Personal insults are free speech?

Not all personal insults rise to the level of defamation but they are in the same general category of speech.  They have never been protected free speech.

Reasoned criticism is another matter. That is protected.  But the young writer below cannot, apparently, see the difference between criticism and personal insult.  It is rather symptomatic of the vacant Leftist mind that they see insults as criticism. I hate to mention it, but it is possible to make political criticisms without insulting anyone personally. Conservatives do it routinely.

And the response by the conservative below is an example of that. He did not trade insult for insult but simply made some polite proposals. But it would appear that the Leftist concerned did not rise to that level of maturity.

But one can in a way understand the thinking of the woman below. Leftist discourse is so light on reason that insult has to substitute for rational argument among them.  Insults are often all they have got in defending their positions


When I saw a tweet saying that The New York Times newsroom might have bedbugs, I wasn’t especially surprised. The city says the problem is “increasingly common.” It seemed like a mundane inconvenience for the paper of record and joke fodder for its critics. I didn’t expect these jokes to end up infesting my Twitter timeline, but then conservative Times columnist Bret Stephens got involved.

Stephens, a vociferous defender of free speech, went full-on “I’m telling your manager” on a professor who tweeted, “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.” The absurd episode exposed, not for the first time and likely not the last, how the free speech double standard works for many intellectuals and politicians on the right.

Many people, including President Donald Trump and Republican politicians trying to crack down on the right to protest, are eager to crusade as champions of liberty and open discourse — until someone lobs the slightest criticism in their direction.

The Stephens incident is just one example. On Monday evening, Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University, tweeted the joke at the columnist’s expense. Later that night he returned to Twitter to share an email he said Stephens had sent him, with the university’s provost (Karpf's boss) on cc.

SOURCE