Technology And Speech: A Conundrum

Americans have always engaged in disinformation. Political foes have historically disparaged each other; activists of the Left and Right have used pamphlets and newspapers, then radio and television, to spread bile and bigotry. Those of us committed to the principles of free speech have argued that–whatever the damage done by propaganda and lies (Big and small), allowing government to censor the marketplace of ideas would be a greater danger. 

I recently posted a relatively lengthy defense of that belief, which I continue to firmly hold.

Nevertheless, It’s impossible to ignore the fact that today, technology–especially the Internet–has vastly increased the ability to disseminate lies, misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, and I suspect I am not the only free speech purist who worries about the growth of widely-used sources that enable–indeed, invite and encourage– inaccurate, malicious and hateful communication. 

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now “X”) is a prominent example. Musk dispensed with the site’s previous content moderation policies, invited Trump to return, and recently welcomed back the far-right Austrian who received donations from and communicated with the Christchurch terrorist before the 2019 attack. Since Musk purchased the social media site, such far right users have proliferated.

The founder of the so-called Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, who preaches the superiority of European ethnic groups, was banned from Twitter in 2020 under the former management along with dozens of other accounts linked to the movement amid criticism over the platform’s handling of extremist content.

He’s back.

As Max Boot recently wrote in the Washington Post, “X (formerly Twitter) has become a cesspool of hate speech and conspiracy-mongering.” 

The problem became especially acute following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel when the platform was flooded with antisemitic and anti-Muslim misinformation. It’s like watching a once-nice neighborhood go to seed, with well-maintained houses turning into ramshackle drug dens.

That deterioration of the neighborhood has been confirmed by organizations tracking digital bias:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate reported a surge of extremist content on X since Musk took over in 2022 and fired most of the platform’s content moderators. The center found tweets decrying “race mixing,” denying the Holocaust and praising Adolf Hitler. The thin-skinned tech mogul responded by filing suit; early indications are that the federal judge hearing the case is skeptical of X’s claims.

The focus of Boot’s article wasn’t on the Free Speech implications of bigotry spewed by widely-used social media platforms, but on the fact that taxpayers are essentially subsidizing this particular cesspool.

What galls me is that, as a taxpayer, I wind up subsidizing X’s megalomaniacal and capricious owner, Elon Musk. His privately held company SpaceX is a major contractor — to the tune of many billions of dollars — for the Defense DepartmentNASA and the U.S. intelligence community. He is also chief executive of Tesla, which benefits from generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry.

Musk needs to decide whether he wants to be the next Donald Trump Jr. (i.e., a major MAGA influencer) or the next James D. Taiclet (the little-known CEO of Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor). Currently, Musk is trying to do both, and that’s not sustainable. He is presiding over a fire hose of falsehoods on X about familiar right-wing targets, from undocumented immigrants to “the woke mind virus” to President Biden … while reaping billions from Biden’s administration!

 

Musk is a “front and center” example of the conundrum posed by “Big Tech.” His obvious emotional/mental problems make it tempting to consider him a singular case, but his misuse of X in furtherance of his narcissism is simply a more vivid example of the problem, which is the ability of those who control massive platforms to distort the marketplace of ideas to an extent that has previously been impossible.

 

I have absolutely no idea what can or should be done to counter the threat to democracy, civic peace and reality that is posed by social media platforms and propaganda sites masquerading as “news.” Wiser heads than mine need to fashion regulations that require responsible moderation without infringing upon the genuine exchanges of opinion–even vile opinion– protected by the First Amendment. Figuring out how to walk that line is clearly beyond my pay grade.

 

One thing that government can do, however, is refrain from financing people who, like Elon Musk, are using our tax dollars to create division and foster bigotry. The First Amendment may protect his cesspool from sanctions, but it certainly doesn’t require financial support. As Boot concludes, Musk

 

 can espouse views that many Americans find abhorrent, or he can benefit from public largesse. He can’t do both — at least not indefinitely.

