It is all well and good to say that a janitor at the New York Times Building enjoys the same freedom of speech as the paper’s top editors do; but the fact is that the latter can use this freedom in ways the former could only dream of. This is why the Founding Fathers viewed free speech as inextricable from a free press, as indicated by James Madison’s first draft of the Bill of Rights. “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments,” he wrote, “and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” Without the circulation of public opinion through the press, the founders agreed, democracy would be impossible. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Of course, the speech of a newspaper does not emanate spontaneously from its soul; it takes capital, labor, and a means of distribution, and these are limited material goods that must be secured one way or another. (As secretary of State, Jefferson would fund a friendly newspaper by appointing its editor-in-chief to a lucrative sinecure in the State Department.)
There is, I think, a compelling case to be made that the American political tradition thinks of free speech not as the basis of a free press but as an instance of it. A newspaper is not a giant person; a person is more like a little newspaper. If this is so, then the vast majority of Americans have low budgets, limited circulation, and few dedicated readers, even in the age of social media. In other words, speech is a resource, not an inalienable property, and as such it is subject to the same regimes of theft, privatization, and accumulation that have swallowed up the labor of workers and the fruits of the earth. We have heard much lately about when free speech ends: the moment when protesting for Palestine becomes grounds for detention or deportation in the eyes of the police state, for instance. Less often asked, but equally important, is when speech begins. Did Cotton’s speech begin the moment that the Times published his op-ed? During the editorial process? When Bennet’s deputies pitched the idea? At what point, in other words, did the ordinary flow of money, labor, and influence through civil society stop? Well, never. To say that Cotton was too important not to publish is to say that he enjoyed a certain social position that deserved the paper’s famously discriminating attention. From the start, Cotton had more than free speech: He had actual speech, the very thing that protesters were being denied all across the country.
One of the principal goals of the protests of 2020 was therefore to seize the means of expression: protesters were not exercising their right to speak freely so much as they were trying to amass a form of social influence that could meaningfully compete at a national level. In other words, they were starting a newspaper; what Williams hates is that people started reading it. The fact is that telling a voiceless person they have free speech is like telling a poor person they have freedom of money: Nice work if you can get it!