Category Archives: Freedom of Speech

Writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, Professor Lisa Barrett of Northeastern University posed a question this weekend:

"When is speech violence?"

Barrett, who specializes in psychology, tries to answer the question with two key points.

First, "Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. ... When you're forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it's a good kind of stress temporary and not harmful to your body and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning."

No problem there. Stress is something we can internalize and compensate for.

But then Barrett warns against "long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that's the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain." What kind of stress is Barrett talking about?

Milo Yiannopoulos.

The professor explains that "it's reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering."

Conversely, Barrett says, Charles Murray is worthy of our ears because he offers meaningful debate.

In this juxtaposition of Milo and Murray, Barrett wants us to regard her argument as nuanced and intellectual.

We should not do so.

After all, there's a moral and intellectual rot at play here. While Barrett might deride Yiannopoulos as a "hatemonger" who has no interest in the exchange of ideas, his supporters clearly believe the opposite. Whether defending Donald Trump or challenging college campuses to allow controversial speakers, to them, Yiannopoulos does serve social debate.

And that speaks to the broader issue here.

At its most basic level, Barrett's argument is neither intelligent nor constructive. It is simply hyper-arrogant. The professor believes her viewpoint of stress and speakers should be a guide for all society.

The opposite is true. Indeed, Barrett is exactly why the Constitution grants such latitude to the conduct of free speech. If not, a speaker's appeal or discomfort will be viewed subjectively by each individual. The Constitution represents the truth that the more individual viewpoints exchanged, the more opportunity for worthwhile social discourse.

Barrett concludes with a call to action "we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence."

Well, from the prospective of my brain cells, Barrett's argument is a form of violence. Not because it threatens me, but because its arrogant idiocy causes me painful stress.

Yet unlike Barrett, I believe freedom of speech is too important to be subjugated to my misplaced emotions.

Continued here:
The latest idiotic attack on free speech: Opinions as violence - Washington Examiner

BELLE PLAINE, Minn. A veterans park in Belle Plaine became a ground zero for constitutional debate after the city created a Free Speech Zone where memorials of any religious background could be placed.

In January, a Christian memorial was removed over concerns it violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. Now, a satanic memorial is set to move in, causing protests on Saturday.

The removal of the Christian memorial by the city of Belle Plaine sparked outrage. The city cited complaints that it violated Constitutional obligations to separate church and state. Later, the memorial was returned to the park.

In February, the Belle Plaine city council voted to establish the veterans memorial park a Free Speech Zone, welcoming any religion or group to take part.

This is what we support, this is what the community supports, said one protester. And it doesnt matter if you are Jewish, Muslimwe are all Americans fighting this war together.

But, promises of inclusion were quickly put to the test. The Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, announced a plan to install a monument of their own: a black cube with a helmet on top.

The monument is intended to honor veterans who may not be Christian.

Counter-protester Army Reserve Lieutenant Kevin Lindow told Fox 9 that he supports any memorial, regardless of religion or background. He said he does not believe in God, but did serve his country and would like the monument to be in the park.

Others at Saturdays gathering believe Constitutional protection comes with exceptions.

My thoughts are, if you are calling Satan to be on your side, you are not going to expect any blessings, Bernard Slobodnik, a protest organizer said.

There is a freedom of speech, but freedom comes at a price, as well, said one protester. They are free to believe whatever they want to, but they need to do it on their own grounds, not on public property.

Read more from FOX 9.

