FREE SPEECH DEFECT.

Here’s a rare midweek release of a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie to the non-members among you, about one conservative’s (and every one’s, really) response to the firing of an NFL coach for years of offensive messages. It is, as they say in the promos, inspired by true events. 

As I always say whenever the cancelculture crybabies rush to defend some big name like Coach Gruden who will almost certainly die rich of old age in his bed despite his “cancellation,” I would happily accept laws that kept such people from being fired, suspended, or otherwise punished for speech so long as the law also applied to the non-rich, such as the trans Netflix employee who, so far as I know, is the only person who has actually suffered for what they've said about the Dave Chapelle special (notwithstanding the fantasies of rightwingers who go “I bet my buddies will get fired for writing a good review of The Closer I bet I bet” -- bitch, show me one!). But conservatives never accept that deal, for some reason. 

Though Erick Erickson is not my model for the REBID item (when he is, I take greater care to ape his awfulness specifically), his own essay on the subject was inspirational. It’s full of nuggets like these:

Gruden said in private what other people might say, including referring to Joe Biden in 2012 as a “nervous clueless pussy.” Whether you like it or not, these conversations happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language.

This was clearly an orchestrated effort to punish Gruden for past comments and drive him out of the NFL. We can speculate on who did it. But we should really focus on the problem here that keeps happening.

There’s so much ugly-stupid in there, but for me the suggestion that Gruden was targeted by the NFL because he said something bad about Joe Biden once, plausibly-deniable chickenshit though it is, doesn’t approach the cowardliness of the “Gruden said in private what other people might say” argument. Erickson can’t even go all the way with the logic of his essay: that it’s so common and understandable to use racist, misogynist, and homophobic slurs on a regular basis that anyone, including himself, might do it. 

I’m not saying Erickson spews like Gruden did; obviously he’s too weaselly to expose himself like that. But if he were more forthright about his assertion, he might be forced to explain why, in his experience, “conversations” that “happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language” (not his friends, surely!) so frequently include these slurs. Or would that be a “critical race theory” question to ask, since it implies American bigotry didn’t die at Appomattox?

Can’t resist adding this bit from Erickson’s essay after this one, about how mandatory vaccination against pandemic viruses is liberal tyranny:

When my father-in-law went for an antibody infusion the other day, the nurse told him the infusions were in short supply. According to the nurse, the Biden Administration was punishing Georgia, Florida, and other states that had no mask or vaccine mandates by withholding antibody infusion doses. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. The point is the nurse believed it and is relaying that to patients. That will have an effect and, in fact, the Biden Administration is withholding antibody doses for reasons that remain nebulous. [Italics added]

I mean, the anonymous authority with an outlandish accusation that the author disseminates is standard procedure with, for example, Rod Dreher, but I don’t think even Dreher would just admit up front that it may be bullshit.