Protests, Freedom of Speech and History

We have been hit by a wave of protests in the past few years.  Some vandalize works of art and others block key roadways.  We look at the history of some protests, and ask, what is the price of Free Speech.  

Transcript

Protesters, Freedom of Speech, and History

April 2024

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Ronald Reagan

“Say what you want, but you NEVER say it with violence!”

 Gerard Way

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene II

In 1215, a protest was taking place at Runnymede, an otherwise obscure field lying next to the Thames in Berkshire between Windsor and Staines.  

Magna Carta, or Great Charter, was the product of a political crisis and an uprising of the leading men of England. Many barons – descendants of the 1066 Norman invaders – resented being subjects of such a powerful monarchy. In an attempt to make peace, what became known as the Magna Carta gave these barons legal protection against arbitrary monarchical rule. Most English people were left without individual rights and the barons launched an insurrection against King John anyway. Magna Carta was later appropriated by those resisting authority, not least during the 17th Century English Civil War.

Now, to be clear, this protest was as much about feudal power and the ability of taxation between an oligarchic clique as much as it was something for the “people.” However, it set a clear precedent that the law sat above the monarch and not the other way around.  

Another protest that was much more about the masses occurred some 170 years later, in 1381. The Peasant’s Revolt, led by Wat Tyler, included rebels who marched from Kent and Essex to London. Some leaders even challenged the existence of the class system. When assembled at Blackheath, Lollard priest John Ball preached equality for all. The Archbishop of Canterbury and key royal officials were killed, but King Richard II ended in reasserting the Crown’s control. Promises made were later reneged on, and Tyler was killed, along with hundreds of others. But feudalism was on its way out, and the plight of many peasants did improve. This was partly due to the Black Death, which occurred some 35 years earlier, giving power to the peasants because there were so many fewer of them. 

Yet the Peasant’s revolt was not the establishment of some constitutional monarchy but the peasants looking to the King, all of 14 years old, for redress from the nobles. Hence, they spared Richard’s life but took revenge on some of the peerages. 

The American Revolution came about as a protest, including the dispatch of tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. Twenty years after the American Revolution, the French version began with the same issue: a state that taxed its people with little to no representation. And here, a distinction must be made. We are experiencing a wave of protests coming from pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protesters. Note I group the two together. Before the Hamas massacres of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Hamas enjoyed popularity in Gaza. In the West Bank, the current leader, Abbass of the PLO, will not allow elections, knowing Hamas will win. The line between Palestinian desires and their identification with the goals of Hamas is a very thin one indeed.  

A description of the protests that occurred this week of this recording is from writer Haley Strack, 

Protesters in dozens of cities across America are participating in the “Global Strike for Gaza” today. They’re attempting to effect economic blockades to coincide with Tax Day. Iran’s attack on Israel this weekend didn’t deter the pro-Palestinian groups from holding the already-planned events. In Chicago, protesters organized by a group called Chicago Dissenters blocked the access road to O’Hare International Airport at around 8:30 a.m. to protest Boeing, which sells military equipment to Israel. Activists posted videos on social media of irritated airline customers walking along the shut-down road with luggage in tow. Some of the comments on the post mocked “the privilege of being annoyed” and being “inconvenienced by having to walk to your flight while Palestinians are being murdered.” All of the participants in the blockade were masked.

So the thinking might be, “We are doing what the American Revolutionaries did, so what is the difference?” The distinction between 1773 and 2024 would be Rashid Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Jamal Bowman. These figures are elected to the House of Representatives to represent the people in the halls of government, in the case of Tlaib, particularly those of Americans of Palestinian origin. This representation was denied to the English peasants of the 14th century, as well as the American colonists of the 18th. Also, note the fate that befell Wat Tyler for having the temerity to challenge the English government. Post Tea Party, the British government implemented the Coercive Acts after the Boston Tea Party. These citations included the closing of Boston Harbor, the movement of trials to Britain, and the arbitrary quartering of British troops in Boston homes, all without any recourse or appeal.  

