More Than Half Of Americans Want The Government To Censor Speech

10/29/2019

The First Amendment, which guarantees Americans freedom of speech, should be overhauled to reflect current cultural norms, according to 51 percent of the respondents to a survey published on Wednesday by the Campaign for Free Speech. The campaign is hoping to call attention to the dire state of Americans’ preeminent civil rights with the poll, which breaks down opposition along gender, race, class, and educational lines.

History will continue to repeat until humans learn the lessons of the past.  Censorship is always necessary for tyranny to thrive.

The younger respondents were, the more they supported overhauling the law to restrict speech. However, college graduates were the least likely of all educational groupings to support the restrictions, indicating that the increasingly regulated speech environment at American universities may be backfiring in some cases and producing adults who cherish their rights because they know what it’s like to be deprived of them. –RT

What was also horrifying, is that over half of millennials believe “hate speech” should be against the law, though no definition of “hate speech” was given (and indeed the definition tends to vary given the time and place) during the survey. Most of those who want a ban on such speech consider jail time an appropriate penalty, although female respondents were the least supportive of such draconian sentencing, according to a report by RT.

And it isn’t just the free speech of their fellow Americans that some people want to be censored.  They also want what is essentially, state-owned media.  In fact, 57 % of respondents support government action against “newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false,” with nearly half of those agreeing such offenses should carry a jail sentence.

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