The First Amendment protects speech. It does not require silence from the rest of us.
Dedicated to those who have endured the consequences of hatred and remind us why both liberty and human dignity must be defended.
The recent march by members of Patriot Front through the streets of Washington, D.C., left many Americans angry, frightened, and asking the same question:
Why are they allowed to do this?
The answer is both simple and profoundly important.
Because we have a Constitution.
I found the images deeply unsettling. Hundreds of masked men marched in disciplined formation, carrying American flags and banners while proclaiming a vision of this country that I believe is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals on which the United States was founded. Their message was not simply one of political disagreement. It was a vision of America defined by exclusion rather than equality.
Yet my reaction to their ideas does not change my view of their constitutional rights. In fact, it reinforces it.
Over the course of eighty years, I have watched America argue with itself through the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War, the attacks of September 11, and some of the most polarized elections in our history. I have seen citizens exercise their constitutional rights wisely, and I have seen them abuse those same freedoms. Yet I have never lost faith in the principles themselves. The First Amendment has endured because it protects liberty rather than agreement. It trusts citizens to answer bad ideas with better ones. That faith has been tested many times before, and it is being tested again today.
The First Amendment was never intended to protect only speech that most people find acceptable. If that were its purpose, it would hardly be necessary. Popular opinions rarely need constitutional protection. The Amendment exists precisely because free societies recognize that governments cannot be trusted to decide which political ideas deserve to be heard.
That principle becomes most difficult to defend when the ideas themselves are offensive. It is easy to support free speech when we agree with the speaker. The true test comes when we find the speaker’s message morally repugnant.
Many Americans are too young to remember a controversy that tested this principle nearly fifty years ago. In 1977, a small group of American neo-Nazis announced plans to march through the largely Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust survivors had made their homes after the Second World War. Few proposed demonstrations have caused greater public outrage.
The emotional arguments against allowing the march were compelling. Survivors who had endured Nazi persecution would once again be confronted by men wearing symbols associated with the regime that had murdered millions. To many, it seemed an act of deliberate cruelty.
Nevertheless, the courts concluded that the First Amendment protected the march. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, despite fierce criticism and the loss of thousands of members, defended the constitutional principle involved. Their position was not that neo-Nazism deserved respect. Quite the opposite. Their argument was that once government acquires the authority to suppress political speech because it is hateful, no one can guarantee where that authority will end.
“The Constitution protects their right to march. It does not require the rest of us to pretend their ideas are beyond criticism.”
History has repeatedly demonstrated the wisdom of that concern. Governments almost never surrender powers once they acquire them. The tools created to silence today’s extremists often become tools for silencing tomorrow’s dissenters.
That is why I believe Patriot Front has the constitutional right to march.
It is also why I believe the rest of us have a civic obligation to answer them.
There is an important distinction between constitutional rights and moral legitimacy. The Constitution protects the former. Citizens determine the latter.
White nationalism deserves no moral legitimacy.
Its central premise is that America belongs more fully to some people than to others because of ancestry, ethnicity, or race. That idea is fundamentally incompatible with the promise contained in the Declaration of Independence that all people are created equal. America has often failed to live up to that promise. Our history includes slavery, segregation, exclusion, and discrimination. Those failures are undeniable. But they do not invalidate the principle; they remind us why it remains worth defending.
What concerns me most is not simply that extremist groups exist. Every democratic society has its extremists. What concerns me is how easily history can fade from public memory.
Authoritarian movements rarely begin by announcing that they intend to destroy democracy. They speak instead of national renewal, cultural decline, restoring traditional values, and reclaiming a country that they claim has been taken away. They present themselves as patriots rather than revolutionaries. Their symbols are often national flags rather than party banners. Their language is carefully chosen to sound familiar before its implications become fully apparent.
History teaches us to pay attention to those patterns.
That does not mean every unpopular political movement is fascist. Such accusations are too often made casually and unfairly. But neither should we ignore movements that openly embrace ideas long associated with authoritarian nationalism simply because they remain politically marginal. Democracies are seldom lost in a single dramatic moment. More often, they are weakened gradually, one step at a time, while citizens convince themselves that someone else will protect the institutions they take for granted.
I do not believe the answer is censorship. The answer is citizenship.
A free society possesses far more powerful tools than government suppression. We can vote. We can teach history honestly. We can challenge falsehoods with facts, answer prejudice with principle, and refuse to allow intimidation to become normal. We can insist that our national symbols represent liberty for every citizen rather than privilege for a chosen few.
Those are not signs of weakness. They are demonstrations of confidence in the democratic process.
Some readers will undoubtedly disagree with my willingness to defend the constitutional rights of people whose views I find abhorrent. Others may object to my unequivocal condemnation of the ideology they promote. I understand both reactions.
I simply believe that America is strongest when it holds two principles at the same time: unwavering protection for constitutional liberty and unwavering opposition to ideologies that deny the equal dignity of our fellow citizens.
“Democracy survives not by silencing hatred through government power, but by confronting it openly without surrendering either our principles or our humanity.”
The First Amendment gives extremists the right to speak.
It gives the rest of us the right, and, I would argue, the responsibility, to answer.
That is how democracy survives. Not by silencing hatred through government power, but by confronting it openly, confidently, and without ever surrendering either our principles or our humanity.
The organizations, slogans, and faces will change. They always have.
The constitutional principles should not.
If we surrender our commitment to free speech because we despise those who invoke it, we diminish one of the very liberties that distinguishes a constitutional democracy from the authoritarian systems we fear. But if we remain silent in the face of ideologies built upon exclusion, intolerance, and racial supremacy, we fail another equally important obligation.
The challenge has never been choosing between liberty and moral courage.
America requires both.
Author’s Note
This essay was prompted by the July 2026 march of members of Patriot Front through Washington, D.C. While the article addresses that event, it is not intended as a commentary on one organization alone. Similar tensions between constitutional liberty and extremist ideologies have appeared throughout American history, from the Skokie controversy of the 1970s to the present day.
My purpose is not to argue that every controversial movement represents the same threat, nor to suggest that government should suppress offensive political speech. Rather, it is to affirm two principles that I believe must coexist in a healthy constitutional democracy: the government must protect the right to free expression, and citizens have an equal responsibility to oppose ideas that deny the dignity, equality, and humanity of their fellow citizens.
Freedom of speech is one of America’s greatest strengths. Our willingness to answer hatred with truth, history, and moral conviction is how we keep that freedom worthy of defending.