The First Amendment Was ‘the Most Revolutionary Part of the American Revolution,’ Law Professor Turley Says

“Free Speech defines us, and that is the awakening that we all have to try to work towards,” George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley says. 

Turley made his remarks on this week’s episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. 

In his recent book, published in June, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” Turley explored why people need free speech to be fully human.  

“But, most importantly, what this book tries to say is that we’ve gone through ages of rage, perhaps not as rageful as this one, but we’ve survived,” he said. “But what we’ve learned is that rage doesn’t define us.” 

Although governments can reduce people’s appetite for free speech, they can never kill people’s taste for it, Turley said. 

“The most revolutionary part of the American Revolution was the First Amendment,” the law professor said. “No nation had ever stated the protection of free speech as succinctly and absolutely as we did, saying that you simply could not abridge [freedom of speech], period.” 

But freedom of speech is under attack by many Americans in academia, said Turley, a frequent guest commentator on the Fox News Channel. 

“I have a colleague who is leading an effort to amend the First Amendment, because she says that it’s too aggressively individualistic,” he said. “And these are popular views today in academia, and the result is an alliance that we’ve never seen before.” 

Every generation thinks they have a unique reason to silence others, Turley said in the podcast. 

“In the history of humanity, no censorship system has ever worked,” he said. “It’s never stopped a single idea or a single movement.” 

You can hear more of what Turley has to say about America’s periods of rage, the preservation of free speech, and what Americans can do to stand up for their rights here:

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