A seat is a seat
Kings come and go, it remains
Lacks but a footstool
Write again for me musicThat my soul desires to hear;Will you lift your penWill you sing again?Inspiration is silentas though in great and dreadful fearDares not utter verseBlessing, no, nor curse;Write again, if you hear meAnd together count the costOf what must be doneWhy remain ye mum?All must hear of your thund'ringWhat remains shall soon be lostSince your voice is deadI shall sound instead.
No One Believes in Freedom of Speech (anymore)
One illusion conservatives labor under is that they are the party which respects freedom of speech. Of course, let us be clear: the left also labors under this illusion, special pleading nonwithstanding. As always, both sides appear to themselves to be the champions of what is fashionable, whether or not this accords to reality.
Let me preface this: I am perhaps one of the most open-minded people you will ever meet. That is not to say I am fashionably open minded; as Chesterton put it, the point of an open mind, like an open mouth, is to close it on something solid. There is what is called the 'big five' psychological exam, and I always score very high on 'openness', which if you knew the stridency with which I hold my opinions, would seem unusual to say the least.
The fact of the matter is this: when you have really investigated (or so you think) and have concluded such and such (or so you think) yourself, you tend to be that much more unyielding in whatever opinion was this way formed. Liberals often show surprise that a person who 'reads books' has any sort of opinion that differs from what they consider 'open minded' (fashionable) thought. One should not! There are many different ways of looking at the world, and thus many different ways to explain the facts of history, even respecting them as they are, and these ways are often contradictory!
Openness to new ideas is essential for a thinker, but it doesn't mean one is necessarily open to the ideas that one thinks one ought to be. It is rather hidebound to think of all ideas as being on a kind of level playing field, or all perspectives as being equal - there is hardly a more conservative style of opinion, even if in some eras this opinion does not appear among conservatives.
This is because this thought - equality among opinions - is really equality among accepted opinions, which lo and behold is 'the status quo'. Very liberal conservative of you, conservative liberals!
Among people who read there are generally three kinds: those who are reading for some tangible goal, such as a class or a project; those who are reading fashionably and read or want to appear to have read fashionable books, and those who want to read to know things. The last class alone are people who are in any real sense 'open minded', but it is usually the second class which bother with the title.
Thinking for yourself is dangerous, if for no other reason than it is easy to become very opinionated about things whose opinions would be very detrimental to your life at present, irrespective of whether these opinions reflect a true understanding of reality or not. Merely being open and reading in pursuit of knowledge itself poses a danger!
To test this for yourself, take an opinion you hold very strongly and try to convince someone for whom that opinion might be a threat. For best effect, it should not involve physical violence, since such opinions easily earn one approbation anyway. You may find that defenders of free speech or open minded people are not!
I've probably been banned from more conservative spaces than liberal ones; this is because I always make the mistake of thinking I can convince conservatives of things, being more from that background, than liberals. I would never assume I could convince an abortion-believing, democrat-voting liberal of anything, and don't try -- I assume as soon as I open my mouth I will be banned for hate speech. (This probably isn't true, but on this assumption I've never been banned from Twitter.)
In this I find that both spaces lack openness, there is very little in the way, in any such spaces, of discussion. This is not a new problem, by the way, but has certainly grown worse over time. The internet has if nothing become good at passive-aggressive suppression of speech; Reddit innovated in the shadow-ban, where people literally do not know that others cannot hear them. More recently it has become more active in shutting down things it does not like to hear; it especially does not like to hear this!
People who believe in freedom of speech do until the point at which I open my mouth and tell them, for example, that democracy is a sham. "Well," they might say, "did you think they might be right in considering that beyond the pale?" I used to think so, too! Yet, I have only proceeded in understanding by carefully considering new ideas, and attempting to synthesize them. Many fail the test, and I must admit you eventually do get a sense for which ideas hang together, and why, which gives people the impression you are close-minded.
It shouldn't be thought that an open-minded person is simply open and fair with every opinion; and again, no one really considers open-minded-ness a virtue. What I like to offer at least is an attempt to explain to a reasonable person why I believe they are wrong. Rather than coming off as 'open minded', the force of my opinion comes across as close-minded. Yet as I explained above, the close-minded person is least likely to engage in a debate, for to them either an idea is already among acceptable (but toothless) opinions, or it is to be silenced without discussion.
People believe in freedom of speech up until the point at which they encounter a truly novel opinion (to them;) forcefully presented. The entryist's art is to never forcefully preent their opinions until they have the power to do so. Though honesty is worth nothing today, one could at least say I am honest. I am, however, a very poor entryist.
Why would anyone, though, believe that all opinions deserve an equal hearing? Lèse-majesté shall be the whole of the law, or at least it persists at all levels of discourse. If only many thinkers understood this concept, they would understand why freedom of speech is impossible. When people say that some certain speech is 'violence', they are referencing the real concept that speech could threaten what they regard as something vulnerable which in their view should not be attacked.
One reason why I attack democracy, such as attacking the concept of voting, is because in addition to being true, it can be used as an object lesson in Lèse-majesté. If one were to successfully invalidate voting in the public eye, such that the futility of an individual voting in the former USA's national system became common knowledge, the whole system would be thrown into crisis, wounded perhaps mortally. I expect to be silenced, and this is further a demonstration that Lèse-majesté has not been done away with, with the concept of the republic or of democracy.
The biggest failure in our system was to not more clearly, honestly, and openly define what 'freedom of speech' means for a republican or democratic system. At the current time it appears to mean prostitution but not a defense of itself as a concept; yet how is one to have expected, at all, that the political class could publicly discuss (and only the discussions of the political class in a republican context are at all 'public') issues so as to inform voting, without explicitly outlining that this was the purpose of said freedom of speech?
Yet of course, who, having attained power in a democratic system, would brook speech being used to threaten their power?
And so it goes.