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About That Plan…

An increasing number of media outlets are reporting on Project 2025–a plan by the Heritage Foundation together with other right-wing organizations intended to be a road map for a second Trump presidency.

Pundits have noted Project 2025’s similarity to Victor Orbán’s “illiberal” democracy in Hungary, where Orban has gutted the civil service and filled government positions with loyalists who support his attacks on immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ community, and his efforts to distance Hungary from other NATO nations. Orban’s recent trip to Mar-A-Lago was followed by a less-publicized meeting at Heritage.

So–what is in the Project 2025 plan for a second Trump Administration? Heather Cox Richardson recently spelled it out:

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace. In their vision, the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means making “family authority, formation, and cohesion” a top priority and using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.

The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”

Dismantling the administrative state in this document starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism describes Project 2025 as a significant threat to democracy. Spearheaded by Heritage and supported by more than 80 extremist organizations, the plan aims to “rescue the country from elite rule and woke cultural warriors.” The Global Project notes reports of internal discussions centered around a proposal that the next “conservative” President invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, in order to allow use of the military to quell civil unrest.

Project 2025 plans what it calls a “robust governing agenda,” with all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism.

It threatens Americans’ civil and human rights and our very democracy. The America that Project 2025 wants to create would involve a fundamental reordering of our society. It would greatly enhance the executive branch’s powers and impose on all Americans policies favored by Christian nationalists regarding issues such as sexual health and reproductive rights, education, the family, and the role of religion in our society and government. It would strip rights protections from LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, women, and people of color. It would dismantle much of the federal government and replace our apolitical civil service with far-right partisans it is already training in anticipation of a power shift. It would end attempts to enhance equity and racial justice throughout the government and shut down agencies that track progress on this front. Efforts to tackle issues such as climate change would be ended, and politicized research produced to back the project’s views on environmental policy, the evils of “transgenderism,” and women’s health would take priority.

There is more, obviously, in a thousand-page document, and it’s all very chilling, but what strikes me is how explicit and professional it is.

Project 2025 represents a very troubling step up from the tracts and manifestos produced by the disaffected and generally disturbed members of militias and groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This is a professional document, produced and endorsed by people and organizations that already wield considerable power and influence–extremists who have already massively infiltrated the courts, completely taken over of one of America’s major political parties, and who “own” numerous lawmakers in Congress and in a number of states. Those “fellow travelers” are easily identifiable: we need only look at the GOP Representatives who oppose aid to Ukraine, attack trans children, and advocate for a national abortion ban. (Here in Indiana, that includes far-Right Congressman Jim Banks, currently running for the Senate, among others.)

The fact that Heritage felt free to put it in writing tells us the takeover is well underway. That should terrify us all…..

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A Bill Passes. Then What Happens?

Making policy–passing laws–requires a series of decisions. It begins with (and is often stymied by failure to reach) an agreement on the existence, nature and extent of the problem to be solved. When lawmakers do see the same problem, and agree on why something is a problem, they then have to come to some consensus on what action is needed to solve or ameliorate that problem. Then–in our age of “privatization”–they need to determine who should enforce the agreed-upon remedy. Should those empowered to deliver the new service or oversee compliance with the newly-passed regulation be government employees, or should that obligation be vested in the private or non-profit sector?

And finally, once the problem has been identified, a solution agreed upon, the means of enforcement determined, and the law passed, a sound policy process will vet how the new law performs–evaluate its effectiveness in actually addressing the original problem, and noting–and ideally correcting–any negative unanticipated effects.

This process will inevitably involve debate and discussion, and in an era of technological and social complexity, creating sound policy increasingly requires careful attention to sources of specialized expertise in the matter at hand.

Unfortunately, today’s Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on what time it is, let alone what our actual problems are. The GOP buffoons who increasingly dominate America’s legislative chambers ignore virtually all the “grunt work” needed for sound policymaking. When they aren’t fundraising, preening for Faux News cameras or producing television ads blaming “others” for real and imagined social problems, they are using legislative tactics to block rather than produce policies.

