The Tongue Is a Fire

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the right: campaigners against immigration, Brexiters, the enemies of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that words, phrases and concepts thought to be their property … have been appropriated by the forces of neoconservatism. This is particularly true of the concept of free speech.’ Today, alleged infringements of free speech that would once have outraged Guardian readers are splashed all over the Daily Telegraph. As I write, the Telegraph front page leads on an apparent threat by the US State Department to scrap a trade deal with the UK, because it was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the UK’, in relation to criminal charges against a Christian anti-abortion campaigner in Bournemouth. This concern echoed a statement made by Vice President Vance the previous month that he feared free speech ‘in Britain and across Europe’ was ‘in retreat’. The other stand-out feature of the debate today, and something it is hard not to see as ominous, is the growing gap, in law and practice, between the United States and the rest of the world which calls itself free.

How did all this come about? There could be no better guide than Fara Dabhoiwala: of Indian descent, born in England, educated in Europe, having taught for many years at Oxford and now at Princeton, he is today an American citizen, perfectly placed to survey these choppy transatlantic waters from his New Jersey crow’s nest. Every chapter of What Is Free Speech? makes you think afresh about the subject. What repeatedly surprises Dabhoiwala, and us, about the history of free speech is its incurably accidental nature – reforms undertaken for one set of reasons generate unforeseen and quite different consequences – and, also, the cobbled-together quality of the debate. Free-speechers of all kinds argue with great vehemence but seldom with any historical perspective. The phrase ‘off the top of his head’ applies to so many of the most illustrious players in the game, academic theorists and Supreme Court justices alike. Dabhoiwala tells us that when he tried to find books on the subject, ‘it turned out that, although endless volumes had been written on censorship in every time and place you could think of, the history of free speech as a modern concept had attracted almost no attention – except from Americans fixated on their First Amendment.’ Contemporary uses of the term seemed equally unclear to him, amounting to little more than slogans to whip up publicity for the speaker or denounce his or her enemies. As the leading First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer noted in 1992, ‘there seems to be little free inquiry about free inquiry and little free speech about free speech.’ It was a paradox that an orthodoxy of tolerance should be so intolerant of those who had less protective rather than more protective views about freedom of speech.

We need, I think, to get some feel for the pre-modern landscape of public speech to understand the huge distance we have travelled. The pre-moderns were painfully aware of the potency – and the perils – of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary sentiment, ‘the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones,’ is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The dangers to individuals and to society were considered so great that speech had to be policed and, if found harmful, suppressed and punished. An English law of 1275 made it a crime to ‘tell or publish any false news or tales’. Suits for defamation, ‘scolding’ and spreading lies filled the medieval courts. Verbal injury was punished as severely as physical injury, sometimes more so, especially by the churches in their treatment of blasphemy and heresy, both essentially crimes of speech. The pre-modern world needed no J.L. Austin to identify ‘speech acts’ or ‘performative utterances’. Speeches were acts. There was no dividing line. It is Dabhoiwala’s driving theme that words do have consequences: ‘Our modern distinction between words and actions, and their supposedly different potency, is just a convenient myth … it makes the ideology of free speech possible, but it’s also an inherently unstable fiction.’

This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated outside, might land them in a libel suit or even in jail. But the idea of a blanket freedom for ordinary people to have their say wherever and whenever they fancied was miles away.

Then quite suddenly, it wasn’t. Within less than a century, the old ground rules began to crumble, in England at least. During the Civil Wars, from 1642, the system of government print control broke down. Amid the chaos, a multitude of new sects arose, each bitterly convinced of its own truths and determined to propagate them through an explosion of pamphlets. Freedom of conscience and freedom of expression formed a cantankerous alliance, and out of it arose for the first time a grudging acceptance that even erroneous doctrines had a right to be heard, because truth would always triumph in the end. As Milton proclaimed in Areopagitica (1644), ‘Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ But even this limited liberty needed to be policed, to keep out doctrines which remained unacceptable, such as popery and atheism. Ironically, after publishing Areopagitica, Milton worked as a government licenser of printed works. After the whole ghastly half-century of civil conflict had come to an end, Locke’s Letters Concerning Toleration struck a milder note, not only repeating the argument that truth would always prevail, but arguing that toleration was the only way to get some peace, because ‘it is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions (which might have been granted) that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world upon account of religion.’ But the same limitations were to persist; the new toleration did not extend to ‘opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society’, which could rule out anything from promiscuity to popery.

