Thread by @JoekillianPW

The NYT editorial board bemoans dangers to Americans' "right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned."

Most actual reporters have to shake their heads and chuckle. 🧵

nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opi…

*Of course* there is no right to voice one's opinion in public without being shamed or shunned.

That's not a legal right. It's not a journalistic right.

At best you might call it an aspirational civic principle. And only a very specific type of person aspires to it.

My entire adult life I've worked for daily newspapers, weeklies, magazines, digital first publications.

I've faced *actual* attempts by governments to *actually censor* my work. I've been assaulted and arrested doing my job, as protected by the 1A. I've had death threats.

Miss me with this weak "People are being shamed!" nonsense.

I'm here to tell you:

You have the right to speak, to write, to put things out there. You do not and cannot control how it will be received and what reaction it may provoke. It was ever thus.

When you exercise your First Amendment rights, there is a strong likelihood some people aren't going to like what you have to say.

Some of those people are going to exercise their judgement and stop reading. Some are going to use their voices to oppose you.

And that's how it works in this country, folks.

God Bless America.

Growing up in conservative parts of the South, church groups regularly told me what I should and shouldn't be watching on TV, listening to or reading.

I can, therefore, only raise a bemused eyebrow at this new conservative panic over "cancel culture."

Over the course of my career, I don't recall even once thinking - much less arguing - that the many people who didn't much like the things I wrote and said so loudly were stifling my voice and might cause me to self-censor.

I've had readers say they were cancelling their subscriptions because they didn't like the sorts of things they read in papers for which I worked.

I've had them tell me if I continued writing those things, they'd come down to my newsroom and shoot me.

I can tell the difference.

But you know what I called *both* of those reactions, when I got them?

I called it a Tuesday.

Now, people using actual government power to ban works and speech or limiting is different than people having negative reactions or choosing not to consume something.

Threats and acts of violence are different. The difference is important to understand.

That's why it's *actually* dangerous to equate governments banning books and governments limiting classroom conversation with "cancel culture" - an amorphous, catch-all term for people making personal decisions about what they consume and why.

My mother wasn't a legal scholar, a political philosopher or a journalist. She was, for much of her life and mine, a hairdresser and a bartender.

When I was 12 years old and learning about reactions to things I might say outside our house, she sat me down and we had a talk.

"You can say what you want," my mother told me. "But what you say and how you say it will always have consequences. Sometimes the consequence is just that people will think you're an asshole, stop listening to and talking to you."

That's not a civic tragedy. It's how this works.

If my mother learned that lesson in salons and barrooms and passed it to me in an Eastern NC trailer park, I feel sure the folks with the New York Times editorial board can get their heads around it if they really try.

@threadreaderapp - Unroll, please.