The Growing Dangers of the
Limitation of “Freedom of Speech”
in America: Argumentative Essay
From the 1970s, up until the last decade, free speech as been allowed
without relatively any danger and no issues, however, recently that has all
changed and traditional free idea exchange/speech has been challenged.
This may have rooted from the term: “Political Correctness,” this term was
only used infrequently until the 1980s, whereas the “The American New Left”
began to frequently use this term, however it was still only used ironically
and not very recent. In October 1990 an article by Richard Bernstein is
released, which is credited of popularizing the term, then in 1991,
conservatives started to use the term to envelop their concerns about the
left, in both political debate and culture. Finally, George H.W. Bush used the
term in one of his speeches as he says that the term arises to sweep away
the debris of racism, sexism, and hatred, it actually replaces old prejudice
with new ones, as it subjects some topics, expressions, and gestures as off-
limits.
Some may also conclude that the issue of exchanging ideas may stem
from when there was inequality among different groups of people. As some
speech that is made to day might be traced back then. This is where “Hate
Speech” comes in, hate speech is a demoralizing thing said about a group of
people that either is not true or is based solely off of race or gender. Now, on
places like college campuses, they plan to prohibit “Hate Speech” (some
have already), however they seem to always broaden hate speech, and say
that some speech, that generally would be publicly accepted and not “Hate
Speech” would be categorized as “Hate Speech.” Either way, “Hate Speech”
is still protected under Freedom of Speech until otherwise changed. This can
be seen as Hate Speech is defined as: “speech that is intended to insult,
offend, or intimidate a person because of some trait (as race, religion, sexual
orientation, national origin, or disability), (Noah Webster). And freedom of
speech is defined in the constitution as: “the legal right to express one’s
opinions freely” (Noah Webster).
One of the fundamental issues growing in lots of American college
campuses is the banning of freedom of speech and the banning of what the
colleges deem “Hate Speech.” Over ninety percent of American colleges
have policies that could restrict freedom of speech in some way(Daniel
Burnett). With over a quarter of the colleges completely trading freedom of
speech for a “Freedom of Speech Zone,” where they are only allowed to
share what some may deem as sensitive subjects to others in that zone,
most of these colleges have also “clearly and substantially” restricted free
speech rights(Daniel Burnett). The banning of freedom of speech may not
always become an official policy on some of these campuses, however many
students will get violent over someone speaking with an opposing idea. This
can be seen as when a conservative speaker, Ben Shapiro went to go speak
to the UC Berkeley Campus and students. This caused hundreds of
protesters, many violent, to attempt to disrupt or stop the speech, that night
there were at least nine arrests made, one was even was even being held for
suspicion of battery towards an officer. This also showed the clash between
two “radical” sides of the political spectrum, however this was little in
comparison to what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. In Charlottesville in
2017, there was a “Unite the right” rally, held by many of those on the far
right, was first intended to stop all of the recent takedowns of memorials that
honored Confederate soldiers and Generals. However most of those
moderates were drowned out by a
Lot of actually white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and even a few KKK
members.
Source:https://www.studypool.com/documents/18329668/the-growing-
dangers-of-the-limitation-of-freedom-of-speech-in-america-argumentative-
essay
