Free Speech on Fire--and Not in a Good Way

Jonathan Turley writes that free speech is dying because there's been a paradigm shift in the way we here in the West understand it. We have gone from thinking of it as the right to speak up, even if it "offends," to worrying about how it will be received by people whose precious feelings may possibly be hurt. The "right" to not be "offended" has therefore trumped the right to offend (a fundamental shift exemplified by Canada's notorious Section 13). And did I hear someone mention something about shouting in a crowded theatre? Re that Turley observes:

The much-misconstrued statement of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater is now being used to curtail speech that might provoke a violence-prone minority. Our entire society is being treated as a crowded theater, and talking about whole subjects is now akin to shouting “fire!”

Another way to think of it is like this: While we here in the West may still have a marketplace of ideas, there are people, many of them leftists and Islamists, who have dedicated their lives to ensuring that some ideas never get to market.