Kerby Anderson

Yesterday I talked about the leftist impulse to censor. But you might wonder why the left so frequently promotes censorship. Dennis Prager recently provided some insights into “Why the Left Has to Suppress Free Speech.”

He begins by stating a fact from history. The left always suppresses speech going all the way back to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He explains that this is an important difference between liberals and the left. Liberals and conservatives believe in free speech. The left does not.

Think of some of our major institutions. The left controls universities and allows no dissent. The left controls nearly every news medium. There is little or no dissent in the mainstream media. The left controls Hollywood. No dissent is allowed there. In these and other venues, we see the cancel culture at work.

Prager argues that the left fears debate and dissent because it is a threat to their ideas. He describes leftism as a big balloon that can be broken with a mere pinprick. He has seen how one articulate conservative on a college campus can undo years of left-wing indoctrination.

I have seen this as well because I have participated in or moderated several forums with Christian ministries in which lectures or debates take place. Students are often surprised to hear good reasons to believe in the Bible and a Christian perspective. They discover that their professors and the media have presented a caricature of Christianity and presented history and information in a very biased way.

Nearly a century ago, one Supreme Court justice argued that the best way to counter “falsehoods and fallacies” was “more speech, not enforced silence.” Those were wise words then and are wise words now.