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[Pages S4364-S4365]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FREE SPEECH
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If they don't like an op-ed, they want it unpublished.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
[[Page S4365]]
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
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