Who Defends Free Speech Now?

Mark Steyn has been embroiled in a Section 13 case under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Recently, he testified to the Canadian parliament about this. Speaking of the case, Jay Nordlinger today writes:

And it is very interesting that, in these times, the burden of defending basic liberty has fallen to people known as right-wingers. As an old Ann Arbor kid, I find that very, very interesting, and astounding.

Interesting, maybe. Astounding, not at all. The Left (and here I mean the institutional Left, not necessarily your neighbor who tends to vote Democrat) champions free speech as a tactic only while they do not control the commanding heights of speech. The fact that they now wish to suppress speech merely confirms what we already know: they do now command those heights. "We" may have Fox News and talk radio, but "they" have every other TV network. We may have the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the New York Post... but they have nearly every other newspaper. And so on.