Tea at Trianon: Freedom of Speech

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Freedom of Speech

From The Federalist:

Our political system is called unfree by people who hate the president, but they fail to note the ways in which the American Constitution prevents any president from infringing our rights. Trump may, as RWB notes, have “declared the press an ‘enemy of the American people,’” but he has done little to make those words anything more than the complaints of a thin-skinned politician against a press that delights in tweaking his nose.

RWB also notes that the Obama administration “waged a war on whistleblowers who leaked information about its activities, leading to the prosecution of more leakers than any previous administration combined” and the absence of a press shield law. In this, RWB shows that they are less interested in rights than in special privileges for reporters.

This is the wrong way to understand Americans’ rights and our Constitution’s protection of those rights. Freedom of the press is not a class right for journalists. Instead, it is an expansion and amplification of the freedom of speech. Free speech is the right to say what you want; free press is the right to publish those opinions. They are freedoms that belong to all of us. If granting special rights to reporters would help our ranking on RWB’s charts, it would also make us a less equal society, privileging the actions of one profession over those of ordinary people.

In America, that universal right is protected not only by the First Amendment, but by the separation of powers that is essential to our liberty. If Trump sat at the head of a unitary government, one could imagine how the First Amendment might be ignored. (Read more.)