Conservatives Also Have a Responsibility to Free Speech

Conservatives are as much of a threat to free speech as radical progressives.

When alt-right agitator Jason Kessler took to the stage outside the city hall in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month, he made reference to a political tradition born centuries ago in that very city.

That tradition—freedom of speech—gained official legal status in the United States with the drafting and passing of the First Amendment by Charlottesville native James Madison in 1789. The Amendment, which stipulates, among other things, that the federal government is disallowed from making law “abridging the freedom of speech,” has a lengthy record of defending controversial groups in the country.

Many, including figures on the libertarian right, have come to use the Amendment and its repercussions as a sort of rallying cry in a struggle against the left — especially in the wake of violence at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that Kessler organized. Kessler himself, after being heckled and booed off stage during his speech at the Charlottesville city hall, later tweeted in a moment of bathos, “The First Amendment is finished it seems.”

It’s difficult to disagree that some progressives and self-styled liberals have staged challenges to the unlimited freedom of speech — examples are becoming uncomfortably plentiful. The sheer scale of violence from left-leaning students at the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year in response to conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s campus speaking gig alone is enough to cast aspersions on the left’s attempts to limit hateful speech.