The Buckley Institute has released its annual survey of American college students, and the results are pretty disturbing.
Not only do one in five students surveyed think that America “deserved” 9/11, and not only are positive feelings about socialism soaring, but a year after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking to students on campus, 45% of the more than 800 respondents said physical violence can be justified to stop someone from expressing what they consider hate speech.
(That's up from 39% last year.)
Interestingly, of the students who said violence could be justified, 72% also acknowledged that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
That means that these aren't necessarily students who don't know what the Constitution says. Many of them understand that the speech they find offensive is legally protected. They just believe there are circumstances where physically attacking someone for exercising that right is acceptable.
It makes me wonder how many of them have ever considered why the First Amendment protects offensive speech in the first place.
After all, we don't need a constitutional amendment to protect speech that everybody likes. Nobody is clamoring for the government to ban compliments, birthday wishes, or opinions about how nice the weather is. The entire point of protecting free speech is that people will inevitably say things other people find offensive, outrageous, or even dangerous.
The First Amendment restricts the government's ability to punish people for expressing their opinions. It doesn't require anyone to agree with those opinions, and it certainly doesn't protect every possible form of expression. True threats, for example, aren't protected simply because someone chooses to express them in words.
But the distinction between an offensive opinion and a genuine threat matters enormously. Once we decide that someone's words are dangerous simply because they make other people uncomfortable, we've created an awfully convenient justification for silencing just about anyone.
And what happens when someone else gets to decide which opinions are too dangerous to tolerate?
That's where I think this survey becomes particularly troubling. The students aren't being asked whether they personally like offensive speech. They're being asked whether violence can be justified to stop it. And a remarkable number of them appear to believe the answer is yes—even when they recognize that the speech itself is protected.
The Constitution, of course, doesn't guarantee that private citizens will respect one another's rights. It's primarily a restraint on government power. But a society in which large numbers of people believe constitutional protections should be disregarded whenever they conflict with someone's feelings is a society that's going to have a difficult time preserving those protections.
Rights become pretty meaningless if we only believe in them when they're convenient.
This isn't just a free speech problem, either. Americans have been making similar arguments about privacy for years. We're told that giving the government more access to our information, communications, and private lives is necessary to keep us safe. And because most of us want to feel safe, it's easy to convince people that surrendering a little freedom is a reasonable price to pay.
The problem is that the power we give away doesn't disappear when the emergency ends, or when the people we trust are no longer the ones exercising it.
That's exactly the kind of tradeoff we explore in our newest book, The Tuttle Twins and the Shield of Liberty.
In it, Ethan and Emily discover what happens when their community begins trading away privacy in exchange for promises of safety, and why protections that seem unnecessary today might be the very ones we desperately need tomorrow.
You can pre-order your copy now!
There's another finding from the Buckley survey I haven't mentioned yet. Eighty-seven percent of students agreed that the First Amendment is important.
That would be encouraging, I suppose, until you consider how many of those same students are willing to make exceptions when someone says something they don't like.
We've apparently done a pretty good job teaching young Americans that constitutional rights are important. I'm not nearly as convinced we've taught them what those rights are supposed to protect us from.
And given what happened to Charlie Kirk, that's a distinction I wish more people understood.
— Connor