(This is frustrating for all serious citizens, of course, but I spent the last 21 years of my career teaching policy, and watching the total abandonment of actual governance in favor of performative antics is beyond painful.)

It’s one thing to outline the steps of the policy process, as I’ve done above. But just as a (non-AI) picture can be worth a thousand words, a real-life example can be more illustrative than an abstract process outline. So let’s look at a tax bill that Trump still touts as evidence of…something.

As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explains:

The tax overhaul signed into law by former President Donald Trump in 2017 cut the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but during the first five years it has been in effect, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that. This is mainly due to loopholes and special breaks that the 2017 tax law left in place and, in some cases, introduced. Corporate tax avoidance occurs because Congress allows it to occur, and the Trump tax law in many ways made it worse.

Tax policy is one of many intractable dividing lines between Republicans and Democrats, and it is a given that the tax overhaul of 2017 was not a product of agreement over the nature of the problem. Republicans think the problem is that businesses have to pay too much; Democrats think the problem is that wealthy folks aren’t paying their fair share. Clearly, a tax cut for profitable businesses is not the result of agreement on the nature of the problem. But the linked report focuses on the part of the policy process that both parties–and the Keystone Kops in Congress–routinely ignore.

How is it working?

The Institute looked at taxes paid by profitable corporations.

  • The 342 companies included in this study paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1 percent during this five-year period, almost a third less than the statutory rate of 21 percent.
  • Nearly a quarter of the corporations in this study (87 companies) paid effective tax rates in the single digits or less during this five-year period.
  • Of these, 55 (16 percent of the total 342 companies) paid effective rates of less than 5 percent. This is particularly striking given that all these companies were profitable for at least five years consecutively. Companies paying less than 5 percent include T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, Nike, and many others.
  • Twenty-three corporations paid zero federal tax over the five-year period despite being profitable in every single year. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of the five years.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, 50 corporations paid effective tax rates of more than 21 percent, but most of these companies were also the beneficiaries of large tax breaks because they were paying taxes from previous years that they delayed using depreciation breaks.

One obvious “fix” for this would be passage of the global minimum tax negotiated by the Biden administration that’s currently being blocked by GOP lawmakers more interested in currying favor with special interests than engaging in the policy process.

Americans deserve better.

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My Mother Was Right…

As I used to tell my own children, you should always listen to your mother.

My sister and I were the products of a politically “mixed marriage.” Mother was a Republican and Dad was a Democrat, and they often ended up casting votes that cancelled each other out. There was a limit to our mother’s political conservatism, however–she was deeply suspicious of what she called the “fringe Right,” the Birchers and others who were then seen by the broad majority of the party as kooks and crazies.

Mother didn’t live long enough to see those kooks and crazies complete their takeover of the Republican Party and chase out the more moderate folks we used to lump together as “country club Republicans”– some who were philosophical conservatives and others whose business interests had turned them into anti-tax, “trickle-down” true believers.

Everything my mother thought about what was then the far-Right “fringe” has turned out to be correct. Only worse.

I was reminded of her long-ago criticisms when I read a recent article in Talking Points Memo. (Apologies if this is one of the articles behind the paywall for subscribers only.) The article began:

Whiplash-inducing breaks from long-held party positions have become the norm in today’s Republican Party.

From former president Donald Trump to emerging voices such as Senator J.D. Vance, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, a wave of politicians and activists have signaled an abandonment of Republican orthodoxy on issues that once defined the party.

The party of free trade has become protectionist. The party of Cold Warriors has increasingly backed Russia and opposed aiding Ukraine. The party of less government has grown conflicted about where it stands on Social Security and Medicare.

How can not just a party, but its voters, suddenly change direction on so many bedrock issues?

Or have they?

