America's "free speech crisis" takes a darker turn: How corporate power got us here

During the 2015-16 academic year, when explosive packages and political street violence weren't on our minds, a lavishly funded, brilliantly orchestrated “free speech” campaign drew sensation-hungry media into dramatizing the grave danger to Americans’ freedoms of expression and inquiry posed by petulant, censorious “cry-bully” college students, their coddling campus mentors and parents, and an ideology of racial and sexual “political correctness” enveloping our society. Maybe that’s why conservative “free speech” crusaders who’ve condemned university tribunals so loudly have been eerily quiet about analogous boardroom decisions. Yet even before most Americans could see why the “free speech” crusade was wrong to blame so much on college kids and their deans, the crusade itself was hijacked in 2016 by candidate Donald Trump. He got away with posing as a champion of free speech while vowing action against free speech in the press -- and by his critics and opponents -- partly because, as some retired New York police officers who resented their “diversity” training and “sensitivity” sessions told me, they believed the free-speech crusade’s deceptions and think that Trump “speaks his mind” about what they’ve had to put up with while in uniform.