• Tag Archives 1st Amendment

  • A Warning to Americans From Across the Pond: Don’t Take Your Free Speech Rights for Granted

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    For the past decade, freedom of speech has been at the forefront of America’s culture war, and it should not be controversial to say that both sides are at least partly to blame for this.

    Many on the left have exploited their expanding cultural hegemony to suppress dissenting speech in universities, religious institutions, and the creative industries, while some on the right have attempted to suppress “obscenity,” punish the speech of their ideological enemies, and micromanage classroom instruction.

    To those on all sides who think of America’s proud free speech tradition as a political football, I have a simple message: heed Britain’s example.

    Last month, a woman was arrested in the UK for refusing to cooperate with a Police investigation into her activities near an abortion clinic. What stimulated this investigation? Was she blocking access to the clinic? Harassing women seeking an abortion? No, she was silently praying.

    The arrest of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is just the latest in a tapestry of alarming censorship exhibits. Since the passage of the Communications Act in 2003, it has become the norm to see reports of people being jailed for ‘offensive’ private text messages; during the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth, several peaceful anti-monarchy protesters were detained or arrested; and in a recent statement, the Crown Prosecution Service argued sections of The Bible “are simply no longer appropriate in modern society and … would be deemed offensive if stated in public.”

    The reaction of Britain’s governing elite has not been to correct this sorry state of affairs, but to double down on Parliamentary efforts to curb free expression. New legislation called The Public Order Bill, if passed, will have a chilling effect on our right to protest; the government’s proposed Online Safety Bill would fatally undermine encryption, while forcing tech companies to censor speech “on an industrial scale”; and some MPs have recently taken it upon themselves to sign a letter condemning an offensive op-ed about Meghan Markle.

    Thankfully, the American Constitution is clear that decisions about the content of speech are not in the purview of legislators, but individuals. Although post-New Deal Supreme Court jurisprudence leaves much to be desired, it is to the judiciary’s credit that it has generally upheld First Amendment provisions stringently.

    While a strong system of constitutional protections is a vital prerequisite to upholding individual freedom, it is not a silver bullet. The key threat to free speech in the UK comes from voters’ unwillingness to defend the right at the ballot box.

    On free speech, most Brits are split into two groups. The first takes a Helen Lovejoy-esque approach to speech, with “Won’t somebody think of the children?” being an essential rallying cry for their campaign to encourage more online censorship. This group tends to endorse the view that causing offence or panic trumps the right to free expression, which in turn underpins their desire for other restrictions like anti-hate speech and anti-misinformation laws.

    The second group’s approach is akin to appeasement, condemning the latest encroachment on free speech (particularly when it affects them or their in-group) and proclaiming censorship should not go one step further. They rarely, however, make the principled case for free speech or advocate the repeal of all speech-suppressing laws.

    The first group is an active threat to free speech, while the second lacks the ideological commitment to fight back against the tide of censorship engulfing British law.

    The task ahead for those of us trying to restore free speech is titanic: first, we have to engineer a colossal change in the culture around free speech, such that voters will no longer tolerate infringements on their freedom by MPs. If we can accomplish this, we must then repeal a gargantuan body of speech-suppressing legislation. Only then would it be possible to implement institutional protections akin to the First Amendment, which would shield freedom of expression from future Parliamentary interference.

    Those willing to take on this task look to America as the shining city on the hill—a haven of free expression in a world becoming increasingly hostile to it. So much of the work we must do in the UK is already done in the US: you have a proud revolutionary heritage which promotes individual expression, characters who stand proudly as individuals against the mob are core to so much of your history and mythology, and your constitutional guarantee of free speech has largely withstood the challenges thrown its way.

    This has not, however, always been true. During World War I, Americans were whipped into a patriotic fervor which saw dissent as a vice, not a virtue. As expected, Congress was not immune to that fervor, passing the Espionage Act of 1917, which restricted anti-war speech. Tragically, the Supreme Court also refused to stop liberties being undermined, upholding Congressional censorship in cases like Debs v. United States—which approved the imprisonment of socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs for speaking against the war—and Schenck v. United States—which upheld the criminalization of speech urging people to ignore the draft and originated the misguided idea that falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater is not legally protected speech.

    As America’s past and Britain’s present show, you cannot always rely on precedent and institutions to protect free speech. In 1944, Judge Learned Hand delivered a speech titled “The Spirit of Liberty.” While I believe the vision of liberty he articulated in the speech was flawed, he delivered an important insight when he said:

    “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

    The future of free speech lies in the heart of every American, in every university lecture theater, in every protest, in every vote, in every speech, and in every debate. Nurture it and selfishly guard it, because if politicians sense that your willingness to protect it has diminished, everything from your right to speak out against government policy to your right to silently pray outside an abortion clinic may, before you even realize it, be eroded.

