Tim Walz claimed there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." That's false--the First Amendment has no such carveouts for those things. So it's concerning that Walz would think otherwise.
Hillary Clinton has made similar comments, saying "But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States." But again, there is no First Amendment carveout for propaganda, Russian or otherwise.
There are some limits to protected speech, but they're rare and mostly limited to direct incitement of a crime or other threat.
In the final analysis, I don't think it matters. The former leads to the latter. The same is true of things like attempts to keep the LGB, but toss the T. The T follows from the LGB. The LGB already presupposes all that is needed to infer the T. You would be drawing an artificial line in the sand otherwise. It's ad hoc and doesn't work.
One common error people make is that they think they can pick and choose beliefs and positions a la carte and expect them to remain stable as fixed parameters of the environment. But that's not how ideas work. They aren't static in this way. Rather, they function much like presuppositions that, over time, are worked out, dialectically, if you will. Society is like a machine that works out the consequences of ideas over time.
So, I always find it amusing when anyone appeals to some fondly remembered status quo that held in a prior decade, believing that all one needs to do is return to that status quo "verbatim" and all will be well, as if these things were just a matter of arranging the furniture a certain way. You can't roll back the clock, and if you could, you would only recreate a similar development that led to the undesirable state of affairs in the first place.
This isn't an argument for some kind of Big P progessivism, or against tradition, only an account of how cultures develop over time. In our case, by understanding the tensions and contradictions within the liberalism tradition, we can come to explain why Western societies have moved in a certain direction over the last 200 years. Heck, we can go back further to the influence of Luther, or even further to Ockham, without whose ideas liberalism would arguably not exist.
