#1433 Sedition Act

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2021

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

We speak with President Thomas Jefferson this week about the Sedition Act of 1798. Jefferson points out the importance of free speech and says that "its value comes in times of crisis. We don't need to protect what is comfortable, responsible and harmonious. If we're a free society, we need to protect speech that is critical, offensive, obnoxious, that which challenges the status quo, and that which will be seen by the government in power as horrific. That's why we need the 1st Amendment."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Good day, Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners, and as always, first and foremost, thank you so
0:07.6	much for listening. We're so pleased to have our little world here of the Thomas Jefferson Hour
0:14.3	and our faithful friends from around the country. You know, we've been doing these zoom town
0:18.9	meetings of the Jefferson Hour David, and it's so much fun to actually see some of the people who
0:24.1	have written to us over the years, or maybe they're completely new members of the 1776 cub,
0:30.0	or admirers of the Jefferson Hour, and it's great. We're going to do a lot more of that, but this
0:35.9	week we go back to sort of our tradition, and we have a letter from a man named Doug Stein about
0:41.4	the Sedition Act of 1798, and you know, it's a long time ago, but it's a very, very important
0:50.0	subject, and the question is, under what conditions can officials censor or coerce free expression
1:01.6	by American citizens, and the Enlightenment, which was that great European American movement of
1:08.8	the late 17th century, the 18th century, and the early 19th associated with people like Voltaire
1:15.5	and John Locke and Dr. Samuel Johnson, and in this country with Franklin and Jefferson,
1:20.4	the Enlightenment believed in a virtually unrestrained freedom of expression, that in a free
1:26.3	marketplace of ideas, good ideas would drive out the bad ones, and truth would drive out nonsense,
1:30.5	and science would drive out superstition, and in fact the only way to cloud that exchange,
1:35.8	that clarifying exchange was for government to get involved to try to determine what was
1:41.2	acceptable speech, and what was unacceptable speech. Well now, in the first weeks of the year
1:48.0	2021, we're having a kind of national hand-wringing debate about false facts, false news, fake news,
1:55.7	alternative truth, the platforms that have sometimes helped to spread conspiracy theories,
2:04.2	and platforms, frankly, that were used to create the insurrection of January 6th, the attack on the
2:10.1	United States Capitol, as everybody knows, Donald Trump was permanently banned from all of the
2:15.6	major social media platforms, and there are serious discussions going on around the country,
	...

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