The First Amendment Is Dying

The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend.

It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some of them are fine with compelling you to say things, in fact.

Technocrats, “journalists,” the president, and self-styled experts often view unfettered speech as a cancer that threatens “diversity” or “social justice” or “democracy” or “the environment” or “safety” or “unions” or dozens of other issues that are perched high above speech in the hierarchy of modern values. The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters.

You don’t have to be a free-speech absolutist to believe that banning the president from tweeting on an allegedly neutral platform undermines the spirit of open discourse.

We are now often a society of self-censors, which, as Orwell noted, is as pernicious as any other variant. Sure, you can have your say, the leftist assures you. You just can’t have it on any platform or outlet with wide reach. Just look at the thermonuclear meltdown on the left over the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk — a man whose sin is professing to believe what any self-respecting liberal did a decade ago.

Orwell, though, was concerned that independent journalists and publishers would “keep certain topics out of print” not because they were “frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.” The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with.

It is. In 2017, I wrote about Trump’s threats to revoke NBC’s broadcast license for spreading fake news. Of course, NBC News has no constitutional right to that license, but threatening your critics clearly conflicts with once-accepted principles of free discourse. The same goes for Trump’s executive order empowering the White House to collect complaints of “online censorship.” Oh, how distressed liberals were over this attack on free speech.

Yet, when, in July of 2021, Jen Psaki casually noted that the White House had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” there was not a peep from any of them. Biden Communications Director Kate Bedingfield

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