Not exactly. For the most part, I find your article well written, and I always enjoy reading what you write, especially when you do so with your sense of humor on full display.
You talk about people being oversensitive to the use of certain words, such as crazy or gypsy. I think you are right in saying that perhaps we are getting a little bit too picky about scrutinizing the use of every term which has been stated with innocent intent. The word police needs to chill a bit.
On the other hand, this is very different from repeatedly and vocally stating outright lies such as the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or the Russians did not interfere in the 2016 election or that the left wants your child to have surgery to change his or her gender. These are not only easily provable falsehoods, they are outrageous and dangerous, no more subject to debate than claiming the Earth is flat.
Not everything is a matter of opinion, and some lies are potentially destructive enough to hurt people. They change public discourse and perception in ways that negatively impact the lives of very real people. Being intolerant of fictions promoted as truth is not to be intolerant of free speech. Certain things are not a matter of opinion.
There is no transgender agenda to groom children. The 2020 election was not stolen, nor was the 2022 election. Russians ARE trying to meddle in our electoral process, and any number of other things. I am all for free speech and open discussion on things with which we may disagree involving actual facts or an attempt to discover them where the picture is unclear, but to suggest that the loud, continual, and vocal repetition of outright lies is free-speech is not correct. There are limits.
Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh and the politicians who repeat their drivel, are not engaged in free speech and just expressing their opinion. They are engaged in a very deliberate attempt to confuse and indoctrinate the general public into their agenda and lies. Loudly condemning it is not to condemn free-speech. There is no equivalency.
Joseph Goebbels famously said in the lead up to the Second World War, that if you repeated a lie long enough, it became accepted as the truth. Blaming the Jews for the ills afflicting post World War I German society directly led to the holocaust. Not everything is a matter of opinion. Many modern day commentators and politicians have taken a page out of Goebbels’ playbook. Donald Trump lit a match to it in 2016, and we are still suffering from the consequences of the continuing repetition of misinformation.
Just look at the explosion of laws this year in red states, trying to eradicate the very existence of LGBTQ and trans people in particular. It is actually rather frightening. The dangerous effects the “opinions” driving these efforts have had on American society is self evident. In many ways the current political trends in this country more resemble Nazi Germany of the 1930s than the democracy I have lived in for the past 60 years.
