Well the title of the article was probably not written by Bari Weiss. If you've ever spoken to a columnist, you would know that the titles of the columns are written by the copy-editors and not the authors. While she herself is an editor, she would not be editing her own column so I suggest you focus on the text of the article rather than nitpicking a tweet and the title.

As for the free speech comments, do you not find it troubling that future lawyers for this country (who will be arguing cases and eventually may even be appointed to the bench) have no understanding of free speech? Trying to block someone from even taking a podium is not exercising free speech. If you protest her being there, that is free speech, but you cannot literally try to keep someone from speaking and say you are exercising speech.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

I don’t see how anyone could defend shouting down someone as mainstream as Summers.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

She was still trying to make the point in the course of the article that everyone is being called fascists these days, listed multiple countries that are not in fact fascist that should be labeled the real fascists, and multiple other examples of name calling in the US that did not involve charges of fascism and as far as I can see largely constituted no actual threat to free speech at all other than hurt feelings. I am quite happy to say though the blame for her really dumb citation of a fake Tweet should also fall on the editors though!


Yet again, those future lawyers made no actual claim about the First Amendment barring Sommers from speaking. On the legal side, this is a group of private citizens in a private university lobbying for one particular norm of free speech when it came to guest speakers on campus, so I'm not sure this says anything worrying at all about the future of freedom of speech.

Beyond that, Sommers was not physically restrained from the podium and I have no idea why you imply that here. She was merely met by a group of students exercising their own freedom of speech. Freedom to an audience sounds like one of those icky positive rights you libertarians are always getting so worked up about.

Now of course, if we're talking about free speech as a robust social norm rather than a narrow legal concept, I am quite happy to say that I'm not generally a fan of no-platforming. I also don't think anyone genuinely concerned about free speech as a social norm would vomit anywhere close to the thousands of words Weiss and Stephens and the like have churned out on those damned college kids these days, particularly in comparison to people being threatened with losing their livelihood over the exercise of free speech. These authors cannot be arsed to say anything about the multiple impediments to free speech off college campuses, and Weiss actively worked against free speech there when it came to professors she disagreed with about Israel.

I think it goes beyond that. There are things you can't say, even if you can verify them. The Right does this as well as the Left, no doubt, but the Left is doing it and claiming a) that they are not and b) they even if they are doing it, they are doing it in the name of relieving oppression. Good luck relieving anything without an agenda based at least part in social class; it's not going to happen.

But the real problem is that there are things you can't say and if you say them, you'll be attacked. Colleges are supposed to produce knowledge, not drive certain forms of knowing underground.

Protest is healthy, but using force--even the force of conformity--to keep people from speaking is Orwellian indeed. I can't believe so many on the Left are blind to this, but that's identity politics for you. It sometimes replaces investigation and debate with a coding system that is impervious to nuance or context. Why don't we just have a Party official in every classroom?

It also has to do with both the second amendment and the cultural principal of free speech. Slightly different, but that is why this applies to many non-public situations (but not any situation).

I got nailed on this once and paid a pretty steep price.

Pundits being called mean things are literally the majority of substantive examples in the article. And when it comes to being hypocrites, it's the supposedly consistent free speech defenders on the right who so quickly clam up when people are denied employment altogether for political beliefs about Israel, rather than the amount of outrage the namecalling and no-platforming that pundits getting paid anyway regularly inspires.


This is superficial rubbish. Please eaborate on these ways of knowing being driven underground, no doubt likely at the behest of the vast cultural neo-Marxist conspiracy theory that permeates college campuses.

She's been on Morning Joe talking in circles and sounding exactly like the kids she's "troubled" by. She's really sounding like little more than a scold, except when she blithely dismissed her mistake citing a troll account.

Zeph' s critiques seem on point, especially given how she (half) described Sommers again.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

For starters, don't attribute ideas to me that I did not say.

Is "she" Sommers?

Sorry , the "she" I was referring to was Weiss. Weiss continued to frame Sommers as something of a liberal Democrat. And Squinty and the Meat Puppet(Charlie Pierce's words) ate it up.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Sommers likes to think she is a liberal and a provocateur, and sometimes she does try to provoke people, but she is also a scold, as you say, which is strange because that's what she often complains about.

she's a right of center scold more or less. who knew my grandma was a fascist too?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

By that account we all had at least one fascist grandma

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Pretty sure many would have called one of mine one. At least once the dimentia came on and the filter went away.

