Below is my column in Fox.com on renewed attacks on free speech and the apologists for this anti-free speech movement, including most recently comedian Jon Stewart. From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, the left is pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.
Here is the column:
“The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” That headline in a recent column in the New York Times warned Americans of a menace lurking around them and threatening their livelihoods and very lives. That menace is free speech and the media and academia are ramping up attacks on a right that once defined us as a people.
In my new book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how we are living in the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history. An alliance of the government, corporations, academia, and media have assembled to create an unprecedented system of censorship, blacklisting, and speech regulation. This movement is expanding and accelerating in its effort to curtail the right that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “indispensable” to our constitutional system.
It is, of course, no easy task to convince a free people to give up a core part of identity and liberty. You have to make them afraid. Very afraid.
The current anti-free speech movement in the United States has its origins in higher education, where faculty have long argued that free speech is harmful. Starting in secondary schools, we have raised a generation of speech phobics who believe that opposing views are triggering and dangerous.
Anti-free speech books have been heralded in the media. University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has written how dangerous free speech is for the nation. Her book, “Attack from Within,” describes how free speech is what she calls the “Achilles Heel” of America, portraying this right not as the value that defines this nation but the threat that lurks within it.
McQuade and many on the left are working to convince people that “disinformation” is a threat to them and that free speech is the vehicle that makes them vulnerable.
It is a clarion’s call that has been pushed by President Joe Biden who claims that companies refusing to censor citizens are “killing people.” The Biden administration has sought to use disinformation to justify an unprecedented system of censorship.
As I have laid out in testimony before Congress, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over “critical infrastructure” to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So, you can cite true facts but still be censored for misleading others.
The media has been running an unrelenting line of anti-free speech columns. Recently, the New York Times ran a column by former Biden official and Columbia University law professor Tim Wu describing how the First Amendment was “out of control” in protecting too much speech.
Wu insists that the First Amendment is now “beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” He bizarrely claims that the First Amendment “now mostly protects corporate interests.”
So free speech not only threatens your life, your job, and your privacy, but serves corporate masters. Ready to sign your rights away?
Wait, there is more.
There is a movement afoot to rewrite the First Amendment through an amendment. George Washington University Law School Professor Mary Anne Franks believes that the First Amendment is “aggressively individualistic” and needs to be rewritten to “redo” the work of the Framers.
Her new amendment suggestion replaces the clear statement in favor of a convoluted, ambiguous statement of free speech that will be “subject to responsibility for abuses.” It then adds that “all conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.”
Franks has also dismissed objections to the censorship on social media and insisted that “the Internet model of free speech is little more than cacophony, where the loudest, most provocative, or most unlikeable voice dominates . . . If we want to protect free speech, we should not only resist the attempt to remake college campuses in the image of the Internet but consider the benefits of remaking the Internet in the image of the university.”
Franks is certainly correct that those “unlikeable voices” are rarely heard in academia today. As discussed in my book, faculties have largely purged conservative, Republican, libertarian, and dissenting professors. The discussion on most campuses now runs from the left to far left without that pesky “cacophony” of opposing viewpoints.
Experts at leading universities were fired or stripped of positions for questioning COVID claims. Conservative faculty have been hounded from schools and conservative sites have been targeted by government-funded programs. Thousands have been banned from social media.
What is particularly maddening for many in the free speech community is how the left has responded to opposition to censorship and blacklisting. Some are claiming to be victims by those who criticize their work to target individuals and groups as disinformation.
Others, like comedian Jon Stewart mock those who object to the erosion of free speech by noting that conservatives are making these objections on television or online. So, according to Stewart, how can there be a problem if you are able to still object? The suggestion is that there can be no threat to free speech unless people are completely silenced.
Stewart insists that “we are surrounded by and inundated with more speech than has ever existed in the history of communication.” In other words, because people can still speak, the well-documented systems of censorship and blacklisting must not be so bad.
It is not clear what Stewart would accept as sufficient censorship. In universities, polls show both faculty and students afraid to speak openly. The government has funded a host of programs to pressure the source of revenue of conservative sites and to target dissenting voices. Yet, because we are raising objections to these trends, Stewart laughs at the very notion that free speech is under fire. After all, he is doing just fine.
What appears to be a punchline to Stewart is a bit more serious for others who have their livelihoods threatened by the anti-free speech movement.
