The right to free speech is under attack from intolerant liberals and leftists who want to silence their political opponents as well as extremists. According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, woke ideology and the impulse to demonize President Donald Trump was behind the effort to undermine constitutional rights in recent years via the Biden administration’s efforts to impose censorship on social media and in the press on issues like the COVID pandemic.
He is joined in this episode of “Think Twice” by George Washington University Law School professor and Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley, author of the important new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage. Turley said that Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent speech in Munich, Germany tried to call attention to the way freedom of speech is under siege in the supposedly democratic nations of Western Europe. But, as Vance also admitted, the same has been true in the United States.
Turley’s book highlights the fact that almost from the moment the First Amendment was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, the right to free speech has been under attack. Founding Fathers like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as well as icons of the law like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes have undermined free speech by targeting political opponents as well as radical minorities who step outside the national consensus on various issues.
The latter coined the phrase about not crying fire in a crowded theater. Turley says that “may be the dumbest line ever written by a Supreme Court Justice” but it continues to be employed to justify censorship.
At the core of this debate has always been the unique idea of the First Amendment that the right to speech is inalienable to every citizen regardless of whether their ideas are good or bad and which the government can only restrict under very limited circumstances. As in the past, the impetus behind the contemporary war on free speech has been the belief that political foes represent a threat that cannot be coped with by normal means. That led to the Biden administration’s bullying of social media and Internet companies to censor dissent against their policies and to repress opponents like Trump. But rather than pushing back against this ominous effort, mainstream corporate media outlets willingly cooperated with and supported censorship and labeling dissent as “misinformation” or even sedition.
Turley notes that the recent false statement of Margaret Brennan, the host of the CBS News show “Face the Nation” that the Nazis succeeded because of free speech illustrates the problem. That’s not just because she’s dead wrong about the history. It’s also because she and other liberal elites think that free speech is bad because it allows those who disagree with them in Europe as well as the United States the right to promote those views.
The legal expert also notes how leftists who dominate the academy have sought to undermine the free speech of conservatives and others who disagree with them while hypocritically declaring that their efforts to silence dissent are protected by the Constitution. Turley specifies that the actions of pro-Hamas antisemitic protesters on campus to de-platform, intimidate, advocate and engage in violence against Jewish students at U.S. colleges are not protected by the First Amendment.
This also applies to the way leftist-dominated teachers unions have mainstreamed antisemitic discourse and instruction in K-12 schools. Turley says their control of public education has led him to embrace school choice measures that would allow all parents to take their children out of these hostile environments.
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