I would argue that Biden’s fear of pro-Palestinian Arabs in Michigan and the loss of that swing state in November’s election are prompting his 80-year reversal of pro-Israeli policy. In America of 2024, voices can be heard and responded to without denying the rights of other Americans. And, of course, on those blocked bridges, we just hope that no medical emergencies would prompt the need for these thoroughfares.  

All of this brings up the right to protest and something directly aligned with that in the First Amendment: freedom of speech. “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves,” exclaimed Henry David Thoreau. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” 

To which I say to these esteemed historical figures, bollocks. Who is King, or anyone, to say this law is good and that one is bad in a Republic where representation exists? Is it a perfect system? Of course not. But this is not English peasants being ground into the dust by avaricious nobles and an indifferent monarch.  

When King talks like that, I think not of an African American reverend but Richard II murdering peasants or George III quartering British troops. After all, they had their view of what was moral as well. The English King, or any King, gets to determine the laws that our King unilaterally suggested he can determine.  

Under this ethos, if I decided that blocking my access to my workplace might prove deleterious to me keeping that job and imperiling my ability to feed my family, then I am morally justified in running down the protesters with my 2-ton SUV. That is ludicrous, of course; harming them in such a fashion is, need I say, against the law, regardless of my fears and feelings. Now, I would not advocate harming any protester physically, but here, the law is clear: they are breaking the law and need to be arrested and jailed, i.e., removed from the road. 

I would remind King supporters and the protesters today that the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement was a series of laws passed by Congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1965. Since then, we have featured black secretaries of state, 22% of the Supreme Court is African American, and we have elected a black president and a black female Vice President. I am not denying the ability to protest. I am denying the ability to protest illegally.

I was a small child back in 1978 when the Nazis decided to march in Skokie, Illinois. Why Skokie? Because Nazis are assholes. According to Meghan Keneally of ABC News, “One estimate cited in a court filing from the time said that roughly 40,000 of Skokie’s 70,000 residents were Jewish.” As I talk of this, in 2024, we are ten years more removed from the Skokie march than the march was from the Holocaust. Not only was there a large Jewish community, but many Holocaust survivors were in residence.  

Yet the ACLU defended the rights of the Nazis to march, “The notoriety of the case caused some ACLU members to resign, but to many others, the case has come to represent the ACLU’s unwavering commitment to principle.” Let’s say I do not believe our current ACLU is my parents’ version. I see many examples of the ACLU being more of a limb of the Democratic Party than a valued institution protecting free speech. But whatever they have become, the need for such an organization is why I am a staunch believer in institutions, including those that safeguard our liberties. It is not that we should eliminate or defund the ACLU to use current jargon, but rather reform this one or create something along the lines of the 1970s version.  

I should note that I was also too young to remember the theatrical release of The Blues Brothers. It was only after watching it on a Blockbuster video that I realized its greatness, including a cathartic scene where the brothers, who hate Nazis, drove them off a bridge. But consider a few key points that distinguish even what the Nazis were doing. They pre-announced their march, received permits, and concluded their demonstration in a public space, a park. Again, Nazis are assholes, so they did not do this in the spirit of the law but to gin up participation and media notoriety. But they, even Nazis, seem to have understood what activists today do not seem to grasp fully, the nature of freedom of speech.

In the very first amendment to the constitution, comprising the first of ten Bill of Rights, there is an explicit prohibition on the part of the federal government from restricting the right of the individual to protest government policy or to express personal opinions. It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But, and I cannot make this point clearly enough, freedom of speech does not mean freedom to speak anywhere at any time. When climate activists block a public street without a proper permit, they violate the law. When they deface a work of art belonging not to them but to the museum, they are vandalizing property. When that pro-choice protester shows up in a residential neighborhood after 10:00 PM to try to intimidate an originalist Supreme Court justice, they are not permitted to do so. They are breaking the law when they block access to public thoroughfares without a permit. And when there are threats, that is forbidden. This is from an ACLU handbook: 

The First Amendment does not protect a speaker who urges an angry crowd to immediately attack someone or destroy their property. Also, the First Amendment does not protect “true threats” directed against a particular person who would reasonably perceive in the message a danger of violence. 

