Free speech of the 21st century: Glenn Reynolds

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

1984 might have better been titled 2016.

What is the status of free speech in the 21st Century? I’d say that speech is freer, but people are not.

On the one hand, it’s easier than ever for people to share their thoughts. I started my blog, InstaPundit, over 15 years ago, when new online platforms made it really easy to run a weblog (we still mostly called them “me-zines” back then) without having to fiddle with things like DreamWeaver and FTP.  Now, while lots of people still have blogs, other platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, InstaGram, etc. make it even easier to express yourself. (And if hyperlocal expression is your thing, there’s always YikYak.)

So the old gag line that “freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one” is out of date. Or, maybe it’s a case of back-to-the-future here: In Colonial times, a printing press was a comparatively inexpensive investment before newspaper publication became an industrial scale operation.

But as the technical barriers to self-expression have dropped, the social barriers seem to have increased. A few decades ago, both left and right believed in free speech. Students at Berkeley and elsewhere protested to demand free speech rights, and a national consensus arose that the answer to ideas one dislikes is not suppression, but more speech.

That’s not so much the case today. As Kimberley Strassel notes in her new book, The Intimidation Game, it’s now open season on free speech, at least when it’s expressing the wrong views.

President Obama himself presumed to lecture the Supreme Court on the wrongness of the Citizens United decision, though that decision was really about the government’s power to punish filmmakers for making a documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton — the sort of thing that one would think was at the core of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. If you can’t make a film criticizing a powerful politician, what does free speech really mean?

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And numerous state attorneys general have taken it upon themselves — in probableviolation of federal laws against conspiring to deprive people of their constitutional rights — to go after various “climate change deniers” because they view their ideas as unacceptable.

And where legal pressure ends, we now face vastly more social pressure against free speech than we used to. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, 1984 might have better been titled 2016.

We may be able to communicate in a nanosecond and send photo images in real time on our cell phones, but someone who was a student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s would today be shocked that there is less free speech on campus than a half-century ago — unless he is a tenured dean who helped to implement the censorship he once opposed. If a junior faculty member were to write a paper on the racialist undertones of Black Lives Matter, the lack of factual evidence for a campus rape epidemic, or the connection between radical Islam and terrorism, he would likely have to struggle for tenure. It is not just that aJohn Ford western could not pass current PC muster, but even modernist raunchy satire such as the 1980s TV hits In Living Color and Married with Children, or the comic career of a Teri Garr orVictoria Jackson, or a movie like True Lies simply could not pass today’s Ministry of Truth.

Well, just like Big Brother in 1984, people don’t suppress opponents’ ideas because they are confident in their own. They suppress opponents’ ideas because they have more confidence in the argument of force than in the force of their arguments.

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And that leads to a general rule: The people who are trying to silence their political enemies aren’t doing it because they’re right. They’re doing it because they’re afraid that otherwise, people will realize they’re running a scam. Bear that in mind, this election season, and beyond.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter @Instapundit.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/18/free-speech-citizens-united-obama-twitter-glenn-reynolds/88893556/