Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Representation and Voice
In the First Amendment of our Constitution, the people are given a right of free speech. Essentially, we argue, it allows us to say whatever we want. But it can not protect us from the consequences.
All over the country, expression and speech have come under assault — not from government, but from fellow citizens acting in one accord from social media mobs (Tim Hunt, Dr. Matt Taylor) or their workplaces (James Damore, Brandon Eich). Self-described Classical Liberal Dave Rubin hosts countless Democrats who have been run through the gauntlet of mob-silencing after giving voice to thoughts that seem even mildly out of line with the Left’s positions.
There is a “chilling effect.” For years, the “silent majority” has grown even as the Supreme Court has upheld the First Amendment against all challenges. How could this be? Clearly, speech is not free. If speaking means infamy, harassment, and financial difficulties, then expect less speech.
With a representative government, we have the ability to use our speech for someone who can amplify our own voices. My voice does not always win. But sometimes, my voice does win! Yet repeatedly, that representative cowers in the face of the media storm that swarms, isolates, and destroys.
Our voice remains a whisper in the storm.
Until Trump.
Trump was not the first, though. Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Rand Paul all had moments that amplified my voice and stood firm against media attacks. They navigated the media with courage, strength of conviction, and wit. It is the resulting support gained from those moments that gave rise to their candidacy. It is with great dismay that they were then drowned out by others who took my voice and changed it (Rubio).
With their voices drowned by campaign donations and split support, there rose the voice that echoed my increasing anger and frustration. The man who commanded all attention, whose voice has rarely strayed from my own growing concerns. He did more than amplify my voice, everyone paid attention and no one could silence him.
For whatever his personal reasons are, the things he says speak.
It doesn’t matter if his ego is what had him claiming his inauguration was the biggest ever or even that it wasn’t true! It mattered to me that he drew attention to how underrepresented my voice is and how the media downplays support for conservative views. March for Life, Tea Party, Glenn Beck’ s 9/12 rally, Pew Research polling on abortion and financial support of Planned Parenthood. As Rush says, the media wants you to think you are alone. But I am not alone! My voice won the election! Even if not a majority, it is clear I am not the only one and there are millions of us. So even if Trump’s inauguration isn’t the biggest ever, it was still satisfying to see the media proven as liars for misrepresenting Trump’s crowds by using a photo from early in the day.
It doesn’t matter to me that the President says the media should lose licenses for lying about him. The media lies about me! I’m a racist, bigot, homophobe, hater. My religion needs to change with the times, my business should be run by state dictates and not by my own conscience. If I say otherwise, bigot. If I espouse anti-immigration sentiments, I’m a racist. They don’t know us. They lie about us just the same. So when the media publishes a story with obviously wrong facts that were easily checked, I am satisfied by the very public exposure Trump gives them well beyond the one line redaction at the bottom of a week-old editorial.
This is my voice. And it is finally being heard.
Published in General
Thank you, Altargirl. Great post. We must never shut-up or surrender to speech control.
Preach sister!! Amen!
We are Spartacus.
Here is the interesting question: what happens to those Democrats then?
What happens, for example, to the manager of the Starbucks who—despite what the DailyCaller reports is an above-and-beyond commitment to social justice—finds herself on the receiving end of the now-usual, lunatic heretic-stomping?
When this happened to me…and then to my friend Mel…and then to my friend Marlin…and to Dave Rubin…and to other people who considered themselves kindly, normal liberal people….the result was that we all began to re-consider our attitudes both towards “progressives” and towards the others that progressives have anathematized. “Maybe Ben Shapiro isn’t that bad?” we ask ourselves. “Maybe I should actually watch the Planned Parenthood videos? Maybe Darren Wilson doesn’t deserve to have his life destroyed? And maybe the Trump Voter has a point?”
I think that in finding eachother and forming a community, they can organize to reclaim their party. There are more of them than SJWs, they just need to make their way out of the ctrl-left fog.
I do not think they should be Republicans except for as a very temporary alliance. I can share the country with Dave Rubins. I can’t share it with the unhinged.
There’s this saying “don’t shoot right”. In my head, I have this image of a long battlefield with everyone marching in a direction. The left, dressed in blue, marches with guns pointed at the right. The right faces left. The fringes are your extremists. As long as your back is to them, they shouldn’t shoot you in the back. The Dave Rubins are blue uniforms with their backs to the right. As long as I see their back, they are my ally, but we aren’t the same team.
If it’s true that we only function in a bi-party system, than the Democrat party needs to be taken back from the far left.
On-line mobbing has become a serious problem. Some of the more unpleasant aspects of small-town life have been replicated on a very large scale in the electronic ‘global village.’ I discussed this at my post Freedom, the Village, and the Internet.
Brava AltarGirl!
(To make one small point: that Trump had such a big inauguration crowd at all is pretty amazing: DC is overwhelmingly Dem! Oh and remember “J20”? The radical Left did its best to scare people away!)
Trump is our man. He’s done a great job so far, even his enemies have to admit it, (or would, if they talked about actual policies at all.) If things go on like they began, what will the Left say in 2020? They’ll hafta stick to their willful misinterpretation of his remark after Charlottesville; it’s all they’ve got.
But hey: people have already forgotten the Lefty James Hodgkinson! So, Idk if they can keep this old dead fish fresh till then. It stinks already: keep the funk outta our way..
