Last week, I wrote about the left’s playbook of projection and deflection, wherein they ascribe their own sins unto their victims. This week, let us examine how the left tries to advance its radical agenda by redefining words and standards. Today’s case study: free speech.

While the First Amendment of the United States Constitution recognizes and protects the God-given right to free speech, there has always been a reasonable, popular consensus that there exists material not suitable for young, impressionable children and that, alternatively, for adult consumption, cannot be banned. The left is endeavoring to rend this consensus.

Presently, the left equates the removal of age-inappropriate materials that sexualize children from public schools as “censorship.” As readers of last week’s article will recognize, such is a deflection and a projection from the fact the left has for years been banning, eliminating, and re-editing all manner of media, usually by “dead white European males” (though certainly not exclusively), from curricula for being contrary to the dictates of their “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) secular religion.

While one might expect leftists to recognize their own mendacity and hypocrisy, one would be sorely mistaken. For the left is both benighted and buoyed in their self-delusions by their ideology, one that has engaged in a long-running war on language. Believing that redefining the language will refashion reality, the left weaponizes the language to advance its political agenda, providing a word with a meaning antithetical to its original popular understanding—often in combination with replacing an existing objective standard with a new subjective one. These weaponized, twisted terms and standards are designed to deceive both the general population and the left itself—in short, turning their black hats into white hats in the distorted funhouse mirror of their minds.

Building upon Steven Soukup’s exceptional American Greatness piece, “The Left’s Repressive Tolerance,” let us ponder how the left has come to redefine this term.

In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse brazenly proclaimed the left’s plan to twist the language and the concept of objective standards for free speech beyond all recognition. Bluntly, in the hands of Marcuse and his fellow leftists, “day is night as dark is light and wrong is right,” and tolerance is perverted into intolerance.

Under the constitution, tolerance is tantamount to “live and let live.” Regarding free speech, in sum, one need not agree or even listen to another but must tolerate the other’s right to speak. The more free speech the merrier, as it were—unless one were a leftist who, unable to convince the public of the rectitude of their cause (because it is non-existent), believes that stifling other views will allow their genius to persuade the populace to support their radical agenda.

Thus, the objective standard of content neutrality undergirding tolerance for all manner of free speech must be jettisoned, and a subjective standard must be substituted (though duplicitously not expressed in such honest terms). For, as Marcuse asserts, “This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested.”

How so?

“The political locus of tolerance has changed: while it is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies. Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non-practice: laissez-faire the constituted authorities. It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities.”

Cutting through the cant, Marcuse and his fellow travelers disliked modern society; ergo, the objective standard is out of the Overton window and his subjective assessment will now dictate your right to free speech. Why?

First, the left thinks other people are problematic morons:

“The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda…are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives.” [Emphasis mine.]

Aye, there’s the rub and reason number two: Marcuse and the left are upset that their voices are being ignored—granted, they are being ignored by sane people, but that is lost upon the left. Ergo, folks need to shut up and listen and submit to the left’s demands, lest a feckless, fascist-abetting humanity squander the opportunity to improve their lot in life:

“…promulgated, practiced, and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.”

Per Marcuse and his ilk, your God-given right to free speech must be repressed so you can be herded into an existence without fear and misery, like the workers’ paradise of the Soviet Union or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Patently, Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” is tantamount to “perverting tolerance.” Non-leftist thought will not be tolerated and will be silenced (i.e., “repressed”). This is Marcuse channeling his inner totalitarian to put his own verbose sophist pillows on the threadbare intellectual chair of Rousseau’s civil religion:

“The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period—a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today is in many of its most effective manifestations, serving the cause of oppression.”

Oh, and the reward for being “forced to be free?” As if regressing from corrupting civilization into noble savagery and socialism progressing into communism, repressive tolerance will one day magically morph into “liberating tolerance,” whereby everyone in the world will agree with Marcuse and the left, so everyone will have free speech and tolerance again. No, really….

For the record, Marcuse is up front about why he feels entitled to destroy your rights:

“The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities—that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.”

Succinctly, this academic believes one can only open a mind by closing it first. Is there any greater explanation and, yes, indictment of modern academe? How Allan Bloom was so prescient back in the day….

So, here, in all its hubristic duplicity and imbecility, is the left’s stance on free speech: projection and deflection; substituting a subjective standard for an objective standard; the perversion of the term “tolerance”; and the rationalization for not only censorship but also cancel culture and worse for dissenting opinions and people. Frankly, Marcuse and the left’s idea of tolerance is intolerance—shut up and listen, or else.

Now, you can see why the left calls non-leftists “fascists” and “Nazis” and why any dissenting opinions from leftist doctrine are deemed “hate speech.” Simply, the left aims to repress your right to free speech to control the public discourse and agenda, and feels justified in so doing because you are a cog in the regime’s machine.

Perhaps, then, it is also because this diabolical distortion of “tolerance” and the subjective standard, which both allows its twisting into “intolerance” and rationalizes away the repression required to enforce it, that renders leftists susceptible to “justifying” and indulging their “rage” with violence?

While there are more strategies and tactics to be explored within its pages, suffice it to once more note that, if unchecked, the postmodern left’s playbook could become Western civilization’s suicide note.

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles, a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.