Rise Up Against the Fear: Why It’s Our Duty to Stand Up for Free Speech and Expression

Fear can be a powerful weapon against a people’s freedoms. And what better way to spread fear than to make an example of those who speak up for what they believe in. Over the past nearly two years we’ve seen the “soft” power of the agents of fear: The doxing, defaming and firing. We saw the college and university administrations, so eager to throw their students and faculty under the bus. Encampments were crushed, demonstrators cuffed. Even silent protests in libraries were … silenced. We got so used to seeing people carried out of public spaces for speaking up and peaceful protesters surrounded by campus cops that it all became ... normal?

Now, we’re seeing the full-on iron-fisted agents of fear. We see the lockups, the attempted stripping of visas and worse. We see the armed “immigration police” roaming the streets, masks covering their faces, their SUVs often unmarked, ready to cart away not just people here without proper status, but those with every right to be here ... but who said the wrong thing.

People who have no legitimate reason to be scared are now rightfully fearful. Even at this paper, we’ve received requests since January to delete names and stories of persons who were interviewed in the past. They did nothing wrong. They said nothing wrong. But now they fear some consequence for simply making their voice heard, their perspectives known. We’ve interviewed people who were suddenly worried about saying the wrong thing – even if that wrong thing was just a factual statement that contradicted an official one.

The recent ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William Young — an appointee of the late Pres. Ronald Reagan — offers some comfort in this era that’s edging on paranoia and that saw the arrest of people like Rümeysa Öztürk who dared contribute to an op-ed in a student newspaper.

Here are Young’s words:

This case — perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court —squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”

‘No law’ means ‘no law.’

The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction and it is not to be found in our history or jurisprudence.

Then, he writes: “Having carefully considered the entirety of the record, this Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations.”

The ruling offers a steady voice of reason in a dark time. But what do we do when people in power are issuing executive orders nonstop and are throwing around threats over “anti-Americanism” ­— often defining it however they wish — and against otherwise peaceful dissent? (And isn’t the attempted crushing of free speech and expression in itself an anti-American activity? )

But, tragically, here we are, standing up for these rights against the backdrop of masked authorities, against the backdrop of pulled funding, and against the backdrop of a number of (but as Young pointed out “not all”) universities who have lost their own moral compass.

So, this fear is real for many.

What can we, the common person, do? We can find common ground on the protections of the Constitution. And, while we may disagree on actual speech (which is the whole point of the right to free speech in the first place, isn’t it?), we can agree we must all have the rights promised in the First Amendment. What else can we do? We can exercise our right to vote. We can exercise our right to peacefully protest. And we can speak up when those rights are challenged, for us, and for others.

But there’s more. Some of us can do more than others. In fact, those who are citizens have a special obligation to speak up and speak louder for our noncitizen friends who are targeted. It can be scary to speak out, but the loss of the right to speak out is vastly more terrifying.

We’ll end here with the same Reagan quote near the end of Young’s ruling:

Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.