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Satanic memorial sparks free speech debate in Minnesota city - Fox News

John Patrick Leary Published 11:04 p.m. ET July 16, 2017 | Updated 11:04 p.m. ET July 16, 2017

The recent flurry of activity on the crisis of campus free speech is manufactured, Leary writes.(Photo: David Guralnick / The Detroit News)Buy Photo

The Michigan Legislature, like the U.S. Senate, is a safe space for right-wing groupthink. Thats the conclusion Ive drawn from a recent flurry of activity on the manufactured crisis of campus free speech in Lansing and Washington, D.C. A pair of bills recently introduced by Sen. Patrick Colbeck would direct state universities to ensure the fullest degree of intellectual freedom and free expression, and would then require them to suspend or expel student protesters who infringe upon another persons free speech rights. Colbecks bill is similar to proposed legislation in Wisconsin, Colorado, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Sen. Chuck Grassley recently concluded a Judiciary Committee hearing entitled Free Speech 101: The Assault on the First Amendment on College Campuses.

What is driving this concern with college activism? Conservatives have been in an uproar since a series of raucous protests against conservative speakers at campuses like the University of California, Berkeley, and Middlebury College in Vermont last year. In February, Milo Yiannopoulos, the disgraced former Breitbart.com editor, canceled a talk at Berkeley in the face of raucous demonstrations. The following month at Middlebury, student protesters interrupted a lecture by Charles Murray, an American Enterprise Institute Fellow and co-author of The Bell Curve, the book that argued that racial inequality is shaped by nonwhite peoples genetic makeup.

Grassley and Colbeck choose to read disruptive demonstrations like these as evidence of a pervasive crisis of free speech on campus. Grassley claimed that American colleges are becoming places of anti-Constitution indoctrination and censorship. His primary example of this dreadful development? Seventy percent of students today believe it is desirable to restrict the use of slurs and other language intentionally offensive to certain groups, he said. The First Amendment, to Grassley, protects Americans God-given right to be cruel in public. Colbeck echoes this assessment.

The Bill of Rights should be next on Colbecks summer reading list. One can argue about tactics, but Berkeley and Middlebury students had every right to loudly, disruptively, even rudely protest Yiannopoulos and Murray. The First Amendment makes no demands on politeness. And Yiannopoulos and Murray, in turn, had every right to give their lectures without state repression. But contrary to popular belief in the GOP, the First Amendment does not guarantee anyone, right or left, a platform or a polite audience.

Whats more, Colbeck seems not to recognize that the First Amendment applies to speakers he doesnt like leftist protesters, in this case as well as those he does. Senate Bill 349 stipulates that protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity are not permitted. Violations of this vaguely-worded rule what does infringe mean? would result in either suspensions or expulsions for student demonstrators speaking out on the issues that matter to them. Under the law, student activists would have recourse to a disciplinary hearing and a lawyer if they have enough pizza money laying around to hire one, that is. Colbeck may have read 1984, but he has learned all the wrong lessons it. It is Orwellian in the extreme to propose a free-speech tribunal, presided over by college authorities, as a remedy for the suppression of free speech.

The stated reasons for the GOPs interest in regulating college campus activism dont stand up to scrutiny. What, then, are their unstated reasons?

Politics. Student activists, the clear targets of the bill, are on the left. Senate Bill 350 stipulates that universities must not shield students from protected speech, if they find the ideas and opinions expressed unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. I agree as does every faculty member I know. (Unlike Sen. Grassley, however, I dont consider racial slurs to be ideas.) But if Colbeck were serious about nurturing unpopular or controversial opinions in college, then he would be alarmed at the rise of neo-McCarthyist groups like Turning Point USA, which operates a Professor Watchlist that claims to expose and document leftist professors across the country. He would be disappointed that George Cicciarello-Maher, a Drexel University political scientist on this list, faces possible dismissal over a series of tweets that earned the ire of an right-wing outrage machine on social media.

But you will not hear a word about them, or many others like them, from Colbeck or Grassley. Conservatives, no longer content to undermine public colleges by starving them of funding, now seem to prefer that the government regulate their intellectual lives more directly all in the name of free speech, of course. And in the name of freedom of speech and thought, we shouldnt let them.

John Patrick Leary is an assistant professor of English at Wayne State University.

