In Whitney v. California, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that only the solution to destructive speech is more speech, not less. This idea ha

In Whitney v. California, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that only the solution to destructive speech is more speech, not less. This idea has been at the core of American jurisprudence for a long time, but few people seem to grasp the full implication of the solution that Brandeis proposed. It's not simply that we should allow destructive propaganda, period. It's not just wishful thinking that better education would help people see through the bullshit. In the same judgment Brandeis also wrote that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty." He was asking US what WE have done to counter the bad speech that's all around us. How much time, money and energy have we devoted to the cause of exposing the haters for the hypocrites they are and demolishing their arguments to the point that not a stone is left upon another, using every non-violent action available to us, before we all ran to Uncle Sam and asked him to spank those bad boys on our behalf? So you're right, a lot more work needs to be done. But not by the government. It's only because the rest of us have been so careless that destructive propaganda is having a field day rummaging through our democracy. The people who have a duty to produce better speech includes everyone from the CEOs of big social media companies to every last user who saw something bad but went "eh, I don't have time for this." The cost of giving up free speech is unconscionable, but the cost of maintaining it isn't trivial, either.