Fire in the Belly: A Defense of Free Speech

From the beginning of history, our ancestors have practiced the art of storytelling, wrapped in blackness as they huddled around the flickering fire, telling the legends of their people in the warm, crackling glow, passing on the best of themselves. This has always been the way, for we are storytellers.

Is it any wonder then that we would seek to protect the very instrument of our being, or that throughout history societies have celebrated and defended our freedom of speech?

In the 5th century BC, the practice of speaking freely or parrhesia was a necessary aspect of Athenian democracy, practiced in both the assembly and the agora, where citizens spoke openly—provided they were not women or slaves. Or think of the Roman Republic, which could not have existed had its senators been unable to voice critical concerns. And of course, the Enlightenment itself was nothing if not a flowering of ideas the sum total of which was not worth a single breath had it not been shared.

Freedom of speech is the most precious of all liberties, the one by which we defend all others, the horn we sound when another freedom is in peril, the shield we raise against the arrows of deception, and the spear we send into the ranks of oppression.

The freedom to speak one’s mind is not merely the freedom to mouth an opinion but to think out loud and to engage with others who are thinking out loud and, by engaging, to test and unravel the fallacies within their formulations as you ought to hope they will unravel the fallacies within yours.

After millennia at each other’s throats, we have hammered out that our most basic practice and the bedrock of society—talking to one another as though round a fire—is the best foundation of human interaction for any society.

Ours is a democracy, and the founders of our noble nation conceptualized it to be a republic in which power is vested in the people, who rule through freely elected representatives with the protection of free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and it’s the first for a reason.

The First Amendment

In the 1937 case Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, the United States Supreme Court ruled against AP after it fired a New York office employee by the name of Morris Watson over his union activities with the American Newspaper Guild. In his dissenting opinion, George Sutherland wrote that the freedom of the press is not just about the right to publish but also includes the right to make employment decisions.

This is not how freedom of the press has been understood in our country, nor should it be, but Sutherland was right about two things.

First, he understood that there is more to a law than the ink on parchment. There is also the reason the law was set down, the spirit of the thing.

This is the old debate over the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, what it literally says on paper and what it was intended to achieve. In the history of constitutional interpretation, those who favor a spirit-based interpretation are said to believe in a Living Constitution, a viewpoint known as judicial pragmatism, which says that the document can be amended and improved as the needs of a society evolve. Those who hold this view are known as organists, and one of the most famous organists alive today is Bruce Ackerman, an American legal scholar and Sterling professor at Yale Law School who was named a top global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine in 2010.

The second thing Sutherland got right was the idea that freedoms fade fast and must be pushed and pushed forward, else they wither. As he wrote in his dissenting opinion:

Do the people of this land—in the providence of God, favored, as they sometimes boast, above all others in the plenitude of their liberties—desire to preserve those so carefully protected by the First Amendment … If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.

The central tenet of American philosophy is the belief in individual liberty as reflected in the Bill of Rights with its protections for speech, religion, and the press—but how can we ever have freedom of faith or of the press, rule of law or equality, or any other value we might wish to raise high without having the principle of free speech with which to address when they’ve been permitted to sink low?

Our modest republic was founded in the fire of decolonial revolution and the tradition of legal principles in which our nation was forged was not invented on our native soils, in fact we apprenticed something that had been mastered by the very people who we threw off as overlords, we learned to speak the language of liberty by listening to the same tribe that enslaved half the world.

I mean of course the English, particularly the English philosopher John Locke with his theory of natural rights, outlined in “Two Treatises of Government,” in which he argued that individuals have an inherent right to life, liberty, and property—I know that sounds familiar—and his belief that that the purpose of government is not to rule over people but to protect their rights because as he saw it, governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, a consent given by means of free speech.

Therefore freedom of speech is the instrument by which government obtains and maintains its legitimacy, the instrument by which the public broadcasts its oppression and fights back, it is the primary reason that the government exists and this is why the framers of the United States Constitution made the First Amendment one preventing the government from abrogating this particular freedom, though Americans often confuse the implications.

We commonly hear that the First Amendment only applies to government action, but this is because of the constitutional focus on restraining governing power. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, was created to protect citizens from abuses of power by the government, which was the focus of concern at the time in order to prevent the kind of tyranny that the American colonists experienced under British rule.

The oldest commercial corporation in the world is said to be the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, which obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347. But over 400 years later in 1776, the world had not yet been overrun by corporate power and the main force of oppression remained tyrannical governments.

