European governments and too many in the media believe that free speech should be the preserve of calmer elites. This belief underlines efforts to constrict Elon Musk‘s controversial speech.
True, while he’s one of the most dynamic entrepreneurs of our time, Musk gets some important things badly wrong. Musk presumes that the far-right activist Tommy Robinson is a martyr for fleeting British freedom. In reality, Robinson is a violent soccer hooligan with convictions for drug dealing and fraud. Similarly, Musk presumes that the German AfD political party is solely concerned with reducing immigration. But while that’s true of many AfD supporters, the party’s senior ranks are infested with Nazi sympathizers. They flirt with a legacy that wreaked havoc on the world and required righteous annihilation from the air, land, and sea.
It is also unfortunate that Musk is hypocritical when it comes to free speech. The world’s richest man and owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X likes to present himself as a free speech absolutist, someone willing to challenge establishment cartels and ensure a free-flowing dialogue in the public interest. In reality, Musk has shown a repeated willingness to restrict the speech of those who track his airplanes — the right to scrutinize the extremely wealthy or powerful is central to democracy — challenge his viewpoints, or aggravate authoritarian governments such as that of Turkey. The billionaire’s affection for communist China is also always on full public display.
Still, via his activity on the X social media platform, Musk is underling the extraordinary value and importance of the First Amendment.
First, he is unleashing an overdue, unrestrained public discourse on a matter of evident public import: the generational scandal of child sex trafficking in the United Kingdom. This concern involved more than 1,000 white preteen or young teenage girls being systematically abused by thousands of predominantly Pakistani-British men in northern England.
While some in the media pretend that this problem has been discussed and dealt with seriously by the government for years, anyone who has spent any time in the U.K. knows full well that the scandal was essentially covered up due to concerns over perceived racism against British Pakistanis. This reflects a European tendency to sweep racism and concerns over perceptions of racism under the carpet rather than, as in America, and even if sometimes in a problematic fashion, address them head-on. As a side note: Racism against very decent British Pakistanis is rife in the U.K. just as racism against decent French Africans is rife in France.
Considering the child sex abuse scandal, however, thanks to enterprising reporters such as Charlie Peters, we now know that there was an effort by police, local authorities, and even the central government to conceal or otherwise make this scandal go away. Musk is now pushing for a national inquiry, aggressively attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other ministers who have rejected these calls. While the Conservative opposition party now supports an inquiry, it bears noting that the Conservative government, which left office in July 2024, rejected it. This speaks to a sustained government fear that an inquiry would lead to senior politicians, public officials, and police officers, many now retired, receiving scathing indictments from such a review and that public anger would only grow.
But thanks to the continuing courage of victims, the work of reporters such as Peters, and Musk’s platform and First Amendment power, momentum is clearly shifting towards a national inquiry. Notably, an influential Labour mayor threw his support behind the idea Thursday. But the role of the First Amendment must be emphasized here. For one, it underlines why a similar scandal on U.S. soil would be more difficult for the police and government to conceal.
But the First Amendment also deserves note in this situation in the manner by which it is allowing Musk to draw out unrestrained debate. Crucially, were Musk living in the U.K., he would very likely have been arrested under England’s expansive hate speech and online intimidation laws. But because speech is now online and because the British government knows that Musk is close to Trump, Musk is essentially a voice that cannot be constrained. Any action against Musk risks incurring U.S. government action against U.K. interests, and any action against those echoing Musk’s sentiments in the U.K. would risk only empowering his arguments further.
If imperfectly, then, Musk is underlining the central thesis of the First Amendment: expansive speech liberty and tolerance even for hate speech to facilitate maximal public debate on matters of maximal public import. In contrast, British and European speech law insists that maximal public debate be subordinated to preventing individual intimidation and hate against protected classes such as sexual orientation and religion and ensuring maximal social stability in any one moment. The problem is that this approach, as shown in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and many other European nations, only allows social ills to fester and anger to grow toward a boiling point. It leads to greater division rather than a messy path to growing unity.
Put another way, we’re very lucky the founders had the foresight to trust a mass of flawed people over a minority of flawed politicians. Consider how Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts explained this principle in the 2011 case of Snyder v Phelps: That 2011 case involved religious fanatics protesting with profanity near the funeral of a young Marine who had been killed in action in Iraq.
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Explaining the court’s overturning of a tort lawsuit by the Marine’s family against the protesting church, Roberts noted that “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
Liberals do not like this understanding when it applies to Musk and social media. Conservatives do not like this understanding when it comes to anti-American or anti-Israel protesters on college campuses. But all Americans should look at Europe and be thankful for the founders’ better wisdom.