If you’re going to run a country for the benefit of a few, it’s dangerous to let people complain about it. The only way to impose unpopular policies on a population is through fear and silence. Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule. That’s why the Framers put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it.
Not that any ruling class has ever supported free speech for long. In the summer of 1917, a Socialist Party official in Philadelphia named Charles Schenck spent $150 to have fifteen thousand political pamphlets printed. The United States had entered the war in Europe that spring, and Schenck was hoping to convince draft-age men not to serve.
“When you conscript a man and compel him to go abroad and fight against his will,” the tract argued, “you violate the most sacred right of personal liberty,” as protected by the Thirteenth Amendment. “Exercise your rights of free speech.” The headline over Schenck’s essay read: “Long Live the Constitution of the United States.”
A judge promptly issued a warrant for Schenck’s arrest. Federal agents raided his office, seized his pamphlets, and carted Schenck off to jail. Charged under the recently passed Espionage Act, he was convicted on three counts and sent to federal prison.
It’s hard to believe an American citizen could be jailed for expressing a political opinion, but it was common at the time. Schenck was one of thousands of Americans prosecuted by the Wilson administration for disagreeing with its policies. Remarkably, this did not seem to strike most Americans as strange or unconstitutional. Charles Schenck did not become a folk hero. His appeal, when it finally arrived at the Supreme Court, was unanimously denied. He died in obscurity.
Only radicals cared about what had happened to Charles Schenck. The American Civil Liberties Union was formed in 1920 in part as a reaction to his case and others like it. For decades after its founding, the ACLU took an absolutist position on the First Amendment: ACLU lawyers defended free speech in all cases, and with particular vigor when that speech was unpopular or outright despised.
It sometimes seemed like there wasn’t a villain or miscreant the ACLU wasn’t eager to represent. Klansmen, communists, anti-Semites, pornographers—all got free legal counsel when the ACLU determined their right to speak was under attack.
When a Denver theater owner was arrested for screening D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (a local ordinance banned movies that incited “race hatred”), the ACLU defended him. When the U.S. Post Office burned copies of James Joyce’s unreadable modernist novel Ulysses on obscenity grounds, the ACLU took the case to court. Militant atheists got help from the ACLU. So did any number of draft dodgers, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to salute the flag.
Maybe the most reviled client the ACLU ever took was an American Nazi leader named Frank Collin. In 1977, Collin and a small group of self-styled fascists applied for a permit to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois. More than half of Skokie’s residents were Jewish; several thousand had survived Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis had chosen the venue to cause maximum outrage, and they succeeded. The town of Skokie denied the permit; an Illinois judge later ratified that decision. The ACLU took the case.
Everything about the ACLU’s position was offensive. Not only were its lawyers defending the National Socialist Party of America, but Frank Collin himself was cartoonishly repulsive, even by the standards of Nazis. He looked and dressed like Adolf Hitler, complete with a brown shirt, swastika armband, and greasy bangs. Collin later turned out to be half-Jewish himself; his own father had been held at Dachau. Not long after Skokie, Collin went to prison for molesting boys.
The ACLU represented Frank Collin all the way through the federal court system. Thousands of ACLU members quit in disgust. Many others withheld financial support. Some complained that not only did the ACLU defend Nazis, they’d sent a Jewish lawyer to do it. It was too much, even for fervent supporters of free speech.
You can see why. How could a decent person voluntarily represent Nazis? It was horrifying, but also revealing. You’d really have to believe in free speech to represent someone whose speech you despised, especially if it meant losing donors and being criticized by your neighbors.
The ACLU really believed in free speech. Their dedication succeeded. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that even publicly marching with the swastika was protected speech.
There was a time when the First Amendment qualified as secular scripture for educated Americans. They might abhor your views, but they’d die for your right to express them. That’s what they always said, and there was clearly truth in it. Freedom of speech was vital not just because it’s inherently gratifying to say what you think, but because speech is the foundational right of an open society. Free speech makes free thought possible. All other rights derive from it. The right to express your views is the final bulwark that shields the individual from the mob that disagrees with him. Without freedom of speech, we are not free.
Interpretations of the First Amendment evolved over time, and for decades the ACLU looked for vehicles to expand them. In the summer of 1964, they found an unlikely one. Clarence Brandenburg was a small-time Ku Klux Klan leader from western Ohio. In August of that year, he invited a Cincinnati TV station to film a rally consisting of about a dozen Klansmen. With cameras rolling, the group burned a cross, and Brandenburg gave a speech attacking blacks and Jews. “We’re not a revengent [sic] organization,” he said, “but if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance [sic] taken.”
