Whatever you think of her comedy, and I really don’t want to litigate that here, this interview with Kathy Griffin about her experience with the ‘internet woodchipper’ of the alt-right is absolutely worth your time.
I’ll have more to say about this next week. But in the meantime, this is a little piece of what I’ll be talking about.
My country doesn’t have the First Amendment. I think I’ve heard free speech isn’t written into our constitution (maybe even our laws) anywhere. But I do think it’s important.
That’s why, when I recently posted an article and somebody posted a response article that contained hate of both my religion and gender, I left that comment up.
It’s true that the concept of free speech has been under assault lately in the West.
“her experience with the ‘internet woodchipper’ of the alt-right”
I’d put that about equal with the Disney producer who posted a picture of kids going through a woodchipper for committing the crime of being harassed by an Indian.
You see it every time any remotely conservative speaker comes to a university campus to speak: the protests and near-riots. (Once, in Toronto, they even pulled a fire alarm to stop somebody saying that equal rights apply to men as well as women.)
What happened when people hung up posters saying ‘It’s okay to be white’ – and nothing else – also show how much trouble you’re in. One campus called the police because of them.
Last year, in the UK, a guy posted a limerick on Twitter. The limerick said he doesn’t believe it’s possible to change a person’s gender, even with surgery. He got a threatening call from the police about it. They threatened to tell his boss and get him fired. (He was self-employed and laughed it off.)
Right now, in my country, there’s a high-profile case where a top rugby player (Israel Folau) is about to be sacked for hurting gay people’s feelings.
The assaults on free speech are really getting out of hand. It’s 1984, people! Should we be standing for this?