Monthly Archives: June 2022

It was just a sticker. It said, "China Kinda Sus."

That was the entirety of the message that led William P. Gilligan, president of Boston's Emerson College, to write a letter to the whole college community accusing the conservative student group that distributed the sticker of "anti-Asian bigotry and hate."

It didn't matter that the message was a criticism of the Chinese government, not Asian people. Nor did it matter that one of the students handing out the stickers, KJ Lynum, is herself Asian (in fact, one-third of the group's members were Asian). The college suspended the group and found it guilty of violating the school's "Bias Related Behavior" policy.

Later, disheartened by the experience, KJ dropped out of school.

On campus and increasingly beyond, labeling speech "hateful" makes those in authority feel empowered to shut it down. It should be no surprise, then, that the label is sometimes used frivolously to emotionally manipulate people into accepting unjustified exercises of power, including the punishment of the expression of ideas.

Off campus, activists used the label to try to pressure Netflix to take down recent comedy specials featuring Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, while some Republican legislatures use it to justify banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. When Elon Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter to promote free speech, some of America's more eager censors lamented an "uncontrolled" internet where some people may be free to express opinions others dislike or find distasteful.

If you ask Americans, most will say they strongly support free speech protections. However, label the speech "hateful" and that support plummets, particularly among Democrats.

We've all heard the saying, "Hate speech is not free speech." There's just one problem with that mantra: It isn't legally true, at least in America. The First Amendment's protections for free speech do not include a "hate speech" exception. That's due, in large part, to the problem of subjectivity: Who decides what's hateful and by what standard? Donald Trump? Joe Biden? Should we ask Emerson President Gilligan? Eighty-two percent of Americans say we can't agree on a definition of hateful speech, even as 40 percent say the government should ban it.

In the United Kingdom and Europe, where hate speech laws are common, they are used to punish everything from YouTube jokes to critiques of religious figures.

After failing for 40 years in America, the hate speech-inspired "words that wound" conception of free speech popularized by Critical Race Theory co-founder Richard Delgado in the 1980s might now be overtaking the "sticks and stones" approachat least on campus and on social media. In Delgado's conception, words can function as a form of violence: "They can assault; they can injure," says the description of his 1993 book on the subject that he co-wrote with other CRT founders.

For most Americans in the '80s and '90s, especially free speech advocates, the conflation of words with violence was seen as a direct challenge to our liberal democratic order. Sigmund Freud once said, "the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization." Equate words with violence and soon people will feel justified in using violence instead of words to settle their disagreements. Democracy, in which disputes are resolved not through violence, but through debate, discussion, and voting, cannot survive the collapse of that critical distinction.

The "words that wound" notion of speech inspired a movement for restrictive speech codes on college campuses. It was routinely defeated in court, but a growing number of students and college administrators still cling to this vision of enlightened censorship. "Hateful rhetoric is violent, and this is impermissible," wrote the editorial board of the University of Virginia's student newspaper earlier this year in demanding the school not allow former Vice President Mike Pence to speak on campus.

Ironically, the growing support for censorship may be due, in part, to free speech advocates winning in the court of law. As First Amendment protections have become stronger during the past half-century, the remaining legal cases often involve less-sympathetic speech at the margins, like that of the Westboro Baptist Church and white nationalists in Charlottesville. Younger generations of Americans who see the First Amendment protect wildly unpopular speech may easily forgetor may never have been taughthow the First Amendment empowered everything from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement.

But how long will the legal bulwark against additional exceptions to free speech hold? As Judge Learned Hand put it during a 1944 speech, "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."

In short, if we don't defend and promote a culture of free expression, we risk losing the culture and our legal protections.

What America needs now more than ever are vocal, nonpartisan free speech advocates to remind Americans why we defend free speech in the first place. We need advocates who won't simply fall back on the circular "because the First Amendment protects it" argument. We need advocates who are willing to unapologetically stand up for the right to speak even the thoughts we hate.

We say "unapologetically" because, too often, even free speech advocates sound like they are apologizing for the offense speech might cause, genuflecting before other values and never issuing a full-throated defense of our speech rights. While such apologies may have their place, they risk distracting from free speech advocates' essential point: That free speech is a fundamental human right for which we need not apologize.

