for my 50,000th post: The "White Knights" of the First Amendment
(a lengthy, excellent read on a very difficult subject)
The White Knights of the First Amendment
In June 2016, faculty defenders of the First Amendment faced off against University of Oregon administrators and staff in a symposium originally intended to educate people about the work of the campus’ Bias Response Team. At places like Emory University, University of Oregon, University of California, Santa Barbara and over 100 additional institutions, Bias Response Teams were created to “provide targets of bias a safe space to have their voices heard, to promote civility and respect, to effect change around these important issues in a quick and effective manner and to ensure a comprehensive response to bias incidents.” But according to First Amendment advocates, when the BRT contacted faculty members to talk about complaints that had been made to the BRT concerning—to take one example, derision about the use of gender-neutral pronouns—this created a climate that undermined their freedom of speech. There was little room for discussion at this symposium, recorded for the purpose of podcasting, but a great deal of conversation about the dangers of “safe spaces,” “politically correct thought police” and the “chilling” effects of institutional responses to bias. What happened on the University of Oregon campus was not an isolated incident, but part of a string of similar incidents that have unfolded over the past two years—in which mostly white, cis men have transformed criticism of their speech and the ideas they propagate from women, queer people and people of color into challenges to their freedom.
As Alice Marwick and Ross Miller point out in an article about online harassment, hateful, defaming or harassing speech is protected by the First Amendment—which has made it extraordinarily difficult for women, people of color and queer people to protect themselves from online harassment. In attacks on campus BRTs and so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs), conservative students on college campuses are now extending Men’s Rights Activists’ use of the First Amendment to protect their ability to harass and discriminate against marginalized folks.
We asked Ms. if we could publish this article using a pseudonym because of our concern that we will be harassed by Men’s Rights Activists and those who sympathize with them. Our desire for anonymity is at once a symptom of the climate we go on to describe and a by-product of an emphasis on free speech that is proving to be a screen for unethical and vicious on- and offline harassment. These attacks are part of a longer tradition of conservative attacks on campus activists aimed at ridiculing and undermining critiques of sexist, racist and homophobic utterances and practices under the guise of protecting freedom of speech.
Political Correctness, GamerGate and Defenders of the First Amendment
The current attack on campus social justice activists has its roots in the early 1990s, when “political correctness” entered popular culture. The term, originally used on the sectarian left, was revived in 1991 by conservative Allen Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom followed the longstanding anti-communist tradition of suggesting that liberals were policing speech on college campuses. In the subsequent series of articles written by conservative journalists, the 1990s moral panic about political correctness re-animated an older anti-communist trope that saw threats to systems of power from which they had long benefited in struggles for civil rights, economic equality and gender equity. Transforming victimizers (those espousing racist or sexist beliefs that understood people of color and women as being genetically inferior to White men, as in The Bell Curve), critics of political correctness represented themselves as champions of free speech and First Amendment Rights. They were, they claimed, being silenced by left wing criticism when, in fact, they were intent on silencing their critics.
In the summer of 2014, the inheritors of this political legacy once again rallied around the belief that they were the beleaguered defenders of free and open speech and journalistic ethics during a series of incidents that became known as GamerGate. The Men’s Rights Activists campaigns mobilized during GamerGate began in the wake of the suicide and mass shootings perpetrated by Elliott Rodgers in Isla Vista, California in May 2014, notably online protests against the hashtag #yesallwomen. Online attacks against women gained momentum later that summer, with an aggressive online attack on independent game developer Zoë Quinn. Quinn released the interactive fiction game Depression Quest in February 2013. The game was intended to draw attention to the challenges of living with this illness, but it also drew the ire of male gamers who made it their business to police what counted as a legitimate or “serious” games. When Quinn’s game received positive reviews, online protectors of the integrity of games understood to be serious (e.g. manly) began to grumble and then take shots at Quinn. Motivated by the belief that praise for Quinn’s game resulted not from the merits of her design, but because of Quinn’s relationships with journalists writing about games, the situation erupted in August 2014, when Eron Gjoni, Quinn’s former boyfriend, published an inchoate, meandering post. In it, Gjoni claimed that a favorable review of Depression Quest on the gaming blog Kotaku resulted from Quinn’s presumably sexual relationship with the reviewer.
. . . .
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/09/14/the-white-knights-of-the-first-amendment/
= new reply since forum marked as read
You are one great DUer.
Yes, they do.
I will have to read the rest later, on the run right now. Thanks for posting this important subject, niyad.
Congrats on 50K as well.
25,000 posts on a political message board and... http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017133120#post3
but can't stand white guys with opinions. 
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I still don't understand why you think the 1st amendment is "nuanced".
Especially when I'm off my meds.
Here's the thing:
There are a certain number of white guys who deeply fear there's a time coming when they'll be oppressed just as their culture oppressed others.
Good thing they are well armed... 
Thank you for all your contributions here at DU! 
