I wasn’t going to write anything about this as it seemed too obvious to comment on, but I haven’t seen others do so—and it is worth noticing.

There has been, and continues to be, talk about college students and people on the left as “snow flakes” and weak/soft/thin-skinned, too easily hurt by speakers on campus. The extent to which college students take offense at comments may (or not) be greater than it was in the past. Last week, though, we saw Republican Congresspeople doing the same thing. See this.

Liz Cheney has been telling the truth about the 2020 election and (some of) the lies coming from Donald Trump and his sycophants. She has not, so far as I have seen, been particularly rude about it. She has simply pointed out that some people seem intent on enabling and spreading Trump’s lies. The response includes claims of being offended and “hurt.” (TN Rep. Chuck Fleishmann: “It hurt me very much.” A lobbyist: “what she’s said was offensive to me, and many others.”)

It is not unusual on college campuses to hear claims that speech can harm so badly that we should not only be concerned, but also set policies to prevent such. Speech codes were/are meant to prevent harm. This is the sort of concept creep—where we talk of things previously thought non-harmful as harmful—that I worried about in my Toleration and Freedom from Harm and that Frank Furedi worried about in his On Tolerance.

Furedi’s concern was with acceptance of a “transformation of distress into a condition of emotional injury” (106) that would be used to justify interference meant to silence discussions that might somehow endanger those offended (or those they pretend to protect). A standard response is that such people are too weak to hear (or have others hear) anything that might offend them, cause them to doubt themselves, or that simply might not put them in the best light. Cheney is clearly not putting most of those in her party in the best light and offending some to the point of “hurt.” One wonders if her detractors will try to pass some sort of congressional speech code.