And if an opposition group demonstrates on the same day, at the same location as the original protesters? “Police must ensure that the two opposing groups do not silence or harm each other,” adds the ACLU. All of this sounds logical, but the ACLU goes further. “Governments often can require a permit for parades in the streets, given the impact on vehicle traffic. Likewise, the government often can require a permit for large protests in public parks and plazas to ensure fairness among the various groups seeking to use the site.” There are countless examples of fools placing themselves in the streets and then shrieking with horror when arrested or drivers move them aside. I am not advocating running them down, but they are breaking the law; the driver is not. And do not get me started if an emergency is taking place needing that thoroughfare.  

Let me present my cause. American education is the bedrock not only of our market system but also of the civics that need to be learned in schools, which provide the bedrock for our civilization and our nation. I also believe that Teacher’s Unions, with their corruption of our schools and their injection of leftist ideology into our curriculum, are a disease infecting our schools and our children. I started this podcast to combat that very infection of our historical curriculum. I believe this with as much passion as do greens in climate change or Tlaib about Palestinian rights. Yet, I would not set up camp with a bullhorn outside the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s home. I would not block traffic on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive nor deface works of art in Chicago’s Art Institute. My goal is to persuade enough people to vote for school choice, enough parents to reorient the curriculum, and to elect representatives who believe in me. 

King was wrong. Moral violation, of which I believe the Teacher’s Union is complicit, must be addressed through the existing laws, or those laws need to be changed. They are not to be ignored or broken.  

Another aspect of freedom of speech goes beyond the law or the penal system. Regardless of what Joe Biden tells us about free college or his old boss about free healthcare, nothing in this world is free. Let me emphasize that as well-nothing is free, there is always a price. 

In college, there are costs for buildings, professors, and administrators (way too many, in my estimation, but you still need one or two). Nurses and doctors are not volunteers; someone built those giant MRI machines. In healthcare, it is not the insurance companies who ultimately pay. It is the individuals, corporations, or taxpayers who pay the insurance companies. Nothing is free.  

Yet Freedom of speech is not concrete, like a diploma or blood work. There are three prices we must pay for speech. The first I have already elucidated above. There are limits on where and when in terms of speech. The second relates to the content of tolerable speech. Many wish to dictate that nature. We have seen a position on acceptable speech from the left in terms of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and other infantile statements emanating from the university. Like a virus, these views have infected greater society. Yet, if we are to have free speech, that means unlimited speech in terms of content.  

Unlike Jake and Elwood Blues, we cannot drive the Nazis off the bridge. We must listen to, manage, and counteract their bile and hate. Not all the time, and not in our living rooms, but the speech is there. I would also argue we have to listen to Marxists, a seemingly more acceptable form of speech (especially at the universities). However, I would argue Marxism is worse than Fascism because we do not as readily see the threat. Cossacks in the 1920s, Chinese in the 1950s, and Cambodians in the 1970s, through their combined 100 million murders, learned of the danger of Marxism. But either we have free speech or not, and since I believe we need it, I have to deal with the fantastical Marxist useful idiot talk of the utopia of the commune-in a public university no less.

My nightmare scenario is some commission, government-mandated, of course, who takes on the job of deciding which speech is acceptable. Before you can say Jacobin, you will have commissions that are highly politicized and eliminate speech they deem hateful-a twist on King’s decision of what laws are just. We have seen the beginnings of this already, and now, even on the right. Free speech means unlimited content.  

The third price we pay is more material. A business person could tell their staff, colleagues, and bosses that they are, in fact, a member of Wicca, the religion of contemporary Pagan witchcraft. They could add that if they work hard enough, they could cast a spell turning tofu into deep-dish pizza. It is their right to express this view, as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It would be debilitating concerning opportunities for promotion. And when there were mass layoffs, which come to most corporations, it would be, “So sorry, Mr. Warlock, but we are going to have to part ways, though it has NOTHING to do with your eccentric belief that you think Harry Potter was a work of non-fiction.” 

