NEW ULM, Minn. – The southern Minnesota member of Congress, Republican Brad Finstad, wants Minnesota State University-Mankato to fire a political science professor. The prof, Kevin Parsneau, had commented online on the assassination of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. “How long do we really need to look for Brian Thompson’s killer?” Parsneau asked rhetorically. The professor then answered his own question, expressing disappointment that Thompson’s one-off killer were not a serial killer. While provocative, the comment fit the solidifying nationaal outrage over gross abuses in the health insurance industry that the assassination triggered. The academic community responded critically of Congressman Finstad as a latter-day book-burner with a kill-the-messenger impulse. The professor’s defenders didn’t side so much with Parsneau’s sentiment but the value of diverse viewpoints in a free and opens society. They pointed to the standard textbook rule against censorship — the Counter Speech Doctrine as articulated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. Bradeis talked about the proper response to negative speech being to counter it with positive speech. In other words, the answer to disagreeable and unsettling speech is more speech, not less. Put another way: Consensus emerges only from robust and uninhibited exchanges and dialogue—not book-burning.
Finstad. A New Ulm farmer finishing his first term in Congress. In college at the University of Minnesota he studied agriculture, not political theory. Finstad’s rise in politics was as a Trump toady.