Is Free Speech Just a Shield for the Powerful?

Who really benefits from free speech? In this episode of American Socrates, we take a hard look at free speech absolutism—unpacking the idea that all speech should be protected, no matter how harmful. Is free speech truly a tool for liberty, or has it become a shield for the powerful to silence the vulnerable? We explore the philosophical roots of free speech, real-world consequences of protecting hate speech and misinformation, and the moral limits of expression in a democratic society, especially on college campuses.

Whether you're a free speech defender or a critic, this episode challenges you to think deeper about one of our most sacred rights.

Transcript

I may not agree with what you're saying, but I'll defend to the death you're right to say it. I know you've heard this line before. It's one of those decidedly American noble ideals that gets passed around, which, for me, is generally delivered in a Foghorn Leghorn accent. But what if I told you that that idea, the idea that free speech is always good, always right, always worth defending, no matter the cost, has been hijacked? What if it's being used not to protect truth, but to protect people in power? To defend the bully, not the students, or to shield the bigot, and not the classmate who they just shouted down? Today, we're going to ask a question: Should all speech be free? Or to put it differently, who pays the price when we pretend that all speech is equal? Because there is a price. And like all things with prices, sometimes it's just not worth it. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Free speech isn't some god floating above the Constitution. It's a legal rule with limitations, and we all accept those limits every day. You can't lie about someone in print. You can't scream fire in a crowded theater. You can't harass your coworker and claim it's protected speech. And you sure as hell can't say whatever you like in someone else's house and just expect them to put up with it. Free speech never trumps private property rights. You can be kicked out of a bar, a church, a workplace, a college campus, and that doesn't violate your First Amendment rights. So why do we treat campus speech codes on like, say, hate? Like there's some kind of constitutional meltdown? Because we're not just talking about legal rights here. We're going to be talking about moral responsibility and the purpose of free speech, especially in education. See, we've been told that the point of free speech is to get more rights ideas out there, to get more ideas on the table. But more ideas aren't always better. Nobody teaches that one plus one equals three just for balance, just to teach all sides. No Nobody should be giving equal time to say, flat Earthers in a geology class or creationism in a biology class. But sometimes we treat opinions built on hate, lies, or dehumanization like they deserve the microphone. Today's episode is about free speech absolutism, the idea that all speech should be protected, always, everywhere, no matter what, for the greater good. We're going to look at how that idea plays out in the real world. We'll ask why groups like FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which claims to be defending liberty, often end up defending racism, transphobia, and fascist speakers while ignoring the students who are forced to leave campus because they no longer feel safe. And we're going to talk about why free speech, if it really matters, has to serve something bigger than itself, like the truth or dignity, like justice. Because if we can't ask what free speech is for, then we're really just handing the mic to the loudest voice and letting everyone else be drowned out. Let's start by clearing up one of the biggest misunderstandings about free speech in America. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee you a microphone. It guarantees you protection from the government telling you what you can and can't say, but that's it. You have the right to express your views without the government throwing you in jail for them. But that doesn't mean you can say anything, anywhere, and expect there to be no consequences. If you try walking into a Walmart and screaming insults at people, you're going to get kicked out, not because you're rights are being violated, but because free speech doesn't override property rights or public safety. The same goes for college campuses. A university isn't exactly the government. It's a private or semi-public institution with a mission. And that mission includes education, safety, and the dignity of its students. So when colleges set speech codes or conduct policies, they're not exactly violating the Constitution. They're setting the terms for participation, just like your job might have rules about harassment, or your church might have standards about what could be said at the pulpit. Free speech never gave you the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. Yet, over and over, we see groups like fire losing their minds when a college says, you can't invite this speaker who calls trans people mentally ill and compares them to predators. FIRE and others call that censorship. They argue for an idealized version of free speech, where every spoken word is equally important to every other one, or more realistically, that they're all equal in the great arena of ideas. But here's the truth. Speech has always depended on the place, on the purpose, and the power of the people who are speaking. it. It's why you can't run into a courtroom or a funeral shouting your political slogans. It's why colleges of all places are allowed to set standards. The point of free speech isn't chaos, but clarity. It's supposed to support learning, not domination, which, of course, undermines learning. If it still student of color can't focus in class because someone is shouting slurs at them, or that's not robust debate or the pursuit of truth, or even the marketplace of ideals. That's just a hostile learning environment. And if we pretend that letting everyone speak at all times, and all places, under all conditions, is the only way we're going to protect freedom, then we're merely confusing freedom with entitlement. The irony is, is that people who scream the loudest about cancel culture almost never defend your right to, say, counterprotest, to boycott, to walk out, all of which are equally free speech. What they defend is