[Front Page] Tech plutocrat Elon Musk announces he is buying Twitter to liberate this "virtual town square" from one-sided political censorship - and he is met with hysterical charges that he is attacking free speech. A woman who reposts TikTok videos of "woke" teachers bragging about their sexualize of children in their classrooms, is attacked by a Washington Post reporter who harasses the woman’s family in order to silence an enemy of "free speech" and purveyor of "hate" - just days after the reporter appeared in a video and bursts into tears over getting the same treatment she later inflicts on the anonymous creator of Libs on TikTok.We are clearly living in Orwellian times, when the ambitions of tyrannical power are camouflaged by debased language, incoherent thought, and patent double-standards. Like the Newspeak of 1984, our progressive media abuses words like "diversity" and "free speech" to make them mean their opposites: a uniform orthodoxy protected and enforced by censorship. As long ago as Thucydides, this abuse of language and thought was recognized as the enemy of freedom and the precursor of a tyranny that reduces the diversity of opinion and ideas into one monolithic, oppressive dogma.
Since its creation in the ancient Athenian democracy, free speech has been the sine qua non of a political order that includes a wide diversity of citizens, not just the rich and educated elites who monopolized power in oligarchic or autocratic regimes. Since political discussion and deliberation were conducted through public speeches, citizens had to be protected from reprisals for, or limitations on their diverse opinions and their particular ways of expressing them.
True diversity - the diversity of thought and opinion - is intimately connected to free speech, itself one of the most critical foundations of political freedom, and most important bulwarks against tyranny.
This freedom of speech given to social and economic inferiors was one of the major criticisms of democracy in arguments against politically enfranchising non-elites. Antidemocratic critics like Plato, an aristocrat and philosopher who favored rule by a technocratic elite, mocked the average Athenian who presumed to address his betters in the Assembly and the Council. Plato’s like-minded mentor Socrates mocked and slandered the masses as "dunces and weaklings," the "fullers and the cobblers or the builders or the smiths or the farmers or the merchants or the traffickers in the market-place who think of nothing but buying cheap and selling dear."
The common sense and traditional wisdom of these poor and middling citizens, which make them fit to participate in political deliberation, are disparaged. Hence, they should not have the right to speak out during such deliberations, but defer to their social betters. Their diversity is an impediment to good government, not, as Aristotle argued, a resource comprising a great diversity of talents and life-experiences.