Modern-Day Book Burners

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.” - Fahrenheit 451

Groupthink breeds intolerance, and the academic echo chamber on college campuses across this great country is winning the day, with an outright ban on alternative thought.  It may be unwritten, but it’s understood.  Freedom of speech, a founding principle in America, gave our citizens the explicit right to freely express their ideas and opinions on every conceivable topic, including politics.  Yet, that very privilege has become an anathema to the one-size-fits-all mindset in the halls of academia.

College campuses, once custodians of intellectual curiosity and openness, have been increasingly guilty of one form of intolerance after another.  These include the introduction of safe spaces, free speech censorship, and de-platforming (a practice of disinviting a speaker and denying them a platform).

Safe spaces made an unfortunate return to popular culture by providing a place where students never have to face an idea that is different from their own.  Here captured minds of mush are encouraged to run and hide from the monstrosity of alternate opinions.  Multi-cultural centers go a step further by seeking to segregate students by race.

UC Berkeley, where the original free speech movement began in 1964, seems to have made a U-turn and now fears the very diversity of thought they once championed.  In 2017, chaos broke out on its campus when several violent clashes arose between MAGA-hat supporters and their anti-Trump adversaries including Antifa, a political protest group that reformed following the election of Donald Trump.  These militaristic, masked thugs show up whenever a rally from an opposition group forms.  Their tactics are violent, and their suppression of opposing views is the very behavior they claim to abhor.  An event called “Rally Against Hate” was formed to protest another event called “Say No to Marxism”.  Free Speech Week was canceled following petitions signed by campus professors and students, who prefer to hear only the sound of their own voices.

In 2014, Condoleezza Rice was forced to bow out as a graduation speaker at Rutgers, for simply having an “R” after her name and not the required “D”.  De-platforming has become the most popular form of censoring free speech whether the speaker is a more controversial sort like Milo Yiannopoulous or others like Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, and sociologist, Charles Murray, whom they simply don’t approve.  Apparently opting out of an event they don’t like is too difficult for these deep thinkers to fathom.

In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 book, “Fahrenheit 451”, Bradbury warns against censorship, mind control, and the suppression of ideas.  The novel begins with firemen, initially charged with putting out fires, now beginning to start them, whenever the crime of reading is exposed.  As Bradbury so eloquently noted, a book is knowledge, a loaded gun in the house next door, and the well-read man of the past is too perilous to allow in the here and now.  But it soon became evident that once a book is read, its content remains in us, and cannot be taken away, by fire or fear.  

An educated electorate is a dangerous electorate because free minds are open minds.  And until we wrestle control of young minds back from the liberal elites that guard the ivory towers, our battle continues.  Fahrenheit 451 remains a beacon lighting our way forward.  It deserves your consideration.