    Freedom of speech is functionally extinct in Britain. I urge all Americans to learn the lessons from our experience.


    Harrison Griffiths

    Harrison Griffiths is Communications Officer at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank in London.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


    📂This entry was posted in News and Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Free speech used to be held up as one of the core American institutions. It was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason: while other countries have also adopted free speech, it is a fundamentally American tradition.

    More than that, free speech is essential on its own terms. It is the single best way for humans to make progress. None of us are perfect, and none of us know the full truth. Therefore we all need to engage in the marketplace of ideas in order to find the truth and develop the best path forward.

    But free speech has been under attack for decades.

    One of the earliest—and most influential—critics was Herbert Marcuse, a college professor and the father of the New Left. In an essay called Repressive Tolerance published in 1969, Marcuse recommended removing rights (including the right to free speech) from conservatives. Marcuse didn’t see the world in terms of human beings who all have equal worth; he saw the world in terms of power. Those with power should be forcibly silenced (at least, the ones he disagreed with) so that those at the bottom could have more freedom. For Marcuse, if a majority is being repressed, what is needed is “repression and indoctrination” of the powerful so that the weak get the power they deserve.

    In recent years, Marcuse-style attacks on free speech have filtered down from academic institutions into the mainstream.

    Ilya Shapiro, adjunct law professor at George Washington University and the University of Mississippi, provides a case study on the new rules around who can speak and what they can say. Early in 2022 Georgetown Law School hired him to teach. When President Biden said he would only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro expressed dismay at this form of blatant affirmative action. At the voicing of this heterodox view, the sky fell down on him.

    Georgetown swiftly placed Shapiro on administrative leave, where he languished for months without knowing whether or not he’d be fired. An administrative investigation into the offending Tweets lasted 122 days.

    Georgetown finally reinstated Shapiro, but only on the technicality that he hadn’t officially started at Georgetown at the time he sent his tweets. The Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) said that his comments were “objectively offensive” and that saying something similar in future may be enough to get him fired.

    Even more disturbingly, the IDEAA adopted a blatantly subjective standard for deciding whether or not speech by faculty would be punishable. “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” according to the report. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.”

    As Shapiro puts it: “That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.”

    This punishment of heterodox speech isn’t an isolated incident. A 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that over a third of Democratic responders said that a business executive should be fired if they “believe psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers.” A substantial number of respondents thus advocated stripping someone of their job for the crime of saying what many psychologists know to be true.

    The new cultural norms around free speech aren’t just a problem for right-wingers. In an in-depth explainer on cancel culture, Julian explains the scope of the problem:

    “Heterodox Academy surveyed 445 academics about the state of free inquiry on campus, asking them, ‘Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?’

    One of the hypothetical consequences Heterodox Academy listed was, ‘my career would be hurt.’ How many academics said they would be ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about this consequence? 53.43%.

    To put it another way: over half of academics on campus worried that expressing non-orthodox opinions on controversial topics could be dangerous to their careers.

    We see the same self-censoring phenomenon among college students. In 2021, College Pulse surveyed 37,000 students at 159 colleges. They found that 80% of students self-censor to at least some degree. 48% of undergraduates reported feeling, ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

    In a panel on free speech and cancel culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said, ‘I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship.'”

    It’s not just students and professors. In an article titled “America Has A Free Speech Problem,” the New York Times editorial board noted that 55 percent of Americans have held their tongue in the past year because they were concerned about “retaliation or harsh criticism.”

    Extremists on both sides of the aisle increasingly wield their power to shame or shun Americans who speak their minds or have the temerity to voice their opinions in public. This problem is most prominent on social media, but is spilling into offline conversations as well. Citizens of a free country should not live in fear that a woke or far-right mob will come for them because they express an idea that isn’t sufficiently in vogue.

    The very concept of free speech is increasingly associated with violence. When former vice president Mike Pence planned to speak at the University of Virginia, the student newspaper Cavalier Daily published a furious editorial saying that Pence shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Why not? “Speech that threatens the lives of those on Grounds is unjustifiable.” It takes a lot of mental contusions to conclude that letting Pence give his opinion could threaten anyone’s life.

    It’s not just students. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?”

    According to Barrett, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”

    She continued: “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.”

    The fact that psychologists are lending the veneer of science to the idea that speech is violence should be deeply troubling to every American.

    When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place. Robust norms of free speech helped people build the emotional and mental resilience to cope with ideas they disagreed with. It helped us build bonds with people who believed different things, because we were able to listen to and understand their position.

    Free speech also enabled multiple parties to argue from competing worldviews and find a solution that was better than what any party had formulated going into the discussion.