But with the incorporation doctrine established through the Fourteenth Amendment and certain Supreme Court rulings, the First Amendment was soon extended to include state and local governments.

This is in keeping with the philosophical bedrock of our nation’s founding ideals as derived from a handful of French philosophers—namely Montesquieu and his idea of the separation of powers, Voltaire with his prodigious writing on civil liberties, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who famously argued in The Social Contract that legitimate political authority lies with the people.

The American founders, particularly Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, were well-read in these Enlightenment philosophies and quite obviously incorporated them into the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and other foundational documents of the United States.

As others have said before me, ours is perhaps the first nation ever to be founded upon a set of philosophical principles rather than upon a religion, an ethnic identity, or the expansion of imperial power.

It is a shame then to think that we are voluntarily relinquishing ourselves of these noble ideals to instead slide back to thinking of ourselves more in terms of individual identity—race, religion, sexuality, and gender.

The Wisdom of the Crowd

I received my master’s degree with a specialization in human behavior, and at one time I had wanted to become either a professor of human behavior or perhaps a couples counselor. Although I did not go down that path, I have spent the decades since studying couples therapy, and one of the things that you learn is that a relationship isn’t just a comfort blanket, or a promise of company at the end of your road home. You are a pilot in a ship on uncharted seas with waters that run sunny and smooth or dark and stormy with nary a moment’s warning, and your partner, if you’ve a good one, is co-captain.

My father was a pilot. He was in the Air Force and then entered the airline industry, and he could tell you that a co-pilot is never there to take orders and do as told, but to reinforce, strengthen, and support, and that is not an obedient role. In fact, if the jet is veering toward a mountain ridge, it could even be the co-pilot’s duty to challenge authority. This is the beauty of a good relationship. You have the horsepower of two brains harnessed together, each one acutely aware of the weaknesses of the other, solving problems in tandem.

Now imagine this extrapolated out to the societal level. That’s the genius of crowdsourcing. It was Aristotle who first wrote about the “wisdom of the crowd” in his work Politics, from the Greek word polis or city. Politics were the things that concern the city, and for Aristotle, the health of the city depended of a kind of emergent intelligence, the opposite of the phenomenon of mob rule, whereby people in groups become smarter than alone. Or as he put it:

It is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost.

A famous example took place at a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, England, when 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. Statistician Francis Galton noticed that the median guess of 1,207 pounds was within 1% of the actual weight. That is the wisdom of the crowd, and that is one of the reasons that freedom of speech is so dear.

Freedom of speech is often regarded as a relatively new principle, but in fact it is more ancient than we know, more common than we think, and more precious than we realize.

The First Citizen of Athens

In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, we learn that at the end of each year of the war, which lasted from 431 to 404 BC, there was a public funeral for the war dead, which included the cremation of the fallen followed by a funeral procession with 11 cypress coffins, one for each Athenian tribe as well as an extra one, left empty, for the missing. The coffins were buried at a public grave in the town of Kerameikos, which was famous for the clay mud deposited on its shores by the Eridanos River. The name of the town is therefore where we get the word “ceramic.” As part of the funeral ceremony, each year the state selected a prominent Athenian citizen to deliver a speech, and after the first year of the war, the state chose Pericles to speak.

Thucydides called Pericles “the first citizen of Athens,” for it was he who had turned the Delian League into an Athenian empire and led his countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War, a period now known as the “Age of Pericles.” It was he who promoted the arts and literature, giving Athens the reputation of being the cultural center of Ancient Greece. It was also he who began the construction of most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon. Finally, it was he who fostered Athenian democracy. Truly then, much of what we think of when we think of the glories of Ancient Greece can be traced to this one man.

And after the first year of war against the Spartans, Pericles delivered his speech for the dead, but instead of speaking directly about the fallen soldiers, he chose to honor the fallen by speaking on the matter for which they had given their lives, namely Athens itself. And so what did the father of Athens and Athenian democracy have to say in this moment of great urgency, what words did he send over the crowd to rouse their spirit?

To this day, Pericles’s Funeral Oration is a classic not just in democratic philosophy but in the art of rhetoric. As a former university lecturer of logic, debate, and public speaking, this speech was one that I often used to begin the semester. And if you think about it, this funeral oration was really more a eulogy for Athens than for its war dead, therefore in it, Pericles glorifies that which made Athens great, so that if it succeeds in battle then its people will know what for and even if it falls to Sparta, every citizen will know it was worth the fight.