their right to speak and really your obligation to have to listen to them. But that's not how rights work. That's not what democracy looks like. And it sure as hell is not what education is for. So let's set the foundation straight. The First Amendment protects you from government censorship. It does not guarantee you a stage. It does not protect you from being challenged and absolutely does not force a community to host speech that undermines its own values. The question isn't well, free speech matters. The question we need to be asking is, what is free speech for? Because until we answer that, we're just handing the loudest people the biggest microphone and pretending that we're living up to the ideal, the noble standard of the First Amendment. OK, so now that we have some idea of what the law actually says, that the First Amendment protects speech from government interference, not from consequences or community standards, I want to ask a deeper, but related question. Is more speech always better speech? That's the story that free speech Act absolutists try to sell us on, that we need to let every idea enter the public square, no matter how hateful or false or harmful, just in case it contains some hidden truth. And if we don't, we're often being accused of censorship, of being anti-democratic somehow, of fearing an open and honest debate, something like that. This idea comes from the so-called marketplace of ideas. It's a metaphor that was made famous by John Stewart Mill and, of course, former Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis. The marketplace analogy essentially says, let's let every idea compete with every other idea, and of course, the best one will rise to the top here. That certainly sounds really good on paper, and I wish it were true. But the legal scholar Charles Lawrence III has a brutal truth for us. He argues that the marketplace of ideas is a myth and that it really never was fair. This idea was built by, for, and around the people with the most power, the wealthy white men. And this market was meant to sell ideas, including racism, sexism, and exclusion, as if those were just one of the options. Look, if you're a woman and someone calls you a stupid whore before a class discussion, are you just going to raise your hand again and risk being insulted a second time? If you're black and some white kid is out there defending slavery, and he tells you that you're just whining, that black people were actually better off in the cotton fields with white masters. Do you really feel free to speak your truth when your blood is boiling at being dehumanized like that? Anything you're going to say is going to come off as a rant at that point. Lawrence says speech like this, hate speech, isn't just offensive. It's exclusionary. It doesn't invite debate. It shuts debate down. It stops it from happening. The whole point of this kind of speech is to kill discussions of the truth by attacking one side so viciously that they don't even feel like continuing the discussion anymore. When you're told, either directly or implicitly, that your identity is a problem, that your race, your gender, your culture is somehow less deserving, less allowed to speak, you're being silenced. If this is the marketplace of ideas, hate speech is destroying all the competition and all the ideas. And then, when people have no other choice, it claims it's the best idea on the market. Censorship, mind you, works exactly the same way.. So if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, we should probably call it a duck, right? The reality is that there is no such thing as a free exchange of ideas. The marketplace analogy is a very flawed one. Ideas in the pursuit of truth are not all presented in a market. They're actually kind of forced to fight each other in a particular arena.. It is the arena of ideas that determines truth. Debate, in different rational debate is that pursuit of truth. So in that era,na, in order to achieve what we hope it will, that, you know, the best ideas are going to emerge victorious, this requires particular rules of engagement. Any speech that violates those rules is not and should not be allowed. Such speech abandons the pursuit of truth and engages in harm in order to force a victory. In short, it cheats. It cheats. Lawrence argues, rightly, I believe, that hate speech is not just words. It's an action, it's sticks in stones. It's like a slap in the face, which stings, doesn't completely harm, and yet a slap in the face is not considered a form of protected speech. It's a public humiliation, not for any pursuit of the truth, but simply to shut down the opposition so that your side is to be perceived as having one. It's an intentional effort to exclude someone from full participation in the debate. And this would include their right to free speech. It's the same logic behind segregation, Lawrence argues. And Brown vs. the Board of Education, the court ruled that separate schools harmed black children's ability to learn and thrive, even if they are otherwise equal. Because the message being sent to those children by the separation is that you don't belong here. Education isn't for your kind. You don't belong in this classroom. You don't belong in this country. You don't belong in this conversation. So when we say, well, we need to hear all sides, what we're often doing is protecting speech that silences others as though that we're being fair-minded and inclusive. So let me ask you something. If someone shows up at your dinner table and starts insulting your family, do you defend their right to free speech or do you throw them out of your house? Because they've broken the basic rules of human dignity and respect for you, their host? If you would kick them out, then maybe colleges ought to have that same right to protect their students that you would exercise to protect your family. That's what Lawrence means when he calls free speech absolutism an empty ideal. When we defend the rights of the bigot above the dignity of the oppressed, we're not promoting democracy. We're dismantling it. And look, we're not talking about banning controversial topics or difficult truths here. We're talking about speech intended exclusively to hurt, to exclude, and to dominate. So the bottom line is free speech should protect the truth, not bury it under a mountain of hateful manipulation. And when speech becomes a weapon instead of a tool for the pursuit of