We're living in a strange time.
We have a president who considers negative polls fake news, who throws fits when companies exercise their right to sell the merchandise they want.
We have a president who, in many ways, is an open enemy to free speech.
But that isn't anything new, and it isn't an issue coming solely from conservatives.
The UC Berkley protests in response to Milo Yiannopoulos are an interesting case. After all, technically those students aren't a government or educational institution straight up saying, "No, this speaker can't speak here." They're students exercising their own first amendment rights, albeit in an incredibly destructive and not terribly proactive way.
However, it is a violation of free speech. Free speech, by design, is meant to protect unpopular speech. It's meant for all types, but unpopular speech— especially unpopular political speech is a main protectorate, as it's the easiest type of speech to silence. Milo is a divisive character, and that's putting it lightly. However, whether you like him or not (which, I personally don't, if I may interject an opinion), in the context of that college campus, his speech is unpopular speech.
Same goes for Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. Although Rule 19 is a legitimate rule in the Senate, that doesn't make it right. And it isn't right for Mitch McConnell to silence her in reading Coretta Scott King's comments about Attorney General Sessions. The sole purpose behind this was, to phrase it in a simplistic way, that the comments would hurt the Sessions' feelings, if you will. Of course, unlike Milo, the Democrats were at least able to get some of their point across, as another senator finished reading the letter.
The source of this, largely, is the conflation between politics and feelings. Of course, there is room for feelings in politics and hot button issues are ripe to become emotionally charged. But ultimately, we must think with our heads and not our hearts. When we start letting our feelings run us rather than rational thought, there's nothing but more trouble and division.
YouTube personality Philip DeFranco made the point that once you silence somebody, people become more interested in what they have to say. He's right–- following the incident with Senator Warren, many news outlets and people are in her corner. Milo Yiannopoulos's popularity stems from when he was banned from Twitter.
Ultimately, though, the situation of free speech in our country can be summed up by a Frederick Douglass quote: "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
