These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

This began to change in the 1960s, not because the NRA started talking about the Second Amendment, but because black nationalists did. In 1964, not long before he was shot to death, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” That same argument animated the founding of the Black Panther Party.76

They fought by tooth and nail and by hook and by crook and they believed they were fighting for the meaning of America, but, really, they were fighting for raw political power.

The suppression of hate speech, which, a generation before, had been the project of FBI agents who investigated civil rights activists, became the work of the university. In less than two years under the University of Michigan’s speech code, more than twenty white students accused black students of racist speech.

The conservative media establishment, founded on the idea that the existing media establishment was biased, had built into its foundation a rejection of the idea that truth could come from weighing different points of view, which, after all, is the whole point of partisan disputation. Instead, the conservative media establishment engineered a fail-safe against dissent. As one historian explained, “When an outlet like the New York Times criticized a liberal policy, conservative media activists presented it not as evidence of the paper’s even-handedness but as evidence of the policy’s failure. Even the liberal New York Times had to admit. . .

Historically, the idea of innovation has been opposed to the idea of progress. From the Reformation through the Enlightenment, progress, even in its secular usage, connoted moral improvement, a journey from sin to salvation, from error to truth. Innovation, on the other hand, meant imprudent and rash change. Eighteenth-century conservatives had called Jacobinism “an innovation in politics,” Edmund Burke had derided the French Revolution as a “revolt of innovation,” and Federalists, opposing Jefferson, had declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.”

The immediate end of the war, aided by coalition partners, was to defeat al Qaeda; its more distant aim was to replace the Taliban with a democratically elected, pro-Western government.63 It became the longest war in American history.

The White House answered terrorism, an abandonment of the law of war, with torture, an abandonment of the rule of law.

And yet on college and university campuses, students continued to protest not for but against free speech. Every hate speech code that had been instituted since the 1990s that had been challenged in court had been found unconstitutional.115 Some had been lifted, others disavowed. In 2014, the University of Chicago issued a report on freedom of expression: “The University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

And yet the Obama administration had no success getting gun safety measures through a Republican Congress, which staunchly defended the right to bear arms at all costs, calling the massacre of little children the price of freedom.

Newt Gingrich