Ben Bradford, who wrote the column, hosts a podcast series called “Landslide.” He proceeded to answer his own question,  asserting that the current Republican Party does not, in fact, represent a change or reversal of course–rather, in his opinion, it represents an evolution. “What seems like a shift on fundamental issues” he says, “is the latest expression of the same underlying force that has propelled voters for nearly half a century.”

Bradford takes readers back fifty years, to the mid-1970s and the “New Right,” reminding us of their opposition to a “range of the era’s social and cultural changes: school integration, new textbooks, gun laws, the women’s rights movement, gay and lesbian rights, and — eventually — abortion.”

New Right organizations included Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and the NRA’s further-right cousin, the Gun Owners of America. It also included many of the same conservative groups that push policy positions and drive national debates today: the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the National Right-to-Life Committee, to name just a handful. These groups shared many of the same founders. Harper’s Magazine described their organizational charts as “an octopus shaking hands with itself.”

Two things that were “new” about the New Right were direct-mail fundraising and–especially– culture war.

The New Right was organized around social and cultural backlash. It created a link between activists working for seemingly unrelated causes–for example, opponents of abortion and opponents of gun laws. Howard Phillips described the goal of the New Right as “organizing discontent.” At a time when the major political parties were still trying to downplay hot-button social and cultural issues, the New Right created a coalition based upon voters’ backlash to culture change.

The article argues that it was a tactic that changed the nature of American conservatism.

Bradford goes on to document how the New Right saved Ronald Reagan’s campaign–a campaign animated by a backlash against a changing culture.

The message of a better past endangered by a changing culture would not feel out of place coming from Republican candidates today. And, the issues they emphasize — opposing the contents of textbooks, the use of race in school admissions, and transgender rights, among others — are the modern descendants of those 50 years ago.

As my mother would have added, that “backlash” coalition wasn’t just angry about social change; it was also a hotbed of bigotry–it was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic. If it ever gained power, she warned us, Americans who weren’t straight White Christians would be endangered.

Well, they’ve gained power– and proved her point.

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Can You Stand Another “Re-run”?

The current wave of book banning efforts I referenced a few days ago reminded me of an essay I wrote about the importance of intellectual freedom some twenty-five years ago, for an ALA publication. I dug it out, and decided the observations were still valid–and, unfortunately, even more relevant. So– with apologies for both the length and self-citation– I’m sharing it.

