The right to free speech is not negotiable
Published by marco on
This is a fantastic seven-minute refresher on what the first amendment means in the U.S.—specifically the right to free speech, The government is bound quite strongly to respect one’s right to say anything one wants, even if one is benefiting from a government program, like unemployment or a visa program. While the government is allowed to curtail benefits in the case of criminal prosecution—predicating them on being law-abiding—it cannot retract them based on one having expressed opinions counter to the prevailing regime’s policies.
Glenn Reacts: Defunding Universities over Speech is a MAJOR 1A Violation by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)
“Consider this hypothetical: the US government or, let’s say a state government, opts to provide unemployment benefits to people who get fired, lose their job. Obviously, it doesn’t have to provide unemployment benefits. It decides that it’s going to.
“Imagine a law enacted by a state, say Massachusetts, that said, ‘if you support Donald Trump or express support for the Republican party, you will be ineligible to receive unemployment benefits. The only people eligible to receive unemployment benefits are those who take an oath to support the Democratic party.’ Everybody would immediately understand why that’s unconstitutional.
“And yet, you could justify that law based on the same distortion, the same warped rationale, as is being offered for the Trump administration’s actions this week, which is, ‘oh, look, the government doesn’t have to give you unemployment benefits. You can’t claim that it’s a violation of your constitutional rights if the government takes unemployment benefits away from you.‘
“And the obvious answer is: the state has the right to terminate unemployment-benefits programs for everybody if it wants, but it can’t withdraw them or deny them as punishment for a particular view. Nor can it condition receipt or the right to have those benefits on affirming a particular view. So, the fact that federal funding is optional doesn’t mean the government has the constitutional right to deny it to certain universities that allow a certain type of protest.”