Police arrested Brandenburg for his words. An Ohio court convicted him of violating a state law that banned the promotion of “crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism” for political ends, and sent him to jail. The ACLU took up his appeal.
Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Clarence Brandenburg had a constitutional right to say what he did. The justices concluded that government could not limit expression except in cases where speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and is likely to produce such action.
Convincing rioters to torch a bank was prohibited. Calling for revolution (or in Brandenburg’s words, “revengeance”) was not. In the opinion of Justice William O. Douglas, “government has no power to invade [the] sanctuary of belief and conscience.”
In practice, the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision allowed nearly every form of speech, no matter how odious. If threats from a robed Klansman ranting in front of a burning cross were constitutionally protected, all opinions are. Americans could say pretty much anything they wanted without fear of legal reprisal. Writers and intellectuals celebrated the decision as a critical victory for freedom and the rights of all Americans.
In retrospect, this was the high-water mark of American liberalism. Attitudes about speech began to change shortly thereafter, though as late as the 1990s you still heard old hippies describe the First Amendment as America’s greatest achievement. Lots of places have market economies and democratic forms of government. Only the United States has the guarantee of free expression. Almost every other country prosecutes its citizens for having unpopular views, even peaceful Canada. We don’t. It’s what sets America apart. This isn’t just a free country, it’s the freest.
Radicals cared about the First Amendment because they knew they benefited from its protections. Freedom of speech doesn’t exist for the sake of those in power. It exists to safeguard the rights of the unpopular and out of step. Martin Luther King was jailed for leading protests against segregation. Hundreds of suspected communists were blacklisted in Hollywood. People were fired from jobs for their beliefs. Radicals knew free speech mattered. When you’re in the despised minority, being able to say what you think is the only real power you have.
The opposite is also true. There’s nothing more infuriating to a ruling class than contrary opinions. They’re inconvenient and annoying. They’re evidence of an ungrateful population. They impede the progress of your programs. Above all, they constitute a threat to your authority; disagreement is the first step toward insurrection. When you’re in charge, you’ll do what you can to suppress dissent.
The modern establishment has done exactly that. Once they took over the institutions they formerly opposed, liberals abandoned their historic support for the First Amendment and became its enemies. Nowhere was the change more profound or perverse than at the University of California, Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.
In 1964, a graduate student at Berkeley named Jack Weinberg set up a table on campus and began passing out unauthorized political literature. He was promptly arrested and thrown into a patrol car. Thousands of students surrounded the vehicle and prevented it from moving for more than a day. Joan Baez arrived to sing ballads of encouragement. Many hundreds of protesters were arrested, but in the end Weinberg was released. School administrators caved to student demands for free expression. Berkeley’s campus became synonymous with unfettered speech.
It remained that way for the next fifty years.
By the winter of 2017, when writer Milo Yiannopoulos arrived to speak, Berkeley had become the mirror image of its former self. Students were still willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, but this time they protested in order to silence a speaker. Activists at Berkeley accused Yiannopoulos of being a “racist, misogynistic demagogue” who “notoriously riles up a lynch-mob mentality in his audiences” with the aim of “promoting violence.”
Jesse Arreguin, the mayor of Berkeley, agreed with the students. “Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” Arreguin tweeted hours before the scheduled start of Yiannopoulos’s event. “Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.”
In order to show their disapproval of hate and violence, Berkeley students rioted. Protesters lit fires, smashed windows, and threw rocks, committing at least one hundred thousand dollars in property damage. Six people were injured, including a woman who had come to see Yiannopoulos speak. She was pepper-sprayed in the face while giving an interview to a local news crew. Local police, ordered by the city to do nothing, refused to act. Yiannopoulos fled for his safety with security guards in an unmarked car. He never gave his speech.
A few months later, at a forum on “progressive mayorships,” Jesse Arreguin argued that people like Milo Yiannopoulos shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public. “Public safety is our top priority,” he explained. “And that actually, I believe, takes precedence over freedom of speech.”
