There are certain things that we're not going to say either because of mere etiquette or more often because the discussion has gotten passed such things.

We don't need to have free speech as to whether or not there should be genocide, for example.

We don't need to have free speech over whether or not women should be able to vote.

You know, we have limited time.

But what's going on now is that a certain contingent of people are just making the domain of things that we can't say or that we can only talk about in extremely prescribed ways.

So large that it's beginning to choke out what most societies will consider any kind of sensible or thriving artistic, moral, or intellectual culture.

Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

Well, folks, if you heard that they just passed a law that you can't read Dr. Seuss, do you know about that?

It's true. Biden administration, Democrats are they're going to pass a law that you cannot read Dr. Seuss anymore.

The era of tyranny is here.

I'm joking and overstating things a little bit because you probably followed the Seuss controversy.

Maybe tangentially, maybe closely that basically the Seuss estate decided that several books that theodore Geisel Dr. Seuss had written would be taken out of print because they contained offensive images.

And that precipitated a very, very intense week long news cycle, particularly in Fox News among Republicans, where it was like all they were talking about it was it was a little weird because it was while there was a debate about this multi trillion dollar code relief package.

It's like we're we're finding our way out of like a once in a hundred year plague.

But it was part of this sort of broader cultural conversation that we've seen happening over the last I think it's intensified in the last year or two about.

What some people call and I'm going to sort of avoid the term cancel culture.

Because I think that charm is like a parable sweatpants that has been so stretched out by overuse that it can't hold anything up anymore.

But what it is a discussion about and it's a discussion that's not in some ways that different from debates and discussions we've had it varies other points in American history particularly for me as a child in 90s the great PC debate of the 1990s.

It is a conversation about speech taboo social justice and respect power and hierarchy censure and penalty about what things people can or can't say should or shouldn't say in what environments and what censure should attach to that kind of speech.

Where we draw lines between speech that is offensive speech that might even be harmful and speech that is part of debate whether the who should draw those lines.

All this is really to me thorny interesting complicated stuff even though the debate over it I find exhausting kind of maddening because it always feels like it's being undertaken.

In a kind of disingenuous and cultural like fashion and it also seems to me to often go to the abstract over the particular where the particular is really the only thing that you can really kind of.

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