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Is the Constitution a Suicide Pact?
Putin Weaponizes Free Speech
Everybody understands the danger of atomic weapons, excepting those who disdain history like Donald John Trump or have had their head in a bucket since WWII. Those films of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made for a salutary reason just like the films General Eisenhower ordered be made of the Nazi death camps. Denial is more than dumb; it’s destructive.
The danger of free speech requires a dictator to understand beyond academic abstraction. Would it be tacky to point out that the atomic bomb was an academic abstraction for many years before the first chain reaction was called into existence in a squash court at the University of Chicago — over the objection of some who questioned whether it could be controlled?
It’s fair to ask, if speech is harmless and futile, then why do we protect it? Stanley Fish was right when he argued there’s no such thing as free speech, because there are exceptions you could drive several trucks through. Of course, he agrees with most of the exceptions and I don’t. I believe the Constitution is a suicide pact.
The only written proof goes back to the Declaration of Independence, which lists off a bunch of claims that were not at all recognized in the laws of most nations but ended,
“we mutually pledge to each…
