The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion.

In the past, I have come across some of the words of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.  

From his decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette regarding compelled speech:

As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be…Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

Justice Antonin Scalia, no mean stylist himself, described Jackson as "the best legal stylist of the 20th century."  

I stumble across these items this morning and start rooting around for more information about the words and works of Jackson.  Of course, Wikiquote is a good starting point.  For a man who was United States Solicitor General, United States Attorney General, and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, as well as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, it was worth paying attention to his opinions.

In this wretched moment when the administration is so eager to eviscerate the First Amendment and has been so ardent in pursuing technology companies to become an arm of the federal government to restrict speech and has sought so enthusiastically to create new agencies tasked with policing speech and more specifically tasked with determining what is true enough for citizens to be allowed to hear, these words from Jackson are a balm.

The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.

Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516 (1945) p. 323 U. S. 545