This is how censorship begins

In this last election season, it was impossible not to notice how the local Left was trying to move the goalposts regarding acceptable political speech—at least for their opponents. While local progressive arguably indulged in race-baiting and homophobic rhetoric themselves, they contorted language and logic to claim, absurdly, that fair-minded critiques of far-left policies from centrists were beyond the Pale. Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal unpacks the phenomenon of creeping censorship from the Left.

A primary reason compromise today is well-nigh impossible is that {centrists and conservatives} recognize that their opposition is no longer traditional liberals..but instead progressives who will pocket any concession and immediately commence expanding it past the boundaries of the compromise.

So it has been with the elastic definitions of {acceptable} speech. Increasingly, the self-righteous left has donned the halo of anti-discrimination to create a society that bans an array of spoken and written opinions they just don't like. In their world, virtually any expression uncongenial to their views can be defined as "violence" of some sort.

While courts may maintain a bright line for speech protected from the state, that distinction is close to disappearing in the broader realm of acceptable speech.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing here (subscriber paywall).

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