Censorship: The Tip of the Iceberg

By |2023-03-21T17:21:34-05:00March 21st, 2023|Categories: Free Speech, Freedom, Government, Liberalism|

A history of the transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century could well be told with just a focus on free speech and censorship. But this story of changed attitudes toward censorship yields lessons far beyond just the liberal attitude toward free speech. Aside from the inevitability of death and taxes, there is another [...]

The Commonality of Freedoms

By |2023-02-22T11:35:22-06:00February 22nd, 2023|Categories: Civil Society, Free Speech, Freedom, Freedom of Religion, Politics|

The assault on religious freedom is not occurring in a vacuum. Freedoms of speech and association have also come under siege. These attacks prove a more general truth: that freedom is interconnected; when one basic freedom is undermined, all freedoms are undermined. On the culture-and-religion front, so much has changed over the past three and [...]

The Historical Case Against Censorship

By |2022-09-28T16:43:17-05:00September 28th, 2022|Categories: Free Speech, History, Politics, Timeless Essays|

Drawing from history, our founders understood that liberty and justice could not exist in the same neighborhood as censorship. The solution for our current state, then, is not censorship but civility and a steadfast clinging to the American principles codified in our founding documents, which must be common and applicable to all equally under the [...]

The Threat of Free Speech in the University

By |2022-07-26T13:22:41-05:00July 25th, 2022|Categories: Culture, Education, Featured, Free Speech, Modernity, Roger Scruton, Timeless Essays|

Now I, too, would like the university to be a safe space, but a safe space for rational argument about the pressing issues of our time. If a university stands for anything, surely it stands for that idea of truth, as a guiding light in our darkness and the source of real knowledge. Free speech [...]

Controlling Student Speech… On and Off Campus

By |2021-06-18T13:13:22-05:00May 19th, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Education, First Amendment, Free Speech, Government, Senior Contributors, Supreme Court, Thomas R. Ascik|

Will elementary, secondary, and university students, off campus as well as on campus, be forbidden to criticize, for example, critical race theory and the new American history curricula? And will that prohibition be extended to parents? The grandiose and centralized cradle-through-college education plans of Joe Biden and the Democratic party have now been plainly stated. [...]

A Meager Commitment to Free Speech & Diversity

By |2020-10-27T12:14:46-05:00October 27th, 2020|Categories: Education, Free Speech, Liberal Learning, Liberty, Politics|

The California State University system is long overdue for a revision to its general education program. But why not leave politics out of it and work at cultivating a rigorous and coherent core and a free and open marketplace of ideas—so that graduates are prepared for career success, for informed citizenship, and to participate productively [...]

Cancel Culture Comes to the Supreme Court

By |2020-10-13T16:56:26-05:00October 13th, 2020|Categories: Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Supreme Court|

The reality is that no person and no private institution can escape the ceaseless initiatives by legal activists, judicial activists, cities, states, and, depending upon the Administration, the federal government to re-standardize American public as well as private life, and search out and cancel dissenters. In recent years, including this presidential year, cases in the [...]

The Iconoclasm and Profanity of Roger Scruton’s Sacking

By |2020-02-26T16:04:40-06:00May 1st, 2019|Categories: Conservatism, Culture War, England, Free Speech, Paul Krause, Roger Scruton|

The impetuous call to sack Roger Scruton shows those who clamored for the blade of the guillotine to fall on his head for what they are. His sacking also exposed the concerted effort to demonize and silence anyone outside the public orthodoxy of thought... Sir Roger Scruton is one of the preeminent conservative intellectuals in [...]

Facebook Fascism and the Slippery Slope to Tyranny

By |2019-04-14T21:56:59-05:00April 14th, 2019|Categories: Fascism, Free Speech, Joseph Pearce, Modernity, Rights, Senior Contributors, Tyranny|

Following the recent attack on a mosque in New Zealand by a white supremacist terrorist, I was asked by a national TV network in the UK to appear on a live show to give my perspective as a former white supremacist. (I served two prison sentences for “inciting racial hatred” back in the 1980s.) I [...]

Banning Books and Burning Heretics

By |2021-05-10T03:32:22-05:00January 24th, 2019|Categories: Civil Society, Culture, Culture War, England, Ethics, Free Speech, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Modernity, Poetry, Rights, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

Advocates of the liberal arts include “heretical” books in the great conversation, whereas political liberals seek to silence them as dangerous. As we have seen in Nazi Germany and in communist countries, the banning of “heretical” books ends with the burning of “heretics.” Several years ago, I visited the two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, in [...]

The “Masterpiece” Decision: Half a Cake Is Better Than None

By |2018-06-08T22:53:34-05:00June 6th, 2018|Categories: Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Homosexual Unions, Supreme Court, Thomas R. Ascik|

Though Masterpiece is a decision upholding religious liberty, the Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that free speech about homosexuality does not enjoy broad protections… In the first of two momentous cases on its docket as to whether some Americans can be left alone as dissenters from the punishing orthodoxies of the progressive society and state, [...]

The Left’s Cyber-Censorship of Conservatism

By |2018-06-01T21:51:47-05:00June 1st, 2018|Categories: Conservatism, Culture War, Free Speech, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

We are witnessing storm troopers in cyber-space “pulling the plug” on those whose voices they refuse to tolerate. Two personal experiences of such censorship—both of which relate to The Imaginative Conservative itself—will suffice to illustrate the trend… The interference of Google and Facebook in the recent Irish referendum on abortion raises serious concerns about the [...]

Will the Supreme Court Tell Pro-Lifers What to Say?

By |2018-03-15T23:35:12-05:00March 15th, 2018|Categories: Abortion, Free Speech, Supreme Court|

By state law, the state of California is now forcing pregnancy-support centers, whose sole purpose for existence is to offer alternatives to abortion, to “conspicuously” notify pregnant women of where they can receive abortions. The centers have objected that the law violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment by compelling them to engage [...]

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