Yelling "Fire!" in a Crowded Theater
The skirmish at Guernica made headlines so briefly last month, you might have missed it.
Basically, the literary magazine’s staff up and quit over the March 4th publication of an essay by Joanna Chen that, according to its departing co-publisher, was “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” By March 11th, Guernica had retracted the essay.
I urge you to read it. (It can still be accessed through the magazine’s archive.) Not because “From the Edges of a Broken World” is controversial, but because it is not. And because its suppression snaps into focus the scariest threat yet to our democracy: the subversion of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or freedom of the press. It’s not an absolute freedom, but it comes close. You can, in fact, legally yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, despite Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ insistence otherwise in Schenck v U.S. What the First Amendment does not protect, as the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling established, is speech that “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
That’s important to understand, because those who portray themselves as champions of free speech—the press, social-media platform owners, leaders of the free world—are more inclined to weaponize it than defend it, especially in the run-up to the US presidential election. In the rising din of our crowded online theater, these power-brokers recognize that only by yelling “FIRE!” will voters pay attention. So: They’re not going to muzzle wackadoodles like former White House official Mike Benz— originator of the theory, disseminated by Fox News, that Taylor Swift is a psych-ops Pentagon asset; they’re going to hand over the microphone. They’re not going to permit government agencies tasked with protecting Americans from bad actors even to enter the theater (SCOTUS being likely to rule in June that such protection violates these actors’ First Amendment rights). And social commentators like Joanna Chen, who write with the intention of nuancing our good vs. evil political discourse? They’ll be canceled.
Perhaps this highly selective application of free-speech protection is just another chapter in the Culture Wars. The Left has been canceling voices it deems not ‘woke’ enough on college campuses everywhere—a blatant violation of speakers’ First Amendment rights and gross hypocrisy on the part of institutions whose mission is to open minds to contrary opinions. The Right, meanwhile, has been demanding the removal of thousands of book titles—titles it deems insufficiently Christian—from public libraries and schools (4,240 titles in 2023 alone, up 65% from 2022).
But extending First Amendment protection to every entity in the public theater (bots and foreign actors as well as American voters) feels far more ominous than a partisan salvo. AI technology already enables a manipulation of speech and speakers that by November will defy discerning. And would-be POTUS Donald Trump, whose stolen-election falsehoods incited the January 6th Capitol riot that resulted in five deaths and injury to 174 police officers—clearly exceeding the “inciting or producing imminent lawless action” bar on protected free speech—is now perceived by many voters to be America’s foremost defender of the First Amendment.
I will exercise my voice, come November, by voting. But if the theater is on fire, will it matter?
