Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose the real threat to freedom – Chicago Tribune

Oh, please.

The ignorant, insular snowflakes on college campuses who want to banish conservative speakers are a piddly threat to American liberty.

The hand-wringing and pearl-clutching on the political right about the lefty activists who object to their schools providing a forum to conservative provocateurs is preposterously out of scale to the danger these activists actually pose to the First Amendment.

Snarky firebrand Ann Coulter should have been allowed to speak as scheduled at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed. And the frightening, stifling campus protests to which other conservative speakers have been subjected are inexcusable, particularly at institutions supposedly dedicated to inquiry and freedom of thought.

But come out from under the covers. Put on some fresh trousers. The vast majority of liberal politicians and pundits deplore this sort of suppression, which remains geographically quite limited. Rascals and rabble rousers from all across the political spectrum still have countless venues for expression, and those who wish to enjoy the vile ramblings of, say, Milo Yiannopolous, have no shortage of opportunity online.

The right dominates talk radio and cable chat, and Republicans control every branch of government at the federal level.

Freedom of conservative speech is very, very safe.

A better argument can be made that it's President Donald Trump and the GOP who are the true threats to American liberty.

On March 30, Trump tweeted "The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?" This echoed what he'd promised a year earlier on the campaign trail, "I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money."

The laws on the books say a public figure must establish that a media outlet acted with "actual malice" in order to prove libel. Relaxing that standard would have a deeply chilling effect not only on major media outlets but also everyday citizens, since social media has turned all of us into publishers.

In fact, the chilling effect would be greatest on everyday citizens, since so few have armies of lawyers to defend themselves against aggrieved politicians.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Sunday that pursuing such a change to the definition of libel "is something that is being looked at" by the Trump administration.

In the same interview on ABC's "This Week," Priebus was asked about a related Trump tweet on Nov. 29: "Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag if they do, there must be consequences perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"

"It's something that, again, is probably going to get looked at," Priebus said. "Our flag should be protected, and it's Donald Trump that talks about that issue. And you know what? It's a 70 percent issue in this country. He wins every day and twice on Sunday on our flag."

Not quite. The most recent scientific poll I could find, a 2011 survey by the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and the Newseum, found just 39 percent support for a constitutional amendment to overrule the Supreme Court's finding that burning an American flag in protest is protected expression.

Yes, it's a form of expression that deeply offends many people. So is the sneering, sexist, racist claptrap from would-be campus orators. On principle I defend both forms of expression. But only the former is under threat by the president of the United States.

Fortunately, Trump's impulses to amend the Constitution to clamp down on the media and on other forms of expression he detests will be thwarted by the difficulty of passing such amendments absent an overwhelming national political consensus. Deep breaths, everyone. Free speech is safe.

For genuine threats to the core values of our democratic republic, however, you need look no further than the relentless, state-by-state efforts of the GOP to suppress minority voting. Just last month, a federal judge invalidated Texas' 2011 voter identification law on the grounds that the intent of legislators was to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters, not to combat almost nonexistent in-person voter fraud.

Similarly, a federal court struck down North Carolina's voter ID law last summer, writing that the statute targeted "African-Americans with almost surgical precision" due to the legislature's blatant "concern that African-Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise."

Shame on the those who try to deny provocative speakers the right to speak to willing campus audiences. But really. The threat they pose to liberty pales next to those engaged in campaigns of voter suppression as our peevish president hungrily looks to carve up the Constitution.

Twitter @EricZorn

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Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose the real threat to freedom - Chicago Tribune