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Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard enough, you’d probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at, but intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal politics.
I’ve been a liberal for most of my life, I voted for Obama’s twice. But it was the grotesque intolerance for all non-confirming views that drove me away from the left. Any form of individual thought is liable to be labeled as hate speech, and possibly the worst element of it is the demand to have your cake and eat it too. To go around literally violently suppressing freedom of expression, and then attempt to claim some level of victimhood as if it was actually your voice that was being suppressed.
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
I think this is false.
That said:
> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things to happen, but they only do in your imagination.
Each of the things that I listed has actually happened in the past few years.
Consider reading, with an open mind, the link from my parent post. It's written by a former Cedarville student, which is about as far from a liberal bubble as you can possibly get.
There exist a contingent of conservatives who are extremely hostile to free speech, to the point where they create entire institutions dedicated to suppressing and blocking out any non-christian, non-conservative influence.
They are right there in plain sight. They do things like publicly threaten to have campus speakers arrested and fire faculty for opposing Republican presidential nominees [3].
Do you disagree these people exist?
> Most Christian colleges are actually pretty accepting of LGBT.
I agree! [1]
In my post, I referred specifically to conservative Christian colleges, not all Christian colleges. And I even named particular colleges that fit the mold.
And, btw, those very institutions agree with the facts I asserted (if not the way I phrased them). Cedarville, Wheaton, Liberty -- the presidents of these colleges will be the very first ones to tell you that you should not expect freedom of expression as a student or employee at their college!
FIRE, a free expression advocacy organization focused college campuses, even creates a separate category for these institutions (and their illiberal [2] peers on the left): "Warning Schools". The meaning is literally what I say: you should expect to be censored and this fact is very explicitly written in their codes of conduct and staff manuals.
> Schedule a conservative speaker to talk at a College, at you won’t be at all surprised when a gang of violent, intolerant liberals start a riot.
Wait, have you actually scheduled a conservative speaker on a college campus?
I have.
No mob.
Actually, of all the speeches I organized, only one speaker was heckled. (And the speech/speaker wasn't even remotely political. And the heckler was a conservative, not a student, and I think the heckling that was entirely unrelated to either of those facts. He was just a rude nutjob.)
Just as most Christian colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints, most other colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints.
You don't hear about the countless of uneventful Young Republican/Libertarian speeches. Or the countless weekly bible study groups that happen without incident.
You hear about the tiny handful that go awry. And then a narrative is crafted.
But the point of my post was not that liberal institutions are a bastion of free speech. Just like the point of my post was not to assert that all conservatives are illiberal re: free expression.
The central thesis of my post was just a refutation of assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
by pointing out the very real existence of places like Cedarville/Wheaton/et al. that very much do "no platform" any not-sufficiently-conservative-in-just-the-right-way speech.
And additionally to point out that illiberal conservatives (again, to be clear, a subset of all conservatives) are not new in this country. We are not surprised when a conservative expresses illiberal views (which, again, is not meant to imply that all conservatives are illiberal). Whereas the (also real, also subset) illiberal leftists are a newer phenomenon. Maybe that's why we "see" illiberalism on the left but not on the right?
Because we are used to, we expect, a form of conservative illiberalism re: free expression.
> If your unfortunate enough to voice a conservative opinion in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’ll get a Twitter brigade harassing your employer until they fire you.
It's unfortunate that some conservatives are harassed in this fashion, but this is an anomaly, not a norm. This country has millions of conservatives who are open about their political beliefs (on Twitter, FB, etc.) and do not suffer retribution for expressing those beliefs. E.g., the majority of my friends and family.
And, this sort of harassment also happens to (an also small number of) leftists and even not-quite-conservative-enough conservatives. The one person I personally know who was fired for political speech was targeted by conservatives.
Again, consider reading with an open mind the link in my parent post.
People with illiberal views on free expression and with a vendetta and no decency exist on both the left and the right. Which is why, again, I disagree with the initial assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
It's just not true. Those people exist, in plain sight, and are very open about their beliefs. Falwell openly threatens to have people (not-conservative-enough conservatives, no less!) arrested for expressing views he disagrees with at the wrong place and time.
I do agree that we don't always see them clearly enough. I hypothesize it's because they are so overt about their repression of speech.
But you very much do "see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people".
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[1] For anyone following along, item #3 in this interview does a good job at distinguishing between the sort of conservative Christian colleges I'm referring to and the hundreds of less dogmatic Christian institutions that have much stronger free expression protections for faculty and students: https://www.thefire.org/is-speech-suppression-at-religious-c...
[2] To avoid confusion: I'm using "illiberal" to mean "illiberal specifically on the question of free expression", i.e., opposes free expression. I use "left" and "right" to refer to more general political affiliation. Hopefully that doesn't cause too much confusion...
[3] https://relevantmagazine.com/current/shane-claiborne-says-li...
So where do you think this no platforming of liberals is taking place?
It’s not happening in the media. It’s not happening on social media. It’s not happening on the campus. It’s not happening in the office.
All you’ve actually been able to identify if _some_ conservative Christian colleges (you haven’t substantiated that, but I’ll accepts it’s probably true to some extent), and the football pitch (which isn’t a political forum to begin with). As I said, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that, and point out that we ban accounts that do. We have to, because flamewars consume everything if you let them. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
There was a recent CATO study on exactly this question [1].
Nearly 2/3rds of Republican-identifying respondents believe NFL players should be fired if they don't stand for the pledge.
Over half of the Republican-identifying respondents believe that burning flags should be illegal, that an executive should be fired for flag burning, and also that flag burner's citizenship should be revoked.
None of this is particularly surprising! You expect to find that many Republicans oppose flag burning.
However, you don't expect to hear that Democrats support rolling back free speech protections. The data support this shift toward illiberalism on the left. And you even point out that this shift happened in your original post!
The rise of illiberalism on the left is concerning, but again, nowhere have I claimed that the American left is a bastion of free speech warriors.
My claim is that we do commonly see conservatives going after people for expressing themselves.
And the empirical data demonstrate it's not just "a small minority" of conservatives who feel that's justified. It's a majority. Sometimes a very large one.
So. If you want to complain about illiberal leftists, I'll nod along all day. And you'll notice that this claim was not the portion of your post I took issue with, because I don't disagree. I took issue with your claim that:
> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
because they do, and the data very clearly indicates that the majority of Republicans believe it's justified.
And, once again, to be very clear, there is no implied assertion anywhere that leftists do not do the same thing.
> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble.
Either I'm not the one in a bubble or else someone should tell CATO their methodology is flawed ;-)
[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey-reports/...