It wasn’t just Berkeley where Yiannopoulos found himself under attack. At DePaul University in 2016, a College Republicans event featuring Yiannopoulos was shut down when students stormed the stage and seized his microphone. Campus security staff did nothing to intervene or restore order. Afterward, school administrators released a statement affirming the value of free speech, but they didn’t mean it. When the College Republicans sought to have Yiannopoulos return to campus, their request was denied on the grounds that the school couldn’t provide adequate security for Yiannopoulos’s “inflammatory speech.”
At least one school avoided a violent suppression of speech by simply refusing Yiannopoulos a platform in the first place. New York University canceled a Yiannopoulos event, claiming there were safety concerns because the proposed venue for the speech would have been physically close to the school’s Islamic Center and LGBTQ Student Center. Somehow, Yiannopoulos and his supporters were a threat to NYU’s gay community, even though Yiannopoulos is himself a gay man and has never used his speeches to promote violence.
Yiannopoulos is particularly loathed by the campus left, but he’s hardly the only speaker who’s been silenced. When author Ann Coulter tried to give a speech at Berkeley a few weeks after Yiannopoulos, university administrators cancelled her appearance on the grounds they couldn’t provide sufficient security to protect her from protesters. And then they blamed her for it.
“This is a university, not a battlefield,” chancellor Nicholas Dirks declared, as if Coulter’s insistence on speaking out loud was responsible for the rioting. The New York Times agreed, claiming without evidence that UC Berkeley had “become a target for small, militant and shadowy right-wing groups.”
Across the country, students pushed to muzzle speakers they disagreed with, as administrators, politicians, and other establishment figures cheered them on. In 2014, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, a decidedly moderate Republican, canceled a planned speech at Rutgers University due to pressure from campus activists. The same happened to Henry Kissinger at the University of Texas, and to former Democratic senator Jim Webb at the U.S. Naval Academy, his alma mater. Brown University students forced the cancellation of a speech by former New York City Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly simply because he supported the policy of stop-and-frisk. Any deviation from orthodoxy was considered grounds for silencing.
At Middlebury College in Vermont, hundreds of angry students shut down an appearance by social scientist Charles Murray, screaming at him until he gave up trying to speak. As Murray fled the scene, protesters assaulted the faculty member escorting him, putting her in the hospital with a concussion.
The justification for attacks like this, ironically, was that certain ideas are so dangerous, they constitute violence and must therefore be squelched by force. Punching a speaker you disagree with isn’t assault; it’s self-defense. To many student activists, sticks and stones may break bones, but words can be lethal, and require a violent first strike.
An essay in the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, succinctly summed up the new orthodoxy: The “dedication to complete freedom of speech, regardless of whether or not the speech is harassment, [is] alarming and indicative of a larger, troubling trend in American society.”
The First Amendment is “alarming”? Political differences are a crime? Students are growing up to believe that there is no longer such a thing as legitimate political debate. Free speech is a meaningless concept in a world with only one permissible set of political views; if the battle is between Good and Evil, only a fool would give Evil equal time. No wonder students at DePaul called for “hate crime” charges against classmates who used sidewalk chalk to express support for Donald Trump.
This backlash against free expression is hardly limited to public speakers. People’s private remarks are being increasingly policed as well. At the University of Texas at San Antonio, a public school, philosophy grad student Alfred MacDonald was summoned to his department chair’s office over remarks he had made to a fellow student. The student mentioned that she was engaged to a Muslim man. MacDonald, who is bisexual, had replied by saying he had a low opinion of Islam, since in ten Muslim-majority countries, his sexual orientation could get him put to death.
For the offense of honestly stating his views, MacDonald was threatened with punishment by department head Eve Browning.
“We have not designed our program to tolerate these behaviors,” Browning said, according to a secret recording made by MacDonald. “We’re not going to let you damage the program.”
When MacDonald refused to apologize for expressing his opinion, Browning threatened to send him before something called the Behavior Intervention Team, and warned he could be expelled. Instead, MacDonald transferred to a new school. All that simply because MacDonald said something completely true: in many Islamic countries, his lifestyle would get him executed. But that didn’t matter. MacDonald violated the sacred creed of multiculturalism. Free speech didn’t stand a chance.
MacDonald’s experience will grow more and more common as millennials age and take positions of leadership. A large and growing proportion of Americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech. According to a Pew survey, 40 percent of millennials think the government should have the power to ban statements offensive to minority groups. A 2017 Cato Institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
A growing percentage of the country endorses not only restrictions on the First Amendment, but also the use of extralegal violence in the face of offensive ideas. In the hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, white supremacist leader Richard Spencer was punched in the face by a stranger without provocation. The incident sparked a wave of debate, from the New York Times to Twitter, about whether it was okay to “punch a Nazi.” One survey found that the majority of people who described themselves as “strong liberals” approved.