Dabhoiwala describes nicely how this strictly religious toleration was then hijacked to enlarge the realm of political speech, as the gentler manners of the 18th century took hold. But there were still plenty of laws against ‘spreading false news’, and plenty of vigorous complaints from Defoe, Swift and others about the tide of ‘forgery, infamy and absurdity’ in the newspapers, to which they had themselves contributed a fair bit. The early 18th-century media scene was a swirling broth of slander and sexting, which may remind us of the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii or the troll-dom of social media today, with Walpole and his ministers waist deep in it all. Walpole’s finest achievement in this line was his Licensing Act of 1737, which kept direct political criticism off the English stage for two centuries, introducing the often farcical censorship by the lord chamberlain which was to last into our own day.

But there was no worked-out theory of secular free speech until Cato’s notorious letters. These pseudonymous columns, published in the London Journal from 1720 on, provided, from scratch, a fully formed ideology in sparkling, seductive language. This is how the letter of 4 February 1721 opens:

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech: which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another. And this is the only check which it ought to suffer, the only bounds it ought to know.

What exactly inspired the writers, two little-known journalists called Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard (an ancestor of Hugh Trenchard, founder of the Royal Air Force)? For all the exhaustive textual discussion of Cato’s letters, Dabhoiwala concludes that this remains ‘an unexplored puzzle’. At all events, the letters went viral, became the talk of the American colonies and bewitched the 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin, but quite how and why Gordon and Trenchard dared so much we still are not clear. What is not in doubt is that we can date the modern ‘absolutist’ theory of free speech from 4 February 1721.

Yet the absolutist view did not immediately translate into law or practice. In most of Europe, especially Scandinavia, as the new freedoms spread, they were always qualified by the need to exercise them responsibly or suffer the legal consequences. Even in the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) deployed the balance in remarkably sober terms: ‘The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.’ As for Gordon, he later became a government hack, and – shades of Milton – finished up as Walpole’s most trusted censor.

Yet​ in the same year as the French declaration, on the other side of the Atlantic, the newly fledged United States adopted an unvarnished version of the Cato absolutism. Based on the constitutions that had been adopted by the rebellious colonies between 1776 and 1784, Congress set out a Bill of Rights to amend the constitution. The driving force at the meeting in New York was Alexander Hamilton. His draft bill declared that ‘the people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable’ (‘bulwarks of liberty’ was a phrase lifted straight from Cato).

This wording was pummelled by the subsequent debates and committees into a subtly but crucially different shape. Now it read that ‘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’ (my italics). Thus, in the context of a recently successful rebellion against the colonial power, what seemed most important was that the new government should not be tyrannical like the old one. The clause that became the First Amendment was a safeguard against overreach by the federal government, not an explicit guarantee of individual rights. The same fear of renewed oppression inspired the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms; this was to protect a free citizens’ militia, in case the new government turned nasty. Yet from these two context-driven accidents has developed the abyss that divides the American way of life from almost every other modern nation.

As Dabhoiwala points out, it could so easily have been different had Congress adopted the alternative, balanced draft that Jefferson, then ambassador in Paris, had sent to Madison. This read: ‘The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or otherwise to publish any thing but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty, property or reputation of others, or affecting the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations.’ But by the time Madison got Jefferson’s letter, Congress had already formalised the wording. If only the French Assembly, whose declaration had so influenced Jefferson, had met a few weeks earlier, or Congress a few weeks later, or if the transatlantic mail had been quicker.

This is not the end of the accidents and surprises. What nobody seems to have noticed is that, having landed themselves with this amazing absolutist amendment, the Americans then proceeded to pay no attention to it. As more new-minted states joined the Union, they adopted balanced French-style free-speech laws. Pennsylvania had been the first to revise its constitution; in old age, Franklin himself resiled from his youthful craze for the full-blooded Cato option: ‘I, for my part … shall cheerfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.’ Between 1790 and 1959, every single new territory specified that the right to free speech did not extend to its abuse; most of the original thirteen colonies followed suit. ‘While we deny that Congress have a right to control the freedom of the press,’ Jefferson glossed, ‘we have ever asserted the right of the states, and their exclusive right, to do so.’