What could this great value possibly be? Basically, freedom of speech. Pericles opens with a tribute to the ancestors:

We have received from them a free state. But if they were worthy of praise, still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire.

In other words, glory to the ones who gave us a nation of freedoms, but greater glory still to the ones who expanded those freedoms, and shame on those who have reduced them. He goes on:

We are lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action.

I have dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show you that we are contending for a higher prize than those who enjoy none of these privileges, and to establish by manifest proof the merit of these men whom I am now commemorating.

We are fighting for something greater than the goal of the unfree, because the goal of the unfree is not freedom, but to makes others unfree. This was his point, and it rings true still today. He then says:

For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.

In other words, be willing to kill to keep your people free.

So Pericles begins by praising the custom of the public funeral, but criticizes the practice of including a speech because the honor of the dead should “not be imperilled in the mouth of a single individual,” adding that no speaker can speak too highly of the dead to satisfy their loved ones, yet if one speaks too highly, some will suspect exaggeration.

He also mentions how Athens became an empire, but he does not dwell on the violence that led to the present, rather he says:

That part of our history which tells of the military achievements which gave us our several possessions, or of the ready valour with which either we or our fathers stemmed the tide of Hellenic or foreign aggression, is a theme too familiar to my hearers for me to dwell upon, and I shall therefore pass it by.

Instead he talks about Athenian freedom, the way in which it is protected by the Athenian form of government and the national habits that support those freedoms.

If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences. The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes.

In other words, we as good citizens must extend the law into social life, and not be intolerant of our fellow Athenians. By the way, that phrase above is where we get the expression equal justice under law. He adds:

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality.

If you listen to debates on immigration, you will quickly notice that we are still struggling to maintain our liberality while minimizing how much any enemy may profit from it. We want to let people in, but not the wrong kind of people. We want to be progressive, yet we see that China, Russia, Iran, and Hamas clearly profit from this impulse. It is striking here to note that 2,500 years ago, Pericles so eloquently extolled the importance of open debate and tolerating opinions you do not like.

In Lincoln at Gettysburg, for which the great Catholic intellectual Garry Wills won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1993, we learn that the Gettysburg Address was based on the funeral oration of the first citizen of Athens, Pericles. This was also observed by Louis Warren in his 1946 book Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: An Evaluation.

President Abraham Lincoln delivered his speech on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, and like Pericles, he delivered a tribute to the fallen at a time when the nation was sunk in war, in this case the American Civil War. Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, now the Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four and a half month before, Union armies had defeated Confederate forces in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War’s deadliest battle. Lincoln’s speech remains one of the greatest in American history:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Both Pericles and Lincoln began their speeches by tipping their hats to the ancestors and praising the nation’s devotion to democracy, before acknowledging the grave danger facing the nation and asking the listeners to honor the fallen by forging ahead, while noting the difference between talk and action.

But keeping freedom of speech is a Sisyphean task and every few generations, you find yourself with a young cohort that was raised in comfort and bred to be complacent, and that boulder begins to roll back down the hill. In the end, autocrats overthrew the noble Athenian democracy. Twice, in fact.

From Athens to London

Over at Heterodox Academy, the article on free speech includes this passage:

There is a fundamental difference between reacting to ideas one loathes with scorn or criticism and demanding that specific viewpoints be purged and their authors and enablers punished with loss of livelihood or disciplinary sanctions. However committed they are to liberal and progressive values, influential educational and cultural institutions do not become more diverse, tolerant, and equal by banishing ideas, publications, and speakers that do not conform to the prevailing orthodoxy. It is particularly problematic when media institutions, social media platforms, and universities — none of whom can effectively function without free speech — come to internalize the idea that provocative opinions are “dangerous,” “unsafe,” or even “harmful” to their own staff, students, readers, and users.

In my case, The Seattle Times fired me for commenting on Vladimir Lenin’s psychology and followed up by issuing a statement of apology for anyone who might have been hurt by my remarks. I had compared Lenin to Adolf Hitler, but the Jewish community was not offended. The Jewish magazine Tablet wrote a scathing piece about the Times disgusting behavior, the Anti-Defamation League contacted me and said what the paper had done was clearly unfair, in fact it seemed the only people who did take offense were Leninists, and I was unsurprised to later see that some of the very same accounts that had been offended were making openly pro-Hamas statements online. This was the group of people the paper hoped were not harmed by my criticism of one of the ugliest dictators in human history. The Heterodox article continues:

A global look at the history of free speech suggests that free speech is in fact a shield against oppression. White supremacy, whether in the shape of American slavery and segregation, British colonialism, or South African apartheid, relied heavily on censorship and repression. Conversely, advocates of human equality like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed the principle and practice of free speech to great effect and at huge personal cost. In the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”

All I can tell you from experience is that we are failing to carry this torch, and we should be outraged. In the pantheon of free speech, Pericles lives among the English giants John Stewart Mill and John Milton, and God only knows what they would make of where we find ourselves today.

