The Washington Post tried to compare Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech being stopped after she attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and broke the rules in the Senate this week to Breitbart Senior Editor MILO’s event-turned-riot at UC Berkeley last week in an opinion piece citing the Streisand Effect.
“What’s the best way to make sure a message gets heard? Try to muzzle it,” declared The Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell on Thursday. “Both liberals and conservatives are newly rediscovering the political power of this phenomenon, known as the Streisand Effect. The term refers to what happens when an attempt to censor information backfires and instead unintentionally draws more attention to the censorship target.”
“After all, suppression of speech not only generates more public interest, as bystanders scramble to learn what all the fuss is about; it can also win the speaker sympathy and the moral high ground,” explained Rampell, before comparing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to suggest Jeff Sessions was a racist before his confirmation as attorney general to MILO’s Berkeley event, which was violently shut down by far-left rioters. “The riots didn’t silence Yiannopoulos, however; instead, the resulting coverage megaphoned his ugly message to a much broader audience and will help him sell more books, schedule more lucrative speaking gigs and receive more sympathetic tweets from our sitting president.”
Throughout the piece, Rampell failed to go into detail on why Warren, who was stopped from speaking after she broke Senate rules and falsely branded Sessions as a racist, was remotely similar to MILO, who was forced to evacuate UC Berkeley after violent rioters started several fires, smashed up buildings and ATMs, assaulted numerous attendees, and attacked cars passing by.
“There are many compelling arguments for why protecting free speech, including speech you disagree with or even abhor, is important,” concluded Rampell. “But one underappreciated argument is self-interest. Forcibly silencing and thereby martyring your opponents — rather than employing counter-speech to expose them as wrong or, better yet, ridiculous — may be exactly what they want you to do.”
Whereas Warren clearly broke the rules of the Senate by slandering Sessions, and was thus punished and not unfairly silenced, MILO was violently stopped from delivering a speech at a college he was invited to.
MILO was also threatened with more violence by far-left activists should he return to Berkeley to deliver his speech, while Warren, as far as Breitbart News is aware, has not been violently threatened by fellow senators should she return to the Senate.
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