The University of Chicago and some of our faculty are pondering creating an orientation module on free speech for incoming students—a module that’s all too rare but essential, for “progressive” students are beginning to oppose free speech and the First Amendment since some speech is seen as “harmful”, “offensive”, or even “violent.”

I wrote to a few people involved in our campus endeavor and told them this:

This short article by Ira Glasser (former head of the ACLU) is the best concise explanation of why we need the First Amendment that I’ve ever read. It carefully explains why all speech—including “hate speech”–must be protected. Naturally, it appeared in a right-leaning site, Spiked, but that makes no difference.

Were I to construct an orientation for first-year students here, I’d have them read his piece (it also explains why all progress in social justice has required freedom of speech):

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/21/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-hate/

. . . and also watch Christopher Hitchens’s 20-minute defense of free speech; a tour de force of rhetoric:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY

The parts of the article essential for a modern student’s introduction to free speech is Glasser’s explanation of not only why “hate speech” must be allowed, but also why progressive social justice of the good type requires freedom of speech.

I’ll give a few excerpts. I hope college administrators can and will use this piece to introduce students to the purpose and meaning of the First Amendment.

This describes why the ACLU defended the racist George Wallace’s right to speak in New York City after the mayor had banned him.

For example, the First Amendment protects the right to free speech and assembly by barring the government from abridging such rights. That is how I was able to stop the mayor of New York from banning George Wallace from speaking in 1968. Why did I do it? Because what if George Wallace had been elected? He had already been elected as governor of Alabama. He was trying to get elected as president (and he had considerable support). If he had gained political power, he would not have hesitated to suppress or punish my speech, or the speech of others I supported.

So I needed an insurance policy. I needed a legally supreme rule that barred him from curbing my speech in case he gained political power. And in order to do that, I needed to stop the then mayor of New York, a liberal whom I supported, from using his power to silence Wallace, a reactionary whom I feared. The two were linked because the antagonist of liberty is always power. And because power is fickle and unpredictable.

In a democracy, you can never know who will have power. So all power must be limited in order to protect liberty, including speech. That’s what liberty is: a legal limit on democratic power. The right to freedom of speech is guaranteed only by limiting the power of any government to abridge it. By defending George Wallace’s right to speak when he doesn’t have power, you insure against his curbing your right to speak should he gain power.

On the two-edged sword of bannng speech:

When Martin Luther King, Jr and his colleagues marched, white and black, hand in hand, in America’s deep South, the majority of residents there found King’s vision of an integrated society deeply offensive and tried, on that ground, to ban his speech.

We may find the two examples vastly different. They are vastly different. But if being offensive was allowed to justify banning speech, and if what is offensive were decided by majority vote, then civil-rights marchers would have been banned in Alabama, just as neo-Nazi marchers would have been banned in Illinois.

Could the two cases have been separated, and decided differently? Consider this: those same neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie were also banned from demonstrating in a park in Chicago, along with rival demonstrators from the Martin Luther King, Jr Association, a civil-rights group. Both were banned, based on the same law. And both bans were struck down by the First Amendment, which bars the government from enforcing such a law. The rights of both groups were thus joined together, even as their goals were diametrically opposed.

There was – indeed there is – no way around that. That is why the price of permitting King to speak in Alabama was to allow Wallace to speak in New York. And the cost of banning Wallace from speaking in New York would have been to allow Alabama to ban King from speaking in Alabama.

Finally, the part that may stir the thought of “progressives” who want to ban offensive speech:

What progressives say they care about most is social justice. And for many progressives, free speech and social justice seem to be antagonists. How, they ask, does defending the right of people to advocate bigotry advance the cause of social justice? In their view, prohibiting speech because its content is bigoted or hateful would seem to advance social justice.

Such speech is a barrier to social justice, they say. Permitting it makes it harder to eradicate the layers of prejudice against women and people of colour that has resulted, and still results, in invidious discrimination and subjugation.

I certainly have no quarrel with the passion to end such discrimination and subjugation. I have spent most of my adult life fighting to do just that, and I believe that although much progress has been made, we are still far away from the day when we can declare that fight definitively won. So opposing the content of racist speech remains vital. But believing that, in order to advance social justice, it is necessary to give the government the power to ban speech is self-defeating. Giving the government this power harms social justice. That’s because, in practice, social justice depends on free speech, and always has.