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Column: The manufactured free speech crisis - The Detroit News

Amanda Roley , KREM 5:46 PM. PDT July 13, 2017

SPOKANE, Wash. -- A woman is facing multiple counts of malicious harassment after court documents said she yelled racially motivated comments at her neighbors.

Court records show the cell phone video was taken of Shalisha Israel yelling things like, "You guys drug dealers or something," and "I think you might be terrorists! This is not your America! You are evil!"

PREVIOUS STORY:Woman arrested after harassing neighbors, calling them 'terrorists'

KREM 2 posted the story online and many people commented that what the woman said was not right but what about her freedom of speech?

To verify when your first amendment rights are protected and when it turns into harassment KREM 2 talked to First Amendment lawyer David Bodney.

He said the line between your freedom of speech and harassment is drawn with three exceptions to your First Amendment rights. The first is, if the statement constitutes incitement. Meaning if there is a serious risk of imminent harm, it is possible your speech can be limited. The second exception is if the speech uses "fighting words" meaning if someone continues to provoke another in close proximity using language that would cause a person to respond aggressively. The final exception, is if the speaker says a true threat, which is where the speaker communicates in a way that is a true threat to the safety of the recipient. However, Bodney said these three exceptions are fairly difficult to prove.

"There are not a lot of fighting word cases out there, and there are not a whole lot of true threat cases out there. And thought the court recognizes this notion of what constitutes incitement, it's a very difficult standard to meet," Bodney said.

Bodney adds that your first amendment right is not absolute. In the case of this woman who shouted racial remarks at her neighbors, Bodney said the video does not show any pronounced evidence of the three exceptions to free speech. Even though the first amendment could be used as a defense, Bodney said it could still go in the victim's favor.

"If the speech is annoying, alarming or otherwise meets the test of a state statute that define harassment it may well be possible to get an order to restrain that kind of speech," Bodney explains.

KREM 2 can verify there are exceptions to your first amendment rights that would classify your speech as harassment. Before you exercise those rights, make sure your speech does not include fighting words, a true threat or constitute incitement.

Help our journalists VERIFY the news.Do you know someone else we should interview for this story? Did we miss anything in our reporting? Is there another story you'd like us to VERIFY?Click here.

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Verify: When does free speech become harassment? - KREM.com

We are led to believe that standing up for the Constitution and limiting the tax burden on citizens were Republican tenets. Unfortunately, members of the Republican Party are the ones now considering to stomp on both the First Amendment and the American entrepreneur by changing the way we expense advertising costs.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) is reportedly contemplating the adoption of former Republican Rep. Dave Camps 2014 ad tax proposal, in which commercial advertising would no longer be 100 percent deductible as a business expenseas it has been since the creation of the federal income tax. Instead, it would be 50 percent deductible, leaving the remaining to be amortized over a decade. By holding corporations money for an entire decade, this new tax would treat ads as an asset like machinery instead of as a business expense like research and wages.

I know accounting can be boring, but these are fighting words!

In singling out free, commercial speech from other business expenses, this 50/50 proposal is in clear violation of the First Amendment. After all, the reason commercial advertising has been fully deductible since the income taxs founding in 1913 is because Congress has always known that it cannot constitutionally regulate free, commercial speech by making it a dollars and cents game.

The American Revolution was largely fought over this very issue. Remember the Stamp Act of 1765? The relationship between England and the Colonies was strained already when this tax pushed it to a boiling point. The Stamp Act imposed an across-the-board flat tax on advertising. It levied a tax of two shillings per ad no matter what it was or where it was being printed. Mob violence was triggered. Stamp collectors quit in fear and the British government repealed it a year later to quell the violence, but the goose was cooked. War was on the horizon and the Stamp Act was a rallying cry for the colonists.

After the British were defeated, our Founders set up a form of government with a Constitution in which the First Amendment prevented the government from ever taxing advertising again. Freedom to advertise: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

For centuries, the First Amendment has protected corporate advertising, which goes hand in hand with our formidable entrepreneurial spirit. Businesses must advertise to succeedin fact, advertising spending generates approximately 16 percent of the nations economic activity. Do the Republicans really want to be the party to tax that?

From Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein:

Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment. In overturning a prohibition on legal advertising in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that free speech includes paid advertisements or solicitations to pay or to contribute money. The Court elaborated on the consumer benefits of commercial advertising:

The listeners interest is substantial: the consumers concern for the free flow of commercial speech often may be far keener than his concern for urgent political dialogue. Moreover, significant societal interests are served by such speech. Advertising, though entirely commercial, may often carry information of import to significant issues of the day. [citation omitted]. And commercial speech serves to inform the public of the availability, nature, and prices of products and services, and thus performs an indispensable role in the allocation of resources in a free enterprise system. [citation omitted]. In short, such speech serves individual and societal interests in assuring informed and reliable decisionmaking.

A Republican-controlled Congress would go down in history as the party to regulate our First Amendment right in such a way as to extort more from the already burdened American businessmen and women.

Recently, a coalition of 124 House members, led by Reps. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to congress urging them not to mess with the current tax treatment of advertising.

Will Congress heed the warning? Only time will tell.

Steve Sherman is an author, radio commentator, and former Iowa House candidate. His articles have appeared nationally in both print and online. His most recent novel, titled Mercy Shot, can be found on Amazon or at http://www.scsherman.com

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Is Advertising Free Speech? - The American Conservative

Buffalo Business First

Did Carl Paladino engage in protected free speech? Buffalo Business First As I sit down to write this column over the Fourth of July weekend, my thoughts wander to our rights and duties as U.S. citizens and to the First Amendment's freedom of speech clause. We all know by now that Carl Paladino, developer, former ...

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Did Carl Paladino engage in protected free speech? - Buffalo Business First

Michigan is considering a pair of new bills aimed at protecting free speech after protesters have disturbed, interrupted and ended multiple debates.

Grant Strobl, thenational chairman forYoung Americans for Freedomat theUniversity of Michigan is leading the chargeto rid the campus of unfairdiscrimination against speech based on certainviewpoints,Michigan Livereported Tuesday.

The university does have the obligation to prevent students from heckling and basically taking over an event. They can protest outside or host their own event, said Strobl.

He noted that the universitys current free speechpolicyisnt bad but recommended improvements to encourageuniversities to adhere totheir policies. He said the biggest problem is that the policies arenot regularly enforced, and helped createtwobillsaimed at amending this weakness that will be presented to the Michigan State Senate. Bill 0349 and Bill 0350 are currently under consideration,according to a July 11 statement from Strobl.

Together called the campus free speech act,the billswould demand that collegesand universities allowcontroversial speakers and ideas to circulate, even those considered deeply offensive.

Freedom of speech has turned into freedom from speech said state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, lead sponsor of the legislation. Students are trying to shut down any discussion of issues that they dont agree with, he added.

The bills would applyto Michigans 15 public universities and 28 community colleges, and would require either a yearlong suspension or expulsion of students that repeatedly infringe on the speech rights of others.I think most of the provisions are effective means of encouraging us to enforce free speech polices, Strobl said.

Others, like the Michigan Association of State Universities, do not support the bills and insist thelegislation is unnecessary and duplicative.

This, to me, is typical of institutions cracking down against students that are advocating for themselves saidVikrant Garg, apublic health student and organizer of Students4Justiceat the university.This bill, and the people that make these decisionsoperate under a framework in which they can silence us and inflict violence against us with no consequences.

When a lot of students think conservative mainstream ideals equal violence, it creates an atmosphere where we cant talk to each other, Strobl said in response. Thats one of the things I was looking forward to in attending UM being able to have reasonable, civil discussion.

