by Paul Dame
As Elon Musk prepared to interview an American presidential candidate Monday afternoon, an EU regulator sent a threatening letter that seemed intended to chill such free speech. It shocked me to see how far Europe has fallen from traditional Western values, and where America is headed if we don’t get back on track.
There has been so much news happening on this side of the pond over the past year that most Americans have barely registered the fact that the EU has been engaged in a systematic erasure of what used to be known as basic human rights. More specifically, Musk’s social media platform X has been the target of new regulations across Europe against “harmful” content.
America is unique in its categorical protection of free speech in our First Amendment. It’s so obvious, reading the Bill of Rights, that our Constitution and its protections were crafted by men who had truly suffered painful and unscrupulously unfair treatment from an overbearing government. The scars had not yet healed when they laid out the protections of the Bill of Rights, and time has proven the founders wise for clearly and specifically laying out rights the citizens have that their government does not. Remember, these were men who had to publish literature under false names, who were unable to assemble freely in some places, and who had suffered attempts to have their firearms or ammunition separated from them.
When France followed us into revolution, it seemed as if most of Western Europe began to embrace many of these same principles and values that Americans still hold dear. American values became Western values, and for centuries, liberty was the environment under which innovation and progress thrived. And although few Western countries have the highly robust legal protections of free speech like Americans do, there was at least a moral or cultural appreciation for freedom of expression.
Now we find ourselves in a place where our European allies are trying to intimidate an American from talking about American political ideas on a social media platform owned by an American company. It’s bad enough that the EU thinks it is appropriate to stick its nose into the business of two Americans engaged in political activity, but to go further and threaten sanctions in the EU marketplace for things that are not only permitted in America but outright protected an erosion from certain parts of the west.
I can’t help but think that someday my children or grandchildren will look back at this time in history the same way I look back today at the Sedition Acts of 1798. It seems inconceivable that the men who were alive for the adoption of the Bill of Rights and the protection of free speech were some of the same men who, just a decade or two later, tried to prohibit anyone from printing, uttering, or publishing “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. With 200 years of hindsight, it seems so clear to us now that those actions were so contradictory to the free speech values we have inherited today.
It’s especially ironic because it has been the Left in the West who, for years, have tried to convince society that there is no such thing as objective truth. There is only “your truth” or “my truth.” Yet those same people seem to become precisely objective when it comes to their political enemies saying almost anything they disagree with.
It is time for America to stand firm once again for the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression—especially when that expression is in peaceful opposition to government. Democracy cannot function properly if we, the people, are not permitted to give critical feedback to our leaders about what is working and what is not. This means that we will have to defend the right of some people to say things that are wrong. While the Left addresses that by trying to censor speech, the Right needs to address it by providing more free speech, just from an alternative perspective.
The old institutions that protected this have lost the plot. Forty years ago, the ACLU was at the forefront of literally defending Nazis and pornographers when no one else wanted to. And they were right to do so because free speech isn’t just about the speech we like, and if it is only about the speech that the government likes—then it’s completely useless. Republicans have an opportunity to be champions of free speech. The Left has abandoned this value. It used to be a liberal thing to defend free speech. And depending on your use of the word “liberal,” it still might be. But the Democrats are not liberal anymore—not in that sense. Rather than being liberal, they are better described as Left. They do not want to see a healthy environment for all kinds of free speech. They want to see a highly regulated environment where only certain kinds of acceptable speech are permitted. In some cases, not only is the content being restricted, but also the race, ethnicity, gender, or economic status of the speaker is being discouraged, if not outright prohibited. If Democrats have dropped the mantle in this country, Republicans need to pick it up. And if the Western democracies are dropping the mantle in the world, then it’s up to Americans to pick it up and defend the value across the globe.
The author is an Essex Junction resident and chair of the Vermont Republican Party.