    The silver lining is this: Americans increasingly recognize that free speech is a value whose preservation is essential. The New York Times editorial board notes that “84 percent of adults said it is a, ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”

    As a strong and integrous person, what can you do to limit the impact of the degradation of free speech on your own life?

    First, speak up about what you know to be true—even if no-one else is speaking up, even if there are risks to you. Develop the courage to call a spade a spade. If you see insanity—in your workplace, in politics, in your home—call it out openly and honestly. You’ll sleep better at night. You’ll also become stronger through the act of speaking out. Speaking takes courage, but it also creates courage.

    Second, seek out people who disagree with you. Listen to them. Go further; try to be persuaded by them. Skewer your sacred cows and let go of your ideology. Neither one is serving you.

    Third, banish forever (if you haven’t yet) the infantile notion that words are violence. This notion is profoundly damaging, because it makes you weak. If mere disagreement can hurt you, after all, then so can everything else in life. So will everything else in your life. Instead, embrace the adage of the Stoics: other people are responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your response. Once you embrace the idea that mere words—whether vicious or merely heterodox—cannot hurt you, you are on the path to emotional strength and groundedness.

    Fourth, don’t let yourself become a “tribe of one.” It’s easy, in this environment of chilled speech, to always feel scared to speak up. Find a group of friends who encourage you to speak your truth, and who speak their truth in return to you. Find people who aren’t afraid to share heterodox ideas and to challenge your sacred cows, nor to have their own challenged in return.

    Find a group you’d trust to have your back in a firefight, and who will love you and expect you to have theirs in turn.

    This article was republished with permission from The Undaunted Man.

    Julian Adorney


    Julian Adorney

    Julian is a former political op-ed writer and current nonprofit marketer. His work has been featured in FEE, National Review, Playboy, and Lawrence Reed’s economics anthology Excuse Me, Professor.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


    📂This entry was posted in News and Politics 📎and tagged

  • Without Free Speech, All Speech Becomes Government Speech

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    When I viewed this video, I wondered if it was a hoax. I thought it must be a group of actors trying to make a point about how far restrictions on speech have gone. Unfortunately, the video captures reality in Scotland in 2019.

    The video picks up an exchange between a Scottish high school teacher and a student. The class was asked to sign up for a website, and according to the student, the teacher commented on how old fashioned the website was for listing only two sexes. The student, Murray, remarked, “But sir there’s only two genders,” and the teacher insisted they continue the discussion outside the classroom.

    Murray recorded the encounter on his phone. Here are some of the lowlights of the recorded dialogue:

    Murray: “Why did you kick me out of class? It’s not very inclusive of you.”

    Teacher: “I’m sorry, but what you were saying is not very inclusive, and this is an inclusive school.”

    Murray: (referring to the teacher’s viewpoint that there are more than two genders): “That’s your opinion.”

    Teacher: “That is my opinion, and that is an opinion which is acceptable in this school.”

    Teacher: “Will you please keep that opinion [referring to Murray’s view that there are two genders] to your own house, not in this room?”

    Murray: “So you got to put your opinion out in class, but my opinion has to stay inside my house?”

    Teacher: “I am not putting my opinion out. I am stating what is national school authority policy.”

    Teacher: “I know what you think, and I know what the authority thinks.”

    Following the UK “national school authority policy” on the number of genders, children are taught there are 100 “gender identities.”

    Murray wasn’t sent to a reeducation camp, but the school suspended him for several weeks.

    As for the teacher, he’s trying to be a proper government functionary. Perhaps he’s dreaming of retirement or at least the day when students like Murray will no longer dare to challenge him.

    If you’re sure this sort of incident couldn’t happen in America, think again.

    A new survey conducted in the United States by the Campaign for Free Speech found 51 percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “The First Amendment goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America and should be updated to reflect the cultural norms of today.” 48 percent thought, and a majority of millennials agreed, “hate speech” should be outlawed. An astonishing 54 percent of millennials thought jail time should be the consequence penalty for hate speech. Hate speech was not defined in the survey.

    57 percent of Americans are ready to have government “take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false.”

    These findings are not out-of-line with earlier surveys such as a Cato Institute 2017 Free Speech and Tolerance Survey, which found that 40 percent of Americans think the government should prevent hate speech.

    Recently, Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, called for limits on the 1st Amendment. In a Washington Post op-ed, Stengel wrote “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era,” and without defining hate, he called for laws prohibiting “speech that incites hate.” For Stengel it’s a bad thing, not a strength of America, that our “First Amendment standard is an outlier.”

    If you thought anti-free speech sentiment is limited to college campuses, you would be wrong.