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University Of Michigan Considers Free Speech Protection Bills - The Daily Caller

Three pitched political rallies took place in Washington on June 25. And although all three purported to speak for the people on our most fundamental of rights, the experience of covering the rallies revealed sharply different views among the groups about the right to free speech.

There was the Freedom of Speech Rally led by white nationalist Richard Spencer at the Lincoln Memorial. There was the Rally Against Political Violence, led by Jack Posobiec and Roger Stone at Lafayette Square, and the Speak Out Against Fascism, rally headed by ANTIFA which purports to be an anti-fascist group at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters.

The speakers of the Rally Against Political Violence were going to be a part of the Freedom of Speech Rally until Spencer was allowed to speak, at which point they dropped out and formed their own rally.

Posobiec told Accuracy in Media his was not a political rally or a Trump rally, that he had invited Democrats, independents and others and that even ANTIFA would be welcome to be here peaceably.

Peace and love is why were here today, Posobiec said. We want peace. We want an end to the violence and fighting.

There were many discussions at the rally, most of them peaceable. A few became somewhat heated, but there were no calls for violence or to restrict speech.

Our crew was free to move about the rally without restrictions on who we interviewed or what we filmed. Speakers, including Posobiec and Mike Cernovich, made themselves available for interviews. And attendees seemed excited to have a chance to appear on camera and express their views.

The mood was somewhat more tense at the Rally for Free Speech, where speakers included a Jewish man with a Jews For Trump sign, outspoken white nationalists and others from the alt-right. They didnt necessarily support the same things, although they agreed on the importance of free speech.

Counter-protesters lined up on the other side of temporary barriers, and the two sides shouted obscenities and other things at each other.

At one point a shirtless counter protestor began calling the rally attendees virgins. A rally member then offered the man a Dont Tread On Me T-shirt, but the shirtless man ignored him and continued to call the attendees virgins.

This went on for some time, and a few people would breach the barriers throughout the day and shout at each other. But for the most part, it was not violent and no one tried to suppress the speech of others.

And again, we were allowed to move about freely and interview whomever we chose. Participants still generally were willing to give interviews, and no one tried to block our camera or otherwise prevent filming.

The scene at the ANTIFA rally was entirely different.

As soon as we arrived, we were met with cold, angry stares from about 50 people, most with their faces covered. We were quickly approached by the non-covered face of a woman who identified herself as the media liaison.

As the media liaison was explaining to us that this was a really where they value free speech, an ANTIFA man with a ponytail approached us and asked what news outlet we represented. When we said aim.org, he looked us up on his phone.

As soon as he reached the aim.org website, he immediately called us fascists.

The media liaison ignored the ponytailed man and said we could film on the outside perimeter as long as we arent harassing anyone. This upset the ponytail ANTIFA member, and he pulled her aside and began arguing with her.

Then, my cameraman and I attempted to film and tried to interview people on the outside perimeter. Despite following the rules the ANTIFA media liaison had laid out, we were forcefully blocked by several large ANTIFA members, and others began using the ANTIFA flags they were waving to block our camera so we could not film the rally.

No ANTIFA members beside the media liaison would talk to us. It appears as if members of the Washington D.C. ANTIFA are now split on how to deal with the media. Some welcome or at least are willing to tolerate media exposure. Others, such as the man with the ponytail, want nothing to do with it.

For now, the ponytail mans contingent holds the upper hand.

For a rally where they supposedly value free speech, there was a distinct lack of it. And the group sought neither to advocate for free expression nor to push for peace and love.

Instead, it focused on bashing police officers and America with one speaker claiming the police molest and rape protestors and the ponytail ANTIFA member, who spoke later, to say, f*ck the troops, f*ck the United States, f*ck capitalism. Its not over until America is.

Several speakers called the felony charges against Disrupt J20 protestors for their violent actions on inauguration day unfair and called for them to be dropped. Paul Kuhn, the notorious J20 organizer who plotted to plant smoke bombs inside the Deploraball and was charged with conspiracy to commit assault, attended the rally.

