America has a free speech problem. Not so much the idea. A majority of those recently polled by Real Clear Politics think “First Amendment protections for freedom of speech is a good thing.” But they don’t all agree on what free speech is or means.
That lack of understanding has led to unhealthy opinions about the First Amendment.
A few cherry-picked bullets from RCP.
- Nearly one-third of Democratic voters (34%) say Americans have “too much freedom.” This compared to 14.6% of Republicans. Republicans were most likely to say Americans have too little freedom (46%), while only 22% of Democrats feel that way. Independents were in the middle in both categories.
- …
- Fully three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” social media posts, while Republicans are more split, with 50% believing the government has a responsibility to restrict hateful posts. (Independents, once again, are in the middle.)
- Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to favor stifling the free speech rights of political extremists. Also, Republicans don’t vary by the group: Only about half of GOP voters favor censorship — whether asked about the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, or the Communist Party.
As alluded to in the opening, “Overall, 9 in 10 voters in the U.S. think First Amendment protections for freedom of speech is a good thing, while only 9% think it is a bad thing,” said pollster Spencer Kimball, who directed the RCP survey. “This is agreed upon across the demographics, like party affiliation, age, and race.”
Good in principle but not in practice.
We know what Free Speech means. The government cannot infringe on public speech; allowing that camel’s nose under the tent ends with the camel in the tent and no room for anything but what it decides. We’ve seen how that works in real life, from COVID to Vaccines to masks to closing churches to so-called disinformation ministers (official or self-reclaimed) to shuttering businesses or jailing protesters because they are registered with the wrong political party. And that’s in America.
We’ve seen worse outside our borders and as close as Canada. It’s not pretty.
But the media, including social, have created reasonable doubt in the minds of many. Instead of Free Speech, we need free speech*.
Some conditions have always applied., but the new-age version knows not the evil it embraces. If you ask the government to regulate something, especially speech, it will not stop at whatever boundary line you’ve concocted in your imagination. Once invited across the threshold, it still sucks your rights dry; any bureaucracy tasked with policing words and ideas will do that and won’t stop. You won’t be able to stop it.
Candidates will run on it, but they’ll never manage to do more than get elected. And we are only a few Supreme Court justices away from what little protection we have, as capricious as that can be. Quite often, these unelected, robed hooligans are what stand between us and sanctioned, lawful censorship. A regime that expands its speech and thought policing far and wide such that it will inevitably trample on those who believe it a good idea to regulate some speech.
We do regulate some speech, libel, slander, and genuine threats of harm, but the government bungles these often. Why anyone would see fit to allow them to manage more astounds me, but they do, and it is a growing trend we need to reverse soon. The root of which is public education. We need to teach children why speech must be free, even when we don’t like it, or they might grow up in a nation without it.
Speech is free or not, and asking the State to manage the middle ground will only result in there being no ground left upon which to stand and voice your opinion, especially if it contradicts that of those with power.
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