From Kevin Williamson’s book The Smallest Minority released today:

If we are willing to give a hypothetical evil a moral weight equal to that of an actual evil, then there is no limiting principle at all that is possible, because it is easy to construct an unfalsifiable counterfactual in which practically any particular kind of political communication we find objectionable could contribute to an illiberal or undemocratic outcome, or a criminal one, in some hypothetical scenario. If we allow the publication of Lolita, then somebody may be inspired to molest a child; if we allow the depiction of drug abuse in films, then that might inspire drug abuse in suggestible young people and idiots; if we allow too much criticism of the so-called war on terror, then we endanger the protection of citizens’ other rights, etc. One of the conclusions that I hope the reader will take from the sum of the arguments in this book is that hypothetical evils are generally preferable to real ones, and that the real evils of censorship and suppression are considerably worse than the hypothetical troubles that a more liberal attitude toward unpopular speech might risk.

Williamson, Kevin D.. The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics . Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

HKO

Kevin inspires this definition of the politically correct, “the preference for a real evil over a hypothetical evil.”

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