We know this not from our own reporting our cameras were blocked and our access severely limited throughout our time there but from a livestream of the only media outlet ANTIFA did allow.

What our cameras showed was a group with an angry message, aggressively seeking to block our views. So much for the value of free speech.

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What Freedom of Speech Looked Like at Washington's Freedom of Speech Rallies - Accuracy In Media (blog)

On the Sunday before the 4th of Julya celebration of our nations independence from a regime that, among other odious acts, criminalized the criticism of its monarchcommentator Lindy West exhorted us to Save Free Speech From Trolls. This doltish ramble is Wests debut as a weekly opinion columnist in the New York Times, suggesting that Wests sense of self-respect and that of the Times somehow correlate inversely.

West, wielding an intellect shaped by long hours of fighting with people on social media, bounteous self-righteousness, and little else, begins by recalling the halcyon days when she thought it silly to be called a politically correct, anti-free-speech censor. She muses, I was not the government. I literally could not censor anyone. As if being a government was the only way to go about it.

But then Trump got elected, and it didnt seem so silly anymore. Since then, the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated, writes West. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web mens rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

Thus begins a veritable manual on how to preach to the social justice warrior choir.

West possesses a mysterious gift of psychic progressivism that lets her see into the hearts of men and unearth the real intentions behind their stated ones. Or so it would seem. These men are only pretending to care about freedom of speech, for example. They really want to harass marginalized people for having opinions. They want to feel self-righteous while doing so. It is just that simple they have no legitimate concerns at all, of that West is certain.

Further on in her column, she writes, Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you dont like is allowed to criticize you. She adds, The law does not share that interpretation, as if someone besides herself had made it.

Theyre weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance, she says, obsequiously quoting Anita Sarkeesian, another psychic progressive.

That flushing noise you hear is the sound of productive dialogue disappearing into the rhetorical toilet. Identitarians like West have never grasped that it is impossible to found a good-faith discussion on bad-faith premises such as these. There are great numbers of principled people who worry sincerely, and justifiably, about attacks on the First Amendment in the name of social justice. The veracity of that sincerity is not up for debate any more than Wests Ill be happy to prove mine right after she proves hers.

West describes herself as having made on occasion some relatively innocuous bit of cultural criticism like, say, that racism is bad and artists should try not to make racist art if they dont want to be called racists. Sarkeesian, she says mildly, started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos critiquing the representation of women in video games and issued some precise, rigorously argued opinions about the relative loincloth sizes of male and female video game avatars. For this and nothing more, they were answered with untold abuse, as she frames it.

A typical example of Wests innocuousness is this sentence inan essay she wrote for the Guardian: As we all know from the anguished howls of quivering white people that erupt any time a person of colour expresses any dissatisfaction about being murdered by police, disenfranchised by voter suppression, trapped in cycles of systemic poverty and/or treated like a criminal when theyre just trying to buy a horrible, $49 mauve bodysack, nobody in the world is ever racist, except for actual KKK members and the ghost of George Wallace. Exaggeration for effect is a time-honored literary device, but West employs it so often that one gets the sense that its not only for effect, but to fill the world of her prose with un-woke whites that justify every last bit of her disdain for those who dont share her take on these issues.

Sarkeesian, meanwhile, has been fairly criticized for subscribing to a reductionist form of feminism that relies on similar blanket damnations. What West doesnt tell you is that some of this criticism has come from other feminists such as Liana Kerzner, who were consequently subjected to online harassment from Sarkeesians defenders.

West mentions that Sarkeesian recently appeared at a public talk only to find the first two rows of seats stacked with her online harassers, leering up at her, filming her on their phones. She elides the part where Sarkeesian addressed the man who organized the filming, If you Google my name on YouTube you get shitheads like this dude who are making these dumb-assed videos. They just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because youre a garbage human. Sarkeesian has always been more interested in declaration than persuasion.

