The gag becomes the bandits mask.

Free speech is under attack from many quarters in  the West today, but perhaps the most insidious and dangerous for the future is the way freedom of speech is being eroded within what used to be the bastions of free speech; the Universities:

ONE of the most disturbing developments in the cultural life of the West is the casual acceptance of the policing of language.

These days people who should know better - even artists and academics - devote far more energy towards justifying measures that limit free speech than advocating its expansion. Sometimes one can even pick up a sneering sense of contempt towards those who seek to counter the policing of speech.

Just listen to the tone in which Greg Barnes, a barrister and president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, dismisses the claim that the Federal Court’s ruling against Andrew Bolt represented a serious threat to the exercise of the right to free speech. “Has it not occurred to Bolt and those who are busy mouthing similar platitudes that freedom of speech is not an absolute right?” he asks.

The tendency to treat free speech as a platitude and to mock those who take this right seriously as puerile is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the conceptualisation of the relationship between freedom and the state....

Sadly, the one institution where linguistic policing has become most entrenched is in universities. Historically, institutions of higher education were in the forefront of upholding academic freedom and freedom of speech. Today, communication on campuses is filtered through an elaborate system of speech codes and censorship. The Inclusive Language Guideline of the University of Newcastle reads like a medieval censor’s manual. ...

... the academy has become linguistically infantilised. Students and staff are treated like infants with the warning “Mind your language”. Once self-censorship has become a habit, the addiction to it becomes difficult to break.... It is worth noting this is the environment that shapes the linguistic universe and imagination of the legal professionals of the future, including judges and legal scholars.

What I have highlighted in bold is the development I believe represents the most dangerous result of 'politically correct' speech. In time self-censorship becomes accepted as the norm and freedom as the aberration, and when that happens civilisation has capitulated to barbarism and anarchy is the logical result.