Universities are also "speakers," with an independent mandate to teach, research, and pursue truth for the common good. And this requires taking sides.
What they want is freedom to control reality. What Republicans say, every day is not real, they don't live in reality. What they want is not free speech, they have that more than ever. What they want is to dictate reality to the rest of us.
I've found a pretty effective argument when dealing with right wingers at this point. I simply say that only one side is banning books and it's theirs, and I stick only to that. It's indefensible. They can try to twist it, say it's just protecting kids, and I will continue to say "Only the republicans are banning books". It's the end of discussion. Its shoving in their face that there is a clear line in the sand that republicans have crossed, and there is nothing they can say that would change that.
In the U.S., yes, at this moment the major threats to free speech are coming from the so-called "right". Forbidding teaching black history, LGBT issues, etc. A few years ago, lest we forget, it was Obama cracking down on the OWS protests and trying to prosecute Julian Assange and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Before that it was the GOP again pushing the PATRIOT Act and trying to ban Grand Theft Auto. They did it for a long time with the Red Scare. That of course, basically kicked off in response to Stalin, who was doing his own purges of opponents and censorship. Pre-war, it was Hitler, Mussolini and Franco worst of all, but was happening in the U.S. too. That all goes back even further to the Comstock laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts, you name it. There isn't some magical quality about the directions "left" and "right" by which bad people in power in government under that label don't want to silence their opponents. There is a tendency for what we call "the right" - this kind of more-or-less fascist, religious based, emotionally charged, etc. set of ideologies - to respond more eagerly to calls to silence or brutalize opponents, because they are by and large a good bit dumber at the end of the day.
Take note that this is an engaging title. I'd like to see more political science discussion in this community. These opinion pieces are part not a good part of the internet. They're made for sharing and being consumed on social media.
The Right Wing strategy is to simply claim you are being censored or treated unfairly so that people who don't know what you're doing give you a little more leg room.
Take that leg room and use it to advance your most extreme positions, go back to claiming you're being treated unfairly if anyone calls you on it.
The final step is that you must accuse anyone actually being censored or treated unfairly off pulling this bullshit.
The Right were never free speech advocates, and if you still think they were, try using the word "cisgender" and the word "retard" on Twitter, and tell me which one gets you banned first.
Posts like this show what a lame circlejerk lemmy is. It's much more aggressively tribal garbage than reddit was, which was already pretty lame. How lame of a person you must be to go on a forum and agree with a bunch of other losers about the same things endlessly? Go outside and talk with people who disagree with you. You might learn something.
Since 2020, we've seen hundreds of "anti-CRT" and "Don't Say Gay" bills; thousands of book bans; efforts to defund libraries; campaigns to silence faculty, erode academic freedom, and gut university independence; laws that disenfranchise voters, criminalize protest, outlaw reproductive freedom, and seek to erase trans kids; the Jim Crow-styled expulsions of Black officials; a potential pardon for a convicted murderer because he killed a #BLM protester; and organized threats and harassment targeting DEI officials.