Via The Daily Bell

The biggest thing this survey proves is that Orwellian double-speak is working.

If you are unfamiliar, doublespeak is a term from the novel 1984. It is speech intentionally meant to confuse, or obscure reality.

What does free speech mean? What is hate speech? And what laws currently or should exist in regards to speaking freely?

The answers from Americans prove just how successful the media and politicians have been in making Americans less grounded than a satellite.

The powers that be have successfully confused and obscured any hint of rationality in beliefs. There seems to be little method and all madness. People simply make up their minds emotionally, instead of thinking critically. And that is how those in power like it.

When people behave emotionally, they are more easy to control. A rational belief would be something along the lines of Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

An irrational belief would be that anything that offends you should not be called free speech.

Those who believe the latter fail to understand that practically anything can be considered offensive to someone. Under those circumstances, politicians could limit any kind of critical speech, claiming it promotes violence, offends, or is hate speech.

Holding Two Contradictory beliefs

The study found:

An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that “it would be hard to ban hate speech because people can’t agree what speech is hateful,” … Yet a majority of Americans and a supermajority of African Americans believe that “society can prohibit hate speech and still protect free speech.” (To complicate matters, a quarter of Americans, 38 percent of African Americans, and 45 percent of Latinos erroneously believe it is already illegal to make a racist statement in public.)

So even though most people don’t think you could properly define “hate speech,” they still don’t think banning it would violate free speech. That’s the magic of government for you! Some people will have speech that they do not consider “hate speech” limited, but somehow free speech will still be protected… okay.

Who should get protection against hate speech? Forty-six percent would support a law making it illegal to say offensive things about African Americans… Forty-seven percent of Latinos, 41 percent of African Americans, and 26 percent of whites would favor a law making it illegal to say offensive things about white people in public.

I thought this one was hilarious. White people aren’t interested in making it illegal to trash talk them, but other races are!

Of course, where is the line? Who gets to decide what constitutes offensive? Obviously, the government.

So is saying that African Americans are on average better at basketball than white people offensive? I’m sure some people think so. Should I be locked up in a cage for saying something like that in public?

What about stating a simple fact, like Asian Americans are underrepresented in the prison system? What if I go further and comment on what I think that means; that the average Asian is less likely to be a criminal than the average white, latino, or black person?

And don’t you dare say anything even remotely critical or trans-anything.

Fifty-one percent of Democrats would favor a law “requiring people to refer to a transgender person by their preferred gender pronouns and not according to their biological sex.”

Well, no surprise there. That is one of their favorite doublespeak topics. Progressives like to call the right anti-science, but there are few things more anti-science than pretending someone can change their sex. You can certainly mimic the opposite sex. But if you were born a man, you will never get pregnant. If you were born a woman, you will never get someone pregnant. Yet children are being allowed to make life-altering reproductive changes before puberty.

And finally, let’s criticize the “opposite” side of the allegedly two-dimensional political spectrum.

Republicans were most intolerant of speech and most likely to favor authoritarian laws to punish it on the subject of burning or desecrating the American flag: Seventy-two percent of Republicans believe that should be illegal (along with 46 percent of Democrats).

The flag stands for freedom. That’s why you don’t have the freedom to speak out against it. Makes sense, right?

Looks like there are easily offended snowflakes all over. If Americans had their way, there would be practically no free speech allowed whatsoever!

And that is exactly the climate the media and politicians were trying to create this whole time.

But it Wasn’t All Bad News! Right?

There was one point of interest that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope.

Large majorities agree that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct,” including 70 percent of Latinos, 62 percent of African Americans, and 72 percent of whites. Across partisan and racial divides, large majorities agreed that colleges and universities are not doing enough to teach young Americans about the value of free speech, and not doing enough to ensure students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints…

So it seems people are indeed getting sick of having political correctness jammed down their throats. The only problem is that this feeling is still emotional and ambiguous. There are no hard rules or clear lines that people would ever agree on for when something becomes politically incorrect.

And the very next line shows that again, people’s beliefs contradict themselves.

…a small majority believes colleges “have an obligation to protect students from offensive speech and ideas that could create a difficult learning environment.”

The survey was meant to be about free speech, but I think it proves something much bigger.

America cannot have an intelligent conversation about anything because no one agrees on the basic meaning of words. People will keep talking in circles as long as the media convinces them that they can simultaneously believe two contradictory ideas.

An environment now exists where people will just say and believe whatever they think will get them in the least trouble with social enforcers all around them.

No one will grow intellectually when the media tells them to use their emotions to decide on issues. How can you make informed decisions when you can’t even comprehend an argument?

And that is double-plus ungood.