America’s Fire Sale
Atlantic | Caitlin Flanagan
Caitlin Flanagan argues that freedom of expression isn’t the tool of the powerful; it’s the tool of the powerless. With scathing wit, she skewers America’s free speech frenemies before throwing a dire warning shot across the bow of the entire country, coming to the conclusion that “Whenever a society collapses in on itself, free speech is the first thing to go. That’s how you know we’re in the process of closing up shop. Our legal protections remain in place—that’s why so many of us were able to smack the Trump piñata to such effect—but the culture of free speech is eroding every day.”
It’s a biting piece that takes acute aim at PEN America trustee Boylan, who decided to apologize for signing the Harper’s letter only after seeing who else had signed it. “Frederick Douglass said, ‘I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’ Boylan’s version: I’ll tell you what I believe if you tell me who else believes it.”
Flanagan exposes the disingenuous critics of the Harper’s letter signers, namely the 150 writers and academics who penned an anti-Harper’s letter Substack piece about the marginalized—”The letter said that ‘the intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse’ (To the memory hole, Mr. Solzhenitsyn!), and characterized the Harper’s signers as a group of writers that has ‘never faced serious consequences—only momentary discomfort.’ ….One of Harper’s signers, Salman Rushdie, experienced some of that momentary discomfort when he was nearly eviscerated on a sun-dappled Friday morning at the Chautauqua Institution.”
Flanagan also goes after today’s university student—”Ask an Oberlin student—fresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bio—to tell you what speech is acceptable, and she’ll tell you that it’s speech that doesn’t hurt the feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.”
The upshot? “Here we are, running out the clock on the American epilogue… You might want to look into relocating to one of the other countries shaped by the principles of the American Revolution. They aren’t hard to find. Just go to Google and type in the free world.”
