The New York Times reported today that Ann Coulter would cancel her speech at University of California, Berkeley, her team citing safety concerns. Coulter recently lost the backing of the conservative groups that initially sponsored her visit, and she remarked, "It's a sad day for free speech."
Is it?
Coulter, a sentient pile of cabbage, describes the urge to resist her visit as hostile to free speech. Religious conservatives say that people want to suppress God, while conservatives across the board say that it's difficult being in liberal environments like college campuses, presumably because they teach evolution in the classroom instead of the story of two naked people in a garden.
It certainly is interesting that the party of "personal responsibility" has never once stopped to consider a very plausible reason that people don't want to hear their ideas -- they are garbage. And this isn't just mudslinging. I'm genuinely talking about the actual purpose of ideas.
Why we have ideas
Consider that two people are talking about ways to improve the economy. One thinks that the government should heavily subsidize programs so that people will have more economic freedom and be able to use that to build the market. The other thinks that tax breaks and incentives should go to creators and innovators, so that they can make more opportunity for others.
Who's right? Well, at the start, no one.
That's the point. No one knows at the beginning, so, you know what you do? You test them.
Did Reagan's trickle-down economics work? Did giving more to the upper class incentivize them to more generously invest it in communities for the welfare of others? If it didn't, you have an answer for the two people in the above scenario.
And if people aren't showing up for your ideas or providing compelling counterpoints that you continually dismiss, maybe the problem isn't the people. What Coulter wants is to be able to continue with erroneous beliefs and ideas after the process of figuring out which ones work and which ones don't. That's not ok.
We value truth
Coulter is likely to be bloviating on some network news show by the end of this sentence about the death of values, but the truth is that we have values -- like truth. And if it's objectively true that immigrants don't steal jobs, that evolution is true, and that climate change is happening, then people don't enjoy showing up simply to watch you lie.
In a classic move of manipulation, conservatives like Coulter lie as hard as they can for as long as they can, and when they get caught, they use anger to attempt to regain control. What Coulter needs to get a grip on is that people aren't showing up for her schtick anymore, and that the only thing that died wasn't free speech, but her pride -- funny for a party eschewing "victimhood."
