The first amendment is not a weapon wielded by the rich and powerful. Many of these people of influence are apprehensive of the protections offered by the First Amendment, because the First Amendment is a limitation on their ability to shut the rest of us up. Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) explains why the First Amendment is especially important for political minorities and those who are victims of political opression:
You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority. This is why revolutionary figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech. It’s why John Lewis, someone I was, I got to meet actually because he was in my neighborhood a lot. The great John Lewis, civil rights icon, he would argue. He would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful. It is the best check on power ever invented.
Consider visiting the website of FIRE, a completely non-partisan nonprofit organization, dedicated to free speech for all. You can spend days at the FIRE site reading about the most important free speech cases in the United States, as well as warning about the many people from across the political spectrum that FIRE has represented.
