​Cass Sunstein’s argument that the First Amendment functions as an “arms control agreement” is a sharp, compelling analogy. In a world where everyone wants to censor someone else—whether it’s banning critical race theory or eliminating speech that offends on campuses—Sunstein argues that the Constitution forces all parties to “lay down their arms.”
 
The First Amendment, in Sunstein’s view, serves as a neutral zone, preventing any one group from suppressing another’s speech, no matter how repugnant that speech might seem to them.
 
Sunstein draws a powerful parallel to the 1943 case of *West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette*. In that case, Justice Robert Jackson wrote what Sunstein calls “the greatest opinion in the history of the Supreme Court.” Jackson warned, “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.” In a clear rebuke to authoritarianism, Jackson argued that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
 
For Sunstein, this is the essence of the arms control agreement: no viewpoint may be forbidden, no matter how tempting it might be to do so.
 
While Sunstein acknowledges that this broad understanding of the First Amendment is not easily squared with its original meaning, he points out that the robust protections we now have evolved in response to historical moments of danger, like World War II and the 1960s. “It is perhaps unsurprising that a robust understanding of free speech would develop during the war against fascism,” he writes, and that it would solidify during the fierce debates of the 1960s.
 
Sunstein’s advice for today? College administrators, and others in positions of power, “should avoid the temptation” to suppress views they find beyond the pale. They “should lay down their arms.” If we’re going to have a constitutional arms control agreement, everyone needs to disarm—especially those most eager to wield the weapons of censorship. After all, no one should have a monopoly on banning speech. That would be the ultimate arms race.

​The ever-astute Ayaan Hirsi Ali details the decline of free speech in Britain in a way that perfectly delineates the American distinction between incitements to violence (“fighting words”) and speech that is merely ugly.
 
“After the recent [anti-Muslim] riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious. Julie Sweeney, fifty-three, got a fifteen-month sentence for a Facebook comment: ‘Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Lee Dunn, fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as ‘Coming to a town near you.’”
 
Ali writes in The Spectator that a “triple whammy” at the end of the century ended a long period of liberalization in the UK’s speech laws – the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left critical theories of social justice and the advent of the internet as the public square. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed by the Tory government, could serve as a “censor’s charter” because of its “inclusion of the phrase ‘legal but harmful’ to characterize certain content.”
 
“The losers in all this are not the hapless fools languishing in jail because of their crude online posts,” Ali writes. “The losers are the millions of people who believe the government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to prohibit ideas, words or images that might offend.”

​A letter sent on Monday to the House Judiciary Committee by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should put to rest whether “jawboning” by the government of highly regulated social media companies on their content moderation is taken as mere suggestions, or as something much more.
 
Zuckerberg wrote to the committee Chairman Jim Jordan:
 
“Officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
 
Zuckerberg also addressed the Hunter-Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 election. He writes that the FBI warned Meta that this story was Russian disinformation. So when Meta saw a New York Post story reporting on the allegations, “we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
 
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again … for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
 
As Protect The 1st has said before, government jawboning of highly regulated companies on content moderation cannot help but veer toward censorship. If government agents want to identify a post as dangerous or as foreign disinformation, let them do so publicly.

​For the second time, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro had a chance to stand up for school vouchers to help children from low-income families escape failing public schools to find a quality education in a private school. For the second time, Gov. Shapiro chose what seems to be – superficially at least – the politically expedient path.
 
From The Wall Street Journal:
 
“The Governor has national ambitions, and the teachers unions that oppose vouchers could stand in the way of his chances for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. But he’d also have allies, such as the Black Pastors United for Education, who last month wrote him a letter calling for vouchers. On Friday they wrote him again, saying they never got a response to the first letter, and inviting him to discuss vouchers at a town hall. 
 
“For our lawmakers to disregard this issue of freedom,” says Joshua Robertson, a pastor in Harrisburg, “is unacceptable.” Citing the “dire” education situation in public schools, he adds: “We need a courageous Governor.”

​“Is the Liberty Bell all it’s cracked up to be?”
 
Hear Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik, director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, make wisecracks and wise observations in the keynote address at Becket’s recent Canterbury gala.

Chaya and Yoni Loffman in RealClearPolicy:

“When we learned that our three-year-old son had autism, we knew that finding the right school would be hard. But we were confident that with the right help and resources, our son could thrive.

“Unfortunately, California politicians disagree. When public schools fail to meet the needs of students with disabilities, the federal and state funding for that student can be redirected to private schools that are better able to accommodate their disabilities. But while California lets secular private schools receive these funds, it completely excludes religious private schools, simply because they are religious.” 
 
Michael Helfand and Maury Litwack in The Hill
 
“A group of Los Angeles Jewish parents, children and two schools were in court this week challenging a California law that explicitly bans religious schools from becoming state-certified special needs schools, all the while allowing other private schools the ability to apply for the same state-certification. 

“The consequences of this law have long been devastating, preventing the Jewish community from accessing the necessary funds to build and operate educational institutions that can meet the needs of its special-needs community. 

“But California’s unlawful exclusion has taken on greater urgency in recent months as allegations of rampant antisemitism have plagued California educational institutions from public schools to college campuses. Now, California’s rules put Jews in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma: You can’t have your own schools, and when you come to our schools, be prepared for an environment hostile to your Jewish identity and practices. California cannot allow this state of affairs to continue.” 

The latest from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.