There is a plausible theory of the case for the dramatic rise in illiberal, speech-stultifying wokeness in America beginning a dozen or so years ago: that it’s largely a bottom-up, millennial affair.
“In late 2013,” Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), explained in Reason‘s January 2022 issue, “there was an explosion in censorship that was student-led….The generation hitting campuses in 2013 had been educated by the graduates of…activist education schools. In some cases they were literally the children of the students who had pushed for (or at least were OK with) speech codes in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Tuesday’s 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre—when a dozen staffers of the satirical antiauthoritarian weekly, including some of France’s most beloved cartoonists, were gunned down by Islamists claiming offense at the depiction and mockery of their religion’s…