    Perhaps there are flaws in the survey design by the Campaign for Free Speech, yet the findings warn of waning support for our constitutional rights.

    There is fundamental confusion on the source of our right to free speech. The right to free speech codified in the 1st Amendment is not a grant of the right of free speech; it is a prohibition against government interfering with an inherent right of Americans:

    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.…

    When the first amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—were being debated, Madison and other Founders initially feared enumerating rights would later be interpreted to mean only rights named in the Constitution would be protected.

    Madison addressed those fears with the 9th Amendment to the Constitution:

    The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

    Madison was adamant on the absolute nature of the 1st amendment even when the results displease some or many:

    Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please. And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are misused by a minority.

    Just as you can’t be half-pregnant, there is no such thing as government regulated free speech. If government is the arbiter of what is acceptable speech, you are on the road to a dystopian nightmare. The Founders were clear: fallible individuals, limited in knowledge, were not be trusted with power to infringe on our rights.

    Nor, Madison believed, would a democratic vote offer any protection for free speech. In Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison explains that democracy offers no protection against the passion of a faction opposed to liberty:

    When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government…enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion…both the public good and the rights of other citizens.

    Masaji Ishikawa was born in 1947 in Japan to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. His father was a violent alcoholic. In 1960, Ishikawa’s family, mired in poverty, moved to North Korea as part of a mass repatriation movement that included almost 100,000 Koreans, lured by promises of a “paradise on earth,” a “land of milk and honey.”

    In his book A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea, Ishikawa learned that as a fish doesn’t understand water, he didn’t understand the freedoms he had in Japan:

    When I lived in Japan, I never really pondered my life… I became obsessed with all the things I had taken for granted before, and all the hardships that marked my life now. But that didn’t last long. I soon learned that thought was not free in North Korea. A free thought could get you killed if it slipped out. If you were lucky, you might get sent to some remote mountainous region to do hard labor. Or you might get sent to a concentration camp for political prisoners because you were deemed a “liberal” or a “capitalist” with “bad habits.” And bad habits needed to be stamped out. By means of a jackboot to the genitals. Or then again, you might simply be executed.

    Ishikawa’s family was a potential source of ideas dangerous to the North Korean police state:

    We were constantly monitored by the goons of the State Security of North Korea and the secret police. I guess we posed a double threat. We’d brought some dangerous items with us from Japan when we moved—things like bicycles and electrical appliances and half-decent clothes. What if the local villagers came to realize that their standard of living was pitiful? Worse still, what would happen if they got wind of the concept of free thought from us? They might question the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. And that was verboten.

    Education in North Korea consists mostly of studying the collected works of the despots Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s “revolutionary thought.” Their doctrine of Juche is the backbone of North Korean society. In his book, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, Victor Cha explains the indoctrination:

    Juche was seared into the minds of every North Korean every day through repetitive indoctrination sessions. There was almost a biological and anatomical rationalization for loyalty that went along with the spiritual. Juche’s writings taught that the Great Leader (Suryŏng) Kim Il-sung was the brain, the party was the nerves, and the people were the arms, legs, muscle, and bone of the state. Two messages of obedience emerged: (1) without the brain, the rest does not function; therefore, there must be complete loyalty; and (2) independent thinking was not needed, since this was handled by the brain. The only critical thinking that was allowed was self-criticism based on guilt for not serving the leader well.

    In North Korea, speaking your mind is incomprehensible.

    Reading my essay, you might think I’m overwrought. Surely, those who want to restrict hate speech don’t want “complete loyalty” to a future presidency of, let’s say, Elizabeth Warren. They don’t want Americans to memorize her speeches or study her ponderings in school.

    If you believe my worries are unfounded, read again the exchange with the Scottish teacher and Murray. The teacher thinks he is innocent in stifling dissent. He is merely spreading “national school authority policy.” The teacher knows what Murray thinks and he “knows what the authority thinks.” The view of the “authority’s” trumps the student’s opinions.

    In a future democratic socialist administration mired in economic collapse, is it a stretch to predict that protection of free speech will continue to wane making criticism of government policies verboten?

    If disagreement over the number of genders can’t be tolerated, surely disagreements on a debt jubilee or a wealth tax wouldn’t be tolerated either.

    Ishikawa didn’t understand the freedoms he had in Japan until he lost freedom in North Korea. Like Ishikawa in Japan, today’s Americans don’t know we are swimming in the warm waters of liberty, with the freedom to speak our mind.

    In degree, America is far removed from the world of North Korea. But when government is given the power to determine what is acceptable speech, we are operating out of the same totalitarian mindset that leads to dystopian hell. If totalitarianism comes to America, we will have no one to blame.


    Barry Brownstein

    Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


    📂This entry was posted in News and Politics 📎and tagged