truth, then it's time to rethink what it is exactly we're defending. So by now, hopefully, we've seen that free speech isn't sacred. It's a powerful tool, but like any tool, it can be used to build or to destroy. And no one plays this game harder than fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. FIRE appoints themselves on a noble mission. They say that they're here to defend civil liberties, to protect open debate, and to uphold the Constitution. But when you look closer, their version of freedom starts to look a lot like a defense of the status quo, the kind that serves the powerful people's private interests, but not necessarily the public good. Let me give you an example. When a university says, We're not going to host this speaker who compares black people to animals and calls transgender students mentally ill, fire doesn't ask whether that speaker's ideas have any educational value. They don't ask whether the students will feel safe enough to learn with this person, encouraging the students around them to undermine them or maybe even attack them. They don't ask if this speech violates basic standards of dignity or even rules of evidence for truth. Instead, they just shout censorship, like, every time. Michael Barrentz points out in his article a tale of two arguments about free speech on campus that FIRE claims to be nonpartisan, but its legal cases and public campaigns line up almost entirely with conservative causes. They leap to defend white nationalist speakers, transphobic professors, and anti-black provocateurs. But when students protest, when they walk out of these events or out of classes, or demand that hate not be platformed in their own learning spaces, FIRE frames them as the problem. Their free speech isn't the kind of free speech that FIRE wants to defend. Counter protests, for example, seem like just the right way, according to free speech absolutism, to respond to negative and wrongful speech. You want to fight bad words with good words, as Brandeis famously argued, but not in FIRE's estimation. They tend to see counterprotesting or just protesting, as a form of censorship. The speech they defend always seems to go one way. They'll defend someone's right to say that women don't belong in SEM, but not other people's right to ignore them or deplatform them, or even argue back in cases. And that's the trap of free speech absolutism by assuming that all speech is just opinion. There's no power included here, no hierarchy. It's not harmful, just words. It's just words. They allow a series of logically false quasi-arguments to persist, such as railroading, propagandizing, and mis- and disinformation. And when fire and other groups like that defend this as free speech and ignore the damage that it causes, they aren't really defending liberty. They're defending the license for the people who are already holding power to dominate the conversation. Let's take a step back for a second and ask a broader question. What do we really want free speech for anyway? That might sound obvious, but it's actually where most of this debate falls apart. What is the reason to allow everyone to speak their mind? I mean, we've been taught to think of free speech as the ultimate goal or the highest virtue and a free society. But the truth is, free speech was never meant to be an end in and of itself. It is merely a means, a tool, to help us get somewhere better. towards the truth, towards understanding, towards more freedom for everyone. So that gives us a way to measure if speech is actually worthy of being protected or not.. Is it engaged in truth seeking, or is it doing something else? Nowhere is this more true than on college campuses, where the pursuit of truth is the paramount aim, and even education has to take a backseat to that. The whole purpose of education is to help people figure out what's true, not just what somebody once said somewhere. And sometimes that means knowing when to draw the line between an idea worth engaging in and a lie that doesn't deserve the time of day. Let me put this another way. If free speech were an absolute value, always, everywhere, no matter what, then universities should be forced to teach ideas that we all know are nonsense, like 1 plus one equals three. And they should teach that right alongside the idea that 1 plus 1 1 equals two. And if a math professor were to say something like, But that's nonsense, it doesn't belong here. Then free speech absolutists should be saying, Hey, you're censoring, and you need to be open to all different perspectives. But that's not how truth works. Part of the job of a professor, the job of an educator, is to rule out false beliefs to dismiss them, so to speak. Say something like, you know, hey, look, we've looked into that, and it just didn't work out. That's false. Don't waste your time with that idea. And that's not censorship or bias. That's philosophy. That's academics. That's science. That's SEM, that's logic. It's the primary good of all learning. In science, history, and ethics, we don't give equal time to ideas that are widely held to be false, any more than we would in mathematics. We don't give lectures promoting the flat Earth theory or phrenology or holocaust denial, and we're not violating anyone's rights by saying those ideas don't belong in a classroom or even on a campus. Because the goal isn't just to hear every idea. It's also to critically evaluate them. Free speech absolutism rules out the possibility of critical examination.. Every idea has to be accepted. So none can be tested or eliminated or argued with. But then that's the point, right? People whose favorite ideas really don't withstand scrutiny want to use free speech protections to prevent them from being dismissed. And that's what's really happening here. I'm not against the idea of free speech, but let's not make it into something that it's not. Free speech is the starting line for the journey of truth-seeking. It is not the finish line. And oftentimes, pursuing truth requires excluding majorities of ideas, not because they're unpopular, but because they've just been discredited or they don't work, or because they actively undermine the dignity of people engaged in pursuit, hampering them, as it were, silencing them, excluding other ideas as before they're even considered. That's what fire and the free speech absolutists seem to miss. They treat every idea like it's a houseguest, no matter what it