There isn’t much scholarly disagreement about what the text of the First Amendment says about free expression. The words are unambiguous: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The debate is over what the term “speech” means.
In the 1980s, a group of law professors invented an extraconstitutional category known as “hate speech,” which they said fell outside the protections of the First Amendment. It’s not clear how they arrived at this. The Constitution says nothing about hate speech. The Supreme Court has never ruled on it. Yet on many campuses, hate speech was treated as a valid legal term with a precise and objective meaning. Symposia were held on it. Professors taught sober-sounding classes on it. Students for the most part accepted the existence of hate speech uncritically.
So did the rest of the establishment. In 2017, Howard Dean, who was not only governor of Vermont but at one point even a presidential front-runner, announced on Twitter, “Hate Speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Dean is not known for his intellectual powers, so it’s possible he believed this.
But what accounts for CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who is a lawyer, making an identical claim? Cuomo was once the chief law and justice correspondent for ABC News. During the debate over Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley, he tweeted this: “hate speech is excluded from protection. Don’t just say you love the constitution . . . read it.”
By the time Trump was elected, even the ACLU had given up on unfettered speech. After the group defended the right of conservative activists to rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the summer of 2017, some of its own staffers revolted. More than two hundred ACLU employees signed a letter complaining that the group’s “broader mission” was being undermined by a “rigid stance” on free speech. The national ACLU caved, ending almost one hundred years of First Amendment absolutism.
When you sincerely believe you possess the truth, all disagreement looks like apostasy. For the greater good, it must be silenced. It’s distressing when academics take this view. It’s terrifying when prosecutors do.
In 2015, a Wisconsin district attorney named John Chisholm launched an investigation into conservative activists who helped Governor Scott Walker win election. Though no actual crime had been committed, Chisholm was clearly offended that anyone would aid the Walker campaign. He and a prosecutor named Francis Schmitz ordered police to raid activists’ homes, denied them access to counsel, and imposed orders that prevented them from telling anyone about what was going on. One target described the terror she felt during a predawn police raid as cops flooded into her house and seized her family’s computers and cell phones. She never learned what crime she was alleged to have committed.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ultimately intervened. The justices concluded that prosecutors had “disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right.” Chisholm’s contempt for the First Amendment, the court said, “assure[d] that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished.”
The court particularly excoriated Chisholm for simply inventing new legal doctrines to suit his predetermined political purposes.
“It is utterly clear that the prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing,” the decision said.
In California, the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed a complaint against the Center for Medical Progress, a group of anti-abortion activists, accusing them of illegally recording their conversations with clinic operators without consent. For this, Becerra charged the organization with fifteen felonies, a response so disproportionate that even the Los Angeles Times couldn’t find precedent for it. Tellingly, Becerra did not charge NBC for secretly recording Donald Trump on what became the now-famous Access Hollywood tape.
In 2015, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse announced he had uncovered a “massive and sophisticated campaign” designed to mislead Americans about climate change. Rather than rebut the “misinformation” with his own views, Whitehouse called for prosecution. Whitehouse demanded that oil companies, and their trade associations, face a federal suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the same law used to take down the mob. In Whitehouse’s view, disagreement with him on climate change wasn’t grounds for debate, but for prosecution.
Whitehouse wasn’t alone. In 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Congress that the possibility of suing “climate deniers” had “been discussed” within the Justice Department. The department weighed the idea seriously enough to ask the FBI if a RICO case could be made.
At the state level, seventeen attorneys general teamed up to pursue similar prosecutions of heretics. California’s Kamala Harris, now the state’s junior U.S. senator, launched an investigation into ExxonMobil for taking a position contrary to her own on climate change. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Al Gore all endorsed it.
The prosecutions weren’t happening fast enough for one California state senator, who introduced SB-1161, the “California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016.” The bill would have made it illegal for citizens to disseminate “scientifically inaccurate or misleading information” about climate change. Considering that scientific accuracy is always a moving target, especially on a topic as complex as climate, this amounts to the criminalization of differences of opinion.
But nowhere is speech more threatened than in Silicon Valley. In the spring of 2014, Brendan Eich became CEO of Mozilla Firefox, a company he helped found. Ten days later, he was forced to resign. Bloggers had discovered that six years earlier, Eich had donated money to Proposition 8, a referendum that banned gay marriage in California.
