Can Democrats save free speech? They need to win back credibility

These are dark times for free speech. Since President Trump returned to the White House, the federal government has been deeply invested in restricting speech and activism. Trump is currently suing The New York Times for $15 billion in damages, while caviling over its negative coverage and pursuing personal vendettas against its reporters. His government is targeting colleges and universities for alleged anti-Semitism, which it defines using a broad definition to include opposition to Israel. It is harassing, surveilling, and deporting largely peaceful pro-Palestinian activists who are exercising their First Amendment rights. If a government run by Democrats took such action against conservative movement leaders, Republicans would be wailing about liberal fascism. 

Now, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Republicans have a new pretext for blatantly violating the First Amendment. Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised to “come after those who engage in hate speech,” distinguishing between “free speech” and “hate speech.” As she said in a recent interview: “There’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. … We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Vice President JD Vance is no better: “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said as he guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.” Sen.Ted Cruz, who at least insisted that the First Amendment safeguards hate speech, told a Politico panel that he endorsed “naming and shaming” as a means of supporting a “functioning and vibrant democracy.”

It is almost amusing to hear Republicans talk this way after spending the last decade decrying the illiberal, woke Left. Now, instead of defending their own professed values, they have lustily adopted every last woke pathology. Those progressive pathologies were all too real. “Naming and shaming” is indeed what many liberal activists advocated for in the 2010s, waging Twitter-fueled cancellation attempts against anyone who violated their orthodoxies. In the wake of Trump’s first presidential victory, the Left, along with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, took what they considered to be reasonable measures for desperate times: abandoning discourse among friends, standards in journalism, and defenses of free speech. Just ask anyone who wanted, in 2020, to say that the police should not be defunded or Covid vaccine mandates for employment were an infringement on labor rights and personal liberty. 

The Left’s forms of censorship were more subtle than Trump’s heavy-handed approach, but they existed at a nexus of government, corporate, and institutional power, and came to define the movement in the public eye. Tech platforms, in collaboration with the government, forcefully suppressed information, whether it was the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop or discussion of the Wuhan lab-leak theory. Twitter and Facebook shadow-banned offending accounts, and many institutions, not least colleges, unduly muzzled students and faculty who vented dissident views. As the Left veered into illiberalism, the Right became, for a period, the champion of speech rights.

But those days are long over — and that could be good for the Left. 

The MAGA regime is plainly disdainful of free speech. It is abusing the powers of the federal government because it has yet to fully control the private institutions where liberals still hold significant sway. There is absolutely no difference between the Left’s dedication to cancel culture and Cruz’s call for “naming and shaming.” Or, for that matter, Vance effectively demanding that anyone who says something he doesn’t like about his slain friend get fired from their job. Or the X account Libs of TikTok boasting of making calls to dozens of ordinary people’s employers to get them fired for anti-Kirk messages.

Most ominous is Bondi, who appears ready to wield the full machinery of the Justice Department against the American Left because there are political views in the country she finds distasteful. There are no legal grounds for arresting or even harassing an individual who espouses so-called hate speech. Indeed, the Constitution protects hate speech, as the Supreme Court has affirmed. Bondi knows this. What she is hoping to do, though, is to intimidate the Left and break it on the cultural terrain. Success is doubtful, but she has the power to disrupt the lives of many activists, politicians, and intellectuals, the way the 20th-century FBI and CIA menaced, surveilled, and infiltrated the Left.

The last time conservatives were so openly hostile to speech rights, George W. Bush was president, but that administration, at the minimum, had the excuse of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The 9/11 attack was the pretext for setting up a mass surveillance state, spying on American citizens, and intimidating opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into silence. It was vile, but it had some logic to it.  

Kirk is another matter entirely. His assassination is a tragedy and should not have happened. Yet it does not represent a grave new threat to national security or the American people more broadly. Thousands of civilians were not killed in cold blood. Conservatives can insist it’s the American Left that killed Kirk — the radicals. There may be a radical and radicalizing online discourse that destabilizes such people, and Tyler Robinson seems to have succumbed to the Left-wing variety. But there’s no formal organization or movement behind Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old alleged shooter. He is, in the tradition of American assassins, an alienated, angry, and very young gunman. This is true of most assassins and mass shooters; they have confused and disordered inner lives. Post-hoc justifications are crafted to elucidate what is, ultimately, a form of deep mental illness, and one that occurs on both sides. It is true that the Left has been guilty of blaming mass shootings on an infectious Right-wing ideology but, in almost every instance, the violence had no clear cause that could neatly fit a political binary. Now conservatives are guilty of the same fallacy. 

A good question is what Kirk, a man who defended free discourse, would ask for now. Would he want his death to be used as a pretext for shutting down debate? We’ll never know. One of the great failings of Kirk — yes, it’s acceptable to criticize the recently deceased — was that he was usually willing to jettison certain principles in the service of Trump and MAGA. He did this repeatedly, from dropping his pursuit of the Epstein files once Trump wanted the matter dropped, to flip-flopping from isolationist to supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran. 

With the Right wing apparently finished with free speech, it will be up to the Left to defend and champion it anew. This is possible, still. At the very minimum, the many activists, pundits, and politicians who dismissed the First Amendment’s value in the last decade are discovering, again, why it’s so vital. We can only hope they’ve learned their lesson and are ready to embrace principle over political expediency — only that will bring back the votes.

What might this look like? In the 20th century and into the Aughts, there was rarely any conflict between progressive values and free speech. Leftists understood that an unstinting defense of the First Amendment was vital, and to support the speech rights of so-called enemies was necessary if a climate of free discourse was to survive. The American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to hold a march, and drew a clear distinction between that and an endorsement of the organization’s racist ideology. In the 2020s, Democratic politicians and Left-leaning organizations like the ACLU must become speech champions again. Americans believe in the First Amendment, and they don’t want their rights trampled on. Can liberals and progressives earnestly safeguard these rights once more? It’s not impossible. MAGA, certainly, has handed them an opportunity. 

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