Let’s stipulate there is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you find yourself going on and on through clenched teeth about the Reflecting Pool or the White House ballroom, you’ve probably come down with it and should seek help. Sideshow nuisances don’t put the Republic in jeopardy; when treated like they do, it only serves to delegitimize real threats. Like the objective fact that free speech — the right from which all freedoms flow — is under widespread assault, and from all sides.
To borrow from the late, legendary journalist and First Amendment true believer Nat Hentoff, the “free speech for me, but not for thee” movement knows no political party. Humans, it turns out, like shutting one another up.
The Biden administration did put its thumb on the scale of social media content during Covid. Harvard did jettison evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven for insisting that there is such a thing as fundamental sex differences. Yes, Trump is better at the fine art of censorship — he adds all the subtlety of a mob boss.
But fact is, threats to the free exchange of ideas — even those we disdain — are everywhere and have been since our founding. All of seven years passed between the adoption of the Constitution, with its groundbreaking First Amendment, and President John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act, which made it a crime for American citizens “to print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. Seven years? As Hentoff reminded us, that tells you all you need to know about how hard it is to keep our highfalutin rhetoric in line with our behavior.
That’s why what our local TV news juggernaut is up to matters so much. If you haven’t heard, the FCC has come after the broadcasting license of Disney’s eight owned and operated local TV stations, as well as that hard-hitting news slugfest The View. (Seriously, snowflakes? You can’t handle The View?) 6abc — progenitor of Action News — is one of those “O and Os.” Unlike other media outlets who have practiced appeasement when bullied by Trump’s minions, 6abc (like the other seven ABC affiliates across the country) has urged its viewers to write to the FCC and go on record in favor of the station’s fundamental right to participate in our town square; here’s 6abc’s ad that’s running on-air:
This piece will double as my filing with the regulatory agency. (Full disclosure: I’m a longtime panelist on the station’s Sunday morning public affairs program, Inside Story.) We’re nonpartisan here at The Citizen, and favoring the free marketplace of ideas is still a distinctly nonpartisan position. You can do the same if you follow the instructions to file by July 29 here.
So, you may wonder, why are local TV stations being targeted? Turns out, for nothing they’ve actually broadcast. Get this bank shot: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr appears to be trying to put pressure on Disney to, among other ideological wishes, jettison Jimmy Kimmel, who has had the temerity to satirize the president. Carr, borrowing from his boss’ Sopranos-like phraseology, went so far as to say, “We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way” last fall when Kimmel first raised his ire. Kinda like: Nice little network you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.
Well, seeking to revoke the broadcast licenses of Disney’s local stations is apparently the “hard way” Carr was referring to; ironic, given that he was originally appointed to his post by President Biden and tweeted in 2022: “President Biden is right. Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”
You were dead-on back then, Brendan, channeling George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” It may feel counterintuitive, but there is wisdom in answering offensive speech with better speech, as when the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that Nazis had the right to march in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish town with a high proportion of Holocaust survivors. The Court didn’t say that those citizens needed protection from hateful, traumatic ideas. Instead, it held that the whole purpose of constitutionally guaranteed free speech is to protect the speech we abhor.
Turns out, in the marketplace of ideas, expressions of bigotry give rise to their own refutation; when the Skokie march finally took place, protestors drowned out the few racists who had the guts to show up. The bigots lost the argument, as bigots do.
When they try to shut you up …
And yet the urge to shut others up persists, despite the lessons learned from a previous generation’s comedic free speech hero, Lenny Bruce, who argued that “the suppression of a word gives it its power.” The late, legendarily pugnacious author and polemicist Christopher Hitchens used to do this thing in the mid-to-late aughts. He’d take to the lectern in a packed theater, clutching a glass of Johnnie Walker Black, which he’d lovingly refer to as “Mr. Black’s amber restorative.” He’d look out at the assemblage of his fellow citizens and he’d shout, “Fire!” For effect, he’d repeat himself: “Fire!”
When nothing ensued — no panic, no riot — he’d smile slyly. “You see?” he’d say, going on to fill in the context. How Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ assertion — overruled by his robed brethren in 1969 — that freedom of speech did not extend to falsely shouting fire in a crowded movie theater was actually in response to a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists distributing leaflets in opposition to America’s role in World War I. That was the fire the venerated Justice was so eager to put out such that he would sacrifice the First Amendment.
“Be very, very, very careful when people give you arguments from authority or traditions that suggest free speech can be limited by higher authorities like the sainted Holmes because that’s what you’ll get,” Hitchens said. “The end of it is a group of Yiddish speaking radicals being told they can’t hand out a leaflet in Yiddish on a major question of the day. That’s always how it will end.”
Indeed, we don’t have space here for all the instances of Left and Right relentlessly censoring each other. But it’s particularly egregious when government seeks to put its big fat orange thumb on the free speech scale — be it in Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China or Trump’s USA. Because it is illiberal — a violation of the Enlightenment values our founders debated and compromised on when putting quill to parchment 250 years ago.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
John Milton’s Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty both come to the same conclusion: Freedom of speech is not for he who speaks, but for the rest of us. Every time someone else is silenced, every time an idea is squelched or self-censored, every time a thought goes unexpressed in the public square, we’ve denied ourselves access to an idea — even if odious. Every time a bureaucrat tries to intimidate a steward of the public airwaves into silence or bland expressions of politeness it denies citizens entryway into the messy marketplace of ideas. It censors us.
Even if you’re no fan of Kimmel or The View, you come for them, Big Brother, and you come for all of us. Because the First Amendment is more than what some dude in a robe says it is. It is what we do with it, you and I: How we rely on it in order to report, opine and, yes, offend. To watch characters as disparate as Hitchens, Bruce and Fannie Lou Hamer all joyously speak their mind is to watch The First Amendment come to life. Every time you’re shaken out of your comfort zone by the expression of a notion you’ve never entertained before? That’s the First Amendment at work.
6abc should be applauded for utilizing its massive public platform and wading into a free speech fight it didn’t seek. Because what makes this one so perilous is that it’s a case of an executive branch apparatchik — newly empowered by a Supreme Court ruling — seeking to quell dissent by, as so often is the case, starting with a comedian.
Remember that 1939 New York Times headline: “Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime.” Here, there was Hoover’s FBI’s targeting of Charlie Chaplin for his left-wing beliefs — even though the comic satirized America’s enemy, Hitler. Long before his critics would mysteriously turn up poisoned or fall from open high-rise windows, Putin imprisoned the owner of a network that carried a puppet — Kukly — that made fun of the thin-skinned Russian president.
Satire tends to be the first casualty of illiberalism, and attacks on it are harbingers of crackdowns to come. Sixty-three years ago, we saw an example of how all this is supposed to work. A comedian named Vaughn Meader caught the nation’s attention with his dead-on impersonation of President John F. Kennedy. Meader’s comedy album, The First Family, might not have quite had Kimmel’s edge, but it ribbed the Kennedy clan and became so popular the president was asked about it at a White House news conference. The president good-naturedly gave as good as he got: “I listened to Mr. Meader’s record,” he said. “But I think it sounded more like [younger brother] Teddy than it did me, so he’s annoyed.”
Imagine that? An erudite president secure enough to take a joke, let alone a criticism. Kennedy not only showed he can banter and get a laugh, he demonstrated what democracy is all about: Not just tolerating speech but engaging it.
OUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH
