There’s a confusion being sown on the left, which appeals to the First Amendment of the US Constitution as a means to negate the spirit of the Article, thwart the public interest, and stifle the democratic processes that allow those interests to manifest. Those engaged in this subterfuge include teachers and their unions, librarians and their associations, and the mainstream (linear) media—all of which depend on the commons to convey corporate state propaganda. Progressives are enabled in this misuse of public resources by command of the administrative apparatus.
The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….” This guarantee is rooted in the recognition of private rights—the right of individuals to determine matters of conscience for themselves, and to express opinions in both speech and writing. Accordingly, citizens are free to advocate for open borders, mass immigration, and the transformation of culture and national identity. They may hold and voice such views without interference from government authority.
The question we must engage, however, if we are to understand why people hold such destructive views, is how they come to hold them. It would be one thing if these ideas emerged from free and open discourse. For the most part, they do not. Rather, they arise through indoctrination made possible by partisan control of the republican machinery. Progressives are unencumbered in their effort to bend the republic out of shape precisely because they do not believe in the spirit of the Article they invoke. They do not believe they are limited by the First Amendment because they don’t believe in the First Amendment. Instead, they see the First Amendment as a tool to subvert democracy.
Make no mistake: an ideology is at work here. While some may possess personality types inclined toward what Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”—a disposition toward self-destructive altruism—for most people, these views are not innate but learned. They are transmitted through powerful institutions that shape public opinion: the culture industry, broadcast media, religious bodies, parents already influenced by these forces, and, perhaps most significantly, the educational system, which controls young and developing minds for half of the waking day. This cycle of instruction and programming ensures that successive generations are pressed into particular ideological molds, often without recognizing that what they take as truth is in fact the product of deliberate cultural and institutional conditioning.
Some of these institutions cannot be touched; they have been put off-limits by the Article itself. Religious bodies, for instance, are shielded by the very protections under discussion. Others, however—such as broadcast media, which depend on publicly owned airwaves and therefore require government-issued licenses in the public interest—can and should be held accountable. The same holds true for educational institutions. Public schools are not private sects; they are funded, maintained, and operated for the public good. Even private schools that accept federal dollars must, to some extent, operate within a framework of public accountability.
The public, therefore, has every right to determine the content of school curricula, the materials available in school libraries, and even the values displayed symbolically within school walls. This does not mean interfering with individual conscience or the freedom of private thought. Rather, it means guarding against the opposite danger: that the state’s educational arm dictates ideological or political views under the guise of neutral education, a curtain easily pulled to reveal the charlatan operating the levers of the Great and Powerful Oz. When a curriculum enshrines one political doctrine as unquestionable truth, it ceases to educate and instead indoctrinates. This is what administrators, staff, and teachers in public schools—and in private institutions dependent on taxpayer dollars—endeavor to protect: access to young and developing minds and indoctrinate them in corporate state ideology.
Teachers and their unions, along with librarians and their associations, defend their authority to introduce “controversial” or partisan material into schools and libraries by appealing to free speech, freedom of conscience, and the public good of “educating children.” Yet, by imposing a single ideological perspective on students, they corrupt and undermine the very freedoms they claim to defend. As I have explained in numerous essays, the First Amendment was not written to provide a shield for state-sanctioned indoctrination. On the contrary, it was written to secure the individual’s right to develop conscience and thought independently.
How, then, are those who demand fidelity to the spirit of the First Amendment—and who use the republican machinery to make this happen—characterized? As “authoritarian” and “reactionary.” They even call us “fascists.” But concern over what is taught in schools is neither reactionary nor authoritarian. Nor is it fascist. Indeed, a characteristic of fascism is command of ideological production and the institutions that promulgate that ideology! It is the civic responsibility of citizens of a free republic to ensure that public resources serve the public interest—and the public interest is not served by anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Western ideology. Anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Western ideology is destructive to freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy depend on the cultural, political, and legal institutions and values given to humanity by the enlightened West.
Public control over educational and media institutions is free speech in its truest form. When schools and media become indoctrination centers, the state intrudes into matters of conscience and thought—territory the First Amendment was established to protect. The public, therefore, has not only the authority but also the duty to shape education and other public communications so that they serve in neutral fashion the needs of children and the interests of the public. Only then can schools—and other sense-making institutions responsible to the public interest—fulfill their role as places of genuine learning rather than instruments of cultural, ideological, and political conditioning.
Thus, when teachers’ unions, professional associations, or cultural gatekeepers appeal to the First Amendment as justification for introducing ideological material into classrooms or broadcasting propaganda over the airwaves, they misapply it. More than this, they subvert it—taking a tool meant to limit their ambitions and agendas and turning it against itself and against the people. In truth, then, such actions run contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment, which safeguards freedom of thought rather than enforcing conformity of thought.
The preservation of free conscience requires vigilance not only against government censorship but also against government-backed indoctrination masquerading as education or free media. The American people are not powerless to stop the indoctrination of our children or the dissemination of progressive propaganda. The corporate state wants the public to believe otherwise, but this is not true. The First Amendment is meant to live in practice for the public interest—not serve as cover for practices that violate its spirit and serve instead the interests of elites.
freedom and reason 