Oct. 19 marks the beginning of Free Speech Week — a little-known celebration that only began in 2003. It serves as a powerful reminder of a right far too many take for granted.
It almost goes without saying that freedom of speech is the bedrock of any democracy. It allows people to show dissent freely and speak truth to power. As a recent survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education revealed, free speech is the freedom Americans believe matters most.
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Freedom of speech matters because without it, tyranny would go unchallenged.
Free speech is taken for granted, but recently, it has come under attack. In fact, there are three major threats to free speech: claiming certain speech is violence, labeling certain speech as “misinformation,” and outright cancel culture.
When it comes to people who claim certain speech is violence, take what happened to famed reporter Andy Ngo and myself earlier this year at Dartmouth University. Andy and I had been invited by a student group to speak about the dangers of the political violence perpetuated by antifa. Our topic, however, was deemed violence by local antifa groups, who took it upon themselves to threaten actual violence against Andy, myself, and anyone who dared attend that night.
And while we had three different police departments ready to help the event go smoothly, the university cracked under the pressure and forced the students to stream the event at the last minute. Dartmouth administrators effectively muzzled our speaking engagement over “safety concerns” despite the fact that Andy and I literally preached peace over violence.
When it comes to silencing so-called misinformation, California is likely one of the worst offenders. Recently, California enacted legislation that prohibits licensed physicians from disagreeing with government-sanctioned medical opinions. That’s not how science works.
Science is about open inquiry in which debate and dissent are welcomed. The history of scientific discovery is littered with ideas that were once called misinformation but soon became grounded science. Just take, for example, Ignaz Semmelweis, the first doctor to suggest that doctors should wash their hands with soap and water to ward off infection. Semmelweis was widely rejected, fired, and ostracized from the medical community in several countries until he went mad and was placed in a mental asylum.
But efforts to silence speech go beyond the state of California. Let us not forget the biggest threat to the American culture of free speech: cancel culture and social media censorship. Of particular concern are social media sites like Twitter, which once suspended the New York Post’s Twitter account for reporting a story on Hunter Biden that was later confirmed by almost every major mainstream outlet.
More than any government policy, the policies and practices of social media sites like Twitter contribute to today’s culture of censorship. Because Twitter, like cancel culture, is less concerned with silencing actual misinformation and actual violence and more concerned with suppressing opinions that do not conform to a loud minority.
This is why Elon Musk purchasing Twitter is such a game-changer. Currently, social media sites cater not to the masses but to a minority ideology that has infiltrated many social institutions. Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants to own Twitter in order to promote democratic principles of free speech to the masses. Musk is taking power away from this tiny minority and actually giving the power back to every user.
But, at the end of the day, a billionaire buying a social media network won’t save free speech. If we want our children to one day live in a working democracy, the challenge of free speech lies in the hands of every American.
Certainly, there are bad actors who attempt to deceive people with false information or use language that is offensive to others. But the best way to fight bad speech is with more speech — exposing lies and explaining how and why certain language is offensive. More dangerous than any piece of misinformation is an arbiter of truth who has the power to silence truth in the name of stopping misinformation.
This Free Speech Week, we should celebrate the right to speak freely, not only because we think free speech is important but also because we understand that the right to free speech is the right from which all others follow.
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Gabriel Nadales is a co-national director of Our America.
