When Even The Atlantic Notices...

Some on the left are trying to equate speech with violence.  This tramples on the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, and our American way of life.  I'm glad that others on the left are starting to take notice:

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence. If Milo Yiannopoulos speaks on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, is that an act of violence?

...This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence...

Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence.

Yes, the authors are Jonathan Haidt (self-identified leftie and author) and Greg Lukianoff (President and CEO of FIRE), who have spoken and written much on this topic.  But this was published in The Atlantic, which is a good start.

I've written about Haidt plenty of times.