Jad Abumrad

This is my friend Nabiha Syed.

And I called her because she knows more about the First Amendment than anyone else I know.

She's an award-winning media lawyer and just someone who is really earnestly trying to imagine the best way forward.

And part of it, she was saying like, look, like as a Muslim woman who grew up like right after 9-11...

You know, like, as we all know, it's like Muslim terrorists, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And she's like, and I never, my people never got the mic.

It's about power.

It's about megaphones.

because it was this sort of idealistic metaphor, but also because it was the most convenient laissez-faire set it and forget it sort of model for free speech.

Historically, there have been a bunch of other models and metaphors that people have used to talk about free speech, some of which take the view not so much that, you know, argument and dissent lead to truth, but instead that, like, there's a truth out there in the world and that people have a right to hear it.

Like, what are the facts that you need to know to live your life and operate in society?

And what was interesting to me about this view is is unlike Holmes's argument and for that matter, unlike the, you know, attitude of this is America.

I can say whatever I want.

So, for example, in 1949, the government actually set a policy, basically a rule saying if you are a news broadcaster.

And so Nabiha's feeling about all of this is like if we're going to rethink the marketplace as it exists now, maybe we should incorporate some of this other kind of thinking.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's good.

But then the question is like, who regulates it?

How do we regulate it?

Right now, the people who's regulating it, like we have the courts with like Citizens United being like, we don't.