Banning Bad Ideas Won’t Make Them Go Away

Isn’t it tantalizing to think that the government could simply ban the worst ideas?

Six Republican legislators in South Carolina are co-sponsoring a utopian proposal of that sort. “It is the intent of the General Assembly that educators, administrators, students, childcare providers, employers, and employees respect the dignity of individuals,” its text begins, “refrain from judging, stereotyping, or scapegoating others based on personal or group characteristics or political and religious beliefs; acknowledge the right of others to express differing opinions; and foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry, and instruction.” Supporters of the bill, seductively named “Freedom from ideological coercion and indoctrination,” seem to think that South Carolina’s teaching corps is full of left-wing ideologues bent on brainwashing students––and that an act of the legislature would prevent that.

The GOP lawmakers are hardly alone in wanting to banish objectionable attitudes and ideas by fiat. At Princeton in 2020, 350 faculty members demanding, among many other things, that the administration “constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” adding that “what counts as racist” should be determined by, creating a Department of Anti-racism, whose staff of “formally trained experts on racism” would, among other duties, be tasked with “preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity.”