“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” — George Washington

“Free speech is in trouble,” famed polling guru Nate Silver stated flatly in the headline of a recent newsletter.

I hate to disagree with a guru, but Silver’s wrong.

Well, he’s right, but not in the way he thinks he is.

Free speech has always been and always will be ugly and contradictory, has always been and probably always will be threatened.

In his newsletter, Silver expounded upon the results of the latest College Free Speech Rankings report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also known as FIRE, and College Pulse.

Those groups have annually, since 2020, surveyed thousands of college students across the country about their feelings toward free speech and ranked campuses for their openness.

Michigan Technological University in Houghton ranked as the most accepting university in the latest rankings. Harvard University ranked as the least accepting.

FIRE and College Pulse ask students a host of questions, including whether the students would tolerate on-campus speakers who espouse liberal or conservative ideas.

Unsurprisingly, the results showed conservative students more accepting of conservative speakers and liberal students more accepting of liberal speakers and each side mostly intolerant of the other. Conservative students were more open to the other side than liberal students.

Silver called that a “shift” from the legacy of university students as proponents of free speech.

I don’t think history supports that notion.

True, the Free Speech Movement started on university campuses such as Berkley, but that movement was always about progressives wanting a voice in a conservative world, not about students wanting open dialogue with all sides. Just google “1960s commencement speech protest” to see example after example of conservative/establishment speakers facing demonstrations from the progressive free speech crowd. It happened so commonly that the New York Times made it headline news when nobody protested Harvard’s 1971 commencement.

People tend to support their own freedom to speak, but often use that freedom to shut down those with whom they disagree.

Today, we malign such actions as “cancel culture,” but Americans have done so since before America existed.

In the runup to the American revolution and in the years after the colonists’ victory, American nationalists routinely harassed, scorned, and even assaulted their fellow colonists who supported the British crown. The nationalists believed in free speech enough to protect it with the first amendment to their new constitution, but not enough to allow their fellow countrymen to support the former motherland.

In 1789, John Adams, then vice president, signed the congressional resolution opening the Bill of Rights to voting among the states. Nine years later, as president, Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter, or publish” anything “malicious” about the U.S. government, a bald-faced affront to the very text of the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment.

Thankfully, when Thomas Jefferson succeeded Adams as president, the new chief executive stopped enforcing the rotten act and allowed it to expire.

But Americans in power never stopped attacking the First Amendment when they wanted to bludgeon someone holding an opposing viewpoint, especially during times of war.

Congress silenced rebel sympathizers after the Civil War and refused to let them participate in the reunited government. Congress passed a new Sedition Act in 1918 (it was repealed two years later). Post World War II, the “red scare” collusion between businesses and the federal government silenced anyone even suspected of sympathizing with communists. Shortly thereafter, Richard Nixon tried to silence leftists with the powers of his FBI and CIA. During the War on Terror, the government often abused the Patriot Act to surveil and sometimes harass Muslims.

In short, and with all apologies to Nate Silver, free speech is in no more trouble today than at any other time in our nation’s history.

It’s always been a fragile thing, because it’s human nature to want to shut up someone trying to endorse an opposing view. It happens at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It happens on college campuses. Most dangerously, it happens in the halls of Congress and in the White House.

That doesn’t make it OK. All viewpoints deserve the right to a public airing, with the best ideas winning out through civil discourse, not force or government heavy-handedness. I count peaceful — emphasis on “peaceful” — protests as civil discourse.

So to say a bunch of intolerant college kids means we must raise our guard misses the point.

We should never put our guard down.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.