And so it all remained until 1919 or thereabouts, when the nine justices of the Supreme Court took up the subject of free speech and wrestled it to the ground. That at any rate is the conventional story. Dabhoiwala, by contrast, stresses how long the balanced tradition lasted. Socialists were still being put in jail for expressing extreme opinions all through the Red Scare of the 1920s. The tide began to turn when in 1925 the Supreme Court accepted that the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 applied to free speech, because individual states had no more right than the federal government ‘to make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’.

This was another historical accident. The primary purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was nothing to do with free speech. It was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to stop the former slave-owning states from backtracking on civil rights. In the 1960s, it did good service in that cause, for example in desegregating schools in the South. But by the same token, it could now be used to prevent state courts from banning Ku Klux Klan marches or approving anti-lynching laws.

The ‘strict constructionists’, or ‘originalists’, on the Supreme Court asserted that the First Amendment meant just what it said, no ifs or buts, and the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that it applied just as strictly to the states. Justice Hugo Black, that stickler of sticklers, who served on the court from 1937 to 1971, had been a member of the KKK in his youth, though his judgments were not consistently racist. He was on the side of the angels in the cause célèbre of Brown v. Board of Education. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the court came round to his way of thinking. In the noted Beauharnais case of 1952, Black was one of four justices (out of nine) who wanted to override Joseph Beauharnais’s conviction for issuing a vicious racist pamphlet in Chicago. The American Civil Liberties Union was on Beauharnais’s side too, showing which way the wind was blowing. The ACLU had already assisted some New Jersey Nazis in overturning the state’s libel law. The Beauharnais judgment has not been overruled since, but it is generally regarded as obsolete. These days, neither federal nor state governments are willing to restrict any viewpoint, however virulent or inflammatory. By contrast, the UK, for example, has come to adopt a series of laws criminalising ‘hate speech’, beginning with the Labour government’s Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968. Dabhoiwala concludes that

as a consequence, 21st-century Americans have become as inured to the extraordinary levels of lying and slander in their public discourse as they have to the equally staggering incidence of mass murder by guns in their schools and streets, and for the same reasons – the acceptance of a relatively recent and novel set of presumptions about the meaning and importance of constitutional clauses drawn up two hundred and fifty years ago.

Those​ arguing for a balanced approach, then and now, will find little comfort in the most celebrated text on the subject. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) has never lost its monumental status, and will no doubt survive the bashing that Dabhoiwala gives it here. His central criticisms are twofold. First, the essay starts from a racist assumption. Mill, like his father, James, worked for the East India Board most of his life, but both men had nothing but contempt for Indians and their culture, and neither ever bothered to visit India. Mill told a private correspondent that British rule was the only answer for this sullen and backward people: ‘I myself have always been for a good stout Despotism.’ In his introduction to On Liberty, Mill explicitly excludes such races from the liberties he is about to expound:

We may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage … Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne

– or to a Mill. This blanket exclusion is, I think, even more disabling than Dabhoiwala claims. To arrogate a power to pick and choose which individuals and groups shall be entitled to liberty is to undermine any idea of a general right, demoting the enjoyment of liberty to a privilege reserved for some favoured individuals or classes.

Mill’s second great weakness is his failure to grasp quite how far speech is an act which inevitably has consequences in the real world. He repeatedly argues that speech should always be allowed, ‘including the propagation of opinions which we regard as false and pernicious’ and ‘dangerous to the welfare of mankind’. The possibility that malicious speech might destroy the lives of innocent people, or foment riot, insurrection and massacre, is scarcely discussed. Dabhoiwala can find only one example in On Liberty where Mill concedes that ‘even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.’ This ponderous concession introduces the following example: ‘An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.’ This is a perfectly good example, but a rather tame one. We can all think of dozens more cases in which the threat is more violent and pressing, and liable to cause injury or death or social catastrophe. The examples which Mill offers to illustrate his argument so often have the genteel tone of an academic seminar rather than the raucous venom of the Klan on the rampage.