In his 1859 work On Liberty, Mill argued, “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”

As you can imagine, I stand with Mill on this point and believe that any intellectual must similarly uphold this principle, particularly anyone in journalism. Mill argued that when you silence someone who speaks a falsehood, the truth you are defending becomes a dogma and is no longer a living truth. This is because it is something that must be defended by default, rather than proven right though demonstration, and anything that can be asserted without demonstration can be asserted without knowing the logic of the demonstration, and then you have people asserting it without knowing what it means or why, and then you have dogma. It is the opposite of truth. It is propaganda.

Milton argued in Areopagitica that freedom of speech includes not merely the right to speak one’s mind but to seek information and share it with others. Whereas Mill felt free speech allowed the self to fully develop, Milton believed it was an instrument not of personal salvation but of social edification. We cannot be educated if we are not open-minded. I believe the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a definition of stupidity that describes it as shutting down opposing views, not listening to others or, as Elon Musk puts it, not wanting to hear things you don’t like being said by people you don’t like.

There is truth to this. Of all the Big Five personality traits, openness is the one most strongly correlated with a high IQ. But we do not live in an age of openness. We live in an age where the stage of public discourse is being retrofitted so that the dumbest among us can take part. We live in an age where board rooms and newsrooms are full of individuals with room temperature IQs who happen to be there not by dint of their cognitive faculties but by the blessing of their politically correct political views, or skin color, or genital biography, and one of the most prized values of our day is sadly antithetical to the value of free speech. This is the harm principle.

The Harm Principle

In 1999, the critical theorist and Michel Foucault scholar Bernard Harcourt wrote of the collapse of the harm principle:

Today the debate is characterized by a cacophony of competing harm arguments without any way to resolve them. There is no longer an argument within the structure of the debate to resolve the competing claims of harm. The original harm principle was never equipped to determine the relative importance of harms.

This is why the harm principle is so easily taken to a harmful extreme, because it becomes a messy affair rather quickly to determine harm. I get the feeling Harcourt laments this loss, but I raise a glass to it. There is of course a case to be made for regulating false or potentially dangerous speech. The classic example here is shouting fire in a crowded theater, which comes from a dictum by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States, which held that the defendant did not have a right to speak out in opposition to the draft during World War I and was not protected under the First Amendment.

Most folks know the phrase, if not the case and what it concerned, but fewer know that in 1969 the ruling was partially overturned by the landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio. In this case, the Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Ohio had passed a statute prohibiting people from calling for violence and Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in rural Ohio, who was filmed at a KKK rally calling for “revengeance” against blacks and Jews (although, of course, they didn’t call them “blacks”) and their forced expulsion to Africa and Israel. The KKK rally also included people who claimed the president and Congress were suppressing the white race, and announced plans to march on Congress that Fourth of July.

Brandenburg had given one of the speeches and was charged with advocating violence under the statute, which had been enacted in 1919 during the first Red Scare after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and a series of anarchist bombings in the United States. The American public was terrified and the statute was put in place to prevent communists and anarchists from openly calling for death. Fast forward to 1969 and Brandenburg was fined $1,000 and sentenced to one to 10 years in prison. The Supreme Court of Ohio dismissed his appeal without opinion, but the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of Brandenburg.

If you have heard the phrase “incitement to violence,” this is it. This is the issue for which President Donald Trump was impeached in 2021—inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Incitement is protected based on the imminent lawless action test introduced in Brandenburg v. Ohio. You can call for violence at some vague point in the indefinite future, but not in any specific imminent future. You can say, “let’s kill the president” but you cannot say, “let’s kill the president tomorrow at 7 pm.” This view of free speech is shared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which are to my mind two of the greatest institutions of American democracy.

But outside the reach of the First Amendment, we are losing the culture of free speech upon which our laws rest and without which they lose all force. We have come to believe, as woke progressives instruct us, that what matters most is impact over intent. If you hurt someone with your words, you should not have said what you said. Worse, we are now told that if you merely offend someone with your words, you should be punished in some manner. Context, nuance, or whatever was in your heart are all meaningless, we are told.

