The Price of Ignorance (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

The U.S. Constitution is displayed inside the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C.

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” That old adage, variously worded and variously attributed, has never rung truer. I’m not talking about the cost of formal education, although I’m certainly concerned about that. I’m talking about the soul-crushing ignorance for which our nation is paying a massive price.

The Constitution of the United States is about 4,500 words, the amendments another 3,600. A slower-than-average reader could read all of it in an hour and begin to understand why we still need the Supreme Court to settle disputes over what it means. But how many of us have invested that hour in the past year? Past decade? Ever?

The only parts of the Constitution that Americans of all political stripes and education levels truly seem to grasp are that they don’t have to answer police questions and have the right to a lawyer in criminal cases. Why? Because the price of ignorance on those rights can be incarceration, so the Supreme Court requires law enforcement to educate all suspects that they can remain silent and ask for a lawyer, thereby creating boilerplate dialogue for a thousand crime shows. (In an episode of my favorite TV series, “The Closer,” the FBI agent character smiles at his suspect and says, “I never get tired of saying this: You have the right to remain silent …”)

Spoiler alert: An awful lot of people still don’t exercise those “Miranda rights.”

I am no constitutional scholar, but the deadly insurrection against Congress for doing its constitutional duty and subsequent fallout proves that even the president of the United States didn’t understand the constitutional process by which he was elected (and then sent packing). And ignorance about the First Amendment is so pervasive that even people who absolutely know better have cynically exploited that ignorance.

Josh Hawley, the Springdale native who was elected to the U.S. Senate by Missouri voters two years ago, had lined up a big-time publisher, Simon & Schuster, to publish his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” His thesis, Simon & Schuster promised the book-buying public, was that Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple pose the “gravest threat to American liberty since the monopolies of the Gilded Age.”

Then Hawley decided to take a leading role in disenfranchising tens of millions of voters in swing states that preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump, and a mob that shared his goal of rejecting the will of the voters stormed the Capitol. Five people died, including a police officer who was beaten to death.

Overnight — literally — Simon & Schuster decided that it didn’t want to do business with Hawley, sedition and violent insurrection generally being bad for branding. His contract was canceled. Hawley, stunned that his personal action had personal consequences, immediately squawked that his First Amendment right to free speech was being violated and declaring the private company’s decision to be “Orwellian.”

Hawley is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School; it’s impossible to believe that he doesn’t understand Orwell or the First Amendment. But he trusts that Americans who share his desire to negate Biden’s election don’t — or don’t care.

When Twitter and Facebook, villains in Hawley’s unpublished opus, decided that President Trump had finally violated their terms of service one time too many, more whining ensued about his First Amendment right. But Simon & Schuster canceling its contract with Hawley the Seditionist was no different, constitutionally, than Subway cutting ties with Jared the Pedophile. And Twitter and Facebook acted no differently toward Trump than a restaurant that declined to serve a patron who showed up barefoot and shirtless after many previous warnings.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” and some other things. It doesn’t require any private entity to amplify someone else’s speech. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. (I didn’t make that up. I wish I knew who did.)

Perhaps we need to start issuing a Hawley warning: “You have the right to free speech. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.”

The same goes for Apple and Google deciding not to do business with Parler, the “conservative” — whatever that means these days — alternative to Twitter. That’s what happens when your revolution depends on flip-flop wearing, nonfat-latte-drinking coastal elites. Northern foundries stopped doing business with the Confederate States, but some folks still seem to forget how that turned out.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.