E-Pluribus | May 21, 2021
When free speech becomes freeze peace, more anti-science hypocrisy, and exclusion in the name of inclusion.
A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Nick Clairmont: From Parrhesia to Freeze Peach: The Demotion of Free Speech
The discourse over free speech has sunk so low as to produce “freeze peach,” a derisive term used on social media for those who are deemed too fixated on one of the founding concepts of this country. Nick Clairmont warns at Aero Magazine that even some who claim to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.’s social justice goals are rejecting King’s commitment to the free speech that helped achieve progress thus far.
In the America of [Martin Luther] King’s day, the cultural consensus in support of free expression and assembly was robust. Self-described progressives agreed with King’s stance on free speech. They thought First Amendment rights weren’t being applied broadly enough, and not only saw the right to free speech as a tool of progress, but as one that was their special province. Pushing for legal protections for free expression and free assembly was often a focus of their successful social justice activism. They recognised that, historically, free speech has played a key role in social change at crucial moments, and has hardly been a tool of repression.
Yet today, many on the left who see themselves as wholeheartedly on Martin Luther King’s team have come to oppose his position on speech issues. They not only think of First Amendment rights as irrelevant to their political goals, they even deride free speech and set it up in opposition to social justice. Ironically, even though the right is not necessarily sincere about defending free speech either, this shift on the left put the right at a political advantage: many of their opponents are now booing and hissing a widely popular human value that all liberal societies have traditionally upheld.
[…]
Free speech is shorthand for a cluster of rights that may be more precisely called free expression. It encompasses two ideas. The first involves protection: authorities should not be permitted to prevent you from speaking or writing, censor you, stop the printing or sale of books, or punish you for expressing an unpopular thought. The second is about the intrinsic value of speech: it is beneficial to exercise the freedom to speak your mind—and hear what is in others’ minds. While it is a truism that, just because you can say something, doesn’t mean you should—when that truism becomes a go-to response to much of what is said, written and joked about, it morphs into an easy device for shutting down intellectual discussion.
Read it all here.
John McWhorter: Today’s Elect Left is as Anti-Science as Today’s Right
In his latest at It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter echoes the theme from a recent piece of mine here at Pluribus, the tendency to reject “the science” for political or ideological reasons even among those who swear fealty to science in general.
Take the idea that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us, and motivating claims that black students ought be exempt from certain scholastic demands as well as that entire programs and schools should be transformed into Antiracism Academies. A prime motivation of this, reported endlessly, is to relieve black people of the eternal harm that microaggressions condition.
But Edward Cantu and Lee Jussim have patiently demonstrated that the academic “literature” undergirding this depiction is too full of holes to even begin to serve as the basis for societal reform. This is frankly obvious from reading almost any of the work in question – I recommend taking up just one such article and noting the hopeless circularity of argumentation – but Cantu and Jussim have done a useful job in summarizing the lot of it. The literature ignores legions of black people it surveys who deny that acts are microaggressions, does not show that supposed microaggressions correlate with racist sentiment of any kind, is based on tiny sample sizes, is never replicated, and explains away discrepancies with glum little speculations that would not pass as scientific reasoning among any evaluators not cowed by The Elect.
I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:
“Microaggression research provides a veneer of scientific credibility to vested critical premises, as those studies have statistics, p-values, and reliability coefficients, all useful for creating the appearance of scientific foundations for assumptions, so long as one does not examine the methodological details too closely. But the undertone of much microaggression research is not one of caution commensurate with the guardrails normally imposed by the scientific method.”
Yet nationwide, institutions are turning themselves upside down with a blithe assumption that black existence is deeply imprinted by the endless assault of these microaggressions. We can be sure that arguments such as Cantu and Jussim’s will be ignored, despite that if there were a single teeny article somewhere claiming that microaggressions were “the New Jim Crow,” that one would be endlessly assigned to parents and students as “proof.” (One way we know that is that the foundational article on “white privilege” appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine.)
Read the whole thing.
Bruce Bawer: Not Welcome
This week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that to mark her first two years in office, she was granting interviews only to black and brown reporters in the interest of fostering more diversity and inclusion in the local Chicago media, thereby excluding some in the name of inclusion. Similarly, Bruce Bawer writes that organizers of New York City’s annual gay pride parade are excluding police for at least the next five years, perpetrating an “outrageous betrayal of everything that the gay rights movement once stood for.”
Diversity. Inclusion. These are two of the watchwords, well-nigh sacred, of our woke era. And nowhere is this truer than in the LGBT movement. At NYC Pride, aka Heritage of Pride, inclusion is Job One, if you believe its website. The group works toward a future “where all people have equal rights,” and to that end produces events designed to “celebrate our diverse community.” The most prominent of these events by far is New York’s annual Gay Pride Parade.
Well, it turns out that not everybody is welcome at that parade. NYC Pride has informed the Gay Officers Action League (GOAL), which represents gay New York City police officers, that for at least the next five years the parade will exclude its members. (Last year’s parade was cancelled because of Covid, and this year’s celebrations will be drastically scaled down.)
That’s not all. NYC Pride wants to keep on-duty officers at least a block away from the parade route. Instead, it will use “private security, community leaders, and volunteers.”
What’s the point of all this? NYC Pride says it wants “to create safer spaces for the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] communities at a time when violence against marginalized groups . . . has continued to escalate.” As if police, in 2021, cause such violence instead of preventing it.
This insult to the NYPD—and especially to GOAL—is not just wrong. It’s utterly ahistorical.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
More controversy over what constitutes “hate speech” on college campuses:


Free Black Thought’s Erec Smith on “anti-racism”:




Yair Rosenberg is concerned about holding journalists accountable (as in firing) for what they wrote during their formative years as students:

Thomas Chatterton Williams on the unintended consequences of cancelling those with whom you disagree.


Finally, a humorous self-own to lead you into the weekend.