brings to the door. But if an idea shows up carrying harm for you or hatred or dehumanization, we don't owe it a warm welcome. And yes, drawing lines is hard, but pretending that there shouldn't be any lines because it's hard is not an even remotely acceptable solution. That's moral cowardice, dressed up as principle. We already draw lines all the time. We restrict libel, we restrict threats, harassment, fraud, and incitement. We don't let people stand on the street corners, reading social security numbers out into a megaphone. We draw lines, not to destroy freedom, but to protect the conditions that make freedom real. So why should hate speech, speech that silences, that traumatizes, and that drives people out of public life, get some kind of pass here? The reality is is it shouldn't, because if speech means anything, it has to mean something for everyone. And if we want truth, we can't just tolerate lies for the sake of balance. We have to stand for something. Everything we've talked about so far, the law, the ethics, the university, it all comes down to one real-world question. Who actually gets to speak? Free speech absolutism sounds like it's being fair, but in practice, it protects the people who already have the biggest platform. If you're white and male and wealthy, if you're tenured, your voice tends to carry more weight in that way. And if you're not listened to enough, maybe you just buy the nearest social media platform and make it espouse your particular beliefs, and you call that free speech. But if you're an outsider, if you're black or queer, if you're an undocumented American, if you're disabled, and someone uses that against you in a so-called debate, you're not being really invited to share your perspective, your side of things. You're being put on trial just for existing. Okay, so what is frequent speech really look like? How can we protect debate? Well, let's start with an example. Let's say I have a kid in my class who is a dyed in the wool racist. Our first question will be, is there any debate happening here at all? If that kid isn't changing their mind or even willing to change their mind, we're not having a debate anyway. So, free speech protections probably don't need to apply. At this point, we're just engaged in harm reduction. But let's say that those kids may not be so married to their racism. They believe in racism, they have all these racist ideas and they're expressing them, but they're willing to question what they were raised with. They aren't completely convinced that what these ideas say are true. They still want to defend them, but maybe they're interested in seeing if they can be disproven. Now we have a debate. And I will be the first to defend that kid's right to speak their truth in my class, re regardless of who gets offended. That's the process. This is how we learn. This is how we grow. But only if the interlocutors are genuinely engaged in a spirit of refining their own beliefs, when that happens, free speech is actually important. But if that's not happening, then free speech really isn't all that important. Before we go to defend someone's free speech, we need to analyze what it is being said and what its purpose is. That takes knowledge, that takes discretion, and not everyone's going to be good at doing that. But that's why we have experts. I can tell you the difference when it comes to say something like politics or ethics or economics or personal identity or science and a host of others because that's my field. That's what I study. But I don't think that someone who's never studied these subjects would do a good job of telling the difference between speech meant to shut other people down and speech just pursuing the truth. But there it is, a rational debate within different opinions, people who are both willing to lose this argument if that's where the truth is going to point them, to deserve all the free speech protection that we can give them. But anything that's not that, well, they get varying degrees of limited protection and are actually practices tend to bear this out. We don't tolerate all speech. We never have, we never will, and we never should. In the end, I guess, free speech should be thought of kind of as a story that we like to tell about the kind of people that we are and the kind of country we want to have, about what kind of people we want to be. Free speech has, in certain hands, become a shield for cruelty, a cloak for lies, and a stage for domination. Somewhere along the way, we forgot what it was really for. We forgot that it's supposed to serve something higher, the pursuit of truth, the defense of dignity, the freedom to think, speak, and live fully for everyone, not just the rich. And when someone says the answer to bad speech is more speech, I like to ask them More speech from whom? Because if you've been shouted down, threatened, excluded, or erased, if you walk into the room already marked as less than. If the speech aimed at you isn't debate, but dehumanization, then more and freer speech is not the answer. Justice means telling the truth about power. It means protecting the vulnerable, not just indulging the provocative. It means saying, you don't get to use freedom as a weapon against the very people it was meant to protect.. I'm not saying we shut down disagreement. I'm not saying that we ban hard conversations. I'm saying we stop pretending that every idea is harmless, that every voice is equal, that every platform must be open to those who speak in bad faith. With practice, it's pretty easy to tell who's testing ideas to learn and who's trying to ram ideas down other people's throats. But if we don't draw lines, like the free speech absolutist insists, then the people who speak hate will always win, because they have a special kind of censorship on their side. It's not the marketplace of ideas or even the arena. It's the prison of ideas. So, no, free speech isn't always free. It costs something. And we need to start asking who's doing the paying and who's cashing in. We can stand for something better, for truth, for justice, for the kind of freedom that doesn't come at someone else's expecting. And that's the kind of freedom worth defending, and that's the kind of country I would like to live in. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, maybe make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Viscrates.buzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.