Proposition 8 had passed by a wide margin. Fully 70 percent of California’s black population supported it. The year it became law, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama publicly opposed gay marriage. In 2008, Eich’s position was hardly a fringe view.
None of that mattered. Eich was pushed out of his company for violating a never-specified but universally understood set of rules about what people are allowed to believe in Silicon Valley. The company marked Eich’s departure with a press release celebrating Mozilla’s culture of “diversity and inclusiveness.” In a flourish that even by tech-company standards lacked self-awareness, Mozilla went on to boast that its “culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public.”
In 2016, investor Peter Thiel was one of the rare Silicon Valley executives willing to donate to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Fellow tech investors immediately demanded that Thiel lose his seat on the board of Facebook, on the grounds that supporting Trump was tantamount to committing violence. “Giving more power to someone whose ascension and behavior strike fear into so many people is unacceptable,” explained Ellen Pao, herself the former head of the popular discussion site Reddit. Trump’s views, Pao wrote, “are more than just political speech; fueled by hate and encouraging violence, they make each of us feel unsafe.”
If tech executives will say things like this in public, it’s fair to wonder how their political views affect the products they sell. It’s worth worrying about. Fewer than half a dozen technology companies have an effective monopoly on the bulk of information Americans consume. What if Silicon Valley decided to let only one side speak?
The social media giant Twitter barely hides its contempt for free speech, regularly banning or locking the accounts of users for “hateful conduct,” a term it keeps usefully subjective. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned by Twitter in the summer of 2016. Within a week of Donald Trump’s election victory, the site carried out a purge of accounts associated with the “alt right,” even if they had broken no rules. Political operative and Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone was suspended in fall 2017 for criticizing CNN personalities. Twitter awarded a verification, the blue check that signifies an account is legitimate, to the Muslim Brotherhood before it gave one to the conservative site Breitbart.
No tech company clamped down on speech more aggressively than Google, the most powerful of all. In August 2017, a Google software engineer named James Damore wrote a memo assessing the company’s political culture. It could have described any large Silicon Valley company.
“At Google,” wrote Damore, “we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.”
Over ten pages, Damore examined those prejudices in some detail. Notable among them is the belief that bigotry is the main impediment to professional advancement. There are fewer female engineers than male engineers, liberals believe, because men are biased against women. Damore suspected that wasn’t the whole story.
“We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he wrote. “On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed.”
Damore, a former childhood chess prodigy with a graduate degree in biology from Harvard, was precise and nonpolemical in his assertions. In parts, he seemed nearly apologetic. “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,” he wrote, “and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.”
Damore wrote the memo on a flight to China, as a way of organizing his thoughts. He never intended it to be shared beyond a circle of friends. Within a short time, the paper leaked to a popular tech blog. A political explosion followed.
Danielle Brown, Google’s vice president of diversity, released a statement charging Damore with having “incorrect assumptions about gender.” Brown didn’t explain what those assumptions were, or how they were incorrect. She didn’t need to. Nobody in the press asked. Google’s CEO flew home from vacation in Europe to respond to the crisis.
Many of Damore’s fellow employees, meanwhile, howled for his dismissal. Former Google executive Yonatan Zunger wrote an op-ed saying Damore should be “escorted from the building by security and told that your personal items will be mailed to you.” Others fantasized on social media about assaulting Damore.
Nearly all news organizations described the essay as an “anti-diversity memo,” when in fact Damore had argued strenuously that Google’s culture needed more diversity. Vox called it a “sexist screed,” as though Damore’s essay were a deranged rant and not a carefully reasoned piece.
Within days, Damore had been fired by the company. In perhaps the most Orwellian statement written since Orwell himself finished 1984, Google explained the decision this way: “Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.”
In order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, Google fired James Damore. For the crime of sharing his alternative views. At no point did the company rebut any of the points Damore made. The fact that he made them was enough. Damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions.
The establishment applauded. Many pointed out that the First Amendment didn’t apply to Damore, because Google isn’t a government entity. This is a murkier area than it appears.
Government regulates all sorts of speech in the private sector. Employers can’t fire workers for expressing their religious views, for example. In some states, such as California and New York, that protection extends to political beliefs. Whether Damore’s firing was constitutional awaits clarification from the courts.
