"Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection"
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Free speech only gets interesting when it stops being polite. Neal Boortz, a talk-radio provocateur by trade and a libertarian scold by temperament, is staking out a boundary line: the First Amendment isn’t a gold star you pin on agreeable opinions, it’s a shield for the ideas most likely to be heckled, deplatformed, or punished. The phrasing is deceptively tidy. “By definition” pretends this is neutral logic, not a political argument, and that’s the move: it makes dissent sound like the obvious center rather than a contested principle.
The intent is corrective and combative. Boortz is pushing back against a common rhetorical sleight of hand where “free speech” gets invoked as a status symbol for mainstream views, or as a complaint when criticism arrives. He’s implicitly separating protection from applause. If your speech is already popular, the crowd does the work the law was designed to do. The state, the institution, the majority mood: those are the forces that turn “unpopular” into “dangerous.”
The subtext is a warning about how societies police consensus. Unpopular speech is where power reveals itself, because that’s where consequences attach: job loss, censorship pressures, selective enforcement, social banishment. Boortz isn’t asking you to like the speaker; he’s daring you to tolerate the speech you suspect is wrong or offensive. That dare is also a trap, because it smuggles in a hard question our era keeps dodging: when does protection of the unpopular become permission for the harmful, and who gets to draw that line without turning “unpopular” into a euphemism for “accountable”?
The intent is corrective and combative. Boortz is pushing back against a common rhetorical sleight of hand where “free speech” gets invoked as a status symbol for mainstream views, or as a complaint when criticism arrives. He’s implicitly separating protection from applause. If your speech is already popular, the crowd does the work the law was designed to do. The state, the institution, the majority mood: those are the forces that turn “unpopular” into “dangerous.”
The subtext is a warning about how societies police consensus. Unpopular speech is where power reveals itself, because that’s where consequences attach: job loss, censorship pressures, selective enforcement, social banishment. Boortz isn’t asking you to like the speaker; he’s daring you to tolerate the speech you suspect is wrong or offensive. That dare is also a trap, because it smuggles in a hard question our era keeps dodging: when does protection of the unpopular become permission for the harmful, and who gets to draw that line without turning “unpopular” into a euphemism for “accountable”?
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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