“I DON’T LIKE WHAT HE SAID, SILENCE HIM”

“I DON’T LIKE WHAT HE SAID, SILENCE HIM”

By Domenick J. Maglio PhD. Traditional Realist

Imagine that a certain privileged group of people has the power to personally censor anyone who offends their sensibilities. This would enable some people to rule over others’ words and thoughts. This is un-American but is happening in universities and progressive politics.

Modern child rearing practices as opposed to traditional ones encourage parents to defend their children when another child slights them. In many cases parents feel they have the right to directly confront another child who they feel has offended their child. What they hear is only one side of the story, their child’s version. This approach of intervening in their child’s interaction with peers is rude, short sighted and ignorant. The child does not learn the skills he needs to deal with reality on his own and the parent has no civil right to attack someone else’s child.

When these children mature into young adults, and enter college, it is no wonder they believe the administrators should protect them from normal disagreements with others. These overpriced bastions of education have jumped in to shield certain students from having anyone hurt their feelings even when they are overreacting.

Universities have fallen right into the role of “mother hen”. They have established safe spaces, crying closets and soothing animals to decrease student anxiety. They consciously or unconsciously support the student’s ability to eliminate, not confront anything that might disturb them. These emotionally poorly trained young adults think they have the prerogative to censor any speaker who may have any views that annoy them.

Censorship on modern college campuses is anti educational. These institutions no longer provide the free exchange of ideas. There is only one viewpoint; the progressive one and anything else will not be tolerated. This type of environment does not develop critical thinking: it smothers it.  Our students are being force-fed socialist propaganda, which excludes any mention of every socialist country’s failure while denying the students even a glimpse of US contributions to the world. More specifically, they are taught to despise the USA.

Additionally, social media is inundated with people that recently experienced a university life style. These progressive college graduates are in power to censor social media news. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has used his gigantic platform to filter the news and squeeze out traditional ways of thinking off Facebook. These computer progressives have devised algorithms when triggered exclude certain ideas and their proponents from being allowed on Facebook. The fact is almost all people excluded from social media have been conservative, which is suspicious. It is reminiscent of IRS’s head, Lois Lerner, almost exclusive investigating of conservative political nonprofits.

“Shadow banning” is another procedure to automatically restrict and reduce the number of followers of a person deemed subversively conservative. This has happened to conservative commentators without their being notified.  This is not two-sided civil discourse. It is censorship.

We are witnessing a frightening phenomenon where millenials and others do not believe in the First Amendment. It is no longer freedom of speech for any and all citizens. Rather it can only be “approved speech” by protected class students to insure it is the right speech that will not offend other progressive student’s feeling. Any contrary speech should be disallowed. This is chaotic censorship that will shut down any cogent learning.

This attempt of individual censorship, if continued would be the end of our constitutional republic. Without full awareness of issues and high-level critical thinking skills, a totalitarian state could easily be established. 

A free nation cannot dictate what speech should and should not be allowed. Censorship is toxic to any form of liberty. Individuals who feel they have the right to silence others are dangerous. They do not believe in free speech, they feel superior to others. These people do not want to debate but want to dictate their feelings and thoughts to everyone else.

These people are proponents of oppression, not a free society. Even if the person becomes a king or absolute dictator, their feelings and thoughts could not be imposed on the population without some residents revolting violently. People value their freedom to make their own decisions sufficiently to fight for it.

No one has taught them their viewpoint is only one of many. They seem not to understand that elections are the determining factor of what ideas are going to be implemented.

Domenick Maglio, PhD. is a columnist carried by various newspapers, an author of several books and owner/director of Wider Horizons School, a college prep program. Dr. Maglio is an author of weekly newspaper articles, INVASION WITHIN and a new just published book, entitled, IN CHARGE PARENTING In a PC World. You can visit Dr. Maglio at www.drmaglio.blogspot.com.