Daily Archives: May 17, 2022

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MSNBC host Chuck Todd declared Tuesday that the right uses the concept of free speech to "appease the White supremacist movement."

While discussing Democratic lawmakers efforts to prevent mass shootings in the wake of the Buffalo, New York shooting that left 10 dead, Todd brought up the idea that the right and conservative media are encouraging or at least making room for White supremacist attacks, claiming arguing for free speech and combating online censorship implicitly aided racists.

People light candles at a makeshift memorial near a Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York, on May 15, 2022, the day after a gunman shot dead 10 people. - Grieving residents from the US city of Buffalo held vigils Sunday after a white gunman who officials have deemed "pure evil" shot dead 10 people at a grocery store in a racially-motivated rampage (Photo by Usman KHAN / AFP) (Photo by USMAN KHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

LA TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD BLAMES NORMALIZATION OF VIRULENT WHITE SUPREMACY ON REPUBLICANS

Speaking with NBC News correspondent Garrett Haake, Todd referenced conservative concerns over the new Disinformation Governance Board that was announced by the Department of Homeland Security in April.

"Garrett, look at the way that the right try to weaponize the idea that the DHS was going to essentially try to attempt to monitor hateful rhetoric. They want to make it seem as if its some sort of Big Brother," he said. "And its like, this is always what the right does to appease the White supremacist movement by saying, Hey, free speech. Dont touch speech."

Haake agree and scoffed at conservatives fear over the government board. "Right," he said, "the Ministry of Disinformation they called it."

U.S. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden look at a memorial in the wake of a weekend shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, U.S. May 17, 2022. (REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)

WATTERS: THE LEFT IS TRYING 'CAPITALIZE' ON THE BUFFALO, NY SHOOTING TO DIVIDE THE COUNTRY

Haake then went on to mention a "frustrating" conversation he had earlier with Senator Mike Braun, R-Ind., in which the lawmaker expressed disagreement with a bill combating these shootings as "domestic terrorism."

Haake slammed Braun and Republicans at large for this, adding, "The attaching of labels or to make it right-wing domestic terrorism because thats what were talking about at least in this specific case all of a sudden changes the conversation that Republicans are willing to have about this, and were right back at square zero."

NBCs Chuck Todd dinged President Biden for failing to make the comparison during his first State of the Union. (Photo by: William B. Plowman/NBC) (William B. Plowman/NBC)

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"Well, look, this is sort of the chickens coming home to roost," Todd said. "They have been appeasing this wing of the party for years and year and years. And now they are stuck with this group."

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MSNBC's Chuck Todd claims the right appeases White supremacists by crying 'free speech' - Fox News

One of the joys of growing up in the rural South has to be the food. In a land where there are not four seasons, just hot and hotter, theres plenty of seasoning. As James Autrey put it, Seasons came with food not the other way around.Our seasons were identified by the foods that we raised. Planting potatoes, butterbeans, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, watermelons, corn, purple-hull peas rites of passage from spring to summer to fall. And theres the meat. Thats where fried chicken takes over the kitchen. The chicken was so revered in the South that we called it the gospel bird.

Rodney Kennedy

I reminisce about fried chicken for one serious reason. Fried chicken, at least until someone invented nuggets and assorted pieces, came as breast, thigh, leg, and wing. The most valued piece at our table was the breast. Lucky was the person who managed to get two chicken breasts at dinner. The poor wings were the last pieces to leave the platter.

Now that politics has become a junk food mall, the chicken has been reduced to one more fast-food item: Chick-fil-A, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, Raising Canes, and so many others. Joshua Gunn says that one could argue in a peculiar, perverse sense, that our junk food habit is homologous to our piquant political diet these days. The allure of junk food matches the allure of our politics simple, cheap, fast, superficial, but somewhat tasty. Junk food addicts care nothing for nutritional value and good taste. Political junk food addicts care nothing for rational deliberation and good manners.

Add a dollop of ketchup to this cuisine nightmare and you have poor taste in spades. Gunn remarks about ketchup, As culinary histories go, we probably should not be surprised that a seventeenth-century Asian table sauce made of pickled fish would turn up in the United States in an octagonal bottle of sugary red pulp, the butt of which one . Must. Relentlessly. Pound. To release. The. Tangy. Treacle. The ketchup of American politics is emotions. Both the left wing and the right wing churn out emotions from the outrage factory.

Prominent political actors have figured out that the media all of it has about a fourth-grade level in terms of what gets publicity. Politics in America have, therefore, become a giant chicken house. If you have ever been in a chicken house (one of those long, tin-roofed, wire-wall cages that hold up to 5,000 chickens per house) then you know that its 50% noise from cackling chickens and 50% chicken poop. The only good day in a chicken house is the day the trucks show up, all the chickens are put in crates, hauled away, and the house is emptied, clean, and sanitized. This, of course, doesnt feel possible for our Chicken House of Politics.

