The question the First Amendment keeps asking, across wars and panics and moral crusades, is whether a democracy can tolerate the possibility of persuasion.

There’s a certain school of thought that says no. Persuasion is too perilous.

I call this way of thinking “swallow-a-fly logic.” I’m referring, of course, to the popular children’s song where a woman ingests a fly and then keeps devouring bigger animals to fix it, until she dies from eating a horse.

It leads to the “old lady who swallowed a fly” theory of obedience: If we let someone with a message we don’t like speak out, people might be persuaded. If people become persuaded, they might stop supporting the war, the president, the government, itself. If support evaporates, enlistment drops or compliance weakens as the state loses leverage. If enlistment drops, the government might fall. And if there is no government, then who cares about the First Amendment?

By this way of thinking, free speech is dangerous because the public is too influence-able, and influence is too unpredictable, and security is too precious.

The constitutional tradition of free speech, when it is working at its best, says yes anyway, go ahead and speak. The alternative is a politics in which the state survives by making dissenters illegitimate as citizens.

That’s what happened to Renée Good when she was shot and killed by ICE in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Her resistance had made her menacing.

I’m a professor of public service and vice chair of the National Communication Association’s Communication and Law Division. My research examines how news institutions shape civic life and how freedom of expression is both a fundamental human right and a fundamental part of democracy.

In modern First Amendment doctrine, the government usually cannot punish speech unless it crosses narrow lines like incitement.

But when national security is invoked, the rules for speech appear to change. Dissent is treated less........

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