1 year ago
77
We begin today with Charles Pierce of Esquire asserting that there is not and has never been any such thing as "completely free speech" in the entire history of American democracy.
Ever since the beginning of the republic, and even among some of the people who wrote and promulgated the Constitution, nobody ever believed in completely free speech. This is especially true among the rich and the powerful—and more especially true of the rich, powerful, and thin-skinned. Somebody is always going to be insulted, offended, or otherwise agitated by someone else expressing their thoughts. That agitation could be political, personal, social, or a hundred other variations, and that agitation almost inevitably fashions itself into a desire to eliminate its proximal cause, to wit, the expression or ideas, or both, that touched it off in the first place. And if you are rich and powerful, your agitation is particularly well-armed.
Any sensible reading of the history of the First Amendment (hell, of the entire Bill of Rights) is a history of pushing and pulling, one step up and two steps back. But the one thing that the First Amendment should protect absolutely is the right of all of us to argue about the rights that the Constitution guarantees. And the last couple of weeks have been a bonanza for that most basic First Amendment exercise.
The primary battleground recently has been Twitter; or at least it has been since Elon Musk, the living embodiment of Rod Stewart's assessment of having "a lot more money than sense," bought the platform and turned it into the lab rat for every twist and turn of his bizarre version of libertarianism.
