Is Free Speech Really the Highest Value?
On Wednesday evening, I attended the third annual RealClearMedia Samizdat Prize Gala in Palm Beach, Florida. RealClear, whose brands include its flagship RealClearPolitics website, is best known as a content and polling aggregator and as an advocate of political and ideological diversity. Pursuant to that mission, the Samizdat Prize recognizes and honors leading champions of free speech from across the ideological spectrum. This year, the prize was given to longtime Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Irish-born comedy writer Graham Linehan, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. (Kirk’s award was, of course, posthumous.)
I am grateful to RealClear for their regular publishing of my weekly column, and appreciated the spirit of the event. Still, I was troubled by some of the rhetoric that I heard throughout the evening when it came to the issue we had all congregated to celebrate: free speech.
In his introductory remarks, my friend David DesRosiers, the publisher of RealClearMedia, criticized the Trump administration’s prosecution of former CNN personality Don Lemon for his much-covered recent storming of a Sunday church service in Minnesota, framing it as a journalism and free speech issue. Later in the evening, Dershowitz stridently defended the fundamental transgender claim that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man; when booed for suggesting as much, he said it was OK to disagree on this because we all have our free speech — as if that is the single highest and most important value upholding American society.
But is it?
Free speech certainly has some intrinsic value, as one good in the broader basket of goods constituting the common good.
The foremost goal of politics, since time immemorial, is to best pursue and realize the common good. Free speech certainly has some intrinsic value, as one good in the broader basket of goods constituting the common good. But free speech has even more value not as an intrinsic matter but as an instrument used toward other substantive ends. (RELATED: When the State Polices Speech)
In the words of the Constitution’s common good-oriented Preamble, it is the “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” (emphasis added), as opposed to liberty qua liberty, with which “We the People” are chiefly concerned. Those “Blessings” are realized, for example, by practicing biblical religion and exercising virtue. This explains why, in the First Amendment text, the two religion clauses come before the free speech clause. The actual first liberty in the Bill of Rights is religious liberty — not free speech. And we have myriad federal laws, such as the Bill Clinton-era FACE Act that Lemon seemingly violated, that reflect our collective value judgment about the supreme importance of free religious exercise. (RELATED: Who’s Afraid of the Ten Commandments?)
The free-speech-as-highest-good view also misunderstands the purpose of free speech in a free society at an even more fundamental level. (RELATED: The Measure of a Free People)
Legal systems of free speech do not exist to bestow legitimacy on the idiosyncratic musings of any individual. To borrow progressive jargon, we don’t maintain systems of free speech to protect and secure “your truth” or “my truth.” Rather, as was historically understood as far back as Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens, we maintain systems of free speech and free questioning because we believe it is helpful in pursuing The Truth. In bilateral or multilateral colloquy, it is the truth of the matter with which they are primarily interested — not in ensuring that any individual feels heard or seen. (RELATED: The Problem Isn’t That Plato Is Woke)
To return to Wednesday evening, then, Dershowitz’s rhetorical appeal to free speech to settle our scores on the transgender issue rings hollow. The professor is entitled to his opinion, but it is always the truth or falsehood of the matter that we ought to care most about. And as Seth Leibsohn and I wrote in a 2023 essay for the Claremont Institute’s American Mind journal, in the context of then-raging anti-Jewish incitement on university campuses, “When purported contributions to the public discourse exceed substantive dissident speech and become unmoored from anything remotely smacking of the pursuit of truth, they are liable to be treated as something less than fully speech qua speech for either moral or legal … purposes.”
Consider Samizdat Prize awardee Charlie Kirk himself. For many, Kirk will be remembered as a martyr for free speech — and for good reason. But as a coalition builder and leader, Kirk was also fully capable of drawing strong boundaries when appropriate. Kirk viewed abortion as murder, gender ideology as irreconcilable with reality, and antisemitism as a “mind virus.” When Kirk was murdered in September while sitting under one of his trademark “Prove Me Wrong” tents, he was indeed engaging in robust free dialogue with often-liberal student interlocutors. But the goal wasn’t to glorify his speech or their speech — it was to bring those liberals closer to the truth.
Free speech is one of the most important principles undergirding the American way of life. But we have other worthy principles as well. And our collective lodestar must always remain the pursuit of the common good and the truth.
READ MORE from Josh Hammer:
Is This the End of Transgender Hysteria?
The Rise of the New Confederacy
Who’s Afraid of the Ten Commandments?
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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