A famous preacher once prayed: God is not for the right wing or the left wing. God loves the whole bird. Not in our political culture. All that matters are the wings. The rest of the bird is now manipulated and even silenced by the wings. Together these wings represent only a third of the population, but they control political discourse for the time being.

What complicates this over-hyped, wing-saturated culture is the outrage that erupts when a speaker engages in his or her own brand of controversial speech. Liberals use free speech to shame conservatives. On the other hand, conservatives use free speech to attack minorities, immigrants, and women. Conservatives say that liberals use political correctness to police conservative speech. Free speech and hate speech are a volatile mixture.

More and more people accept all kinds of speech and invoke free speech privileges if you attack them for being rude, crude, and obscene. Profanity is now seen as a sign of strength for political candidates. Profanity has become, for some, a civic virtue. There seems to be a sort of rhetorical synergy between profanity and civility. This is remarkable in a culture that not so long ago was entertained by George Carlins comedy riff, Seven Words You Cant Say on TV. Shouldnt at least one or two people at least raise an eyebrow that profanity has been promoted to the profound.

Traditional ceremonial rhetoric seems no longer sufficient to satisfy a rabid publics need for leaders to shout back at all kinds of outrage and terror with defiant, uncivil, reckless, profane outbursts. Outrage, profanity, and crazy, off-the-wall ideas are offered a place at the table of normality.

To some, this may sound like attempting to close the barn door after a couple billion horses have bolted. But somewhere there has to be a conversation, a deliberation, a discernment about the future of democracy. Maybe theres a slight chance of a crack in the door of emotion for a return of Aristotle. After all, to Aristotle, moderation was the ideal approach to behavior. He taught that extremism led to unhappiness in every aspect of life. Extremism was unwise. Now, thats a twenty-five-hundred-year-old idea that needs a fair airing in public.

Free speech has become more about being free than it is about speech. The cry is for more freedom, unlimited freedom. The irony is that theres been a dumbing down of free speech. No one seems to care about the debilitating impact of hate speech on others. When conservatives were required by federal law to swallow existing racism, they were strangely quiet in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. Now, they have returned with a vengeance, blurting out all kinds of racist verbiage. This time they have two allies in tow: denial of racism and free speech. In what sense has it become acceptable for Christians to defend hate speech? Or to deny the realities of history or systemic racism?

Egor Myznik / Unsplash

I cannot believe that a new age of outrage, public profanity, and bad manners will prevail among us. No matter how many people are feeling free I am not convinced that this movement will make us proud of being Americans or rewrite our social attitudes and democratic practices. I admit that I hope this is a fad that will fade into obscurity. There is an undercurrent of evil in our midst like a bad moon rising, and we should not lose our sense of urgency. Perhaps the advice of Plato can shake us from the doldrums: And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse, puts good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, persuades them to do evil instead of good, what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be like to gather after the sowing of that fruit? Anything but good.

The warning signs that our obsession with wings undermines democracy are too strong and too in-our-faces to ignore. Eddie Glaude, Jr. in Democracy in Black, observes, Together we must close the value gap and uproot racial habits by doing democracy, once again, in black. If we fail this time and if there is a God I pray that we dont this grand experiment in democracy will be no more.

One powerful voice in our wing-based politics was that of Vaclav Havel, the poet who became president of Czechoslovakia. Havel suggested that the world was losing the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility no guns, no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing. To abandon truthfulness for lies, deception and the vague notion of freedom puts the public sphere at risk. Havel said, I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on the rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is humane, moral, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural. Havels poetic expressions of the power of moral democracy resound as an orchestra filled with trumpets drowning out the cacophonous sounds of a house full of noisy chickens

Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio which is an American Baptist Church for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His sixth book The Immaculate Mistake: How Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump is now out from Wipf and Stock (Cascades).

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Free Speech in a House Full of Chickens - Word and Way

The horror and hatred surrounding last weekend's massacre in a Buffalo supermarket has shocked the nation, sending yet another chilling reminder about the toxic combination of racism, access to guns and mental health that afflicts some young white men in this country. It also renewed the conversation about hate crimes, the right to free speech and the complicity of white supremacist groups in these tragedies. Daniel Medwed, GBH News legal analyst and Northeastern University law professor, joined host Paris Alston on GBHs Morning Edition to talk about the intersection of these issues. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Paris Alston: So Daniel, there's been a lot of evidence coming out around this murder, this mass murder, that it was motivated by racial bias, particularly because the murderer had a white supremacist manifesto. He was influenced by white supremacist vitriol online. And there's talk about it being charged as a hate crime as a result of all that. Do you think that'll happen?

