Category - Free Speech Storyline

As President Trump is slowly beginning to figure out, being the President is not easy, especially in a country built on the Rule of Law, with all its checks and balances, and on Freedom of Speech, which means the criticisms will never end.

It seems Free Speech isn’t free when you’re Barack Obama. Reports have surfaced claiming the former President is due to cash in on a $400,000 check for a private speaking engagement at a conference run by Cantor Fitzgerald LP. To put the fee in perspective, Fox Business recently reported that the average speaker fee of Hillary Clinton is $200,000, making Obama’s at least double that mark.

Granted in Freedom of Speech and dictated by the Rule of Law, this referendum was, for the most part, legitimate. Whether voter fraud claims made by the opposition are true remains to be seen. But the process – casting a public vote for the country’s future – was a democratic process few can argue with.

Albert Camus reminds us that a Free Press can either be good or bad, but a silent press can only ever be bad.

Andrew Hamilton (1676-1741) reminds us we all have a right to complain. In a society based on Freedom of Speech, complaining is a way to make your voice heard in the fight against injustice and ignorance, whether that means complaining about a Republican President or a Democratic one.

All governmental figures are prone to taking criticism. But the fact that Ben-Gurion was the highest governmental figure in the most controversial country on the planet made him also one of the most criticized people of the 20th century.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was an English philosopher, political economist and civil servant often called one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. His “Harm Principle” regarded government censorship as superfluous. In societies with Freedom of Speech, wrong or harmful arguments will be excluded by an informed public.

JFK’s presidency lasted only two short years, but his tenure involved a sequence of history-altering events including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the founding of the Peace Corps, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Trade Expansion Act, and the heated American Civil Rights Movement.

John Peter Zenger was a German immigrant whose publication the New York Weekly Journal made no secrets about its desired aims. Its sole purpose was to expose the corrupt royal Governor of New York William Crosby.

Famous for his dazzling speeches, Frederick Douglass stood as an example of what every black man could accomplish if given the chance to be an independent American citizen.