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Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a librarian involved professionally with issues of intellectual freedom. “Sometimes,” she said, “I get so tired of it. I wonder why I continue to fight.” I’ve thought about that conversation several times; if I could do an instant replay, I think I would tell her that I know why she keeps at it. It’s because it is so important.
I spent six years as Executive Director of the Indiana affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, and of all the lessons I learned during that time, the most profound was this: the future of western liberal democracy rests on the preservation of intellectual freedom.
If that statement seems extravagant, consider both the ideological basis of liberal democracy and the nature of contemporary threats to that tradition.
Our national history would have been impossible without the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a rights-bearing, autonomous being. That concept is integral to our legal system; it is the foundation upon which our forbears erected the Bill of Rights. The Founders envisioned the good society as one composed of morally independent citizens whose rights in certain important circumstances “trumped” both the dictates of the state and the desires of the majority.
Current assaults on that worldview come primarily, although certainly not exclusively, from communitarians of both left and right. Michael Sandel, Mary Ann Glendon and others complain that the American emphasis on individual rights has gone too far, that it is time to readjust the balance between individual liberty and the “common good.” The “common good” is presumably to be defined collectively; that is, by the majority.
There is enormous appeal to this argument. In a world that seems increasingly complex, impersonal, and litigious, a world over which individuals have less and less control, the notion of “community,” like “family,” offers nourishment and empowerment. Who does not long, in some part of her psyche, for a warm family, friendly neighborhood and supportive tribe, where one is valued and/or unconditionally accepted, and where everyone shares the same life goals and values? Freud suggested that the need to lose oneself in a collective identity is the most ancient, persistent and universal force operating on the human species. The problem, of course, is that majorities can be every bit as tyrannical as solitary despots, and there is no guarantee that my family’s values will be the ones that prevail, or that my tribes’ folkways will be the ones that are followed. The fundamental issue in every society is where to strike the balance between human liberty and communal norms. Ultimately, the debate comes down to a conflict between libertarian and collectivist visions of the good life.
In this war over competing worldviews, intellectual freedom is the battlefront. Discussions of the First Amendment often proceed as if the expressive freedom provisions are separate from the religious liberty clauses. They aren’t. In fact, the First Amendment rests upon a magnificent unifying premise: the integrity and inviolability of the individual conscience. The First Amendment is really an integrated whole, protecting our individual rights to receive and disseminate information and ideas, to consider arguments and theories, to form our own beliefs and craft our own consciences. It answers the fundamental social question– who shall decide? — by vesting that authority in each individual, subject to and consistent with the equal rights of others.
Our whole experiment with democratic governance rests on that foundation. As Alexander Mieklejohn famously observed, a nation that is afraid of an idea–any idea–is unfit for self-government. Implicit in the First Amendment is the legal system’s concept of personal responsibility, the University’s commitment to academic freedom, the moral authority of the clergy, the independence of the media, and the legitimacy of the political process.
Those who oppose free expression rarely, if ever, see themselves in opposition to the western liberal democratic tradition. Most of the people who want to ban the book or painting, who want to protect the flag or the Virgin Mary from desecration, are simply acting on their belief in the nature of the public good. Censors see unrestrained freedom as a threat to the social fabric, while civil libertarians believe the greater danger consists in empowering the state to suppress “dangerous” or “offensive” ideas. Censors see no reason to protect expression of low value–no point in protecting the marketplace for the exchange of shoddy goods. They have enormous difficulty understanding the difference between protection of the principle of free speech and an implicit endorsement of the offensive material at hand. And they have little or no appreciation for the argument that once one hands over to the state the authority to decide which ideas have value, no ideas are safe.
I spent my years at the ACLU battling the usual, recurring attempts to control what others might read, hear or download. I attended a public meeting in Valparaiso, Indiana, where an angry proponent of an ordinance to “clean up” local video stores called me “a whore.” I was accused of abetting racism for upholding the right of the KKK to demonstrate at the Statehouse. I was criticized for failure to care about children when I objected to a proposal restricting minors’ access to library materials. In each of these cases, and dozens of others, the people who wanted to suppress materials generally had the best of motives: they wanted to protect others from ideas they believed to be dangerous. To them, I appeared oblivious to the potential for evil. At best, they considered me a naïve First Amendment “purist;” at worst, a moral degenerate.
My introduction to the politics of free speech really came several years before my stint at the ACLU, when I was retained as local counsel to the plaintiffs in American Booksellers v. Hudnut. The case involved a challenge to an ordinance drafted by Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor, and Andrea Dworkin, a feminist author. Both are well known crusaders against pornography, which they define quite differently than the law defines obscenity, and which they argue is more harmful to women than to men. Their ordinance attempted to define as action (rather than expression) sexually explicit materials depicting the “subordination of women.” Such “action” was then treated for legal purposes as sex discrimination. (“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means exactly what I say it means!”) MacKinnon and Dworkin had shopped their proposal around the country without much success before they found eager proponents in Indianapolis.
