Banning, repressing and shutting down speech has become a bipartisan thing

• Recently at Stanford Law School, student protesters shouted over a Trump-appointed federal judge and disrupted the speech he had been invited by students to give.
• Taking the podium, she criticized the judge, in part because he was being hostile toward the student protesters.
• Students then protested the dean’s apology, claiming that “counter speech is free speech.” But coordinated efforts to shut down someone’s speech through disruption or threat of violence, sometimes called “the heckler’s veto,” is not protected free speech.
• The theory behind the First Amendment and the exercise of free speech is that speech, unlike physical conduct or force, should be countered with other speech.

Banning, repressing and shutting down

• Some government officials are trying to make it easier to remove books from public libraries, too.
• The right, in control of certain state governments, has increasingly attempted to use legislative power to ban certain speech.
• The ban likely violates the First Amendment because it does not apply only to sexually explicit speech.

Not just conservatives

• Although many of the policies limiting what students read, see or hear come from conservatives, in some places high school administrators also censor or punish conservative speech, such as forcing students to take off sweatshirts that bear a slogan critical of President Joe Biden.
• Besides the specific examples of speech repression, a documented shift in public attitudes about free speech is happening that is more diffuse, but highly consequential for democracy.
• Younger progressives seem eager to use the heckler’s veto to intimidate or block people from speaking.

Undermining the search for truth

• At many universities, including my own, professors have to demonstrate – sometimes even in their scholarship – a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Many state governments have responded to these progressive initiatives by enacting legislation that is even more censorious and potentially unconstitutional.
• In my view, these efforts to restrict what people can see, say or read undermine healthy discussions and the search for truth.

Room for agreement

• Yet historically, free speech has been one area that both the right and the left have found a unifying, nonpartisan principle.
• First Amendment cases at the Supreme Court often get decided in ways that cut across partisan lines, even by courts that are quite politically divided.
• Attempts by both the left and the right to impose orthodoxy by stifling views leads ultimately to intolerance and authoritarianism.