I’ve built much of my career around free-speech litigation. I’ve championed mostly the rights of conservatives, but during my tenure as president of FIRE I also worked on a strictly nonpartisan basis — protecting left and right. By my rough estimate, I’ve personally worked on well over 200 free-speech cases and public controversies. And here’s what I’ve found:
When it comes to law, we almost never lose. When it comes to the culture, we rarely win.
Conservatives — especially conservative Christians — used to treat the boos and the jeers with shock and dismay. Today — especially for the young — there is less shock and more assimilation.
Social pressure can be even more powerful than laws.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think that this is one of the reasons that people can’t let go of the Apollo cargo cult. They see doing it in any other way as too risky, even though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the big-rocket approach is unaffordable.
On our troubled globe, where states do truly terrible things to their people, gassing them, slaughtering them en masse, impoverishing and immiserating them, I am aware of only one country whose continued existence has been called into question. Should Zimbabwe exist? Or Sudan? Or Syria? Only Israel is subjected to constant questioning of its right to remain a nation. Israel, a sliver of a country surrounded by tyrannical regimes or perpetually unstable governments, free for the moment from war because of strength and not because of neighborly goodwill, this Israel is the target of the opprobrium of preening academics the world over. The question is not whether members of the ASA are anti-Semites, as individuals. All this is not because the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely evil. It is just uniquely Jewish.
