Free Speech
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, on a final matter, since the spring, our Nation has engaged in important conversations about racial justice in policing.
Most people understand that continuing our Nation's tremendous progress toward justice does not mean battling against American principles or American history. Progress means fulfilling our values, not attacking them.
Yet a group of radicals have latched onto this moment to say we should repudiate our country itself. We have watched as mobs have dragged statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant through the dirt. And, in parallel, inside many elite institutions, self-styled intellectuals say we should similarly discard the basic principles they fought for.
One of the key pillars of our Nation is the rule of law. In a civilized society, the same laws need to apply to everyone. The times our Nation has fallen short on this score, particularly for all the years when Black Americans were completely denied the equal protections of law, it has been to our great shame. This has been central to the cause of civil rights. There is a reason the 14th amendment insists on ``the equal protection of the laws.''
Yet, in recent months, local leaders have violated this basic tenet. As riots rocked major cities, we saw politicians decline to act. They seem to fear far-left critique more than looting and chaos. And we saw the uneven application of other rules, like when mayors cheered on mass demonstrations but continued to prohibit religious gatherings. That is the rule of law in jeopardy. Of course, the last example is also a First Amendment issue. And the freedom of expression itself is another principle that has come under threat.
As I said a few weeks back, this goes deeper than just constitutional law. America has always prized the spirit of the First Amendment. We citizens must want to protect an open, civil discourse--a true marketplace of ideas. But, lately, the political left has embraced something totally different.
Today's far left is not interested in winning debates with better arguments. They prefer to shut down debate all together. They don't try to win the contest. They just harangue the referees to stop the game. If they don't like an op-ed, they want it unpublished. If they don't like a tweet, they want to track down the author and get them fired. If they don't like a tenured professor, they throw around Orwellian accusations that his or her ideas make them feel unsafe.
This hostile culture is getting results. According to one brand-new survey, it is only the far-left Americans who do not feel compelled to self-censor their views because of a hostile climate. Everyone but the left feels the threat.
And 50 percent of self-identified strong liberals say that simply contributing to the Republican Presidential candidate ought to be a fireable offense for a business leader. Let me say that again. Fifty percent of self-identified strong liberals say that simply contributing to the Republican Presidential candidate ought to be a fireable offense for a business leader. In this country?
We recently saw the New York Times apologize for publishing a straightforward policy argument from a U.S. Senator. Since, an editorial staffer resigned from the paper because even center-left opinions were not liberal enough and led to her constant harassment. That was a recent editorial staffer resigning from the New York Times because her center-left opinions were not liberal enough and led to her constant harassment at the times. You see, the safe spaces only go in one direction.
On elite campuses such as Princeton, we see faculty turning on their tenured colleagues and even administrators weighing in to chastise people with unpopular views.
We see online platforms such as Facebook threatening to ban political advertising altogether, chilling our democracy, because far-left employees and outside pressure groups berate them for letting the very speakers use their platform.
Even at a time when there is significant appetite in Congress to take a second look at the legal protections afforded to those supposedly neutral platforms, they still contemplate giving an angry minority of agitators a veto over Americans' political speech.
The author Salman Rushdie, who was himself threatened with death for controversial speech, once said this:
Two things form the bedrock of any open society--freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Free expression and the rule of law--exactly the two things we have seen eroded in recent months.
Rushdie recently signed an open letter with other intellectuals--many liberals--sounding the alarm on this cultural poison. ``Editors are fired,'' they wrote, ``books are withdrawn . . . journalists are barred from writing on certain topics . . . professors are investigated . . . steadily narrow[ing] the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.''
Well, you can guess what happened next. The grievance industrial complex came after the letter itself. The authors were accused of advancing bigotry and the cycle of nonsense started all over again.
The United States of America needs free speech. We need free expression. And all of us, from all perspectives, need the courage to speak up and defend it
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source