The University of California Berkeley once again banning a conservative speaker because of the threat of violence made by left-wing groups has brought the issue of free speech back to the forefront. Now the arguments about free speech, censorship, and the United States Constitution are not much different from before but some of the left wing propaganda is gaining acceptance in mainstream America. And that is very dangerous.

Ulrich Baer is a Provost at New York University, in charge of faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity along with being a professor of comparative literature. To say that he is not the constitutional scholar or historian would be an understatement since his apparent interpretation of what the First Amendment means and the intention of our founding fathers in designating free speech as one of the most important liberties and rights is sophomoric at best and completely wrong at the worst.

Prof. Baer writes an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he says that free speech is not guaranteed under the Constitution. He claims you cannot say anything you want willy-nilly and that includes hate speech. What he and many on the left miss or are deliberately misleading us about is that all forms of political speech and speech with which many disagree or might call hateful is specifically what our founding fathers meant to protect. They knew that tyrants would take any means necessary to silence anyone who disagreed with them. How can you have an honest and open political discourse if you cannot disagree with those who are in power? Having the right to speak did not mean that you had to be heard but what it meant was you could not be punished for speaking against whomever was in charge at the time. Very often this does include speech that offends other people.

There were really two main purposes to the right to free speech; one was to protect people who wanted to speak out and disagree with whomever was in charge. The second was to help us identify where hate really existed, where bigotry and racism and all those other terrible things really resided. As Walter Williams has said so eloquently, we have with many of our laws driven racism and bigotry underground. Allowing people to say whatever they wanted helped us to identify those with whom we disagreed and to be able to argue against the points they were making to convince others that they were wrong.

Prof. Baer says that we must balance the inherent value of what is being said with the inherent value of the people who are going to hear it. Now that's one of those gobbledygook statements that someone who believes they are intellectually superior puts together to make themselves sound smart. Essentially what he's saying is that you have to look at the audience that might hear it from two perspectives; will the so-called hate speech encourage the group there to listen to take negative action towards whomever they are speaking against. He also wants to balance those who do not agree with the speaker and their ability to not be exposed to it, thus we have safe zones. Or worse we have censorship.

The most obvious problem with saying that certain types of speech should be censored as Prof. Baer argues is that the standard for what is hate speech changes according to whoever is in power. If we give a ruling body or an authoritative body the ability to censor offensive speech then, when that ruling body is out of power and their opponents are in power, the definition changes. So what you might be able to say today could be illegal tomorrow. That is what our First Amendment rights were established to protect, censorship by tyrants, especially in political discourse. So if Prof. Baer and his ilk have their way anyone with a conservative viewpoint would be silenced. Now they are effectively doing that on college campuses around the country by not teaching students about multiple viewpoints, free speech, and teaching them about the open and free flowing exchange of ideas but now they want to take it to the next step and give the government the power to censor those with whom they disagree.