Stewart has the benefit of being a liberal comedian on a liberal network. Try being a conservative comedian today getting air time on most cable outlets or college campuses. Like so many academics, everything seems just fine to them. With the purging of opposition viewpoints, those who remain have little to complain about.
The effort to assure citizens that “there is nothing to see here” is belied by a massive censorship system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.” Conservatives face cancel campaigns and blacklisting in academic and media forums.
As I discussed in my new book, conservative North Carolina professor Dr. Mike Adams faced calls for termination for years with investigations and cancel campaigns. He repeatedly had to go to court to defend his right to continue to teach. He was then again targeted after an inflammatory tweet. He was done. Under pressure from the university, he agreed to resign with a settlement. Four years ago this month, Adams went home just days before his final day as a professor. He then committed suicide.
Many others have resigned or retired. For them, the anti-speech movement takes away everything that brings meaning to an intellectual life from publications to associations to even employment. It is a chilling message to others not to join the “cacophony of … unlikeable voices.”
Some citizens seem sufficiently afraid or angry to surrender their free speech rights. They have lost faith in free speech. For the rest of us, their crisis of faith cannot be allowed to become a contagion. We must have a reawakening in this country that, despite our many divisions, we remain united by this indispensable human right.
““malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
That describes Democrats and MSM to a T.
This lack of protection of free speech is not just something you have to wait to correct itself. That is surrender. In order to protect free speech, you (meaning all of us) have got to be out there and pushing the whole monolith of power and control so that it falls and crashes to ground. Then you clean up the pieces and drop them in a dustbin and empty the dustbin in a fire until it is all consumed. Then you rebuild the country.
There is an oft repeated truism that “the Second protects the First”. Maybe the time nears when that should become a plan of action.
John Stewart was never funny. My son was often a fan and urged me to watch the comedy channel years ago. So I did and was totally unimpressed. Of course he failed miserably when compared to George Carlin. Carlin was the measuring stick in my mind. I doubt I shared any particular political views with Mr. Carlin but he was hysterical because he was original, totally fearless, and went after everyone. There were many great comedians like Seinfeld, Flip Wilson, Nipsey Russel, even Bill Cosby (in his days before his fall from grace). Most took a particular aspect of our lives and exhausted themselves in pointing out the ludicrous aspects of what we did as we went about our daily chores and made us laugh at ourselves. The problem with progressives is they can’t laugh at themselves because it is beneath them and they have no concept of humor. They absolutely cannot laugh at themselves because they are too “important”.
Also those comedians had lived those same lives as we did and had an intimate knowledge of what was so crazy about what we all did day and found the humor in it. They did not usually come from the pampered classes.
If the democrats and Merrick Garland were truly concerned about Democracy they would go after the advertising cartels that seek to cut off all nonconforming news sources. Like NewsGuard. They act the same way as the accreditation groups who force DEI, CRT and trans “science” on universities, professional schools, public and private secondary schools. Say anything you like but if you step out of line you’re no longer accredited. Which means professional death.
Stewart and his ilk are merely professional clowns. They have their purpose, but why should anyone pay the slightest attention when any of them put on airs of profound knowledge?
I strongly suspect that similar sentiments were expressed in Germany in the early 1930s…
I strongly suspect that similar sentiments were commonly expressed in early 1930s Germany…
Comments above are redundant, and both were intended to be replies to the JJC comment below that contains “free speech is here to stay and managed speech is a relic of a previous age when countries like the USSR told their people what to think”
Cue guillotines.
The guillotine cures many ills, true but who will be releasing the blade this time? In France, I suspect the Left. Perhaps in your country also.
In America today, classic definitions of Left and Right no longer apply. To a communist, everyone else look like fascists. Today we have normal people spurned as “the right” by a tiny fringe of Marxist america-haters, a coalition of the Stupid and the Complicit. The “right” don’t ordinarily care much about politics, unless you make them care. The Left is making us care, with attacks on our freedoms like this. And fortunately, the “right” have most of the guns. Threats to turn the military against us are hollow, because it is our children who volunteer. They may have corrupted many generals to become Marxists like themselves, but the enlisted ranks will quickly dispatch them if they are ever so stupid as to order their troops to attack their own countrymen. And behind every general there are always several colonels waiting for him to be gone. But this is why the Left hates the 2nd amendment so deeply. They are not fighting against “fascism” to save “democracy”; they are fighting America, and the Constitution, and our freedom.
