Legal scholar Jonathan Turley emphasized the importance of viewing free speech as a fundamental human right amid a hailstorm of false definitions.
Speaking at the Free State Foundation’s 17th Annual Policy Conference on Tuesday, Turley said that free speech “belongs to us as human beings, a gift from God.” As social media platforms, global governments and academics attempt to redefine and suppress free speech, Turley argued that “nothing good can be resolved until we could resolve what free speech is.”
To address this issue, Turley pointed to this new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
“This book is about free speech, but it's also about rage,” he explained, arguing that we’re in “an Age of Rage, not the Age of Rage, because this isn't our first.” Turley noted that what he described as rage rhetoric has always been a threat to free speech, particularly when it becomes “state rage,” which he described as a rhetoric used “to crack down on free speech, to use it as a way to silence others, usually silencing their own critics.”
While Turley did not provide a specific example, the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit and an MRC study on 57 federal censorship initiatives exposed the Biden administration’s coordination with Big Tech to censor speech.
However, Turley did praise one tech company, or rather one tech billionaire: X owner Elon Musk. Turley stated that X has become a haven for free speech, which “is in free fall in Europe,” citing his experience at the World Forum in Berlin last week.
Indeed, Turley argued that America has always been unique in its protections of free speech, as enshrined in the Constitution. He said this “was actually the most revolutionary part of the American Revolution. The greatest departure of the Founders from Great Britain was free speech because Great Britain didn't protect free speech really meaningfully. It still doesn't.”
Fortunately, the “Framers decided to define free speech in these sweeping terms, to protect it from government regulation, and to do it, in my view, from a strong natural rights perspective, that it belongs to us as human beings, a gift from God.” Turley asserted that free speech is “needed to complete us … you need free speech to be completely human.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in his address at the conference, agreed with Turley’s assessment that America’s attitude toward free speech has always been different from Europe’s, until the Biden administration. Former President Joe Biden issued an executive order that “embodied the European prior approval regulatory approach” to artificial intelligence.
“Technology takes new laws and regulations, but I believe those laws and regulations should be focused to specific, discernible, identifiable problems, rather than just empowering government bureaucrats to decree whatever they will,” Cruz said. Later, he praised pro-free speech X owner Elon Musk as “absolutely brilliant.”
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