But what happened to James Damore is more than a legal matter. It raises the most basic civic question of all: what kind of society do we want to live in?
Among intellectuals, the answer used to be obvious and widely agreed upon: the goal is a free society. You knew what that meant because all free societies share the same features: They tolerate dissent. They prize reason and encourage civility. They discourage witch hunts and groupthink. They try to ensure that people aren’t punished for saying what they think. They recognize that truth is always a defense.
Every nation tries to influence how its citizens behave, but a free society never presumes to control what people believe. That’s for the individual alone to decide.
For a moment in time, the taste-making class in America claimed to believe all of this, and the country was a better place for it. The majority of journalists and intellectuals in 1975 would never have accepted the lame excuse that silencing, firing, and ruining people for holding an opinion was fine, as long as it wasn’t specifically the government doing it. They would have declared that a free country depends above all on free minds. An open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber. They would have spoken, rallied, and sued on behalf of James Damore, Brendan Eich, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
But now, members of the same class run Google, UC Berkeley, and virtually every other powerful institution in America. Suddenly free speech looks a lot more like a threat than a virtue.
If you’re wondering why prominent media figures no longer seem curious about what government agencies might be doing to Americans without their knowledge, this is the answer. For generations, journalists believed their job was to hold the powerful accountable. This very much included unelected bureaucrats committing unseen sins in the hidden recesses of the federal government. In 1975, the media raised to prominence an obscure U.S. senator from Idaho named Frank Church, after he led investigations into the activities of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other mystery-shrouded government agencies. Church suspected the government was up to something shady. He was right.
The CIA, it turned out, had engaged in multiple assassination plots against foreign leaders, all without congressional approval or oversight. The FBI, meanwhile, seemed to have virtually every prominent person in America under surveillance, sometimes for purely political reasons. The bureau bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms, discovered he was an enthusiastic adulterer, and then tried to blackmail him with the information. At one point, agents sent King an unsigned letter suggesting he commit suicide.
Federal agencies opened private mail without a warrant and secretly inspected the contents. The NSA read hundreds of thousands of telegrams sent into and out of the United States. Under the pretext of fighting the Cold War, federal bureaucrats spied extensively on their fellow citizens, mostly because they could.
Reporters were outraged. Church’s hearings forced a series of much-needed reforms, including the creation of congressional committees to oversee the intelligence agencies, and the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to regulate domestic spying. These were heralded as meaningful achievements, bulwarks against the abuse of government power.
The Church hearings are all but forgotten today, along with the attitudes that animated them. Democrats now compete with Republicans to see who can express more admiration for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They are joined in that by mainstream journalists.
Television news anchors spent the first months of the Trump administration sneering at the idea that government agencies might have spied on Trump advisors during the presidential campaign. Anyone who suggested it actually happened was dismissed as unstable, or a hack.
When it emerged that the Obama Justice Department had indeed spied on the Trump campaign, the posture of most in the press didn’t change. CNN legal correspondent Jeff Toobin dismissed questions about the spying as “lunatic conspiracy theories.” Jill Abramson, the former top editor at the New York Times, suggested that criticism of the Justice Department was near treasonous. “Trump’s attack on the FBI is an attack on the US constitution itself,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, the TV networks larded their evening lineups with retired government officials eager to defend their agencies, not to mention themselves. MSNBC hired former CIA director John Brennan as a contributor. Brennan was on the air frequently, but anchors refrained from asking about his role in the agency’s targeted killing of Americans, or in the cover-up of the CIA’s torture program.
Not to be outdone, CNN hired retired director of national intelligence James Clapper. Clapper was most famous for lying in testimony to Congress in 2013. “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Senator Ron Wyden asked. “No,” Clapper replied. “Not wittingly.”
A few months later, Edward Snowden leaked internal NSA documents that showed the government had scooped up the phone records of more than 100 million Americans without their knowledge or consent. Clapper had lied. Yet he was almost never asked about this on CNN. Instead Clapper was allowed to use his remaining moral authority to bat down further questions about government spying.
Journalists had become handmaidens to power. Most of them despised Donald Trump and his party. A survey during the Obama administration found not a single Republican in the White House press corps. But the main reason the press lost interest in holding the permanent government accountable is that they had more in common with its members than with the rest of the country. They share the same life experiences and cultural assumptions as the people they cover.
The people in power are the neighbors and former classmates of the members of the press. On the most basic level the two groups have become indistinguishable.