Vladimir Putin just bashed the Moscow Times as “undesirable” for its reporting on the Ukraine war. Anybody want to live on the difference between “undesirable” and “unlikable voices”? There’s a video of Newt Gingrich giving a talk at Hillsdale College about research of the flow of academics and students through Yale, Princeton and Harvard. It’s a picture of a group that schools together, neighborhoods together, networks together, and makes policy together. That policy is they know best, and purports to make decisions that the citizens as a whole are not enlightened enough to make for themselves. If true, the optics point to a putative return to a class of nobility v commoners. That screws up the blueprint of the Constitution. They have a Boeing problem.
Agree. But just to clarify the difference between the two situations, Russians never had a supposedly ironclad and irrevocable guarantee of free speech and assembly embodied in their nation’s primary founding document. To me, that makes the betrayal of that right by U. S. Fedgov and its contractors much worse than Putin’s conduct. It does clearly constitute Treason.
“The current anti-free speech movement in the United States has its origins in higher education, where faculty have long argued that free speech is harmful.” (JT)
One such particularly noxious academic is Stanley Fish, former chair of the English department at Duke University. Here is the title of his 1994 book: _There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too_.
In case the consequences of rejecting free speech are not clear, another academic, Richard Rorty, spells them out: “[W]hen the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them . . .”
Want to save America and your treasured rights? Hire professors with rational ideas.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.”
– Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), Lutheran Minister and early Nazi
supporter who was later imprisoned for opposing Hitler’s regime.
Feel free to substitute any of the groups that the powers that be plan to silence today for those referenced by Niemöller. The group identities have zero effect on the accuracy of the idea he espoused in this statement.
This campaign to disable free speech will not work because it is riddled with internal conflicts. To make the case, one must be convinced of one’s own inability to tell fact from fiction. For years, the media have been telling us that Joe Biden is fine, an excellent and strong leader, etc. Suddenly, the curtain is pulled aside and the wizard is exposed as some ordinary Joe with a bad case of progressive memory loss. So much for the unfree speech folks. The Internet and the wide variety of information available today ensures that free speech is here to stay and managed speech is a relic of a previous age when countries like the USSR told their people what to think. Of course, the faculty lounge folks will continue to belittle and berate free speech but who listens to them anyway? Only some of their naive students who, when confronted by the real world, quickly learn the value of free speech as they realize, perhaps for th first time, that they have been lied to by their perceived leaders. No, free speech may bend a bit now and then but it will never break because freedom of any sort can only be depressed temporarily. In the end, truth always wins.
Perhaps the speech is free, but the mind and the spirit they are not free. It is a bad thing that there was never a curtain to be pulled, so that the retarded Wizard needed to be revealed. No, the curtain he was open all the time and the window she was never covered. It is the people who refused to say what they saw, because perhaps the land of the free and the home of the brave – is not the home of the free and the brave, but the home of the coward and fearful. For this reason is why the people should kneel when the song she is sung. And in my country too are we cowards, and La Marseillaise, when she is sung, we should bow our heads in shame also.
“[T]he faculty lounge folks will continue to belittle and berate free speech but *who listens to them* anyway?” (emphasis added)
That is dangerously suicidal.
The censors Turley cites (and their ilk) get their anti-free speech ideas from those “faculty lounge folks.” It is no accident that America’s censors were educated at some of our top-ranked universities.
What you see are the transmission belts of censorship. Look deeper for the generators. They’re at Harvard, Princeton, Duke, et al.
“With the purging of opposition viewpoints, those who remain have little to complain about.“
Is that the new slogan for Project 2025 or just the dumb MAGA cult.
Like the Uterus Collectors preceding them, the Tongue Collectors will be out in force.
Forced Tongue Circumcisions at birth are now mandated. Just two more anti-state vices to go: Hear no Evil (Your Ears) and See no Evil (Your Eyes).
Human Cucumbers ready for harvest at the Solent Farms™.
G-Project 20XX
soilent green is people
What a well reasoned reply.
I’m sure you have plenty of unanswered questions in your brain. The answer to that one, is no.
Do you have an answer as to why every dem-led city over the past 65 years is now a $hithole?