(If we don’t win, it’s the twilight of our country’s brilliant day, and the demise our entire way of life. But at least we’d have a glorious sunset! Shine, perishing republic! )
Easier said than done. The left has defined PC in such a narrow fashion, even the slightest deviation from their norm will keep any potential reformer out of the driver’s seat, maybe to the point of not being allowed in the party.
Likewise, we should avoid the same fate for the Republican party by not forcing such a narrow definition of conservatism on its members . . .
The cyber-mob is not necessarily ideological. They just enjoy destroying peoples’ lives. It doesn’t matter to them if their target is on the left or the right. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know the facts. It doesn’t matter that their faux outrage is over something that wouldn’t bother them at all if they had been standing there watching it. All that matters is that they have a five second video clip or a tweet that they can retweet and, they hope, go viral. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, “in the present everyone will have 15 seconds of social media fame.”
The cyber-mob is empowered by the cowardice of institutions – especially American businesses. In the classic western movies, a courageous sheriff would stand at the door of the jail and stand off the lynch mob. Sometimes, he would even shame the lynch mob into going home and let due process and justice have their day. We have very few corporate CEO’s who will face down the mob. Hobby Lobby and Chik-fil-A come to mind, but who else? And college presidents? Fugedabotit. What a nation of cowards we have become!
Sally Kohn, on the other hand, discovered what anyone who hangs out with conservatives quickly finds:
A quote from her Time.Com piece:
“…the experience of getting to know and like many conservatives and at the same time receiving more and more hate mail from conservatives presented me with a choice. From here on out, was I going to believe that most conservatives were like the ones I’d worked with at Fox News, or was I going to assume that most conservatives were like the ones sending me hateful messages online? Which was the exception, and which was the rule? Honestly, I probably could have made a case either way. This was a decision that tested my core principles. I could either choose to hate most conservatives or not. I found my answer in my aunt Lucy.
Aunt Lucy has a deep love for her friends and family, a great sense of humor, and a laugh that feels like a tickle. Aunt Lucy (not her real name, by the way) lives in the middle of the country and is a conservative Republican. She also loves me and my partner and our daughter and welcomes us with open arms at every family occasion we manage to attend. The few times we’ve cautiously talked politics, Aunt Lucy has been curious and kind. Aunt Lucy watches Fox News, and eventually it dawned on me that most Fox viewers are probably just like her — decent, curious about the news, intending to learn and do something good with the information.”
This seems really obvious to anyone who lives in those parts of the world—not just geographic but sociological—where diverse persons meet, work together and interact peaceably. The assumptions that the bubbled make depend on that bubble not being penetrated by actual, flesh and blood human beings. Leftists understand the concept, they’ve just been persuaded to see the diversity as exclusively racial. If the Dave Rubins of the world can be persuaded that ideological diversity is far, far more important (if only on the grounds that you can’t persuade people of the rightness of your view if you disdainfully shut them out) the rest will more or less take care of itself. And, fortunately, the left appears to be creating more and more Dave Rubins (and Kate Braestrups).
Perhaps. But people get a whole lot braver when they’re pissed off. And the left is very good at pissing people off. (Is “pissed off” COC compliant?)
Good girl, Lindsay! ‘Zackly!
Freedom of Speech doesn’t work if the people don’t hold it as a value and accept private speech that differs from their own.
It is facile to say, you have to pay the consequences for your speech, but if people insist on consequences for speech they disagree with, then speech stops being free in fact. It’s not enough that the government is forbidden to restrict speech, the people must also encourage and allow free speech or it doesn’t work.
With any luck, they’ll all douse themselves with gasoline and immolate themselves, like brave Buckel.
I guess so!
I love the very simple yet powerful statement: My voice won the election.
Just reading those words is both inspiring and reassuring.
Her piece in Time made some good points. However (she’d hate my using that word), she’s still stuck in the world of feeelings:
That’s right: feelings are axiomatic and trump everything else. The feelings may be “valid” (whatever that means) but (there, I did it again) they don’t change the facts and they’re not necessarily persuasive. Also, facts don’t care about your feelings.
Ms. Kohn misunderstands the lessons of cognitive science. It is true that facts are not persuasive by themselves; persuasion requires more. The good news is, emotions can be part of that. But other things are more important. Ms. Kohn has evidently spent a bit too much time with couples counselors and has accepted their ideas uncritically.
Except haven’t Canadian politics been characterized by alternating governments of Liberals and Conservatives, “Tories,” with the total spectrum shifted a bit leftward of the U.S. major parties’ spectrum?
I took a wander over to Chicago Boyz and read the article. Also the comments. It left me wondering this: if I still was working as a home health aide, would I be posting honestly and openly on Facebook? When I had already experienced such weirdness as an employer who had reprimanded me by calling me racist when I followed the law and reported a hispanic co-worker for stealing from a client. (The nursing agency head honchos had no problem when getting such a report regarding any African American women working for them. In fact, the agency head gas lit me for befriending an AA co worker, continually calling my home after 9 PM and asking if perhaps she had mistreated the client, or perhaps she usually arrived late for her shift, or perhaps something was missing?) But if the co worker was hispanic, then they were assumed to also be angelic, and if I noticed major things in the person’s behavior being wrong, I had to either keep quiet or get a demerit put in my record. My answer to this nonsense was to start working for myself.
A lot of the freedom I have in the world comes from the fact that I work for myself these days and don’t have to look over my shoulder wondering about demerits or worse.