Jesse Jackson died today. This essay is not a reflection on his career and legacy (I leave that to others). Instead, I want to use the occasion of Jackson’s passing to emphasize a point about free speech. This concerns an attempt to suppress my speech in the spring of 2024. At the same time, the moment does recall an attempt to derail Jackson’s criticisms of Barack Obama, who, in the context of his successful 2008 campaign for president, was appealing to the white vote by condescending to black Americans.
When the petition was circulated to get me fired (see The Snitchy Dolls Return; see also The Paradox of Petitioning Against Freedom), it was not only my gender-critical beliefs that were at issue. The petitioners also objected to my use of language regarding race, particularly an essay I published in July 2008, Jesse Jackson Criticizes Obama for “Telling Niggers How to Behave.” As busybodies tend to do, the woke scolds had to make an effort to find words that would offend them (see Samuel Johnson and the Prudes of Social Media). However, I did not use the word in question. Jesse Jackson did.
Of course, it shouldn’t have mattered if I had. There is this thing in the United States called free speech. You may have heard of it (you can brush up on it by going here: Republicanism, Free Speech, and the Illiberal Impulse). It’s part of the fundamental law of the American republic. This is how we know that progressives do not believe in the American way: they police language and seek to use the government to do the dirty work of authoritarian desire.
I work at a public university, and the petition was an attempt to persuade the administration to deprive me of my rights. The university did not act on the petition, but employees at other public institutions have been disciplined and even terminated for uttering certain words and opinions. This is the result of progressive infiltration of academia, which is, as I shown and will again show here, antithetical to the foundation of the American Republic, which rests on classical liberal principles.
Progressivism is rooted in a particular strain of liberalism called utilitarianism, which rests on the philosophical foundations of consequentialism. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that the moral rightness or wrongness of an action is determined solely by its outcomes or consequences. Such a system is necessarily preference-based, and there is no check on the means to achieve those ends apart from arbitrary statute, which requires the unjust exercise of power. (See Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument.)
Utilitarians believe government action should be judged by what produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, including how policies make people feel. If a word offends people, if it makes them feel bad, and the government acts to protect them from offensive speech, because government action lacks a fixed moral ontology, whatever means it deems necessary to achieve that end may be justified. This leads to majoritarianism, which America’s Founders explicitly rejected as the tyranny of the majority. James Madison did not even like that word for this reason (see America is a Republic). Utilitarianism is at best a form of soft totalitarianism, in which those who are offended by speech may, if they acquire sufficient power, suppress those who utter it.
By contrast, the Founders subscribed to a deontological liberalism grounded in a moral ontology that defends individual rights—including the right to speak in ways others may find offensive—these found in natural law, which is discerned through reason and observation. A government founded on individual rights protects the man from the mob, permitting each person to speak and write freely without government interference. However much one may wish never to hear certain words or opinions, the authority to control speech must itself be subject to moral limits. This framework guarantees equality in the truest sense: every person possesses the same right to speak and express opinions. There is no right to not be offended. (See Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights.)
This distinction has profound implications for the kind of democracy we will enjoy—or suffer. The system established by the Founders is a republican form of government, in which the will of the people operates within constraints that protect individual liberty. It is anti-totalitarian by design. The alternative, advocated by progressives—majoritarianism—contains no inherent safeguard against tyranny. If 51 percent of the population voted to enslave the remaining 49 percent, there would be no principled basis within that framework to prevent it. Only statutory law could intervene, and such a statute would itself rest on arbitrary authority rather than inviolable principle.
Therefore, freedom of conscience, speech, writing, and association are not merely beneficial to the individual wishing to exercise such freedoms, but are foundational to democratic systems that provide immunity from tyranny that would extinguish the democratic rights of every individual to affect the system. Without the right to utter contrary opinions or to freely hold objectionable thoughts, I cannot persuade others to join me in expressing a collective desire to change circumstances. I cannot share observations that might result in mutual knowledge. I cannot criticize actions that I regard as harmful.
And this is precisely why progressives police language. The main reason the petition was circulated is that I oppose the gender identity doctrine. I show that gender identity is a false construct—or in any case an unfalsifiable claim—and can therefore demonstrate why gender affirming care is an unethical practice. I can also show why preferred pronouns involve misgendering, recoded as their opposite. I can show many other things, as well. Those who want to silence me do so because their project depends on mass ignorance about the ramifications of queer doctrine, and they know I am persuasive. If the truth about gender is allowed to spread, their politics are doomed, and this they must prevent—and the free speech right is there to prevent them from successfully doing so. Ideally, they would pursue rational arguments to counter my opinion, but since there is no rational rebuttal to my position, they seek to silence me instead.
That was the point of my 2008 essay. The media sought to shame Jackson for his language because he was using the slur to criticize Obama’s anti-black propaganda, a strategy Obama put central to his campaign for president. Obama condescended to blacks to reach the white audience whose votes he needed to win office. He was convinced that the best way to garner white support was to say things he believed white people think but are afraid to say. Jackson knew what Obama was up to, so the mass media had to delegitimize Jackson to prevent the spread of mutual knowledge.
freedom and reason 