Don’t forget that there has been no shortage of RINOs over that period significantly contributing to that same result.
It is good to see progressives now realize they can amend the Constitution, rather than argue it is living document devoid of objective meaning (deconstructionist stupidity). It is not surprising the morons that can not articulate cogent arguments for their positions want to outlaw discussion.
We need more intelligent progressives, but then they would not be progressive.
Anonymous 7:29 am
I would go further. Intelligent progressive is an oxymoron.
‘Holy ‘Hanoi Jane’, Batman!! Time for the entertainment industry’s ‘psychofans’ to wake up and smell the coffee. Pull the plug on its revenue streams and kick these pretenders off the high perches that have been created for them. Celebrity is becoming a threat to our Constitutional Republic.
It is a failure of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures that they seem helpless or even clueless in recognizing the efforts of Democrats to create a police state from their domain of academia and media. It is far past time to choke off resources to public schools, and/or establish explicitly conservative schools, teaching a respect, if not veneration, for the values of Western civilization.
Jon Stewart plied his craft on Free Speech. It is his generation’s penchant for never ending sarcastic remarks and no serious ‘work’ to of set a balance. Sacasim is the medium of their culture. A “it’s not my problem” mentality that shifts the ‘work ‘ to Others who do care and see the difference that being genuine creates.
Jon Stewart is a ‘cheap trick’, like so many many others of that genera. Sarcastic pot-shots won’t get the Job done, it takes real sweat.
A huge reduction in government workers would help improve the crap coming out of DC. I just think people have too much time on their hands so they have to make more dumb rules.
Hear, hear!
I think that most of us here agree on the need for drastic culling. What is not yet apparent is the most efficacious method.
So the argument is that the First Amendment (as well as the 2nd and most of the Bill of Rights) is a beast. Kill the beast then, before it kills you said Thaddeus Stevens. Seems like that it is a good catchphrase for the left
The ironic thing is that they will eventually come for the censorship proponents. But then they will not have a platform, having worked so hard to dismantle it for others.
BTW, just starting Chapter 29. Excellent read. Keep up the good fight
No free speech for nazis! And a ‘nazi’ is defined who questions, criticizes or opposes any belief or policy to the left of Mitch McConnell.
Oppose Censorship = you’re a ‘nazi’.
Questioned covid policy = you’re a ‘nazi’.
Notice black crime and IQ differences = you’re a ‘nazi’.
Don’t support open borders = you’re a ‘nazi’.
Oppose NATO efforts in Ukraine = you’re a ‘nazi’ but remember the Azov Battalion fighthing who are actual nazis but fighting the Russians are ok.
Don’t support ‘gender affirming care’ = you’re a ‘nazi’.
Don’t support Joe Biden = no, that’s OK now as long as it’s Kamala.
The list is endless and I’m sure our morally superior s@@tlib friends can add to the above list. I welcome their contributions!!
And JT, remember you’re a ‘nazi’ too. Be glad you have tenure or you’d be a goner too.
I do not want to understand, dialog or reconcile with these people, I want a divorce.
Screw “Our Democracy(tm)!
antonio
Vigorous, even cacophonous free speech is not only indispensable to our liberties, arguably it is 745the sine qua non of the Republic. If the censorship tyrants don’t like it, there is a simple solution: they should just get out of Dodge.
Free speech also presupposes occasional fat finger typos: delete the “745” in the recent comment.
Wikipedia states this about Mary Anne Franks: In addition to her work in legal scholarship and activism, she is an instructor in Krav Maga, a self-defense system developed for the military in Israel. Comedian Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz too? Our founding fathers saw the threat of the Noahide Law people so they gave us the 1st & 2nd Amendments to protect us from them. Once they are able to “rewrite” out the Separation of Church and State clause they can usher in their anti-Christian, genocidal Noahide Laws. Is this what’s up?
@brian
(((Mary Ann Franks)))
Any surprise?
From Turley’s expose two come clear as the true problem in our country: higher education and the government. Not-coincidently, both are dominated by the left.
Ironic that my comment “free speech is supposed to be out of control” was censored on a post about free speech.
Stewart ceased being funny way over a decade ago.
I never bought into the ironic stare into the camera that made the hipster 20-somethings howl with delight over some form of enlightened epiphany of political awareness.