“Dedicated to my father who taught me the pursuit of truth and my mother who taught me the pursuit of justice.” Paraphrased from The Indispensable Right.
“We remain a nation grappling with what free speech means to us as a people. What follows is meant to be the unvarnished story of free speech in America. For better or worse, it is our story.” The final words of The Indispensable Right’s Introduction, page 19.
Why Indispensable?
On Monday Praxis Circle published our interview with Praxis Circle Contributor Jonathan Turley conducted in Chapel Hill on April 3 this year. You can watch the full interview here. That night Jonathan delivered the keynote address at the Annual Meeting of the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance. The author of our Book of the Month for July, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (2024, 347 pages) was the perfect speaker for a full house of Carolina alumni, faculty, and students interested in the pursuit of truth, justice, and free speech.
Did you go to college and have a good experience? If you did, you probably can think of one to several professors who had a major impact on you or maybe even became a mentor. When starting Praxis Circle years ago, one of my first interviews was just such a professor.
Now, having spent much of April 3 with him—including introducing him to Carolina Chancellor Lee Roberts—I can say that Turley is one good hombre that I’m quite sure is extremely popular among his law school students at George Washington University Law School. Of course, he’s one of the leading legal commentators in America—someone who values America’s traditions, strengths, and creative, “outside-the-box” thinking. Jonathan Turley needs no further introduction.
In The Indispensable Right, Turley skillfully tells the story of the development of free speech in America up to the point of the November 2024 presidential election. To accomplish that, he begins with the ancient world highlighting the Bible and such notables as Socrates and Cato, then offers more recent background to the American Revolution, highlighting Blackstone and John Locke.
I went to law school and have always had an interest in Constitutional law, but it had totally slipped past me that Great Britain was never a particular friend of free speech. No, quite the opposite.
James Madison as the Father of the Constitution is clearly our free speech hero today among the Founders, but even he almost got it wrong. Before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he argued against the need for any Bill of Rights saying that the Constitution’s separation of powers, limits on those powers, and checks and balances would be sufficient to ensure freedom. After all, Americans only sought the rights of Englishmen with variations on the theme, like instituting a republican democracy rather than parliamentary monarchy and abolishing aristocracy. Clearly, Madison believed all of the rights in any “Bill of Rights” would exist in English common law, adopted by most states.
Wrong, Mr. Founding Father of our Constitution!
Imagine the creek we would be up without a paddle today if We the People did not have the First Amendment and the accompanying other nine that make up our Bill of Rights (the first ten).
Due to a healthy free speech culture developed in the Colonies that Turley outlines (going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676-77, which continues with our Praxis Circle Contributor Jim Bacon’s blog today), James Madison was pressed upon by Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe and noted Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and Edmund Randolph to change his mind and become a full throated advocate of the First Amendment. Sure enough, in the Founding debates, more civil speech proved the best solution to controversy and potential violence, rather than controlled or less speech.
All the First Amendment says on the subject is “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.” Without those 13 little words, freedom as we know it might have been totally eliminated by now. Let’s face it, as Turley says and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said (who first coined the phrase), free speech is the indispensable right. Turley offers an introductory explanation of why it is indispensable in the clip at top.
America as Free Speech’s Last Best Hope
In April, Turley had just returned from a trip to Europe, where he had attended a conference on free speech. Praxis Circle Contributor Nadine Strossen also attended, and Turley said that the two of them were among the few there who support free speech; you know, the American version.
The European Union passed the Digital Services Act in 2022 to control speech over the internet, and Vice President JD Vance had just given his address at the Munich Security Conference severely criticizing it. The DSA employs legal concepts like hate speech, harmful speech, disinformation, and malinformation (true statements intended to harm) to silence voices. Regulatory bodies and algorithms now patrol and control online communication. It’s the ultimate act chilling free speech and furthering cancel culture that America rejected in the 2024 presidential election.
Turley comments on his trip in the short playlist below and explains why America remains the best hope for freedom worldwide.
Age of Rage: That Would Be Now
The Indispensable Right explains that the First Amendment was originally a restraint on the federal government only. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment broadened its protection to cover all state and local public institutions, including public education. Free speech laws are intended to protect the people from the government, but the people also need protection from each other.
The book takes the reader through the growing pains under the John Adams Administration involving sedition laws all the way through the Summer of 2020 and the January 6, 2021 Capitol event, when sedition laws were yet again revived. Turley describes how the government and the people engage in rage, and how rage has become dangerously accepted in our American culture today. He does not believe January 6 was an insurrection, and he comments extensively on how academic orthodoxy at the university level has damaged free speech on campuses across the U.S.
As mentioned, Turley’s solution to conflict is more speech not less, where illegal conduct is punished over thought or speech. He’s particularly against sedition laws that have always been used by governments to squash opposition or even the discussion of alternative ideas. He believes our laws against treason and other criminal behavior are sufficient to protect the government, and our laws that enforce civil behavior in public spaces, along with protecting property, are sufficient to maintain civil peace and protect the people from each other.
Of course, free speech is not an absolute right in private space and in the private sector. Owners can have trespassers escorted off their property, and businesses can “fire” management or employees (whether on a reality show or in everyday reality).
Turley divides America today into two legal camps on the free speech issue: the functional and autonomous. Functional theorists justify free speech because it strengthens democracy. While free speech clearly is necessary for democracy to thrive, the pro-democracy rationale can actually be used to limit free speech in damaging ways when government views the speech in question to be anti-democratic. (See the Democratic Party’s constant harping that virtually anything Donald Trump does produces “a threat to democracy.”)
In contrast, legal scholars like Turley who support the autonomous theory justify free speech using a libertarian idea that individual or group autonomy allowing for almost any speech is the only effective route producing free thinking and debate. Only conduct, not thinking or language, should be regulated, and only primarily physically harmful conduct at that.
A Hierarchy of Justifications Making America Better (Yes, Again)
While legal scholars who advocate for the autonomous view sound libertarian, The Indispensable Right is not a purely libertarian tract at all. It presents a hierarchy of justifications for free speech squarely grounded in Western and American society and culture, what we at Praxis Circle call CJC (Classical Judaeo-Christianity).
In my opinion, this is the core strength of the book; what makes it so special and highly recommended. While Turley firmly agrees that free speech is vital to democracy, he goes up the food chain of worldview values into presenting how it’s critical for the pursuit of truth and justice, the essential values that he learned from his Dad and Mom as noted above. Free speech is the cornerstone of American politics and social order as an end in itself as well as a means, paving the way since America’s Founding from divine right monarchy to the rule of law.
Turley’s new book coming out in 2026.
Most important, Turley highlights that free speech is much of what makes human beings human. It allows us to be creative as imago Dei as depicted in the Sistine Chapel (and shown in this clip from the interview concerning natural law), where God and man’s fingers touch. Only through free thinking and language can man strive to reach for a likeness to God via the classical and Christian virtues. God gave us the freedom of human agency, and we must preserve this right and potential for our fellow man. (This is Praxis Circle’s Shane Principle.)
Remember, all rights entail duties if they are to be recognized and enforced, so we owe it to each other to preserve this religious and humanistic freedom.
Finally, we could not agree more with Turley: the story of free speech is “our story,” the American story seeking truth and justice for mankind as a nation and among all nations.
With free speech as our keel, we just might get the human endeavor right one day.
I look forward to Turley’s next book to be published in 2026 just in time for our 250th national anniversary, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. We will all get a preview of what we can look forward to during the rest of the 21st century and whether American democracy can survive. My guess is that the First Amendment will have something to do with it.