But the problem with this is that it’s only fun until the rabbit gets the gun. Freedom of speech is not just a form of self-realization as Mill argued, nor a means of finding our way to the truth as Milton argued, but also, far more basic, it is a simple set of rules by which we can all play. Because once you start setting limits, which you inevitably must, you open the possibility that the wrong groups will be sanctioned.

Russia, and many other countries, have outlawed Holocaust denial. This may sound like a good idea, but do you think Jews are safer for it in Russia today? And did you know that the same harm and offense principles on which that law was based also gave legal justification for the nation’s LGBT propaganda law?

Naturally, we expect little in the way of enlightened thinking from Russia these days. But there is a litany of stories coming out of the United States, Canada, and the U.K. involving people being fired, fined, or arrested for speech that is often not only not offensive, but true. I was fired for speaking the truth about Vladimir Lenin. I recently interviewed a young Saudi man who was arrested in Manchester for speaking the truth about Islam. And former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman was fired this year for speaking the truth about inconsistent police behavior toward pro-Hamas protesters.

In 2018, The Jerusalem Post fired cartoonist Avi Katz for publishing a cartoon of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others depicted as pigs. The journalist Haim Watzman responded with this letter of resignation in which he sums up the moral issue rather well:

I cannot be associated with a publication that dumps a staff member simply because his work has upset some readers. Journalism, when done well, always angers some readers, and it is the duty of the newspaper or magazine’s editors and managers to stand by writers and other members of the staff when readers complain about the analysis and opinions expressed by its staff. This is all the more true in the case of editorial cartoonists, whose very job is satire—and a good satirist never pauses to worry about angering the citizenry.

It is a disgrace and a dishonor to Israeli and to American values when our own universities and newspapers, what are supposed to be the gardens of truth in our societies, are found holding it down and stabbing it in the back. I believe many Americans default to thinking that our nation still has the best protection of free speech in the world, when in 2022 it ranked below 20 other nations. You lose what you do not fight to keep.

Jefferson Hated the Papers

This is a long-standing trend, longer than you might think. Consider that in 1787, President Thomas Jefferson, a great champion of press freedom, wrote:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Yet some years later in 1807, he wrote:

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

I’ve often thought about this. The analogous modern sections would be Wires, Analysis, Forecasts, and Party Lines. In fact, I would argue that those sections aptly describe most media today. You’ve got straight news, critical reporting, prediction and then you’ve got left-wing and right-wing news.

By the way, years later, Jefferson’s view of the press became even more dismal and he told a friend, sounding as some folks sound today talking about social media:

I do not take a single newspaper, not read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Newspapers are not just making mistakes, though as they become more politically aligned, their mistakes are more the nature of political bias than honest mistakes, and therefore less forgivable. The removal of the Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine in 2011, requiring that one present both sides of a controversial issue, allowed the rise of conservative talk media, which was followed by the success of Fox News essentially functioning as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and then in an attempt to emulate this success, CNN following suit with respect to Democrats.

The spread of fake news, polarization of our society, and economic pressures have only added fuel to the fire. Newspapers are pushing the trend to think of speech as dangerous, and yet they are in the business of publishing the most dangerous kind of speech of all. Why are they doing this? To please a public that will not be reading them in a year. They are cutting off their own legs to sell to the butcher for one meal’s worth of meat.

Some states have taken steps to protect this sacred value and to enshrine the spirit of the First Amendment beyond the public sphere. In California, the state’s labor code protects the political speech of employees working at private companies. New York laws protect employees from being fired or discriminated against for any legal off-duty activity, including political speech. Colorado, North Dakota, Connecticut, Illinois, and Washington have similar laws.

We will see how it goes from here. Every generation must carry the torch. But every generation has its traitors to the torch, those who would snuff it out if they could but get their hands on it. There is little we can do about that. Our old line of defense was education, but we find our schools and newspapers now bending the knee to the enemies of truth and free speech. But we must carry what little fire we can. Since the dawn of time, speaking to each other has been our way of knowing each other and our world. Anyone who silences or punishes thoughtful debate is the enemy of the flame.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. But I think fire is a better metaphor for free speech. Fire is the only weapon that spreads as it attacks, that grows stronger the more you expend it, and rises higher the more you try to blow it out. The only way to fight fire is to suffocate it. But you only need a single ember to rekindle the glow.