By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--March 21, 2023
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Sometimes it helps to review the basics, and it doesn’t get any more basic than this. Here is the wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
To edit this so we address only freedom of speech, try this:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .
Go back to the Declaration of Independence to understand the function of government in protecting our rights.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .”
Government exists to protect the unalienable rights specifically listed, in this case, in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Government is to protect these rights, not weaken or undermine or trample on them.
It’s disturbing that any agency of the federal government would actively seek to restrict what has long been the most celebrated guarantee of freedom under the Constitution, the First Amendment.
Basic premise #1. Freedom of speech means that the federal government may not restrict what we say. In other words, the federal government may not decide that our speech can be restricted, and cannot act to restrict it.
This creates a problem when federal laws defining discrimination begin to include speech in their restrictions.
There’s a bigger problem when the federal government works with a private company to restrict speech. Government’s job is to protect our rights, not conspire with corporations to erode them. Ample evidence of federal agencies asking private companies like Twitter and Facebook to restrict speech the agencies don’t like is already out there. It happened. It’s probably still happening with many of them, if not with Twitter any more. Under the Constitution the federal government is not allowed to restrict speech under any guise, not by legislation and not by regulation enacted or implied. When this happens, and when the citizens find out about it, it’s a dangerous and ominous sign that the federal government has abandoned a fundamental obligation. It raises the most disturbing of questions in a constitutional republic. Why would government officials seek to restrict free speech? Why would they openly violate fundamental freedoms enshrined in our founding documents? Doing it once would be bad enough, but what does it mean when they do it repeatedly, over years, and across multiple agencies?
Even more frightening, if that’s imaginable, is the thought that major institutions of the press and giant social media corporations would even consider joining with these agencies to suppress freedom of speech and even freedom of the press. What are people thinking? This becomes ultimately scary. They have to be thinking they’re justified in doing it. They have to be thinking that they are willing to take some risk to do it. And worst of all, they have to be thinking that they have the means to get away with it, to escape the consequences that ought to come with any effort to subvert the Constitution. Who does that? Which elected representatives in a constitutional republic think that it’s acceptable to work with the press and with social media to subvert fundamental freedoms so long as they get away with it?
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Talk about an existential threat to self-government! And they’re the ones who shriek about how unarmed people marching peacefully to the Capitol to express their views mounted an insurrection to try to overthrow “our democracy?
Basic premise #2. When people exercise their right to free speech, then others must tolerate it. In other words, we may not agree with what others say, and they may not agree with what we say, but neither of us can restrict what the other says.
There are traditions and precedents in law that serve to define and set boundaries for speech. These are matters for the common law and for local and state courts. When someone utters a potential slander or writes a potential libel, action may be taken in the courts to deal with it because it’s a civil wrong. A statement labeled “misinformation” means that someone may be misinformed. A statement labeled “disinformation” means that someone may be deliberately stating false information in order to mislead. If we want a society with free speech, we will have to accept that others may be misinformed, or may want to sow false information. That’s not news. If there’s a possible slander or libel, sue. If it’s something you disagree with, formulate a better argument or just chill.
Since the whole covid era began, efforts to silence some points of view have intensified. These efforts are wrongheaded at a basic level. The next time someone says that another’s speech must be suppressed because they don’t agree with it, it should be easier to identify the real threat to our constitutional republic.
Free speech means that people are allowed to be right or wrong, and none of us gets to define what that is. The US Constitution says it’s protected, and that’s good enough for me.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.