The greatest danger to free speech in our modern era isn’t merely government’s attempts to silence dissenting voices — it’s the partisan blinders so many Americans wear when discussing the topic in the first place. 

As UNLV’s David Orentlicher rightly noted in a recent news story about Steve Wynn’s defamation case against a Las Vegas-based reporter, First Amendment rights are facing some serious threats at the current moment in American history. 

Speaking to The Nevada Independent, Orentlicher noted that “we have an administration that has decided to target the press and others who write critical commentary … This is exactly the wrong time to weaken the protection of the press.”

Given President Donald Trump’s hostility toward the “fake news” media, such concerns are well founded. 

Despite having campaigned as a free speech champion, and even signing an executive order titled, “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” Trump has proven himself uninterested in the fundamental principles of our Constitution’s First Amendment.

Since winning the election, Trump has sued news networks for “fake news,” threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for supposedly unfair or biased coverage and even sued a pollster for having the audacity to predict a President Joe Biden win ahead of last November’s electoral contest. Indeed, the only speech worthy of freedom in Trump’s narrow worldview seems to be the speech with which he already agrees.  

However, even if it wasn’t for Trump’s clear desire to bludgeon public discourse into submission through frivolous lawsuits and governmental bullying, it’s not as if there’s ever a “right” time to weaken protections for free speech. 

After all, Trumpian Republicans are hardly the only ones to have succumbed to the illiberal temptation to censor their political others — it’s a problem that goes far beyond any single political faction. Even Trump’s predecessor had eerily similar ambitions to police supposed “misinformation” and false news. 

Early on in the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security created the Disinformation Governance Board — an effort to root out disinformation seeded by our nation’s foreign adversaries. The administration’s public efforts to wage war on falsities was quickly criticized as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” bureaucracy and put on hold. 

Nonetheless, in other areas, the administration continued its efforts to ensure fake news was targeted for suppression by working directly with social media platforms on content related to issues such as the pandemic.

For many Americans, that sort of coordination between big tech and government was highly disturbing — and it’s easy to see why, considering the way social media companies are free to directly restrict speech on their platforms in ways the government couldn’t do by itself. 

Facebook, for example, took strong actions to stop the spread of “misinformation” during the pandemic — and it relied heavily on consultation with government officials to determine what information should be considered conspiratorial nonsense. As a result, the tech giant initially banned posts related to the then-controversial “lab leak” theory of COVID’s origins — a theory the Central Intelligence Agency now favors. It was only after enough governmental agencies and health organizations across the world indicated there might be validity to the theory that Facebook reversed course with its ban on the topic. 

To be sure, misinformation is a serious risk in an age of fast-paced social media rumors, propagandistic “news” sources and decentralized information. 

Even a few hundred years ago, individuals such as Jonathan Swift said, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” In the age of TikTok, Facebook and Twitter (or X.com), those falsehoods can now travel at light speed along fiber optic cables to gullible and hysterical audiences faster than ever. 

And that’s likely one of the main reasons most Americans now favor restrictions on “false information.”  

As we see with Trump’s vengeful attacks on the press, however, the only thing more worrisome than a dangerous falsehood is a politician who believes it’s their prerogative to rid us of it. As it turns out, politicians aren’t exactly impartial arbiters of truth — nor do they, as a group, have a particularly great history of respecting free speech rights when doing so imperils their political ambitions. 

During the Cold War, for example, Sen. Joseph McCarthy used government to intimidate and bully political dissidents into silence. Throughout much of the 20th century, the fairness doctrine forced broadcasters to air speech that otherwise didn’t agree with their editorial sensibilities. In the 2010s, the Internal Revenue Service even deliberately targeted and harassed countless conservative tea party groups, effectively suppressing their voice in public discourse. 

And those few examples pale in comparison to the cavalcade of unconstitutional speech restrictions we’ve seen imposed upon the First Amendment at various points in our history — including blatantly partisan efforts to silence minority political parties.  

Every bit as dangerous as such governmental attacks on speech, however, are the many ordinary Americans who believe “false” or “offensive” speech simply isn’t worthy of robust First Amendment protections. Those who succumb to calls for such censorship seemingly forget that, at times, their political others will likely be the ones in a position to determine what speech is considered false, offensive or unsafe. 

Most Americans still say they value the First Amendment, but truly unbiased defenders of free speech are nonetheless becoming increasingly difficult to find in our hyper partisan era. How eager, for example, would many on today’s far left be in vigorously defending the right of neo-Nazis to march down a busy Skokie city street in Illinois? How vigorously would the far right be in defending the right of pro-Palestinian college students to do the same? 

Whether it’s the “cancel culture” that has overtaken the zealots on both sides of the cultural divide, or disturbing attempts by our elected officials to silence dissent, there’s an unfortunate and sprawling belief among certain partisans that only their own ideas should be unburdened by the censors.  

The proliferation of such fair-weather defenders of free speech is precisely why there’s never a good time to weaken the sweeping protections of our First Amendment — regardless of who’s in office.

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.