“Free speech,” “censorship,” and “cancel culture” have become popular buzzwords within the contemporary conservative movement.
It’s an interesting development. The call for unlimited free speech and lack of censorship, not only as far as government involvement is concerned, but across media and social-media platforms, has become something of a rallying cry among a significant segment of the Right, certainly among Republicans.
Much of this is a reaction to the way in which leftists have used their control over the most significant institutions in society to suppress right-wing points of view. Conservatives get their accounts restricted on Twitter and YouTube, have their payment processing shut down by tools such as Stripe, and have their events pulled at universities.
As a result, many conservatives have come to see all this as an issue of free speech, and have developed a sort of “free-speech absolutism,” arguing that virtually all opinions should be tolerated in the public square.
This free-speech absolutism appears to serve some tactical purposes for the Right: It provides ground for the movement to seek legal protection from the government in order to force its way back into the institutions it is being suppressed on; and it gives the Right what they believe to be a winning issue that will gain them favor among young people and the left-leaning.
After all, popular media tends to depict free speech as an issue of the Left, with many a movie and TV show centering around young liberals fighting the conservative, older “Man” in order to exercise their speech freely.
But is total free speech really a good idea? Or is it something that might sound good right now while the Right has allowed itself to be sidelined in our institutions, but that is actually harmful when put into practice? Do we really want to permit all ideas to be given a platform in our society?
Maybe censorship isn’t really such a bad thing — maybe the problem is with what’s being censored and who’s doing the censoring.
First, it’s important to consider the question from the constitutional angle. What does the Constitution say on the matter?
The actual text of the Constitution is brief on the matter. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Any and all other free-speech references to the Constitution are revisionist judicial interpretations. The Constitution merely stipulates that Congress shall not abridge the freedom of speech. It says nothing about the state legislatures or about private entities.
In fact, from the days of the Founding, many states had blasphemy laws on the books that made blasphemy, as understood according to Christian scripture, illegal.
In other words, the Founders clearly had no problem with using state power to censor speech that they saw as corrosive to the moral fabric of society.
The novelist and philosopher Vox Day has made the case that “free speech” is not really ever desired by anyone, but merely a tactic pushed by those who are out of power to erode their opposition. But once they hold the reins of a society, the former free-speech advocates forget all about those liberal ideals.
Day argues that anti-Christian forces in the West successfully used the free-speech argument to take over the culture. Now that they’re in power, they have created their own blasphemy laws — but they now call blasphemy “hate speech.”
Writes Day:
Evil always plays by the principle of “rules for thee but not for me”. It will switch from “free speech absolutism” to “there is no place for hate speech” in a blink of an eye depending upon whom is being affected. This is why there was never any reason to permit the Enlightenment war against Christianity, and in particular, the “free speech” campaign against the Christian blasphemy laws, which was the entire purpose of that campaign from the very start.
Just imagine if, instead of ceding to the Left’s demands for “free speech” and giving them a platform to promote homosexuality, Marxism, gender dysphoria, promiscuity, abortion, and other ills, the Right had held its ground and vigorously censored such speech at both the government and private sector levels.
Imagine if we had kept cultural Marxism and sexual grooming out of the schools from the beginning. Imagine if we had kept pornography and degeneracy off the television, movie screens, and radios, as we did prior to the 1960s.
The nation would have been very different, and we would not be in the position we are now. Remember, if you give an inch, they take a mile. The slippery slope is a tactic, not a fallacy. Allowing cursing and explicit sex on TV yesterday paved the road to child drag-pole dancing today.
Ignore the Republicans who decry political hardball, such as those hapless politicians panning Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ battle with Disney as “cancel culture.”
If we want to win, then we should be canceling the Left’s “culture.”
