On the initial letter, I think it's risible. There are consequences for speech. Always have been. And the letter's main complaint is that other people using speech in ways the letter-writers don't like.
Much of what has changed here is that people have MORE access to speech than they ever had. A college professor said something that makes a student feel uncomfortably sexualized or was pretty racist? 25 years ago (hell, 15, maybe 10) the student had limited places to share that. Now, that student has many.
This has many advantages. It also, of course, has disadvantages. Not so much in something clear-cut in the above paragraph, but in other situations where things might be more nuanced or misunderstood. All nuance gets stripped, necessarily, when we can only have one side*. This isn't a matter of speech being curtailed, it's a consequence of speech being democratized.
*A friend of mine teaching at a school outside of Boston was (anonymously--though she was kept anonymous as well) called out on Insta in one of those Black at [Institution]. She was teaching about institution racism. Had 2-3 days on it. At the end, she said that if those who benefit from the system don't work to solve it, they are themselves complicit, and by the definition they built in the class, racist. She said that he would classify himself as this sometimes. It was put online as "My teacher said he was racist to the whole class." An obvious mischaracterization. But this a lack of free speech, it's an abundance. We're in a transition period where we re-learn how to interact in a world where speech is fully democratized.
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