EDITORIAL: ‘Much to our chagrin’

The pervasiveness of progressive groupthink on the nation’s college campuses has by now been well documented. It is nevertheless quite astonishing to realize the extent to which many of these budding authoritarians reject the very principles of freedom and liberty that gave birth to this country.

Consider a recent editorial in the University of Minnesota’s student newspaper, excerpts of which were highlighted in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

Editors at the student publication expressed outrage that the school’s chapter of the College Republicans had demonstrated its support for Donald Trump’s signature policy initiative by painting a panel on a local bridge reading “Build the Wall.” The paper accused the young conservatives of spotlighting “bigotry” and condoning “an erasure of the American citizenry of Latinx people.”

It went on: “But much to our chagrin, we live in a community that protects their speech,” the editorial board lamented. “Can we find logic in a policy that protects words that blatantly dehumanize vast swaths of America’s population? No.”

This tragic rejection of dead white male James Madison and the First Amendment in favor of a more totalitarian approach has become quite fashionable on the left. For example, an essay last year in the Huffington Post warned of the “dangers of certain types of speech” and argued that the United States “must find an effective way to monitor and forbid dangerous speech, without unjustly infringing upon freedom of speech.”

In fact, there is no speech more “dangerous” than that which argues for using the power of the state to censor debate or to silence unpopular opinions. Yet even confused souls who advocate for the state-sanctioned suppression of that which they find unpleasant must be free to express their beliefs.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,” wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1989, “it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

Let’s hope the dual tonics of time and experience will eventually bestow those Minnesota student editors with a sturdier understanding of the value of free expression and the dangers of advancing tyranny under the cloak of diversity and tolerance.