Daniel Medwed: Absolutely. All signs are pointing in that direction, Paris. Under New York law, a murder will be elevated to a hate crime and subject to an enhanced penalty if the perpetrator, quote, intentionally selects the victim or commits the act based on race, national origin, gender or some other protected status. And given the manifesto that you mentioned and all of the other facts surrounding this tragedy, it appears as though prosecutors would have a very strong basis for charging this as a hate crime.

Alston: And how does that compare to how it works here in Massachusetts?

Medwed: It's very similar here in Massachusetts. A crime becomes a hate crime when it's committed with the, quote, intent to intimidate the individual because they belong to a protected group and that the person was chosen because of their protected status. So the semantics are a little bit different, but the gist is largely the same here in the Commonwealth.

Alston: How hard is it for prosecutors to prove that? I mean, does there have to be proof that the bias was the entire reason for the crime, or much of the reason, or just part of the reason?

Medwed: Those are critically important questions. And I think the answer depends on the precise jurisdiction and the statutory language in place. Does it have to be the entire reason, as you point out, a substantial motivating factor or just part of the equation? Fortunately, here in Massachusetts, we have a 2015 SJC decision, Commonwealth v. Kelly, that supplies an answer. In that case, the court said that prosecutors do not have to prove that bias was the predominant factor or even a substantial motivating factor in a hate crime. They just have to show that the bias was part of the narrative. It's a rather benign or lenient standard for the government, which at least in theory may seem to make it a little easier to charge something as a hate crime here than in some other places.

Alston: So, Daniel, thinking about that evidence that we mentioned that we have of the shooter's motive, do defendants in these hate crime cases ever raise a First Amendment defense? You know, maybe they say that elevating an offense to a hate crime would be punishing them for viewpoints that they're entitled to have, even if they may be bigoted and offensive.

Medwed: People often make those types of arguments. It comes up a lot. A defendant will say they're being penalized for their First Amendment views and that that's unconstitutional. But those efforts have largely failed so far. And here's why. First, I think it's important to note that the First Amendment doesn't provide blanket protection for all speech. The government may impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on even protected speech. And not all speech is subject to robust constitutional safeguards.

Second, and I think more notably, the Supreme Court has already explicitly addressed the nexus between the First Amendment and hate crimes. In a 1993 case called Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the defendant got an enhanced sentence. If I recall, he got seven years instead of two because Wisconsin prosecutors believed that he had intentionally selected the victim based on race. It's a statute that's very similar in Wisconsin to the one in New York that we just mentioned. Mitchell, the defendant, then claimed, hey, this is a First Amendment violation. I'm being punished. I'm being given an extra sentence because of my bigoted views, because of my unpopular viewpoints. And he challenged it all the way through the Wisconsin courts. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed with him and said that this was unconstitutional. He was being punished in violation of his First Amendment rights. But get this the U.S. Supreme Court then took the case and in a unanimous decision the court said no, Mitchell was not being punished for his speech. He was being punished for conduct that was animated by racial bias.

Alston: So sort of acting on those bigoted views.

Medwed: Exactly. And so motive is always an appropriate factor in sentencing. It's not the speech that's being punished. But as you point out, Paris, it's acting on those racially charged and horrific views. So that case, the Mitchell case, provides to some extent a really good safeguard for prosecutors when facing a First Amendment challenge in this context.

On a moral level, certainly they [white supremacist groups] bear a lot of responsibility for creating this vile environment in which racial hatred could flourish on a legal level, though, Paris, it's much more challenging.

Alston: I see. So, Daniel, in the couple minutes we have left with you, I want to talk to you about this growing white supremacist conspiracy known as replacement theory that's been being floated around because of what we believe to be the shooter's motive. And so this theory claims that the powers that be are pushing a population shift to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and other nonwhite people. And this has been said to be spread by everyone from fringe groups and individuals to people like Tucker Carlson on Fox News. So given that, is there any onus for what happened and maybe could happen later down the road on people or groups who may be pushing this in the media?

Medwed: Well, on a moral level, certainly they bear a lot of responsibility for creating this vile environment in which racial hatred could flourish. And it's foreseeable that some people are going to act on these horrific views. On a legal level, though, Paris, it's much more challenging. So on the one hand, the legal theory here is often complicity or accomplice liability, that these white supremacist groups aid or abet "abet" is just a fancy legal word for encourage they encourage racial hatred and therefore they have acted as accomplices in these racially charged crimes. So you can argue that they've acted, that they've aided or abetted in these crimes.

On the other hand, you're an accomplice if you both act and you have a culpable mental state, you have to act with the purpose for that particular crime to occur. And that's where it becomes difficult for prosecutors to argue that these groups are accomplices because they can always say, hey, our views are very general, they weren't particular to this defendant, to this act. It wasn't our purpose to foment this particular act of violence.

Alston: Well, Daniel, per usual, you have made something very complicated, a lot easier to understand, and we thank you for that.

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Hate crimes and free speech: Where do we draw the legal line? - GBH News