From columnist George F. Will’s keynote address at the inaugural Disinvitation Dinner, hosted in New York City on April 15 by the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale to honor those whose invitations to speak at U.S. universities were retracted because of their views:
Free
speech has never been, in the history of our republic, more
comprehensively, aggressively and dangerously threatened than it is now.
The Alien and Sedition Acts arose from a temporary, transitory fever
and were in any case sunsetted and disappeared. The fevers after and
during the First World War and in the early culture war era also were
eruptions of distemper rooted in local conditions and local issues bound
to disappear, which they did.
Today’s attack is different. It’s an attack on the theory of freedom of speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech and indeed if listened to carefully and plumbed fully, what we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake. . . .
Yesterday
the Democratic Party, the oldest political party in the world, the
party that guided this country through two world wars and is more
responsible than any other for the shape of the modern American
state—the Democratic Party’s leading and prohibitively favored
frontrunner candidate for the presidential nomination announced four
goals for her public life going forward, one of which is to amend the
Bill of Rights to make it less protective. It’s an astonishing event.
She said that she wants to change the First Amendment in order to
further empower the political class to regulate the quantity, content
and timing of political speech about the political class—and so far as I
can tell there’s not a ripple of commentary about this on the stagnant
waters of the American journalistic community.
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