Post
by Forty Two » Wed Mar 22, 2017 5:28 pm
O.k., I don't quite see how your post rebuts mine, but I'll try to address it and let's discuss.
One, the irony of Thomas More dying because of a principled stand, that principled stand involved his opposition to Henry the VIII's marriage annulment and his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy that Henry was the supreme head of the Church of England. And, the principled stand was that he was God's servant first, and it was a religious stand. Some people die for their principles. I am unclear how you are linking that with the notion that all people have an equal right to free expression, and that if you make an exception for one distasteful group, then exceptions may be made for others, and eventually the rule may be swallowed by the exceptions.
Next you referred to the Beer Hall Putsch, which was not speech or expression, but violence. Hitler and his small group made violent effort to overthrow the government, for which he was convicted and sentenced to prison. There is no relevance to free speech there, as the government had the right to stop him and it did. It should have sentenced him harsher. As for the comments that Hitler is reported as having made about using legal, democratic means to achieve their aims, well, they did not use legal, democratic means to achieve their aims. They used violence routinely, burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on the Jews and Communists, and then Hitler got himself appointed Chancellor by Hindenberg in 1933. In 1932, Hitler lost the Presidential election by a wide margin. He was pummeled. They used voter intimidation and vote rigging in the last Weimar election and still were not all that popular - Hitler was not elected, but the party won a bunch of seats in parliament. He managed to get himself appointed Chancellor, and then proceeded to use his State power to dissolve the parliament and hold a new election, with the ballot boxes overseen by his brownshirts. Once that was done, he merged the positions of Chancelor and President. None of this was done by vote or with popular support. It was possible because of the machinery of the State.
Free speech did not allow Hitler to win - politics and the failure of Hindenbrug to stop violence was the failure. If the State concentrates on the violence and intimidation, then such a rise won't happen.
With regard to Trump, your speculation as to what he might do about "the left" that he supposedly is all-fired up to oppose and label traitors, although he has not actually said anything about that -- let's assume you are correct, and that he's appointing people he likes to the SCOTUS and to other positions in the government, and his goal is to silence the left. All the more reason, isn't it, to have a broad, fundamental right of free speech? Trump is now the State or acting for the state, and if you were to give him the one tool he needs to silence the Left and render them enemies of the State, then a key tool would be an exception to the rule that all opinions are lawful by suggesting that he or the State can declare a point of view a threat to public order. Give him that, and he can actually do what you're suggesting he wants to do. If, however, the law and constitution is clear that it would be unconstitutional for the State to silence political opposition, even on the grounds that public order might be disrupted, then he can be thwarted in the courts, and he can be thrwarted in congress, and he can impeached. You mention him packing the courts -- what would the packed SCOTUS do to make sure that Trump got his right to label the left enemies of the State and silence them -- why...they would rule that free speech does not include opinions which are dangerous and threats to public order. Wouldn't that be what the Court would do? Make an exception that leftist opinions don't count as free speech? Wasn't that precisely what the State was arguing in the Trial of the Chicago 8 (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seal, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, etc.) was the reason the protesters on trial needed to be convicted... ? The State always wants the exceptions you and pErvin and Peacock talk about. The State wants to shut down inconvenient opposition and inconvenient speech. What saves us, the people, from election to election, is the difficulty the State has in getting its way when it comes silencing people.
So, if you have a bunch of leftists college students rioting and declaring that hate speech is not free speech and Nazis don't have free speech, what they are calling for is an increase in State power. They are calling for the State to silence someone who is speaking. As a result, they must be hoping that the State will remain in the control of people who only want to silence those bad guys. Because, when someone antithetical to the left - with the intent you ascribe to Trump - takes power, they will look for whatever tools they can find to silence their opposition, and that just might be the very protesters and groups looking to silence hate speakers and microaggressors now.....
If, indeed, Trump is a strongman whom some of the public will support no matter what, then isn't it all the more reason to have an ironclad Constitutional provision to which the State is subjected and which the State cannot readily change (absent a Constitutional Convention or a 2/3 majority of Congress and 2/3 majority of all State legislatures too? I mean, you've got a rule that doesn't have an exception for political opponents of Trump. All Trump could hope to do is amend the constitution, or have a SCOTUS that would overturn more than a century of First Amendment jurisprudence that rules that the content of the speaker's message is not a reason to allow the State to censor it. It's the same rule that protected Communists in the past, Civil Rights Activists were protected by it, Vietnam War protesters were protected by it even when Nixon was President. Wouldn't it have been convenient for Johnson and Nixon to have an exception available to them, that if Abbie Hoffman and other hippie protesters' message was a thread to public order that they could be censored?
What I can't get a handle on is why anyone thinks that an exception to freedom of expression that allows the content of the speaker's message to be determinative of its legality is beneficial in any way to the people, and anything other than a wonderful tool for a wannabe despot.... can you explain that? Doesn't the Trump you describe want that exception to be clearly accepted as a limitation on free expression?
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
Spencer is an unabashed white nationalist who promotes the ideal of a white ethnostate. Mealy-mouthed drivel like the above only erodes your credibility, such as it is.
