Frederick Douglass was an ardent defender of free speech, a principle dismissed by Berkeley protesters and rioters and their apologists.
Brendan O’Neill writes:
This week the leftish Twittersphere and liberal comment sites went wild for two stories. The first, that President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know who Frederick Douglass was. The second, that those Berkeley students and non-Berkeley anarchists who shut down the Milo Yiannaopolous meeting might not have done such a bad thing. Okay, a mob silenced Milo, people tweeted and intoned, but perhaps that’s okay in the anti-Trump fightback.
It’s almost unbearably ironic. Because if these critics of Trump themselves knew anything about Douglass, they’d know he was implacably opposed to using mob pressure to shut down public meetings. They’d know he valued free speech so highly, above all other values, that he thought no one should ever be “overawed by force” simply for what he thinks and says. Imagine: in one breath mocking Trump for not knowing who Douglass was, and in the next saying things that will have made Douglass spin in his grave.
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