Taibbi - "Where have all the liberals gone?"
-
https://www.racket.news/p/where-have-all-the-liberals-gone
I have to ask: where are the rest of the “card-carrying” liberals from the seventies, eighties, and nineties — people like me, who always reflexively opposed restrictions on speech?
Is your argument that private companies can do what they want? Then why did you think otherwise in 1985, when Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center suggested record companies “voluntarily” label as dirty songs like “Darling Nikki,” and call them McCarthyites when they compiled a list of the “Filthy Fifteen” albums? Does that not sound suspiciously like the “Disinformation Dozen”? Why were you on Frank Zappa’s side then, but with blacklisters now?
Do you now think it’s not really censorship if the FBI merely makes its opinion known about content, and doesn’t order takedowns? Did you think the same when the FBI sent a letter to Priority Records complaining about NWA’s “Fuck the Police”? Did you agree then with the ACLU, whose Southern California chairman responded to the FBI’s letter by saying, “It is completely inappropriate for any government agency to try to influence what artists do. It is completely against the American traditions of free speech”?
Is your belief that new forms of speech constitute “harm” and “offense” to such a degree that censorship is warranted? If so, why did you once support Andres Serrano and his work Piss Christ, which Catholics insisted was an intolerable offense, and call it censorship when opponents like Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms tried to pull funding for Serrano from the National Endowment of the Arts? Wasn’t the Hustler magazine spread suggesting Jerry Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse offensive? Didn’t you go to The People Versus Larry Flynt anyway?
-
This is the new conservatism. Middle aged, and increasingly elderly, lefties have led their whole lives being dead center of popular culture politics. Somehow they still want to see themselves as counter culture. In fact they are the new cultural conservatives, and the free speech issue highlights it nicely.
Those who don't have a fundamental recognition of the value of free speech, are, in circa 100% of cases, not the sorts of people who've spent their lives generating original, counter-culture thoughts. If you want to know who the programmed mediocrities are, who the sheeple are, they're the ones giggling and rolling their eyes at the mention of free speech, now that it's become tainted with an association with the right.
