Can America Remain A Republic Without Free Speech?

There are a host of reasons that I subscribe to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s substack. The biggest? He reports news that I don’t see anywhere else.

Like a shocking poll from the respected Pew Research Center showing, well, let Mr. Berenson explain:

A majority of Americans - and an overwhelming number of Democrats - no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech.

The government should restrict “false” information online, even if doing so blocks people from “publishing or accessing information,” 55 percent of Americans said in a large poll released Thursday. Only 42 percent disagreed.

The antipathy to free speech represents a sea change in attitudes in just five years. It is driven by a powerful new hostility to First Amendment rights on the left.

In an identically worded poll five years ago, Democrats and Republicans favored free speech online by roughly 3 to 2 margins. Today, Republicans still favor the First Amendment by about that much. But Democrats have turned against it by even more…

When Pew split the respondents by political party, the split - and the change in attitudes - was even more striking.

In 2018, Democrats supported free speech by a 57-40 margin, almost identical to the Republican view. They now oppose it by 70-28, a massive shift over the last five years, while Republican views have not changed.

This is chilling. Especially coming out of a pandemic that was characterized by misinformation spewed from official sources. Those who questioned the CDC or White House on vaccines or covid policies often found themselves muzzled on social media, thanks to pressure from government officials.

It’s worth noting that those who posed questions about the hastily rolled-out vaccine’s efficacy were dead right. Also right were those who opposed school closings, which turned out to be catastrophic for American education.

Not that the public was allowed to hear from those the government wished to silence.

Case in point: Alex Berenson. He launched his substack after being booted from Twitter. Old Twitter, that is, run by government lackey Jack Dorsey.

Clearly the script has flipped. In the turbulent 1960s and 1970s it was the left that embraced the “free speech movement” that was born in Berkeley and spread across the nation during an unpopular Vietnamese War. It was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon administration that sought to silence the peace protestors.

Many conservatives supported government crackdowns on speech 50 or 60 years ago.

It’s also worth noting that it’s now members of the left who are the neo-cons, cheering for the Ukraine War, the military-industrial complex, censorship and Big Pharma. 

It ought to alarm every single American with a passing knowledge of our history that so many are eager to allow censorship of unpopular opinions.

There is no such thing as a republic without free speech. 

I fear for our country.