Free Speech Remains at Great Risk

BUCK: Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University has been on TV a lot on this issue. He’s a very… He’s a sharp mind and a steady hand who’s not a conservative but knows the Constitution and knows… I should say not a dogmatic conservative. I actually don’t even know his politics, but he knows these issues quite well.

He also recognizes that we are in an unprecedented era of true assaults on free speech. We are in a period here where there is more at stake for free speech than at any time, certainly in my memory. And you could go back, even, to the earliest days of the republic. I mean, one of the things that I think people should have a little bit more of a grasp on and should…

I don’t know if saying it should be taught more in schools. Everybody should be aware that even the Founding Fathers sometimes lost their way on free speech issues. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, which did criminalize the publications of newspapers on political issues. It was, of course, under the guise of it’s helping an enemy.

It’s helping in sedition against the country. You go back, what is it, 1802 I think it was, the Alien and Sedition Acts. There were people who were — very small number, I think it was only a handful — who were prosecuted under it, and Jonathan Turley’s pointing out that President Biden right now you can argue is among the most anti-free speech presidents since, well, go all the way back to John Adams.

BUCK: So it was 1798. Sorry. When you go from memory on these things, occasionally I’ll be a couple years off. 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts. And it did prohibit, effectively, opposition to important government policies in the press. So there had to be fights over this. Now, we moved away from that, but there was a law passed here that was in clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is another way of pointing out all of this is a constant fight, a constant change, the debate winning arguments around these issues. This notion of, “Oh, it’s settled.” They actually dealt with stare decisis in the opinion, the leaked opinion to say, “Yeah, stare decisis until it’s not. It’s stare decisis until you get a decision that.” Well, Brown v. Board was the correct decision ending the separate but equal doctrine of a Supreme Court decision before that, right?

But the point being there will be times when it is necessary, moral, and the legal — the right legal thing to do — from a constitutional perspective to say, “Yeah, the previous the court got it wrong,” and they have clearly have. Corabatsu, Dred Scott, there are prevent times where the Supreme Court has gotten it wrong in the past, and right now what we see I think is a Supreme Court that is, well, on the right side.

Dare I say ,on the right side of history and on the First Amendment issues that I think are likely to come before this court, especially as the government is more than ever, under the Biden administration, of the mind-set that they should be regulating speech, they should be telling people what they can say and can’t say. I mean, we got a disinformation czar!

Soviet Mary Poppins is running around singing talking about how you can’t say this and you can’t say that unless you want to be part of the disinformation. I was thinking about singing that, but I didn’t want all of you to stop listening, so I saved from you my singing. But this is a problem, folks. This is a problem. And, as the left starts to lose more — and they are going to be losing more.

Roe is just one of many places where they have lost ground and are being dealt serious setbacks to the progressive agenda. They’re going to try to use the government. They’re going to try to weaponize bureaucracy and use the levers of power at their disposal to crush dissent, to the shut down the other side of the debate and argument on all these issues because they’re not going to win on the actual merits.

They never won on the merits of Roe. They just had people that wanted it to be the law, so they pretended that it was the law. And now they recognize that there will be much more widespread discussion about abortion, there will be much more legislation that will come. I know: Assuming that the 5-4 decision comes down as we expect. But that will change our whole national conversation about it.

So they’re gonna try to control the conversation in whatever ways that they can. And I mean control as in who gets to speak, where you get to speak, what is elevated, what is suppressed, who is canceled, what is censored — and I mean censored even by the government, which is why this discussion of the… I keep trying to remember the name.

The Disinformation Governance Board. It’s Orwell read, it’s 1984 read as a handbook, as a how-to guide, that seems to be what the Democrats have come up with. When Jen Psaki was even asked about this, she refused to say that the disinformation board will refrain from rooting out what they believe to be — censoring what they believe to be — disinformation.

BUCK: How about just say, “Yeah, this is a bad idea and we should have just never even thought about this”? Well, they won’t because then they would be giving up the possibility of using this for political power, and that’s ultimately what they want. They’re gonna use the government, they’re going to use the bureaucracies, and they’re also gonna use the cultural power that they have gathered over time.

The right is waking up to all this, finally. Conservatives are starting to see that the one thing, the neutral space that we wanted to achieve — we were told we should be trying to achieve — in teaching and what our children are learning, it’s not a neutral space. If you allow it to be a vacuum, the left will fill it with propaganda. If you don’t pay attention to it, that’s what happens.

They turn the schools, they even they turn the preschools into indoctrination factories. As obtuse as that may be, what is that they do. That has been what they’ve been doing. But beyond that they’re also looking to destroy any voices that are effective in making the case on the other side. Here, for example, is, ’cause I’m still… (chuckles)

I don’t think the New York Times really has any credibility, but there’s a part of me that thinks at least they should. Are they even trying to keep up the pretense that they are a newspaper instead of a party organ for the Democrats and for the left? I think the pretense has essentially fallen away entirely. Not that they would ever fool me or you with it, but they usually go through those motions and create an intellectual journo fig leaf, if you will. And I feel that they’ve dropped that.