Carlson says that liberals in America used to support free speech, regardless of whether they agreed with the cause. He gives several examples of this, including the ACLU, which most famously defended a Nazi group's right to march in a largely Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois. Another example was the Berkeley free speech movement, where students protested the arrest of Jack Weinberg for passing out unauthorized political literature, blocking the police car for over a day.
Today, says Carlson, the left, including Berkeley, has completely reversed itself on the issue. When Milo Yiannopoulos attempted to speak at Berkeley, students rioted (and the administration and local police allowed the riots) until his speech was cancelled. Other speakers similarly driven from the halls of intellectual debate include Ann Coulter, Condaleeza Rice, and Charles Murray. (I'm aware of more than a few on the right today who would similarly condemn Murray, although they'd half-heartedly agree he should still be allowed to speak.)
The problem extends beyond university campuses, says Carlson, showing up prominently in big tech companies, such as Google, where James Damore was fired for an inoffensive memo which documented quite a bit of science and data saying that "discrimination" was not the primary cause of some people not faring as well in such environments. Brandon Eich, in another case, was driven out of the company he helped found for a minor donation to a Prop. 8 in California, which said that marriage was between a man and a woman.
Carlson ends the chapter talking about the disturbing merger of "journalism" and government power and how this bodes ill for all of us.
So we're already nearing the end of this book and it's time to pick our next. The first question is should we continue the previous policy of alternating fiction and non-fiction? I enjoy them, but the fiction books seem to get noticably less engagement.
After that comes the question: What should be our next book? I'll look back over previous lists, but I'm open to suggestion and we'll see what the group, as a whole, thinks. No mail-in ballots, though.
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