Free speech is the very foundation of our civilization. It's the only mechanism we have which prevents us from violence to sort out our differences. So I'd say it's kind of sacred.
Here is the story: some Canadian professor makes fuss about his objection to legislation which will oblige him to address his students the way they want him to. The official narrative is this: let's move on, he is just being homophobic, bitter and frustrated, or just unkind to vulnerable people.
So what's the big deal?
Please watch the following video to find out. I cannot articulate it any better than Peterson did it himself. All I can say is that what he said about the role of truth in our existence, is probably the most important message I've heard in my entire life.
The truth is a process, it's a process of successive approximation. (...) The truth is a spiritual food. You live on information, you are a cognitive apparatus. (...) If you are fed on diet of deceit, you'll become pathological and the world will kick back at you extraordinarily hard. The first thing it will do is deprive you of any sense of meaning. (...) A life that is characterized by nothing but deceit, has no positive meaning in it but plenty of suffering.
(The interview starts at 6:30)
The silence
For me the most dreadful aspect of all this is the fact that the very guardian of our civilization, the world of academia, remains silent (almost equally silent as Steem, for that matter). Or even outright hostile - they try their best to discredit him and shut him up.
One of the very few people from academia who publicly backed Peterson is Janice Fiamengo and she did is in a spectacular way - she offers a broader context and citations from Canadian Supreme Court, like this one:
The benefits of the suppression of hate speech and its harmful effects outweigh the detrimental effect of restricting expression which, by its nature, does little to promote the values underlying freedom of expression.
Statements like this should send shivers down the spine of any reasonable human being aware of the events of the 20th centry.
The side effects
It seems the affair around bill C-16 has caused some interesting encounters, which probably would not have happened otherwise. Below is an extremely insightful conversation between Gad Saad and Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson:
You can stumble around and speak badly, but if it's genuine, if it's a genuine attempt to articulate the truth, it has unstoppable power.
As one of the YouTube commenters put it nicely: SJWs picked the wrong man to piss off.
If anything, it is the world of academia that has facilitated the assassination of free speech. More than anyone else these so-called intellectuals have been the first supporters of totalitarian ideas like communism and fascism. And as Hayek pointed out: they are so isolated in their ivory tower than they never even CARE about the consequences of their ideas.
The controversy around climate is one of the latest examples of that. They are so convinced about THEIR ideas that they want to censor, imprison or kill (or at least, fantasize about it) anyone who DARES question their ideas.
As @pgveer stated, it is academia that is at the center of the attack on free speech, and on liberty as a whole.
Many of the leftist terrorists of the 60s, with their hatred of liberty, went into academia and have great influence on the academic agenda.
(Source: George, J. and Wilcox, L.,(1996). American extremists: militias, supremacists, klansmen, communists & others. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books.)
It is funny that their own creation can turn on them, as happened to the Chinese communists with the Red Guard, as many LEFTIST professors are also experiencing censorship and attack from the indoctrinated and unthinking "students" they themselves created.
And with a President Trump, many democrats will - at least until they regain power - regret giving the executive branch and the various unaccountable bureaucracies so much power. Some people on my Facebook feed had imagined, a while back, what Democrats would think if a President Trump wielded so much power...
they won't regret anything as they are hypocritical and will fight Trump and make false accusations of overreach while ignoring the entire "pen and phone" overreach of the oblahblah admin
their only two consistencies are inconsistency and the end goal of tyranny
Hence the "until they regain power". Because blue power is of course free from corruption and abuses.
corruption and abuse are the hallmarks of blue power, lol.
I'm not going to let the gop off the hook, of course, but I consider the Left to be the more dangerous partner in the leftist/globalist alliance