After all, even in Mill’s day, the ether was not occupied solely by the polite exchange of ‘opinion’ – such a nice soothing word – but by the steamy toxins of a racism which moved effortlessly from target to target; the Jews, the Irish, the Catholics, the Latinos and always, always the Blacks. The coarse slogans of the mob were steadily backed up by a stream of alarmist books, often written by university professors or ministers. Stanley Fish gives a list of such works, all published between 1870 and 1925, and all plucking the same harpstrings: that America is going down the tubes under the pressure of mass immigration from inferior races, or as President Trump puts it, ‘from shithole countries’. There’s The Melting Pot Mistake by Henry Pratt Fairchild, Our Country by Josiah Strong, The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. Of particular interest is Carl Campbell Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence (1923). Apart from being a rampant racist, Brigham was a leading educationalist and the principal inventor of the SATs which divide the American young into sheep and goats to this day. His aim wasn’t so much to further equal opportunity as to prove ‘the marked intellectual inferiority of the Negro’ and to ‘disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent’. He supported Madison Grant in classifying the Nordic type as the superior race and relegated the others in descending order, a classification so nicely spoofed by Hilaire Belloc in ‘The Three Races’ (though Belloc’s own views on Jews do not bear close inspection):

Behold, my child, the Nordic Man,
And be as like him as you can;
His legs are long, his mind is slow,
His hair is lank and made of tow.

These dismal jeremiads provided fertile soil for the fascist movements which cropped up in all ‘advanced’ countries between the wars. Fish doesn’t mention The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy (1920), by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. This is clearly the book that Scott Fitzgerald was thinking of when he had Tom Buchanan say, in the opening chapter of The Great Gatsby, ‘Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is that if we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’ Stoddard followed up two years later with The Revolt against Civilisation: The Menace of the Under Man. The book was translated into German as Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen and was snatched up by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Alfred Rosenberg, who deployed the idea of the Untermensch to terrible effect. Stoddard visited a Nazi eugenics court in Charlottenburg and approved of the way it was selecting candidates for sterilisation, although he thought that ‘if anything, judgments were almost too conservative.’

Fish points out that exactly the same stuff began to surface again in the 1990s, for example, Lawrence Auster’s The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism (1990). But the most influential of all these tracts has been Le Grand Remplacement by the French novelist Renaud Camus (no relation of Albert), published in 2011.

You might dismiss all these books as tiresome background noise, but all of a sudden they began to generate terrifying effects. A few months before Camus’s book was published, Anders Behring Breivik, an obscure Norwegian neo-Nazi, killed 69 members of the Labour Party’s youth wing at a holiday camp on the island of Utøya. The shocked world was bewildered by the deliberate targeting of these innocent young people. The country’s literary giant Karl Ove Knausgård wrote an article for the New Yorker describing the mass killings as ‘inexplicable’ and delving into Breivik’s troubled childhood and narcissistic personality. But inexplicable was just what these horrible killings were not, because Breivik had written a 1518-page document explaining his motives, which he emailed to a thousand addresses three hours before he started shooting. It’s a collage of other people’s rants which he tells us he culled mostly from Wikipedia, and it blames all the usual suspects – political correctness, feminism and, above all, uncontrolled immigration – for the rot that was destroying Western society: just the sort of causes that the bright young lefties on Utøya island would have been propagating.

Since then, there have been several more of these ‘messaged massacres’. In each case, the collage of hate speech seems to provoke, shape and harden the intention to commit the act, and is simultaneously broadcast to justify the act to the world and inspire copycats – which it does. Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans at an episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015, and left behind on his website a 2500-word manifesto. In Britain, the young Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered on 16 June 2016, in the last week of the Brexit campaign, by a much older neo-Nazi, Thomas Alexander Mair, whose huge collection of fascist literature included a fistful of clippings about Anders Breivik. As he shot her three times and then stabbed her fifteen times, Mair yelled: ‘This is for Britain’ and ‘Keep Britain independent.’ Brexiters fretted that this horrible murder might damage their chances, but it didn’t. In Christchurch, New Zealand, Brenton Harrison Tarrant murdered 51 people at two Islamic centres on 15 March 2019. In his 74-page apologia, slavishly titled ‘The Great Replacement’, Tarrant paid tribute to Camus’s book, and to the actions of Roof and especially Breivik. Later that same year, on 3 August, Patrick Crusius murdered 23 people, most of them Latinos, in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The manifesto he posted, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, deplores the ‘Hispanic Invasion’ and praises Tarrant. On 14 May 2022, Payton S. Gendron killed ten African Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. His 180-page manifesto voiced support for the Great Replacement theory. Sometimes, mercifully, there is only the message, not the massacre. Owen Lawrence, suspected of having shot two women with a crossbow in Leeds in April 2025 (both survived), posted on Facebook his plans for ‘terrorism, revenge and misogynistic rage’, mentioning Tarrant’s manifesto and the Great Replacement theory. He titled his own manifesto ‘The Otley Run Massacre’, after a popular pub crawl near his home. But he turned a gun on himself before he could carry it out.

