The First Amendment and its Baggage

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, who built his career decrying the evils of liberal universities, despite dropping out of online Bible college, saw his shadow this week. When Facebook’s fake third-party arbiters recommended extending the former President’s ban at least six more months, Kirk went on Twitter demanding: “The US Supreme Court should overturn the Facebook’s ‘Oversight Board’s’ ‘ruling’ which upholds the outlawing of the 45th President of the United States from social media.”

Ignore, temporarily, that SCOTUS has no authority here, or that Kirk represents the party which claims that whatever large corporations want must perforce be good, unless it’s not. More important, for my money: Kirk’s statement reflects an unspoken assumption about politics. As rhetorician Craig Rood writes about the Second Amendment, the constitutional prerogative has accumulated baggage that goes beyond the written text. The same applies to the First Amendment.

The literal First Amendment runs only 45 words long, enumerating five freedoms, and we’ve argued about those freedoms for 232 years now. What does it mean to neither respect nor abridge religion? The summer of 2020 saw unprecedented protests which challenged American ideas of peaceable assembly or right to petition. The First Amendment, like the Second, appears brief and settled on paper, but it remains altogether contentious.

What, therefore, does “freedom of speech” mean, constitutionally? By claiming SCOTUS should intervene in Facebook’s internal workings, Charlie Kirk apparently believes it means anybody has a God-given right to say anything they want, on anybody’s platform. Kirk doesn’t believe this, certainly; a member of Former Guy’s “1776 Commission,” a willful effort to exclude certain ideas from America’s public schools. He literally levied government authority to silence opinions he disliked.

We’ve seen this before. PragerU, the conservative vlogger channel, repeatedly claims Twitter, YouTube, and other media have “censored” them, claims they make on Twitter and YouTube. They demand privately owned platforms give them unlimited oxygen, because apparently their hundreds of thousands of followers have modest limits. This, to them, constitutes an imposition upon free speech. And they use the platforms they’ve supposedly been banned from to publicize this claim.

Dennis Prager

Kirk and Prager share an unstated premise, beyond their First Amendment interpretation. They share a definition of “rights” not as something inalienably endowed by our Creator, as Thomas Jefferson famously wrote. To them, rights are something demanded. This isn’t new; the concept of “rights” comes from the British monarch’s official motto: “Dieu et mon droit,” God and my right. “Right” here means one’s right hand, that is, one’s sword hand.

Conservative figureheads yearn for a time when monarchs and aristocrats achieved their rights through violence. That’s why hard-right state legislatures have passed, or are considering, laws that decriminalize hitting protesters with cars. And don’t pretend leftists don’t share this belief. They block traffic, permitting the car assassination behavior, because it works. As Dr. King said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Left-wing interpretations of the First Amendment traditionally assume rights simply exist, and when suppressed by authoritarian lawmakers, remain dormant, like tulips in winter. Right-wing interpretations assume rights must be defended, even without serious material challenges; that’s why they scream bloody murder when leftists suggest, timidly or aggressively, that police shouldn’t kill citizens. They’re working from a script in which rights are demanded violently, and assume we are too.

Unfortunately, that’s what happened on January 6th. In a complete surrender to Nietzschean egoism, an angry minority decided they had prerogative to enforce their will upon others, despite losing the election. To the mindset underlying Former Guy’s political movement, a movement which has reset the Republican Party baseline, the majority’s will only matters to the extent that the majority forcefully asserts it. Everything else is immaterial.

When Charlie Kirk insists Facebook has an obligation to platform Former Guy, or Dennis Prager uses Twitter and YouTube to claim he’s censored on Twitter and YouTube, outsiders sense a contradiction. Aren’t they, we ask, the party that believes private property is absolute? Aren’t they the party that believes government intrusion is socialism, and whimpers publicly about judicial overreach? How dare they involve SCOTUS to change corporate policy?

They see no such inconsistency. Private property, government authority, free speech, civil rights: these words have meaning, to modern conservatism, to the extent that anyone asserts them forcefully. Kirk and Prager don't think we should nationalize Facebook, Twitter, and Google. And they don’t think cherry-picking school curricula from the Oval Office is restrictive. To them, real freedom only comes after a bloody fight.