a bipartisan group of Wisconsinites have organized Free Speech for Campus<\/a>, which bills itself as a grassroots attempt to defend what its name says.<\/p>\n

Pesta reckons that a minority of students are committed progressives, while most are apolitical. But apoliticals and even conservatives, he said, \u201ctalk like progressives,\u201d pressured into treating words as harmful. \u201cIt\u2019s like they\u2019re walking in a minefield,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The data support him: A supermajority of conservative students<\/a> in a UW system-wide survey finally released<\/a> last winter said they were pressured by an instructor to conform to an ideological view, while only a fifth of leftist students did. Perhaps conservatives detected that among their \u201cvery liberal\u201d classmates, 58% felt certain viewpoints could be seen as an \u201cact of violence.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a cheerier conclusion, too: The opponents of American constitutional liberty, traditionally understood, have no arguments left, only masturbatory gestures of insult.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was almost childlike,\u201d said Robert Woodson, one of the interrupted black conservatives, later. Pesta noted this, too: Those who oppose free speech, and the other individual liberties it supports, have never had to cope with serious questioning and so are left with no answers, only puerility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no cogent ideological basis for their beliefs,\u201d he said. Their rage signals their emptiness: \u201cThey can\u2019t convince you what the truth is, so they damn well are going to force you to parrot what they say.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not a winning message.<\/p>\n

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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The post Hard to win over Wisconsinites if your only argument is \u2018shut up\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Badger Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/hard-to-win-over-wisconsinites-if-your-only-argument-is-shut-up\/ The American tradition of free speech runs up against…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-badger-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6325"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6328,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6325\/revisions\/6328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}