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Free Speech Isn’t About Free Speech
It’s about protecting the two most important and dangerous types of speech: Political dissent and religious freedom.
“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law,” Tesla billionaire Elon Musk tweeted on April 26. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
As the Twitterverse was quick to remind Musk, as if he doesn’t know already, Twitter is a private company not bound to follow the First Amendment the way government entities are.
According to this school of thought, hate preachers can say whatever they want under their First Amendment protections, so long as they are stripped of a popular online platform from which to express those ideas.
At the heart of this debate, often overlooked, are two of the most important rights and values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
The First Amendment wasn’t really created to protect the rights of Americans to say whatever they wanted. It was created to protect the rights of Americans to say whatever they wanted about their government and about their religious beliefs.
Political dissent is, arguably, one of the most important types of speech, if not the single most. It is also- not infrequently- incendiary, divisive, socially corrosive and inconvenient to the power elite and the status quo.