SLAPP Legal Strategy Changing Landscape of America’s Traditional Culture

Insightful article on the need to loudly protest when necessary in order to preserve in our society what we hold to be true and valuable.

Such are the new politics of whispering in the twenty-first century version of the culture wars. The values that were instrumental in forming the American culture have been ignored, forgotten, or—worse—forbidden in public debate. Through court rulings, bureaucratic pronouncements, and well-intentioned but unhelpful laws, secular values have allied with government authority to dismantle the ideals of a decent nation.

[snip]

After World War II, an American journalist returned to Germany to live in a remote town in hopes of discovering why law-abiding citizens followed the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Milton Mayer interviewed ten average families, and in one of the more revealing sections of his book, They Thought They Were Free, he asked why the townspeople didn’t protest the abuses of the state. A policeman related the story of a local leader who was arrested in 1933 and “taken away” without being charged with anything. When Mayer asked why there was no outcry from citizens, the policeman told him that the people, by their silence, had given the government that right. There were “no open trials for enemies of the state,” he said. “They had forfeited their right to it.”

Read the rest of Why We Whisper: Restoring Our Right to Say It’s Wrong