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The Freedom of Speech of the First Amendment of the US Constitution

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is, and has been over the years, one
of the most mentioned and praised components of American democracy, which is
considered an example for the democracies of the world due to its antiquity and stability.
This amendment is one of the central pillars of citizens' freedoms, as it contains the rights
of freedom of assembly, press, petition and the most widely used right of speech, and from
it are derived such important rights as the right to vote.

This amendment is one of the components of the American dream, one of those reasons
why dreamers, in the face of danger and hardship, risk coming to the United States, because
they see it as a place where they can feel free to profess faith in the deity of their choice
without being violated, to demonstrate against the government, or to hold symbolic protests
and performances without being persecuted for these acts.

The protection afforded by the amendment becomes more robust if the speech or opinions
that are issued have a political component, and against this in particular, laws cannot be
issued with the aim of exercising any kind of censorship against the speech that is issued, at
the risk of the Supreme Court declaring them unconstitutional and repealing them. This is
where the goodness of the amendment begins to waver somewhat, as it is pertinent to
review what counts as political speech, and how impartial these considerations are, for if
the boundaries are not made clear enough, some unscrupulous people could use the
amendment as an excuse to spread hate speech.

And it was unfortunately this that began to happen when in 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio,
the Court validated the speech of a Ku Klux Klan member on the grounds that even if it is
speech of violence, if there is no imminent and intentional action against the law as a result
of such speech, it is covered by the first amendment. This decision completely changed the
way the amendment is viewed and opens the debate of how far hate speech to crowds
should be allowed under free speech, because communicating a racially charged idea to a
group of people may not immediately generate crimes and violent reactions, but it does
encourage the recipient of the message to engage in violent behaviour against other
members of the community in the future based on that speech.

It is a mistake to consider that ideas must have an immediate reaction in a person's

conceptions in order to be considered criminal; Examples such as the Nazi holocaust or the
KKK massacres are examples of what can happen in the medium term when these kinds of
ideas are spread, turning the American dream into a nightmare for communities such as
Latinos, African-Americans, Asians, the LGBT community, Muslims, among others, who
as minorities or historically oppressed communities are a constant target of this kind of
discourse.