Note, ironically, how diverse the victims are: Norwegian youth workers, a white British Labour MP, Muslim worshippers, African Americans, Latinos. But the terrorist’s rationale is exactly the same in each case. It is of course relevant to dwell on the ghastly childhoods they had all endured. But it is also relevant that they are all inspired by the same hatred of the Other, along with bitter contempt for all the politicians who have spread the rot, the conspicuous exception being Donald Trump, whom Crusius specifically excludes from blame and whom Tarrant praises as ‘a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’. What they obviously like about Trump is the not-so covert racism – the sly asides and the dog-whistles – but also his deliberate destruction of public civility. You can imagine them chortling in their prison cells to see the president and vice president roughing up Zelensky in front of the cameras. What we are seeing in Trumpworld is the weaponising of the First Amendment into an instrument of neo-imperialism. It is not simply anti-abortion campaigners in Bournemouth who must be protected. The Trump administration is now demanding that any company in the world which deals with America must junk its policies of equality, inclusion and diversity or suffer dire consequences. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also mobilising the State Department to protest against the dangers to free speech allegedly posed by the UK’s Online Safety Act, or, to put it another way, against the UK’s right to decide how best to protect its own citizens from harm.

Tarrant’s manifesto was deemed ‘objectionable’ by the chief censor of New Zealand, making it unlawful to possess or distribute it there (exceptions were made for journalists and academic researchers), but this could not prevent printed copies being sold online outside the country. Patrick Crusius had posted his screed online shortly before he started shooting. Site moderators quickly removed the post, but the damage was done. Breivik’s huge collage circulated widely in fascist online forums. Payton Gendron posted his manifesto on Google docs two days before his massacre. It’s all still out there, if you look hard enough.

Dabhoiwala​ doesn’t go into any of this (like Breivik, I got it from Wikipedia). That’s a great pity, because it gives the book a curiously unfinished feeling. The uncommitted reader surely wants to see how the consequences of unbridled free speech play out. We can, of course, point to many unquestionable benefits of uncensored speech: the exposure of paedophiles in the Church and in private schools, of the horrible injustices suffered by Britain’s sub-postmasters, of the maltreatment regularly endured by women on film sets and almost everywhere else, and much, much more besides.

But the case for some laws regulating libel, slander, hate speech, incitement to violence and verbal harassment of all sorts remains as strong as ever, though just as difficult to define and to police with any sort of fairness. So too, does the case for codes of conduct in public institutions, Parliament and the universities being only the most conspicuous examples. The lines are never easy to draw. At what point does ‘political correctness’ cease to be common civility and degenerate into censorship? When does ‘woke’ move from its original meaning of ‘alert to racism’ and turn into self-righteous hectoring? When should an anti-abortion campaigner be entitled to carry a placard outside an abortion clinic, or, come to that, when should a women’s-right-to-chooser be allowed to stake out the home of an anti-abortion campaigner? There is a right to demonstrate, yes, but there is also a right to some degree of personal tranquillity. ‘Watching and besetting’ is an ancient crime under English law, and to this day the courts are still defining its reach. As Dabhoiwala continually reminds us, context is everything, or almost everything. To warble on in an unfocused way about ‘cancel culture’ cannot conceal either the difficulties of the balancing act or its necessity for a flourishing society. The fabric of civility is as thin as gossamer and just as precious. Even John Stuart Mill might have had second thoughts about the innocuousness of speech if he had been shopping at the supermarket in Buffalo or El Paso. And that is even before we tiptoe into the wider political effects. Would the present incumbent of the White House have been able to swim along so effortlessly on his stream of lies and insults without the protection of the First Amendment? Doesn’t Donald Trump ultimately owe quite a lot to John Stuart Mill?