Historically, in the United States, every fight for social justice began with free speech, depending on speech to initiate and sustain the movement to right wrongs. In the early years of the 20th century, for example, the nascent labour movement critically required (and did not often enjoy) the right to meet, to leaflet, to demonstrate and to picket in order to convert workers’ powerlessness into success against oppressive employers.

Also during the early 20th century, the movement to end the lynching of black people, led by courageous advocates like Ida B Wells, totally depended upon freedom of speech and the right to publish. Without these freedoms, it would not have been able to spread the word about the epidemic of lynchings in the South and to gather and build opposition to it.

Or take the case of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. In 1916, she was arrested in New York City nearly every week for distributing informational leaflets on birth control to women victimised and, yes, effectively enslaved by unwanted pregnancies. The beginning of the reproductive-rights movement required freedom of speech the way a new plant requires water and sunlight.

And of course, in our own time, the civil-rights movement could not have ended legalised racial subjugation without freedom of speech. The First Amendment protected the early efforts of activists to call attention to the abuses of skin-colour exclusions and build the support needed to end them. In 1955, for example, Rosa Parks sat down on a seat reserved for whites on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and a then unknown young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr stood up to support her, by organising a boycott of those buses. None of that would have been possible without the protection of the First Amendment.

If this doesn’t convince people to adhere to First Amendment principles, on or off campus, well, there’s no hope for them.

Here’s a 7-minute clip of Mighty Ira defending freedom of speech on Bill Maher’s show, as well as criticizing the modern ACLU for preferring to defend speech that isn’t “harmful”. The ACLU has undergone a severe erosion of its founding principles since Ira was at the helm:

I didn’t know that “Popehat” (real name Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and author) has a Substack site, but then again, who doesn’t these days? What makes this all so annoying is that there’s no way to know who has such sites and who doesn’t.

At any rate, I use to read Popehat’s site for free-speech commentary, and now you can go to his site, “The Popehat Report,” which appears to be free. I can’t remember how I found the two articles below, but they’re both worth reading, and you can do that by clicking on the screenshot. I’ll give a brief summary of each.

The article above was written because the quotation in the title is often used to justify new ways to shut down First Amendment speech. In it, White makes two points. First, the exceptions to the First Amendment are well known and haven’t changed in years. Second, the Supreme Court, in its last modification of the First Amendment, said clearly that further changes are unlikely.  In other words, there will be no future amendment that bars hate speech—the subject of much debate these days.

White:

Let’s review the exceptions to government-protected speech, first through the cases and then through a summary:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly listed the First Amendment exceptions. In 2010, in a very important but not particularly well known case called United States v. Stevens, the Supreme Court offered one of its periodic summaries:

“From 1791 to the present,” however, the First Amendment has “permitted restrictions upon the content of speech in a few limited areas,” and has never “include[d] a freedom to disregard these traditional limitations.” Id., at 382–383. These “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar,” Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of N. Y. State Crime Victims Bd., 502 U. S. 105, 127 (1991) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment)—including obscenity, Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476, 483 (1957), defamation, Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U. S. 250, 254–255 (1952), fraud, Virginia Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U. S. 748, 771 (1976), incitement, Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U. S. 444, 447–449 (1969) (per curiam), and speech integral to criminal conduct, Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co., 336 U. S. 490, 498 (1949)—are “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U. S. 568, 571–572 (1942).

So, there you have it: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct. Throw in true threats – which was left out of this list for some reason – and child pornography, and you’ve got the categories. Note that the Court specifically identifies them as well-known and historic, not as in flux.

I was going to add, “What about false advertising?”, but I suspect that it falls under the aegis of “fraud”. Note, too, that “incitement” is not flexible, for it’s been specified this way:

Incitement is a First Amendment exception. But incitement means “speech that is intended, and likely, to cause imminent lawless action.” All of those words mean things, things defined by decades of court decisions. They don’t mean whatever you want them to mean — they specifically don’t mean “saying things that are bad for America on TV.” Might the courts gradually develop their understanding of one of these words – for instance, by developing a broader understanding of “imminence” based on an internet culture? Yes, over time, through a familiar process. But the point is that you must engage the existing law on what “incitement” means to be accurate — you can’t just declare it to mean whatever you want, and expect that to matter in court. The Supreme Court has been saying for almost a century that First Amendment exceptions are “well-defined and narrowly limited.” The fact that the words in the names of the exceptions — like “incitement,” or “threat” — have flexible colloquial meanings does not signify that the legal meaning of those exceptions is flexible. It isn’t.

