Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has revealed how terrified the elites are of freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is the ‘dread of tyrants’. That’s how Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist, statesman and former slave, put it in his seminal 1860 speech, ‘A Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston’ – taking aim at a racist mob who had shut down an abolitionist meeting and the authorities that had refused to protect it.
The battle lines in America’s free-speech wars are very different today, as of course are the stakes. ‘Slavery cannot tolerate free speech’, thundered Douglass. He saw open discussion as the means to liberation. Today, those who might consider themselves his heirs think you can censor your way to utopia. But one thing at least remains stubbornly the same: more than 160 years later, free speech still fills the American elites with dread.
