Most all Americans cherish our rights under the Constitution and among those rights are religion, protest and free speech…..but the one that is our biggest advantage is that of free speech….but is it?
It appears that many Americans think the whole right to free speech thing is headed in the wrong direction….
An overwhelming majority of Americans believe freedom of speech is headed in the wrong direction, according to a new poll.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), through its National Speech Index, tracks attitudes toward free speech on a quarterly basis. The latest tracking shows that 74% of Americans believe things are headed in the wrong direction when it comes to free speech. Only 26% believe things are headed in the right direction.
The group says there has been a 10% increase since July in the number of Americans who believe free speech is headed in the wrong direction.
The index, which began tracking attitudes toward free speech in January 2024, has shown political shifts, where Republicans’ attitude shifted in a positive direction around the time President Donald Trump was elected for a second term; however, they have dropped from 69% in July to 55% in October, believing free speech was headed in the right direction.
It appears that we all love the right to free speech that is until someone uses it and then all Hell breaks loose.
Personally I believe that this country needs free speech and any effort to curb that right needs to be shutdown immediately.
We need that right to survive.
For at least the past half-century, Americans have been committed to a “free speech principle,” holding that speech is to be encouraged because it serves to produce knowledge, to enable the development of personal autonomy, and to facilitate the self-governance of the nation. In this essay, I argue that any such abstract free speech principle is fundamentally misguided. The value of speech is instead the value of the social practice within which speech occurs. Speech is to be encouraged when it advances the purpose of the social practice in which it is embedded. For constitutional purposes, the most important social practice established by communication is the public sphere, whose development in the eighteenth century made possible democratic self-governance. The health of a democracy depends upon whether its public sphere can produce a public opinion capable of legitimating the state. This turns on the quality of a nation’s politics, not on the quantity of its speech. Americans who conceptualize the current crisis as requiring rededication to the free speech principle thus essentially misdiagnose the nature of our contemporary emergency. We need to repair our politics, not our speech.
https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/unfortunate-consequences-misguided-free-speech-principle
What do you think is happening with our right to free speech?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
what I personally think is happening to our free speech is irrelevant…but the less free the speech becomes, the less free we all become….but trends are trends and there is nothing we can do to reverse trends– we just have to learn to live with whatever comes as long as we are allowed to live.
THat sounds like defeatism…..but that is just me chuq
Let me say it again.. it doesn’t look like it went through the first time….the less speech is free, the less the people are free… but there is nothing we can do as individuals to buck trends… we just have to learn how to live with whatever comes…as long as we are allowed to live, that is.
I keep forgetting that you are sometimes “someone’…..chuq
Free Speech in America is now what Trump decides is acceptable to him.
Best wishes, Pete.
It is no longer a right but a gift if he likes you chuq
Freedom of speech, just watch whay you say. -Ice T
I like it….thanx for the visit and comment…..have a good T’giving. chuq