This position does not apply if a person were to express the goal of physically harming others or themselves. That speech should entail alerting authorities equipped to handle such a situation. Unfortunately, we need to take such threats seriously. King also said, “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is, in reality, expressing the highest respect for the law.” Again, I'm afraid I have to disagree with this on principle, but I certainly appreciate something I believe that the protesters do not see: there is a price, one that King was willing to pay. 

As a conservative, I believe in individual agency, but with that power, as they would say in Spider-Man movies, comes responsibility. I can say what I want, but I must weigh that against repercussions. And workplaces are not public forums such as parks or the town square of which I have obtained a permit to rally a crowd of like believers. Workplaces exist for a host of reasons. I have worked for Fortune 500 companies with a profit motive and the American Medical Association, whose focus was on doctors in particular and healthcare in general. My belief that Hamas are vile terrorists is not directly relevant to those things. I can talk about my views, but again, there would be a price.  

Then, there is the contention of what is reasonable. The New York Times is in the information business and runs opinion pieces daily. In 2020, James Bennet was fired as editor-in-chief of the Times for the temerity of running an op-ed by a sitting US Senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Cotton believed that the Black Lives Matter rioting, as opposed to the more peaceful protests following the death of George Floyd, was illegal and called for measures to end them. But in the fever swamp following that incident, an editorial upholding the rule of law was forbidden. And not just banned, but rather the belief that protesters should be able to loot stores or burn police buildings was seen as a legitimate expression of emotion. The staff of the times was not even as angry with Cotton as with Bennet for giving the Senator the platform. So Bennett was fired. 

Do I agree with this? Of course not. But AG Sulzberger owns The New York Times. It is not a governmental entity; he can fire and hire personnel as he sees fit, even for stupid reasons. I would say that NPR and PBS are government entities, but that is a podcast for a different time. This gets me to the non-hiring of pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic graduate students. As reported on CBS News, 

A New York University law student has had a job offer rescinded by a top law firm and was voted out as president of the school's Student Bar Association after stating that Israel is to blame for the Hamas attacks that have killed more than 1,400 Israelis. ‘Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,’ wrote Ryna Workman in the Student Bar Association newsletter. The message drew swift rebukes from members of New York University's community and from Winston & Strawn, a law firm where Workman had previously been employed as an intern. Winston & Strawn said in a statement on Tuesday that it had learned of "certain inflammatory comments" regarding Hamas' attack on Israel that was distributed to the NYU Student Bar Association. However, the firm didn't refer to Workman by name.  

And so when you see protesters wearing masks, as most often now do, it is not some protest garb but rather an attempt to hide their identities for future hiring opportunities. Sure, they believe the world is ending because of Climate change or that Israel is a genocidal state, but what is that compared to an extra zero on the paycheck from some toney New York law firm? 

These people are as greedy and vapid as they are irritating.  

The term “entitled” can be overused, but for the conservative sensibility, we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit, but not the guarantee, of happiness. We call Social Security and Medicare entitlements. But we are only entitled to them as far as the funds last. And we are not entitled to a long life or good health, as many equate the conception of these programs.  

And we are not entitled to a job. During interviews, we make statements and take stances to best position ourselves for selection for the role. But note the term selection. Like Bennet at The New York Times, Workman was not entitled to employment but received such at the organization's discretion. The fact that I believe the rescinding of Workman’s job was justified and Bennet’s firing was not warranted does not matter. I neither own the Times nor control Winston and Strawn.  

I have the right to be a conservative and to provide the types of beliefs to which you are now listening. But like Bennet and Workman, I do not have the right to employment or promotion. Sadly, beliefs such as small government, a robust presence abroad, American exceptionalism, and the value of religion have been warped by too many voices, and they are now seen as highly contentious. Expressing these beliefs could be deleterious to future career opportunities. But owning my beliefs and stating my goals with the Conservative Historian, I am willing to pay the future prices because nothing, including speech, is free.