While the Courts would make short work of the ordinance, the politics of its passage was an eye-opening experience. Bill Hudnut was, and remains, a close personal friend; I had been the Corporation Counsel (chief lawyer) in his administration. To this day, despite lengthy conversations, he does not see the implications of the ordinance he signed. Bill had been an active Presbyterian minister before assuming office, and simply was appalled by materials that he felt degraded women. When MacKinnon and Dworkin enlisted a local female Councilor on behalf of their pet project to “protect” women, he was supportive. The Councilor has not been identified with women’s causes either before or after her sponsorship of the ordinance. She has, however, been supportive of efforts to restrict children’s access to videos in the public libraries, and has generally been an ally of the religious right. Her alliance with MacKinnon and Dworkin, widely considered to be “radical feminists,” was surreal.
On the evening the vote was taken, busloads of people from fundamentalist churches filled the Council chambers. To the eternal credit of Indianapolis’ women’s organizations, there was no support from local feminists. Only three people had been given permission to speak against passage–me, as a courtesy shown to a former member of the administration; Bill Marsh, a professor of Constitutional law who was then Vice-President of Indiana’s ACLU; and Sam Jones, the Executive Director of the Urban League. Even Councilors who had great qualms about the ordinance were unwilling to stand against the sea of faces from area churches. (The trouble with representative government, as a friend once bitterly remarked, is that it is representative.) One after another, uncomfortable Councilors rose to “explain” their votes; my favorite came from a longtime friend, who said that —while he had “great respect for Mrs. Kennedy’s legal opinion”–he wanted the record to show that he was “against pornography.” The crowd cheered approvingly.
Most of those who voted for the ordinance knew it stood virtually no chance in court. They were willing to spend some tax dollars to defend it, in order to avoid the pain of opposing the righteous folks who had taken the time and trouble to attend the meeting. And the courts did as expected; Judge Sarah Evans Barker issued an eloquent, ringing endorsement of the principles of free speech in her District Court opinion striking down the measure. The Seventh Circuit and Supreme Court each affirmed, and the case has since become a staple in courses on Free Speech and Constitutional Law.
In many ways, American Booksellers v. Hudnut is a perfect example of what the Founders feared when they warned of “the tyranny of the majority” and the need to guard against popular passions. The majority of citizens saw the debate in very simple terms, as did my Councilor friend: one is either for or against “pornography.” Quibbles about what pornography is, concerns about vagueness or over-breadth, were dismissed as lawyer weaseling; like Potter Stewart, they might not be able to define pornography, but they knew it when they saw it.
For civil libertarians, of course, the issue was very different. We were not arguing for the value of pornographic speech–although we were more open to the possibility that pornographic expression might, in fact, have some value. The issue was–and is–our right to decide for ourselves what books we shall read, what ideas we shall consider, what opinions we shall hold, free of government interference. Once the state asserts a prerogative to determine which ideas we may entertain, the balance has shifted from the right of the individual to the power of the government. At that point, citizens no longer have rights, but privileges that may be revoked whenever the political winds shift. For me as a civil libertarian, the issue is not which books I read; the issue is who decides which books I read?
The western democratic tradition literally depends upon the answer to that question.
Those of us who understand the nature of the debate over intellectual freedom in this way must contend with a formidable deficit in citizenship education. Both at the ACLU and at IUPUI, where I currently teach law and public policy, I have encountered widespread ignorance of the most basic elements of the American constitutional system. We desperately need to improve understanding of the theory of limited government and individual rights –not so that people will necessarily come to the same conclusions I reach, but so that we can at least argue about the same issues.
People try to remove materials from library shelves or the corner video store because they find the materials offensive. They try to prevent Klan marches because they disagree strongly with the hateful message of the Klan. Their arguments are against these particular ideas. They are not generally trying to strengthen the power of the state, nor intending to circumscribe the exercise of personal moral autonomy. Civil libertarians see those outcomes as inevitable consequences of censorship, however, and so those are the issues we address. In a very real sense, it is a case of culture warriors talking past each other.
People like my librarian friend, who see the fundamental relationship between the marketplace of ideas and self-government, who recognize the holistic nature of individual rights, simply must keep trying to make those connections visible to the general public. We must all work to raise the level of familiarity with the underlying principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We must agitate for more and better government instruction in our schools, and we must insist on more honest discourse from our political leaders and the media. We must constantly reinforce the lesson that the proper response to a bad message is not government censorship, but free citizens offering a better message.
Somehow, we must get the general public to understand that when we use the power of the state to decide what citizens may read or view, we aren’t censoring smut, or protecting children, or prohibiting blasphemy, or respecting the flag. We are undermining the values that lie at the very core of our national identity.
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