NEWS ANALYSIS: Americans Believe Free Speech Is Eroding in America, Recent Poll Finds

A woman stomps on a free speech sign at the University of California–Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Sept. 24, 2017. Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

If you believe the constitutional right to free speech has been curtailed in America, you are not alone.

A poll conducted in June by the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania found that most people—56 percent of respondents—feel the right to free speech is more restricted than it was 10 years ago, and 41 percent said they or someone they know has held back from speaking freely over the last year for fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

“We have heard from numerous individuals who are bullied into silence and fear retaliation if they speak. They fear retribution from their private employers, government employers, and even by those in the media,” Jeremy Samek, senior counsel at Pennsylvania Family Institute, told The Epoch Times.

“They’ve seen parents and even minors who speak out in opposition to having a male in female locker rooms, or males on their female sports teams, being compared to racists by school employees, and are threatened that even voicing opposition could be dealt with as an act of bullying,“ he added. ”Even individuals who have not spoken on a topic have been doxxed simply because their family member spoke on issues that transgender ideological activists oppose.”

In Vermont, a father and daughter complained about a male in the female locker room and the girl was suspended for complaining, Samek said, and in Massachusetts, a student was suspended for wearing a shirt that said “there are only two genders.”

“Even if these matters are ultimately resolved in the speaker’s favor by a court or by settlement, the continuous attacks on speech results in a chilling effect on others who cannot withstand the barrage of attacks or who fear for their livelihood,” Samek said.

Agreeable Too Long

Ilan Srulovicz, Founder and CEO of Egard Watches and Hollywood actor. Courtesy of Ilan Srulovicz.

Ilan Srulovicz, filmmaker, actor, and CEO of Egard Watches, says conservatives have been too polite.

“We got here through decades of agreeableness being used against us, education being slowly corrupted, combined with the weaponization of the modern day tech/social media age to censor anyone who disagrees with the mainstream narrative,” Srulovicz told The Epoch Times. “I have definitely seen it and felt the repercussions of it with my brand. Saying common sense things nowadays is akin to hate speech. We should stop accepting it and start speaking up. We should support industries and businesses that support freedom of speech above all else and most importantly make conscious decisions to not self censor.”

Civil rights attorney Alan Dershowitz says free speech is endangered in many places across the country.

“The hard left is leading the campaign to limit free speech on university campuses, the internet, workplaces, and other venues,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times. “Professors are teaching that the First Amendment is a white supremacist, patriarchal, and imperialist protection that undercuts progressives. It’s getting worse, not better.”

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, then member of President Donald Trump's legal team, speaks to the press in the Senate Reception Room during the Senate impeachment trial at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 29, 2020. Mario Tama/Getty Images

It is easily forgotten that the right to freedom of speech, having its origins in the First Amendment, is a right to be free of governmental interference in making public statements, Pennsylvania Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. told The Epoch Times, adding that a government entity cannot punish a person for making a public statement, unless that statement is false and causes immediate risk to the safety of others, such as crying “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

The risk to the right of people to be safe outweighs the speaker’s right to falsely claim a fire that could cause a panic injuring people, thus subjecting the speaker to prosecution, explained Castor, who helped lead the team that successfully defended former President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial in 2021 before the U.S. Senate.

Speech Has Consequences

There is no free speech right absent the threat of a government action, he said.

For example, truthfully telling your boss, who is not a government employee, that he is a liar or a cheater can get you fired, but not generally prosecuted. There are some exceptions if the employer is sufficiently connected to the government to be an agent, but that is the basic idea. Firing is a private sector action.

“Being prosecuted is a governmental action. The First Amendment protects against governmental action: ‘Congress shall make no law,'” Castor said.

“With that caveat, people now do not feel free to speak their minds as they once did because of the fear of being cancelled. Like concern for a public shunning, due to heavily a polarized political climate fanned by a mostly biased media, the average person simply stays quiet for fear of saying something someone else will find offensive, that will be picked up by the ’twitter-verse' social media and the left-leaning mainstream media, resulting in that person being labeled as a—you name it—and therefore not worthy to exist,” Castor said.

“There is a prevailing sentiment in the last 10 years that is absolutely frightening to people like me, trained to believe in due process of law and the presumption of innocence: that is, some people are ‘so bad’ they are not worthy of the rights, privileges, and protections of citizens,“ he said. ”The ‘presumption of guilt’ automatically attaches to such people in the minds of the mob and, even more astonishingly, that presumption of guilt attaches to all persons associated with the person who is ‘so bad.'”

Speech Damaged by Social Media

In this screenshot taken from a congressional webcast, Bruce Castor, defense lawyer for former President Donald Trump, speaks on Feb. 8 in Washington. congress.gov via Getty Images

People keep their mouths shut to avoid the mob mentality, magnified by social media and fanned by a complicit mainstream media, he said.

“But they do vote,” Castor said. “This is why you see political polling all over the map and wrong. People tell pollsters what they think the mob wants to hear, then vote how they think. We got here because of social media and a failure of the mainstream media to understand that social media does not reflect general public sentiment. This came as a shock to me, too, as it is easy to assume social media reflects a cross-section of America. It does not. It reflects a small, radical segment of the public. Counterintuitive, I know. But when I defended President Trump in the impeachment, I returned to a wife who was horrified over how me and my team were treated by ‘the news.’”

Castor realized her news came from social media, and to test a theory that social media did not reflect public opinion, he logged the mail and email at the office, where thousands of letters and emails are received in a week. Everything was sepertated into two categories, favorable or unfavorable to his team.

At the end of a week, the mail ran 15 to 1 favorable to unfavorable, the opposite of the social media news his wife had been reading.

“The rise of social media and the failure of normal news outlets to call balls and strikes objectively, and instead cater to what it incorrectly thought is prevailing sentiment reflected in social media, got us where we are today,” Castor said. “I think normal media is waking up to the fact that social media does not accurately reflect a cross-section of American thought, but it has taken a long time.”

Castor says he has seen freedom of expression chilled in the judicial system with political prosecutions and a failure of due process.

Jeff Bermant, TUSK Browser CEO Jeff Bermant

“Prosecutors and judges must be gatekeepers of these freedoms because the jury system is infected with the overt bias created by social media, and the traditional media’s failures to stop it, leading to the ‘he/she is so bad’ because of affiliation to a person, group, or cause,’ that the protections of the Constitution and due process do not apply to them,” he said.

Castor would like to see Congress amend the law to allow social media conglomerates like Twitter and Facebook to be sued for defamation when people post defamatory things that cause damage to the reputations of others.

Arbiter of Speech

Jeff Bermant, CEO of the web browser TUSK—which features an anti-censorship search engine, news feed, and chatbot—told The Epoch Times that the history behind restricting free speech is one of the pillars of socialism and communism.

“Our college professors have been teaching that free speech can only be free if controlled. The claim is not all free speech should be accessible as they should block hateful speech or ‘disinformation.’ This gets very dangerous, as who is the arbiter of speech?” Bermant said. “The Chinese government built its firewall because it claimed it did not want the Chinese people to get disinformation. It sounds familiar. Are we on route to do the same thing? Look at the Biden laptop story, which was not disinformation, but claimed by the deep state that it was misinformation. Many believe that had this story not been censored, perhaps Trump would have won the election.”

Berment says Tusk was censored and booted off ChatGPT for promoting a conservative viewpoint. He says the government played a role in censoring the Biden laptop story.

“The government, under the Constitution, absolutely must never weigh in on free speech and cannot be the decision maker regarding truth or disinformation,“ he said. ”Companies such as Truth Social, Tusk, and Rumble must flourish because even if the government does not stifle free speech, many big companies believe they should be able to control speech.”