Conservative outrage:

PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news?  The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, “If you don’t like it change the channel.”  There are no channels left! It’s everywhere.

That’s “Stage Right” writing at the Big Hollywood weblog about a Sesame Street segment that parodies Fox News. (In another post, Stage Right also complains about Sesame Street’s environmentalist agenda).

Just another example of the anti-politically-correct brigade’s decent into self-parody.

I’ve often heard Fox News’ political slant defended as “response to market pressures.” But ubiquitous leftist propaganda proves widespread anti-American liberal plotting and not an actual marketplace preference for liberal ideas. I’m not sure how that works, but okay.

You know, I get it. I actually agree. Speech codes are a terrible idea, an undemocratic idea. They squelch and destroy discourse.

But I think Mark Steyn is confused. He insists the shooter at Fort Hood was “enabled” by “political correctness”—people didn’t want to act against Nidal Hasan before the shooting because that would be seen as being insensitive. But his argument is that no one responded to Hasan’s words. So, like, what’s the right answer here?

So instead [Nidal Hasan] got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment centre in Little Rock. “This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”
In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favour of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.
This is your brain on political correctness.

Steyn’s right: what Nidal said and how he behaved should have been a clear warning, and the people who didn’t act out of fear of being discriminatory to Muslims should have thought twice. For the sake of your sanity, though, don’t try to don’t try to square that with Steyn’s several previous paragraphs opposing regulation of hate speach:

But still the old refrain echoes through the corridors of power: vigorous honest free speech will lead to mass murder unless we subject it to “reasonable limits.”

Actually, the opposite is true: a constrained and regulated culture policed by politically correct enforcers leads to slaughter.

What?

The way I read it, Nidal’s supervisors made a bad call. They decided that Nidal’s violent and inflamatory speech would not actually turn into action. Frequently it doesn’t; sometimes it does. If there had been laws on the books that said Nidal had to be questioned because of what he said, or that he had to be arrested, would we not then have “politically correct enforcers?”

The politically correct enforcers Steyn’s concerned about are:

Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (with its Potemkin membership but lots of foreign funding) want a world where Islam is beyond discussion—where “red flags” are ignored because to do anything about them would risk career-ruining accusations of “Islamophobia,” or six months of “sensitivity training,” or a complaint to the “human rights” commission where Jennifer Lynch’s enforcers will spay you into a docile eunuch of the PC state. Pace Commissar Lynch, words “should be given free rein,” because they are the first and least worst line of defence in a free society.

So explain that to me. Political correctness says hate speech has to be tolerated, and that’s the problem? What? My head hurts. Isn’t Steyn saying Nidal’s hate speech was given too much free reign?

Sesame Street too, for that matter. After all, it’s taxpayer-funded; they shouldn’t be allowed to make jokes about Fox News. Certainly not at taxpayer expense.

What these arguments boil down to is this: if hate speech hates the right people (Muslims, non-Christians, atheists, Obama voters, Sesame Street) then it should always be allowed. But if it hates the wrong people (Right-wing Christians, Republicans, Fox News) then it should be banned. That sounds to me an awful lot like a “speech code,” just one that benefits Stage Right and Mark Steyn.