Note that “fighting words” or “hate speech” do not constitute incitement.  As far as creating new categories, in the U.S. v. Stevens case, the government asked the Supreme Court to carve out a new exception to the First Amendment that prohibits depictions of animal cruelty. The government’s justification was that the court had already created an exception in the form of banning child pornography, so why not another?.  But the Court responded that it didn’t really create an exception, but merely codified what was already a crime—child abuse, seen as inherent in child pornography. The court then said, in an 8-1 decision, that it couldn’t envision any new exceptions:

Our decisions in Ferber and other cases cannot be taken as establishing a freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment. Maybe there are some categories of speech that have been historically unprotected, but have not yet been specifically identified or discussed as such in our case law. But if so, there is no evidence that “depictions of animal cruelty” is among them.

As for why this matters, it’s because of what I said above: courts are always under pressure to tighten the rules of free speech (“hate speech” is the latest proposed restriction), but that won’t happen. As White says,

[This] matters because it’s good for Americans to know, and understand, our civil rights and the powers and limitations of our government. We’re bitterly divided as a nation. Much speech is controversial, much speech is despised by someone. We’re under constant pressure to accept new limits on speech. It’s good to argue about these things. But the argument should be reality-based. “The First Amendment isn’t absolute,” used as a justification for new exceptions, and untethered from the law, isn’t reality-based.

And read this one, too (both are fairly short):

Here White distinguishes between three construals of “free speech”, which I’ll characterize in my own words (quotes from White are indented).

a.) Free Speech Rights (“FSR”). These are the rights conferred by the First Amendment—that is, all the speech that isn’t prohibited by law (see above). White emphasizes that the exceptions are likely to be pretty much set in stone and will not be modified to include “hate speech”. He argues—and I agree—that knowing some of the history of the courts’ construal of free speech is useful in keeping your arguments on the rails. And it’s useful to be mindful of the philosophy behind FSR, as outlined in the Stevens case ruling mentioned above:

The First Amendment ’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it. The Constitution is not a document “prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 178 (1803).

You can’t just argue on utilitarian grounds, then, that new types of speech should be considered violations. The First Amendment is based on deontological principles, not utilitarian ones.

b.) Free Speech Culture (“FSC”). This is the principle that, regardless of the First Amendment, speech venues such as private universities and widespread social-media outfits like Twitter and Facebook would be best served by adhering to First Amendment principles even if they’re not obliged to do so. This is is a utilitarian application of FSR:

The next category is “Free Speech Culture,” or “FSC,” sometimes called “free speech values” or “free speech principles.” An appeal to FSC is based on history, philosophy, and political science. It presumes that it’s a social good to have wide-ranging, robust, uninhibited debate on important issues, though it might reach that conclusion by different roads. Some believe that a “marketplace of ideas” inevitably produces the conclusions best for society, some believe that all speech has inherent value, and some (like me) believe that as a matter of humility and consciousness of our limits we should be should be careful deciding that we are so clearly right that contrary ideas shouldn’t be heard. Ultimately FSC is utilitarian — we use it to debate how we ought to act collectively for the healthiest society and the optimal pursuit of knowledge.

Here’s where we debate not whether a private school has a right to disinvite a controversial speaker, but whether as a matter of academic culture it should. Here’s where most debates about “cancel culture” will fall. Carefully separating out the legal “may” from the philosophical “should” helps clarify the argument.

As White notes, FSC can contradict FSR, as when students shout down a speaker. In most places they have the right to do so, just as the speaker has a right to speak, but application of FSC would mandate that the students shut up, let the speaker talk, and then protest either in the Q&A section or by offering non-disruptive counterspeech. That’s what White argues, and again I agree.

c.) Speech Decency (“SD”).  This is speech that truly is hateful, and while it is legal, and even allowed under FSR and FSC, can still be reprehensible—reprehensible enough that the speaker should be called out on decency grounds. White gives one example involving the n-word:

Finally, some debates about speech are about human decency — Speech Decency, or “SD.” I think sometimes that familiar phrase “hate speech is not free speech” is an appeal to SD. It’s a way of saying that there’s an idealized set of speech that may be controversial or disagreeable but ultimately is not cruel and contemptible, and that racist speech is outside of that set.

