You Should Read This: How “Free Speech Culture” Is Killing Free Speech: Part One

I’ve posted a “You Should Read This” about a Ken White (PopeHat) essay before; he’s kind of the go-to guy for sensible thinking about the 1st Amendment, free speech and how law and culture should each deal with controversial speech.

It’s kinda his thing.

And he’s very good on it, both as a professional lawyer and as a citizen who thinks about these issues.

Yesterday, he posted the first of a two-part set titled ‘How “Free Speech Culture” Is Killing Free Speech: Part One‘ giving an overview of the legal and cultural issues and how the unpleasant trend he’s calling “free speech culture” has led to formal, government-backed censorship.

If you read the previous essay I linked to back in 2022, then you’ll already be familiar with the basic issues.

But now he’s updating it to show how a lack of what he called “free speech pedantry” is damaging actual legal protections for speech.

It’s not a happy read.

As he says in his sub-heading:

Blurring The Lines Between Official Censorship And Individual Criticism Built The Intellectual Foundation For Trump’s Assault On Free Expression

So that should give you a pretty good idea of where he’s going with this.

I don’t agree with him entirely about it, though.

OK, I agree with him almost entirely.

The only point where I really disagree is when he says:

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree that we won’t use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like and will talk back instead. This is not the default American view, nor the human one. The default view is “let’s use power to promote speech I like and punish the speech I hate.”

It’s the “nor the human one” that I take issue with. He’s correct that it’s not the default American view, but attitudes to speech and control are cultural defaults not biological ones. There is no default human view on these things, and children raised in different cultural contexts will have vastly different “default” attitudes.