None of this justifies threats of violence and deathnor doxxing, criminal harassment, or any other abuse that West or Sarkeesian have had to endure beyond mockery of their arguments. But the truth of the matter is a more complicated picture than the one painted by West, and it doesnt flatter the author so well.

West claims that the true goal [of defenders of free speech] has always been to ensure that if anyone is determining the ways that we collectively choose to restrict our own speech in the name of values, they are the ones setting the limits. She knows this because 8,000 people signed a petition to have Sarkeesian arrested for violating the Logan Act when she spoke at the UN. They didnt get Kathy Griffins back when she pulled that gag with Trumps severed head. They didnt decry the threats against Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor after she called Trump a racist and sexist megalomaniac.

Except that much of GamerGate thought that the Logan Act stunt was indefensible. Reason writer Robby Soave called out the social media mob that went after Griffin. Samantha Harris of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education came out in support of Professor Taylor.

Besides, we can play this sorry game with West: what are we to make of her commitment to free speech and combating sexism given her utter silence about the assault on Allison Stanger? I could speculate tendentiously about Wests real motives, but Im inclined to think that even Wests capacity for outrage is finite, and like most pundits she tends to reserve her public expression of it for calamities in the news cycle that bolster her own side.

The irony of this essay is that its main point that all this defense of free speech is really about deflecting criticism is coming out of a camp of left-identitarianism that spent much of the last decade answering criticism with charges of bigotry. Even a public figure as minuscule as myself has to put up with accusations of racism, sexism, and fascism for taking issue with the absurdities put forth as Gospel by certain progressives.

The fruit of their harvest is the alt-right. We might have gotten the alt-right anyway, but a style of argument that came to be known among people who study the SJW phenomenon as point-and-shriek left little room for rational engagement. Instead, some people took it upon themselves to find out how loud they could get the left-identitarians to shriek. Pretty loud, it turns out, and its kind of fun to make them do it. Thus we find ourselves in a situation described eloquently by Jacob Siegel: The cultural Left became enforcers of rectitude while elements on the right developed an aesthetics of transgression. Cue the cartoon frogs.

But the identity-politics crowd has never been able to deal very well with internal criticism either. It turns out that liberals and leftists enjoy getting accused of racism, sexism, and fascism even less than libertarians and conservatives, resulting in a backchannel culture described by Freddie deBoer, in which even the believers are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. That ultimately harms progressive interests as surely as anything perpetrated by the right.

West should try to understand that our protectiveness of the First Amendment as a legal doctrine falls out of our concern for free speech as a societal norm, and that West is eroding the latter by conflating the two and attributing foul motives to us for wanting to defend them. My politics and Wests likely have nothing in common. But could we at least agree that a society that harbors fundamental doubts about the value of free expression is likely to turn into one that neither of us want?

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NYT Columnist Lindy West Debuts With Clueless Rant Against Free Speech - The Federalist

Amendment 1 of The Constitution of the United States says, Congress Shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The statement, The press is the enemy of the people, is an attack on the Constitution of the United States and Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights not hyperbole or exaggeration but an attack. This encompassing statement includes television, radio and print media.

The term fake news is also an attack on the Constitution of The United States and Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights. Fake news is a response a child would use for something he/she doesnt want to hear. Fake news has no merit just as saying, The sky is falling, the sky is falling! has no merit. Not only does it erode Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights, it is also allows the opportunity to avoid proving the statement. This broad brush attack on the Constitution of the United States of America is convenient to the user because it allows the user to hide behind the Fake news statement and not prove the assertion.

To use another perspective, what if the statements were the following attacks:

Religion is the enemy of the people or fake religion

Freedom of speech is the enemy of the people or fake speech

The right to peacefully assemble is the enemy of the people or fake assembly

As citizens of The United States, protect Your Bill of Rights and your Constitution of the United States of America.

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Freedom of speech and the press protected - Grand Island Independent