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The heavy – and dire – price of enabling hypersensitive snowflakes.
Last Thursday CNN’s recently demoted Don Lemon stirred up the “offense”-Stasi among his own comrades, and provoked a snowflake-storm on social media. Responding to Nikki Haley’s announcement that she is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, Lemon said of the 51-year-old, “A woman is considered to be in their prime in their 20s and 30s and maybe 40s,” citing Google as a source, which clearly means reproduction prime.
A bipartisan uproar ensued. Conservatives like Ben Shapiro and Erik Erikson were (I hope) enjoying some schadenfreude roused by a long-time political enemy’s being hoist with his own “woke” petard. But reinforcing hypersensitive reactions to insults of public figures is a bad idea. Conservatives of all people should be wary of implying that there are limits on free expression because of someone’s subjective, juvenile, or irrational threshold of offense. Look at what catering to snowflakes has done to comedy.
Indeed, from the beginning of political free speech 2500 years ago, being offended or insulted has been one of the costs of living in a diverse, free society in which citizens have a constitutional right to speak their minds no matter how vulgar, dishonest, or insulting their speech. We still haven’t seen anything like the crude sexual insults the Greeks and Romans indulged in their formal public orations and political speeches. Greek comedies, as classicist K.J. Dover wrote, regularly called prominent politicians, sometimes by name, “ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”
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