Do not ask from whom freedom of opinion has been stolen. It has been stolen from thee.
I don’t mean all opinions; I mean the kind of opinion that just is. The opinion that we feel no need to argue about because it is the sum total of our customs, traditions, temperament, personality, general hold on sanity, and presumption of sanity in others. It is the opinion that encompasses the whole crisp panoply of unbudgeable and unabashed certainty that we used to take for granted but which has just about vanished from the American psyche.
This kind of opinion is invariably preceded …