Not really. He seems to be suggesting that Sommers being called a fascist by campus groups is some kind of one-off. It's a really disingenuous position to take when any who is to the right of Joe Lieberman has a good chance of being "de-platformed" and/or called a Nazi on the typical college campus.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Sommers actively sought to get on the same grift that Milo was on, so at bare minimum she has no problem associating with fascists. She's funded by AEI and The Federalist Society. I think it's far far more disingenuous to frame her as actually being some kind Democrat being victimized by those college kids and their no-good, horrible namecalling than anything I said.

The main reason it I am treating the phenomenon as being a one-off is because it literally was so in the course of Weiss' column, excepting of course the fake Twitter count she so credulously believed. Perhaps there is a good column to be written about too many people being called fascists these days, but that one certainly wasn't it. And as I said before, the same people who express so much concern about that horrific namecalling seem to have had no problem with anyone left of the Clintons being labeled a stark raving Stalinist for years now.

What is a "fake Twitter account"?

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

The "Official Antifa Twitter Account" which Weiss so readily believed was evidence of totally real Antifa thugs being mean to Dave Rubin.

That's not what I was asking. I'm aware of this story and the part referencing Rubin in the original piece that was later removed. The question remains- what is a "fake Twitter account"? One without a blue checkmark? Are you a fake CFMB account?

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

You're really going to play word games over an account purporting to be from Antifa yet with a blatantly anti-Antifa stickied post and no actual affiliation of any kind should somehow be treated as possibly real? I think it's trivially true that in some cases it can be difficult to identify parody or troll Twitter accounts or those not necessarily linked to a real person or organization, but in others it's blatantly, glaringly obvious, like this one that Weiss was so eager to believe. If the use of the word "fake" upsets you so much, feel free to switch in "troll" or "parody."

Here's the "debunking" Zeph is hanging his hat on:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman ... .hrkqpXKAA

Essentially, a twitter account claiming affiliation for Antifa falsely claimed responsibility for various acts of graffiti and the like, so that means that it doesn't actually speak on behalf of some number of Antifa members? ISIS accounts claim responsibility for a loose stool, that doesn't mean their overall message, or the people they speak on behalf of, isn't real. This is like the "that account doesn't represent Anonymous, because Anonymous is a collective" shit people used to excuse questionable actions by Anon members. At it's core it's a No True Scotsman.

I don't need to hang my hat on that report alone because this is literally the stickied post on the account: https://twitter.com/OfficialAntifa/stat ... 4922920962

It seems like you're the one getting upset. As far as I know, "Antifa" isn't some official organization with a charter and incorporation. So I don't know how someone is "fake Antifa". The fact remains that some human being (or maybe it was a Russian bot) used a Twitter account to say some shitty stuff to and/or about Dave Rubin. You can call that "fake" if it makes you feel better, but the fact is, it happened.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

But they didn't mean it! Look into their heart!

Weiss and the New York Times both used the term "fake" as well, so maybe the retraction actually shouldn't have been printed at all? It's good to know though that both you and JLN are happy to literally use the "people on Twitter are saying" approach which has been rightly mocked for years here to now justify this article though.

I wasn't trying to beef on Zeph. I guess what I would consider "fake" would be if it were someone with opposing views taking an action to make the other side look bad, e.g. a black guy spray-painting the "n-word" on his own windshield. I mean, yeah, if Steven Crowder was operating that account and fucking with Rubin, that's fake. But I don't believe anyone has made such an argument and we have no way of knowing.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Plenty of people say this. They are sick of ideologues of every kind insisting upon "the ends justify the means" thinking and willingly using every rhetorical fallacy as long as they win.

I don't care what they call her, just let her speak her mind before responding.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I think anyone with the slightest bit of critical thinking skills who's looked at other Tweets at that account, including the blatantly over-the-top stickied one I've now mentioned several times, would quickly be able to discern it's a troll account that easily fits the very definition of fake you provide. I think believing otherwise or arriving at "we just can't know for sure" conclusion reflects a ridiculous amount of gullibility and/or desire to have your priors confirmed. And given this apparent epistemic uncertainty about whether or not it's actually from persons associated with Antifa, I'm still left wondering if you're therefore questioning whether the Times should have deleted the passage and added the correction at all and how and why "people on Twitter are saying" suddenly became a legitimate way to make political points.

FemiNAzi was created by Limbaugh and officially added to the lexicon of the nation decades ago.

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