Michael Bicksel originally offered this article as a speech during the American Identity Summit Gala in May. It has been edited for clarity and length. 

Similar to the Thinker’s recent American Identity Summit in May, this weekend gives us the opportunity to reflect on America at 250, and the core definitional principle behind its success. 

Our Founders were very astute readers of history. They were well aware of the failures of Athens, Rome, and Venice, among a small number of other historic experiments with democracy. They wondered whether a republic could persist at a continental scale; whether a nation with two wildly oppositional economic models, industry and agriculture, freedom and slavery, would fall into civil war; and whether a three-branch model could sufficiently govern a country without impeding on the rights of citizens. 

The Founders answered these, and many other questions, to the best of their ability. But these are also ongoing questions, and in many cases these questions seem harder to answer today than at any other point in our history. Some people interpret this as a mark against the Founders, as if they did something wrong or missed outcomes they could’ve otherwise prevented. But the opposite is true. The Founders understood the distinct possibility that our nation could one day fall into disrepair, ripped apart in civil war, dominated by an unrepresentative government, or blunted into defeatism and retreat. Because of this, they implemented the most revolutionary concept of our revolutionary moment: freedom of speech. 

Free speech, they reasoned, was the only way to avoid the outcomes which they sought to prevent, but which they could in no way entirely preclude. James Madison remarked, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” Ben Franklin believed that “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” And our first President George Washington grimly said that “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” 

250 years after July 4th, 1776, freedom of speech persists as perhaps the strongest knot tying our divided country together. But even it is under threat. America’s most prestigious universities routinely score among the worst in the country for protecting free speech. Our closest ally, the United Kingdom, from whom we inherited more of our government and culture than any other country, today arrests more people for speech violations on social media than does Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And Charlie Kirk’s assassination late last summer is a stark reminder of the stakes of the struggle for free speech among young people across our homeland. 

It is in this environment which the Chicago Thinker finds its purpose. The University of Chicago is the lone exception to what is increasingly the rule that America’s most elite universities must oppose free speech and expression. But as with America more broadly, the University of Chicago will only remain an exception so long as organizations like the Chicago Thinker engage vociferously in open, and often loud, debate. That roudiness, zeal for disagreement, and total unwillingness to shut up and step aside, is the cause of not only our success as a group, but across the wider student body as a large part for the success of this university in continuing to chart the path for a truly revolutionary education in the 21st century.

That mission is why we sought out the speakers and panelists who participated in our American Identity Summit. Guests heard from the likes of Tim Pool and Dr. Scott Atlas, who asked whether lockdowns were the right decision despite total condemnation from the scientific establishment and mainstream media. They heard from Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould, who has been optimistic on how crypto and technology will impact banking despite still widespread opposition from the greybeards of Washington. And they heard from David Axelrod, who looked at what he found to be the boring landscape of 2000s political campaigns and said, what happens if you add Barack Obama and social media to the mix?  Each of our panelists offered a story like these, of a moment (or in some cases, several moments) where they saw something differently. That unorthodox thinking continues to be the driving motivation of this group, to support truth through speech.     

It is thus fitting to close with a quote by Thomas Paine, a Revolutionary patriot and one of the most outspoken voices for freedom across the United States. In his famous Rights of Man, he remarked on the subject of freedom and truth: “Freedom had been hunted round the globe. Reason was considered rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing … [for] Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” So let us heed the words of Mr. Paine and seek freedom through reason, truth, and the power of our own speech.