This is a perfectly legitimate debate. It’s fine to say that using a racial epithet is usually protected by FSR, that in some circumstances it ought to be protected as a matter of FSC (for instance, in allowing “Huckleberry Finn” to be taught to high school children notwithstanding its use of epithets), and that people who use it to belittle and demean ought to be called out as a matter of SD.

Once again, clarity about values helps illuminate the different rights and different interests in play.

In this case the speaker’s intent is usually vital in determining whether he/she has violated SD and should be called out. Using the n-word didactically, as when teaching Huckleberry Finn, or, as Don McNeil of the NYT did, asking a question about what somebody else said (this led to his firing), is not reprehensible and should not be offensive.  In such cases the language doesn’t violate any of the three construals of speech given above.

Another example is “hate speech”, which can be truly hateful rather than offensive. I would defend your legal right to call me a “Dirty Jew who should be gassed”, and even defend the idea that you should be able to say that on Twitter. But I would find it reprehensible, hateful, and deem you a bigot and an anti-Semite.

White justifies parsing speech into the three distinctions mentioned above, and I agree:

Debates that clearly identify FSR, FSC, and SD are useful and sometimes even illuminating. They have the potential to teach people about their civil rights and about American government. They can persuade our fellow citizens about how to balance different interests, or at least clarify how we reach our personal outcomes on difficult social and cultural questions.

Debates that sloppily conflate FSR, FSC, and SD are counterproductive. They tend to misinform people about American civil rights, especially if the listener is not already sophisticated on the subject. They produce some of the most persistent delusions of free speech discourse — like the imagined right not to be offended or the supposed right not to be criticized.

Yesterday I described the mayhem that ensued in Sweden and Denmark when a nativist right-wing politician, Rasmus Paludan, head of Denmark’s anti-immigrant Hard Line Party, set fire to a Qur’an live on Facebook last month. He then announced that he was going to tour Sweden over Easter weekend burning Qurans: a tour with burnings in different Swedish cities. This caused the expected consequences: public ire and violent protests that included overturning buses and throwing Molotov cocktails. (The Muslims, of course, were irate over the burning of their scripture, and perpetrated the violence.) Paludan is continuing his Burn The Qur’an Tour and continues to create mayhem.

However, the Swedish and Danish police protected Paludan, and several readers noted that his acts are not prohibited in Sweden and Denmark, even when they could cause damage to people and property.

The question I posed to readers was this:  could burning a Qur’an in the U.S. under some circumstances not be considered Constitutionally protected speech if it led to foreseeable and imminent harm, and if that harm was intended?

Like most readers, I see no issue with burning Qur’ans, but I was posing a hypothetical legal question.

Most readers argued that this “speech” (burning the Qur’an) would be protected in the U.S. even if it was likely to lead to foreseeable and intended violence. You can see readers’ comments here.

However, I wanted a definitive legal opinion, so I consulted a very well known law professor specializing in free-speech and First Amendment issues.  His/her answer was that, yes, under some circumstances burning the Qur’an might NOT be protected speech, in which case the burner could be prosecuted. The prof’s response (I’ve added the link), quoted with permission:

According to the Court’s 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which remains a leading precedent, the government cannot punish an individual for engaging in expressive conduct that causes others to engage in violence unless the individual specifically intended to cause that reaction and his speech caused likely and imminent violence. So, whether the right wing Swedish politician could be punished for his conduct would depend on whether the government could prove that causing the violence was his specific intent in burning the Muslim [book] and that the violent response was likely and imminent (and grave).

Now these circumstances may not obtain in the case of Paludan, and proving intent is of course quite difficult. Nevertheless, it is not beyond possibility that someone burning the Qur’an could be punished by the U.S. government for that act under the “imminent violence” provision.

I consider this opinion definitive.

Here’s a recent video of Paludin burning the Qur’an under police protection, and some of the reaction: