Louder with Crowder - July 03, 2024


The First Amendment: American Masterclass with Historian David Barton | Louder With Crowder

Topics
freedom of press false news voting rights and responsibilities
Hosted by
Steven Crowder
Guests
David Barton
Mentioned
Thomas Jefferson George Washington Benjamin Rush Eugene Foster Joseph Ellis Bernie Sanders Sally Hemings Hillary Clinton Donald Trump Nick Sandman John Adams Peter Singer William Colby Monica Lewinsky William Binney Mark Messier Barack Obama George W. Bush George III John Locke and 8 more
A German and a Jew Walk Into a Bar | Talking With People The Second Amendment: American Masterclass with Historian David Barton | Louder With Crowder

Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

201.85

Word count

4,831

Sentence count

420

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In July of 2019, the First Amendment was already under fire for its lack of protection for freedom of speech. Since then, things have only gotten worse. The government has worked hand-in-hand with big tech to shut down stories that both they didn t like and have altered the course of elections. You have had people removed from the town square for simply questioning government policy, domestically or internationally. And the sitting president was actively banned from all social media in the span of 24 hours in one of the most obvious examples of collusion that we ve seen in this country as it relates to government and private companies. We are actually in danger of losing our first amendment rights in the United States, and too few people understand what that actually means.

Transcript

Transcripts from "Louder with Crowder" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:02.000 So when I first brought you this installment in July 2019, the First Amendment, freedom of speech, they were already under fire.
00:00:09.000 Universities were banning speakers, performers, because of the woke mob, which is a newly coined term, and celebrities were being canceled for 10-year-old tweets.
00:00:17.000 It was new territory.
00:00:19.000 Since then, one could argue that things have not improved, but almost have gotten worse.
00:00:26.000 You have the government having worked hand-in-hand with big tech to shut down stories that both of them didn't like and have altered the course of elections.
00:00:33.000 You have had people removed from the town square for simply questioning COVID policy, domestically or internationally.
00:00:40.000 And the sitting president was actively banned from all social media in the span of 24 hours
00:00:46.000 in one of the most obvious examples, I would say, of collusion that we've seen in this
00:00:51.000 country as it relates to government and quote unquote private companies.
00:00:56.000 We are actually in danger of losing our first amendment rights in this country.
00:01:03.000 And too few people understand what that actually means.
00:01:07.000 Hopefully this helps.
00:01:17.000 Happy 4th, or Independence Day if you prefer.
00:01:20.000 I prefer 4th because it's easier to say.
00:01:21.000 I'm also wildly uncomfortable, as you are now, I'm sure, the viewer.
00:01:26.000 We're here with David Barton, wall builder, wall builders, sorry, is the organization, and he's sort of like the MacGyver of historical artifacts.
00:01:34.000 You give him a bent-back paperclip and an empty straw and he will give you the Declaration of Independence.
00:01:38.000 He just finds them out of nowhere.
00:01:40.000 Today we'll be talking about, specifically, the First Amendment, freedom of speech, if I can just You're not the same as those 4th grade kids that were sitting there in the 1890s.
00:01:52.000 Especially because they were very malnourished and I assumed quite often beaten.
00:01:56.000 So, first off, for people who aren't necessarily entirely aware, In a nutshell, what is the First Amendment?
00:02:04.000 What does it guarantee in the United States?
00:02:06.000 The First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights.
00:02:08.000 It recognizes rights that exist and says that people have a right to do these things and that government is not to touch those things.
00:02:16.000 So the First Amendment contains five rights that says government cannot regulate these rights.
00:02:21.000 They don't belong to the government.
00:02:23.000 And you have the right, free exercise of religion, you have the right of speech, you have the right of press, you have the right of petition, and the right of assembly.
00:02:33.000 So those are the five rights.
00:02:34.000 Now, unfortunately, only one in a thousand Americans can name the five rights in the First Amendment, so we don't even know what they are generally.
00:02:41.000 But those are five things that the government is not to interfere with and limit and regulate.
00:02:47.000 Is this uniquely American?
00:02:47.000 Right.
00:02:49.000 Does this exist anywhere else in the world, particularly like freedom of speech as an absolute?
00:02:54.000 It did, but it was always, for example, Great Britain, we had all of these rights in Great Britain.
00:02:59.000 And part of the reason the Founders explained that we separated from Great Britain was King George III kept violating these rights.
00:03:05.000 Some of these were set out back in the Magna Carta.
00:03:07.000 So these have always been recognized as natural rights, God-given rights, inalienable rights, different terms.
00:03:13.000 They've been written about by John Locke in the 1690s or Montesquieu in the 1750s.
00:03:18.000 Other nations, other philosophers, Grotius and Pufendorf, they're Dutch philosophers.
00:03:22.000 A lot of people wrote about them.
00:03:24.000 Not many nations had them.
00:03:25.000 But in the British system, they did exist.
00:03:28.000 But they were regularly violated because in the British system, you didn't have three branches that were separated.
00:03:35.000 You had three branches, but the king's over everything.
00:03:37.000 So if the king went bad, it all went bad.
00:03:39.000 That, combined with a taxation without representation, ended up with entire buckets of twinings in Earl Grey being dumped into the harbor.
00:03:46.000 So, for people who maybe they just think it starts with the First Amendment, but you have some context here that sort of led to that, right?
00:03:53.000 You're saying this is the Zinger?
00:03:55.000 Yeah, this case is the case and trial of Peter Zinger.
00:04:00.000 Now, let me set the background even before that.
00:04:02.000 I'm going to go back here to an Act of Parliament, and this goes back in the 1600s, 1646 this is.
00:04:09.000 So this is passed in June, or December of 1646, and it's a law of Parliament on whoever can preach the Gospel of the Scripture.
00:04:19.000 So they're saying, here's what you can and can't say.
00:04:21.000 We will tell you who can say religious speech.
00:04:25.000 So that's a law of parliament on who can and cannot have religious speech.
00:04:29.000 Who can and cannot say things about the gospel.
00:04:31.000 So this is the British mindset.
00:04:33.000 You have free speech, but we'll tell you what you can say and who can say it, etc.
00:04:37.000 Kind of like the British mindset today, where they jail someone for doing a cover of Kung Fu Fighting because it's hate speech.
00:04:42.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:04:43.000 You know, that seems more regal.
00:04:44.000 Yeah, that's more regal back then, because you had Parliament do it.
00:04:47.000 So, what they get into is, with that kind of mindset in America, there's a lot of government interference with America, and Americans are much more aware of their rights.
00:04:56.000 They did a lot of reading of those guys we talked about, the locks and monascuses and grocers in Pufendorf.
00:05:02.000 They knew rights, and they knew inalienable rights, and they knew that government existed
00:05:05.000 to protect rights, and Great Britain's not doing that.
00:05:08.000 One of those rights was freedom of the press.
00:05:12.000 So freedom of the press, what happened was you had a governor in New York, Governor Cosby,
00:05:17.000 who the people thought did some really crummy things.
00:05:20.000 A heavy...
00:05:21.000 Once a Cosby, always a Cosby.
00:05:22.000 All right, I apologize.
00:05:26.000 He did some inappropriate things, we should say.
00:05:29.000 We'll say inappropriate is the word there.
00:05:31.000 So he did inappropriate things, and newspaper publisher Peter Singer criticized that in writing.
00:05:36.000 He didn't impress.
00:05:39.000 The British courts took him and jailed him for a year and said, the law says you can't criticize the king or the government.
00:05:46.000 And that's British law, you can't do that.
00:05:48.000 So when it went to trial... And this took place where?
00:05:48.000 He did it.
00:05:51.000 This took place in New York City in 1735.
00:05:55.000 So he goes to trial in 17... well actually they jailed him in 1734.
00:06:00.000 And so in 1735, a year in jail for criticizing the government, he is at trial and he has two really good attorneys.
00:06:07.000 The judge disbarred the attorney.
00:06:12.000 Zinger.
00:06:12.000 You got a Zinger now.
00:06:13.000 He had a Zingerman, yeah, representing, probably, yeah.
00:06:17.000 Or Berg, yeah, Steen, right.
00:06:20.000 So they get disbarred and they choose this young attorney who doesn't have any experience
00:06:24.000 and said, you can defend him.
00:06:26.000 And so his defense to the jury is very strong.
00:06:29.000 He says, look, He may have criticized the government, but what he said was true. 0.55
00:06:34.000 And the jury went back and said, truth is an absolute defense.
00:06:37.000 He may have criticized the government, but if what you say is true, then that's fine.
00:06:42.000 You're allowed to criticize.
00:06:43.000 You have the right of free speech.
00:06:45.000 You can criticize the government.
00:06:46.000 What you say is true.
00:06:48.000 And so that jury decision that overturned what the judges were doing, and the one thing that the British did get right at that point in time was the jury has the final word.
00:06:57.000 And so in cases like that, and William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, when the jury said, that's it, that was the end of it.
00:07:05.000 And the British at least did respect that.
00:07:07.000 So that became the foundation of freedom of press.
00:07:09.000 Now it's interesting that in that building where the trial occurred is the same building in which we framed the Bill of Rights to give freedom of the press.
00:07:18.000 So as they're sitting there framing that, it's just, you know, it's like right there we had the trial.
00:07:22.000 Right.
00:07:22.000 So this is all cognizant to Americans because this is all part of protecting those natural rights.
00:07:28.000 And again, though, kind of like we were talking about before, you know, this was when there were shared fundamental values.
00:07:32.000 Truth is an absolute defense.
00:07:33.000 That's right.
00:07:34.000 But you were also telling me more, I think we have some over there, kind of fake news.
00:07:37.000 If it wasn't true, it wasn't always defensible, right?
00:07:41.000 This is kind of fun stuff over here.
00:07:43.000 So let me pull some stuff out.
00:07:45.000 I'll just let you take the first shot at this.
00:07:48.000 So this is an old law book.
00:07:50.000 This is one of the state law books.
00:07:52.000 This happens to be out of Virginia.
00:07:54.000 And here's the whole section.
00:07:55.000 What's the section titled?
00:07:56.000 False news.
00:07:59.000 So there's false news.
00:08:00.000 Here's what you do with false news.
00:08:02.000 You got the right to news.
00:08:03.000 You have the right to freedom of the press and speech.
00:08:06.000 You don't have the right to lie.
00:08:07.000 And so what happens is you can lie, but you need to be held accountable for it.
00:08:11.000 So this is where we would provide provisions.
00:08:15.000 And here's another one of the law books with this kind of fake news stuff.
00:08:21.000 And so what would happen here, if I can get to it, you know, again, this is an act against divulgers of false news.
00:08:29.000 So if you're saying something that's a lie and that hurts somebody's reputation, he's got a right to defend his reputation.
00:08:36.000 So you've got to make a way to punish people who intentionally say something false or that do things that hurt your reputation.
00:08:44.000 Today we've made it very, very, very hard to sue for defamation.
00:08:49.000 And of course today you have to show that there was great economic harm.
00:08:52.000 So if somebody slanders me or libels me, it's only slander or libel if it's hurt me economically.
00:08:59.000 They don't count reputation as something.
00:09:01.000 These guys thought your reputation was everything.
00:09:03.000 So there were a lot of laws that said you have freedom of press and speech, but you also have to be accountable.
00:09:10.000 This is one thing I love about what the Founding Fathers did with every right in the Bill of Rights.
00:09:13.000 They said for every right, there's a corresponding responsibility and duty.
00:09:17.000 So, I've got the right to free speech, but I have the duty to tell the truth when I speak.
00:09:21.000 I have the right to keep and bear arms, but I have the duty not to shed innocent blood.
00:09:24.000 You know, so, everything had a responsibility.
00:09:27.000 And so, that's what the responsibility is.
00:09:28.000 Now, is this false news?
00:09:29.000 Does that just apply to the press, or does that also apply to personal freedom of speech?
00:09:33.000 Both.
00:09:34.000 Here's a press one.
00:09:35.000 This is great.
00:09:36.000 It says on the front, Letters from General George Washington.
00:09:40.000 And so, this is dated 1796, but I want to show you the first letter.
00:09:44.000 Can you be using tweezers or something?
00:09:45.000 You bet. It looks like it's coming apart. It is. It's old.
00:09:48.000 So George Washington.
00:09:49.000 These are letters from George Washington, but I'm going to open it up here and the first letter...
00:09:54.000 Shouldn't you be using tweezers or something? God, I mean, like, if I have a first issue printing of the thing, a
00:09:59.000 comic book, and if I bend the crease, it's worth nothing.
00:10:02.000 Well, you're right, and that's why we hold these to about 60 to 90 degrees open.
00:10:07.000 We don't let them go open all the way.
00:10:09.000 And we don't use gloves because gloves, you don't have the sensitivity.
00:10:13.000 And so if I use a glove, I'm invariably going to tear that paper.
00:10:16.000 Now gloves are good for artifacts.
00:10:18.000 And I'll keep my fingers off the printed part, but on the edges, that's how we can tell how soft the paper is.
00:10:26.000 So what we have is a letter from George Washington.
00:10:28.000 This is June the 12th, 1776.
00:10:30.000 So we have Washington in the middle of the Revolution.
00:10:34.000 This is a letter that was printed from Washington, apparently, in a New York newspaper.
00:10:41.000 And in this letter, Washington takes this tone of I don't know what to do here.
00:10:46.000 What I'm doing in this revolution is the wrong thing.
00:10:49.000 We shouldn't be doing this.
00:10:51.000 We don't have a moral right to do this.
00:10:53.000 I don't think this is going to turn out right.
00:10:54.000 The whole thing is just a real downer.
00:10:58.000 Except he never said any of that.
00:10:59.000 That was the press making that up.
00:11:01.000 I was going to say, it doesn't sound like my Georgie.
00:11:03.000 That's right.
00:11:04.000 It was not George.
00:11:05.000 This was done by a newspaper editor in New York To build sentiment against the revolution. 0.99
00:11:12.000 Get the patriots, these guys are all radicals, they're all crazy. 0.94
00:11:15.000 Washington doesn't even think they're right. 0.99
00:11:17.000 And everybody loved Washington.
00:11:19.000 So this was the press doing false news.
00:11:23.000 What were the consequences for that?
00:11:24.000 Well, the guy got exposed, first thing, was when they exposed it, and America still had enough of a moral fiber back then, they didn't like being lied to.
00:11:33.000 And so at that point in time, that's it.
00:11:35.000 He's kind of, he's no longer a press guy anymore because nobody's going to buy his stuff.
00:11:39.000 So that was exposure.
00:11:40.000 But on the other hand, you have a founding father like Benjamin Rush, who's a signer of the Declaration.
00:11:45.000 And as a signer of the Declaration, he was, John Adams said he was one of the three most notable signers, three most notable founders.
00:11:52.000 John Adams said you had Washington and Franklin and Benjamin Rush.
00:11:55.000 But he's not often talked about.
00:11:56.000 He's not often talked about.
00:11:57.000 People think he wrote Fly By Night.
00:12:00.000 Not at all.
00:12:01.000 But he was amazing.
00:12:01.000 No.
00:12:02.000 I mean, he's the father of public schools under the Constitution, started five universities.
00:12:07.000 He's the most famous physician in American history.
00:12:10.000 He has medical cures 200 years ago we still use today.
00:12:13.000 He had a critic back then, there's a guy named William Colbert, that just absolutely would not let up on him in the papers. 0.98
00:12:20.000 He's a quack, he's a killer, he's killing his patients. 1.00
00:12:23.000 I'm selfish that way, you know. 1.00
00:12:24.000 I'm sorry. I know. Yeah, I'm sorry. You keep it all for yourself. That's right. I'm selfish that way, you know
00:12:28.000 This is just so this is an action This is a court report and what happened this guy beat on
00:12:35.000 rush for years and years and years and rush Ignored him as much as he could and finally he said, you
00:12:42.000 know my reputation. I got to do something So he took the guy to court, and in court he won a huge settlement against the guy.
00:12:51.000 So back then was that like four nickels?
00:12:52.000 It was, back then it was $5,000.
00:12:54.000 That wouldn't even get you an attorney hired today. 0.53
00:12:56.000 But back then, that was a huge settlement.
00:13:00.000 And so, $5,000, and he gave it all to charity.
00:13:01.000 Because what he wanted was his reputation back.
00:13:03.000 He didn't want the press, and this guy particularly, who was riding in the press.
00:13:08.000 So, an individual action against a person, and Rush won it in court.
00:13:13.000 And that stopped the guy.
00:13:14.000 He had no more criticism of him after that.
00:13:16.000 Rush got his reputation back.
00:13:18.000 And even today, Russia considered and viewed very highly.
00:13:21.000 Yeah.
00:13:21.000 That was a big thing.
00:13:22.000 A lot of people don't understand that nowadays.
00:13:23.000 When people say, them's fightin' words, it usually wasn't from being physically assaulted.
00:13:27.000 Back then, your reputation was worth something protecting.
00:13:27.000 That's right.
00:13:30.000 Or the reputation of your wife, right?
00:13:32.000 This was something that people, they would.
00:13:33.000 They would go to blows over.
00:13:35.000 And now we're talking... They would go to duels over.
00:13:37.000 Yeah, I know.
00:13:38.000 Dueling was really common.
00:13:39.000 When you think about that, a couple of punches in a bar fight seems like nothing if somebody ruins your reputation.
00:13:43.000 But back then, they were pretty severe.
00:13:46.000 And it seems like we've lost a little bit of that, and we've also lost some accountability.
00:13:50.000 I've often talked about this in hockey.
00:13:51.000 It's the only sport where there's accountability because the ref will Thomas Jefferson.
00:13:54.000 No, no, no, no.
00:13:56.000 You earned this one, Marc Messier.
00:13:58.000 Exactly.
00:13:59.000 Now, that was in contrast to what you were telling me, Rush to Jefferson.
00:14:03.000 Thomas Jefferson.
00:14:04.000 What happened in the election of 1800 was Thomas Jefferson, the libel and slander against
00:14:11.000 him has reached a level that has never been seen in any other political campaign.
00:14:16.000 We talk about negative campaigning today.
00:14:17.000 We're a bunch of wimps.
00:14:19.000 I mean, you read what was said about Jefferson back then. 0.99
00:14:22.000 He was a murderer. 0.86
00:14:23.000 He killed a wife and eight kids, and he's abolishing the Navy, and he's, you know, he's finding every Bible, and he's collecting them and burning them. 0.98
00:14:32.000 I mean, the stuff that was out about him.
00:14:34.000 Sounds like Bernie 2020.
00:14:36.000 Well, nothing changes over time.
00:14:39.000 Only one actually didn't happen.
00:14:42.000 So he's got all this stuff and we've got a whole bunch of these articles about him, this negative stuff, and he's writing his friends and saying That's not true, and we all know that's not true, and history has proven it wasn't true.
00:14:55.000 And this is the period of time in which he was accused with fathering children of Sally Hemings.
00:15:00.000 Right.
00:15:00.000 A lot of people still believe that.
00:15:02.000 Well, in November of 1998, the report came out by Joseph Ellis's Nature and Science magazine that said, we now have DNA evidence.
00:15:10.000 Jefferson did it.
00:15:11.000 We know he did it.
00:15:13.000 Actually, Eugene Foster's the guy who did the DNA test.
00:15:15.000 I talked to Eugene.
00:15:16.000 We talked to him.
00:15:17.000 He said, no, I told him that.
00:15:19.000 We did not even use Jefferson's DNA in the testing.
00:15:23.000 And so what happened, Joseph Ellis was a huge fan of Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was being impeached for the Monica Lewinsky stuff at the time, and he thought, you know, If we can say Jefferson did that, we can say Jefferson was a great president, this had no effect on his presidency, and so Ellis had actually been part of a full-page ad in the New York Times on how great Jefferson was, shouldn't be impeached, and this seemed to help it.
00:15:44.000 So when the piece came out, and by the way, we talked to Eugene Foster, he did a second DNA testing, and same thing.
00:15:52.000 There's no evidence that Thomas Jefferson did this.
00:15:55.000 So, to this day, everybody knows there were 211 news outlets that carried the announcement that Jefferson did it.
00:16:03.000 Six weeks later, they pulled the story back and said, ah, sorry, we were wrong, but only 11 outlets carried the retractions.
00:16:08.000 Was it kind of one of those first story front page retractions?
00:16:11.000 Absolutely.
00:16:11.000 Somewhere in the sports section.
00:16:13.000 That's right, in the advertisement section.
00:16:15.000 Somewhere next to Garfield in the comics.
00:16:17.000 Exactly.
00:16:18.000 And so people today still think Jefferson did it.
00:16:20.000 Jefferson, back then, he said, I'm not going to take these guys to court.
00:16:23.000 He said, I could easily disprove them in court.
00:16:26.000 I can show.
00:16:27.000 He said, but you know what?
00:16:28.000 I trust the good judgment of the people.
00:16:31.000 I trust that there's a God in heaven before whom these liars will stand and they'll have to account to Him.
00:16:35.000 He went through three reasons.
00:16:37.000 He just didn't think it was worth taking to court.
00:16:39.000 It's interesting that today, one of the reasons the critics of Jefferson use is that he never denied the affair with Sally Hemings, therefore he's guilty of it.
00:16:48.000 No.
00:16:49.000 So he's a guy that did not take advantage of his ability to prove his innocence back then, and today we say, well, he must have done it.
00:16:58.000 But Rush did, and so we have a different opinion of Rush.
00:17:01.000 We see the people who might be a little nervous hearing this saying, well, of course, okay, you shouldn't lie, commit libel or slander, but there is some concern that someone in power can more easily say, well, that's not true, that's libel or slander, and they have the ability to tip the scales of justice.
00:17:13.000 You know, that's what people would say about Donald Trump, for example.
00:17:20.000 There was a lot of cause of action back then and a jury of your peers is what decided.
00:17:25.000 The government didn't decide, the jury decided.
00:17:28.000 We don't do this anymore today, but at the time of the founding fathers, If a judge overturned a jury decision, that was an impeachable offense for a judge.
00:17:37.000 You just did not do that.
00:17:38.000 You did not overturn the will of the people.
00:17:40.000 Today, judges are all the time sitting inside jury verdicts.
00:17:43.000 Oh, that amount was too much.
00:17:44.000 You've got to set it aside.
00:17:45.000 So their defense back then was government, this is our protection because our peers We'll look at it and say, nah, the paper was right, you were wrong.
00:17:55.000 And has there been precedent set to be really clear in delineating between outright lies, fabrications, and just having an opinion that might be insulted?
00:18:03.000 Well, not anymore today, because it is so hard to sue for your reputation.
00:18:07.000 Again, you have to prove economic hurt.
00:18:10.000 And the average American can't prove that he's been economically hurt by lies.
00:18:13.000 That's why I love what's happening with Nick Sandman.
00:18:15.000 I hope Nick Sandman does really well, you know, the kid on the mall, Absolutely.
00:18:20.000 Opinion pieces, that's right.
00:18:21.000 Opinion pieces.
00:18:21.000 Yeah, the Covington school.
00:18:23.000 And so he sued so many of these media outlets.
00:18:26.000 And if he is able to avail in that, then people start getting their reputation back.
00:18:30.000 But I want to make sure people understand that the First Amendment still would protect,
00:18:32.000 for example, op-eds that are unpopular.
00:18:35.000 Opinion pieces, that's right.
00:18:36.000 Opinion pieces.
00:18:37.000 But when you come out and make it fact, and you said George Washington wrote this.
00:18:41.000 No, that was a fabrication all the way around.
00:18:43.000 And you didn't do due... See, we hold doctors liable for malfeasance if they don't do due diligence.
00:18:49.000 And for a reporter not to do due diligence... Now, if you want to say this is my opinion, here's an opinion piece, you got it. 1.00
00:18:54.000 If you want to say, Donald Trump is an idiot. 1.00
00:18:56.000 George Bush was wrong about Iraq. 1.00
00:18:59.000 He's a crappy president. 1.00
00:19:00.000 Barack Obama sucks. 1.00
00:19:01.000 People can say that. 0.99
00:19:03.000 So, outside of lying, outside of libel and slander, are there any limitations on individual speech?
00:19:08.000 As it relates to the First Amendment.
00:19:10.000 The limitations are accountability of telling the truth, or at least not hurting someone's reputation for lying.
00:19:17.000 Well, it's not only that.
00:19:18.000 I think it's even more pure than that.
00:19:19.000 It really is distilled to truth because people often say, right, well, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
00:19:23.000 That's right.
00:19:23.000 You can't.
00:19:24.000 If there's a fire, you can't lie because that could cause physical harm to somebody.
00:19:28.000 People could get trampled.
00:19:29.000 That is the moral sense that was there, was truth was the bottom line.
00:19:33.000 You're after truth, and we may have differences of opinion.
00:19:37.000 That's why you rarely see slander or libel cases in the abolition time, because there was two opinions on the worth of blacks.
00:19:46.000 Those are opinions.
00:19:48.000 But to absolutely come out and say that you said this when you didn't, or that I accused you of something you had no part in, That's where it crossed the line.
00:19:56.000 And it's interesting that, like you said, there was a time where these were sort of
00:19:58.000 shared moral values where we said, okay, if we're going to have freedom of speech, which
00:20:02.000 is a pretty radical idea, like you said, it existed obviously in the old land, but it
00:20:06.000 wasn't necessarily enforced equally.
00:20:08.000 But we said, we are going to have true freedom of speech.
00:20:10.000 There was a shared value that truth is really important.
00:20:13.000 Whereas when we've moved away from that, now people don't even understand the First Amendment
00:20:17.000 where they say, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
00:20:19.000 Well, it's not about yelling fire, it's about the truth.
00:20:21.000 They say, well, hold on a second, you shouldn't say this on campus.
00:20:23.000 Well, it's not about it being offensive, it's someone saying something that is untrue, and it's really become a territory that, with my generation, kids have no grasp of it.
00:20:33.000 And they say it's reductive.
00:20:34.000 But I do think the First Amendment really can be incredibly reductive.
00:20:38.000 It comes down to, are you telling the truth?
00:20:40.000 That's right.
00:20:40.000 Or are you knowingly lying?
00:20:42.000 That's right.
00:20:42.000 I should say.
00:20:42.000 Because people can be wrong, right?
00:20:44.000 And intent was a large part of it.
00:20:45.000 Right.
00:20:46.000 I mean, of course, the Juul case with the bombing in Atlanta in 96, the newspapers held liable.
00:20:53.000 And the others that reported it were also liable.
00:20:55.000 But intent was a big deal.
00:20:57.000 You had to have an intent to lie, not tell the truth, to hurt someone with falsehoods.
00:21:02.000 And that intent was really big.
00:21:04.000 If it was innocent, that was one thing.
00:21:06.000 And it really can be boiled down to it.
00:21:07.000 Then the First Amendment applies to all.
00:21:09.000 It is absolute, provided that you are not And that was why with every right there's a corresponding responsibility.
00:21:15.000 You got a right to free speech, free press, but you have a responsibility to tell the truth.
00:21:17.000 be even knowingly hurtful of someone's feelings but not dishonest, it's covered.
00:21:22.000 Dishonesty is the one.
00:21:24.000 And that was why with every right there's a corresponding responsibility.
00:21:27.000 You got a right to free speech, free press, but you have a responsibility to tell the
00:21:31.000 truth.
00:21:32.000 Right.
00:21:33.000 This is kind of a little bit more macro.
00:21:35.000 We do have to get going.
00:21:36.000 We have some other installments, of course.
00:21:37.000 Click the button, watch them on YouTube.
00:21:40.000 For example, Bernie Sanders, to go back to Bernie Sanders, has talked about how the Boston bomber shouldn't lose his right to vote.
00:21:46.000 Or even, let's scale it back, because that was a headline that convicted violent felons maybe shouldn't lose their right to vote.
00:21:52.000 What was the idea from the Founding Fathers, for example, if you violated those responsibilities with those rights?
00:21:58.000 For example, let's say, of course, you had the right to carry a firearm.
00:22:02.000 But if you shot somebody and killed somebody, to what degree would you lose access to those rights?
00:22:07.000 You know, it's an interesting thing because we look at voting as a right.
00:22:12.000 They did not.
00:22:13.000 They didn't see voting as a right.
00:22:14.000 They saw it as a responsibility.
00:22:16.000 It was a duty.
00:22:17.000 It was something you owed.
00:22:19.000 It was you choosing your government under which you live.
00:22:22.000 And if you've committed a heinous crime, You shouldn't be choosing the leaders because your whole moral sense is skewed.
00:22:28.000 If you think it's okay to take somebody's life, you're not the one we want choosing our leaders.
00:22:33.000 And so there was an exclusion that happened there.
00:22:36.000 You have proven yourself unworthy of of knowing the moral sense of what your leader should be.
00:22:42.000 And so for them, there was a penalty.
00:22:44.000 And even as I grew up in school, because I obviously have white hair, you don't, it was a big deal to lose your right to vote.
00:22:55.000 And that was a deterrent to crime, actually.
00:22:57.000 Voting was so important to us that when we were reminded that if you do this, you lose your right to vote, No, I'm not going to do that.
00:23:03.000 That was actually a deterrent.
00:23:04.000 It would not be today.
00:23:05.000 Right.
00:23:06.000 Because we're so sloppy with that right and we don't cherish it.
00:23:09.000 Or you could lose your right, obviously, to carry a firearm.
00:23:11.000 That's right.
00:23:12.000 And that was big stuff.
00:23:13.000 And so we understood how important those rights were.
00:23:16.000 Now we're kind of in an entitlement mentality.
00:23:17.000 This is what the government owes me.
00:23:19.000 And it's not.
00:23:20.000 Those were rights that we exercised.
00:23:21.000 And so, at that point, the right to choose self-government, to choose leaders who would not be corrupt, who would not exercise power wrongly, who would keep government limited, etc., that was a really big deal.
00:23:33.000 But we don't teach that civic responsibility the same way.
00:23:35.000 So today, we just throw, well, anybody that has two legs or one leg or no leg, anybody can vote.
00:23:40.000 You know, and you don't even have to live here.
00:23:42.000 You don't have to be part of the country.
00:23:43.000 But not anybody can have the right to speak freely or own a firearm, which, you know, they're number one and two when you look at the amendments.
00:23:49.000 Mr. Barton, thank you very much.
00:23:51.000 Watch more.
00:23:51.000 We have installments on the Civil War, Revolutionary War, Second Amendment.
00:23:56.000 Happy Fourth! 0.97