That's why our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, steadfastly refuses to take a position on the content of the speech we defend, aside from saying that it's protected. Why say more? As Mark R. Hamilton, the courageous former president of the University of Alaska, wrote in a memo to his colleagues, "Attempts to assuage anger or to demonstrate concern by qualifying our support for free speech serve to cloud what must be a clear message."

Freedom of speech allows us to authentically express our individuality, to learn about our world, and to live peacefully within a democratic society. Free speech is an essential ingredient for scientific progress, social justice, and artistic expression. Most simply, freedom of speech enables us to know what our fellow citizens really think and why.

Free speech makes free people. We must not give up the fight to preserve it.

Greg Lukianoff is President & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) co-author of the bestselling book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure." Nico Perrino is Vice President of Communications at FIRE and the host of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast.

The views in this article are the writers' own.

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Free Speech Makes People Free. We Must Defend All Speech Without Apology | Opinion - Newsweek

Lets talk about the First and Second Amendments.

Not those two the original ones.

The original First Amendment created a formula to determine the size of the House of Representatives based on the population of the United States in 1789.

It didnt pass.

The original Second Amendment set out to define when Congress can change its pay.

That didnt pass either.

What we know today as the First Amendment prohibits the government from depriving us of certain freedoms religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, and it allows a path to redress grievances with the government.

It begins Congress shall make no law

Pretty clear.

In his distinguished 34-year career on the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Hugo Black said as much.

He was the driving force behind the 1964 Times v. Sullivan decision that declared freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment restrict public officials from suing for defamation.

Black also sat solidly behind the press in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case in which The New York Times published damaging evidence about the government's involvement in Vietnam.

Black wrote: Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

In an opinion piece, managing editor Pat Fox writes that we should choose our champions for truth-telling carefully.

Ive made my living, raised a family, paid my mortgage thanks to the First Amendment. I get edgy whenever someone tries to mess with it. I dont like it.

And yet

People have messed with it a lot.

There are libel laws sometimes used to intimidate reporters from pursuing stories. Libel laws ostensibly restrict the press from unjustly defaming individuals and organizations.

Also, newspapers cannot copy information verbatim or run a photo from a published work without facing a suit over copywrite infringement.

What gives?

The Constitution says Congress shall make no laws

Well, Im willing to discuss it. Pretty much everyone in the newspaper business loves discussing it.

The press is the only profession, by the way, specifically cited for protection in the Constitution.

One of the best expressions of that distinction came from Justice Potter Stewart in his dissent opinion in a 1971 case involving police searches of newsrooms.

Perhaps as a matter of abstract policy a newspaper office should receive no more protection from unannounced police searches than, say, the office of a doctor or the office of a bank. But we are here to uphold a Constitution. And our Constitution does not explicitly protect the practice of medicine or the business of banking from all abridgement by government. It does explicitly protect the freedom of the press.

I love that.

On the other hand, should I be able to pick out of the air some local businessman and publish an article saying he is a shady no-goodnik who parks in handicapped stalls?

Im willing to discuss that or any other matter relating to the First Amendment and the press. Lets hold a town hall.

Now, concerning the Second Amendment

I dont like anyone messing around with the Constitution not the First, Second, Third or any other amendments.

I grew up in the rural Midwest and spent a lot of my youth hunting, so Im familiar with guns. Many of my friends own one. We want to keep them, too, for a variety of reasons.

We all came by our firearms legally, and we all took safety courses on their proper use.

By golly, wed probably be willing to talk to other people about our guns, maybe discuss safety and care, whether wed ever loan one to a high school senior or whether wed give one to a certified manic depressive.

There are some people who wont talk about these sorts of things, though. Sixty of them are in the U.S. Senate. There are a lot more in the Georgia Legislature.

They wont discuss it.

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Opinion: Free speech and guns a winning combination - Appen Media

Speak Truth to Power

by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners. George Carlin

Cancel culture political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

In this way, the most controversial issues of our day race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc. have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

Free speech for me but not for thee is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

This tendency to censor, silence, delete, label as hateful, and demonize viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite is being embraced with a near-fanatical zealotry by a cult-like establishment that values conformity and group-think over individuality.

For instance, are you skeptical about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines? Do you have concerns about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? Do you subscribe to religious beliefs that shape your views on sexuality, marriage and gender? Do you, deliberately or inadvertently, engage in misgendering identifying a persons gender incorrectly or deadnaming using the wrong pronouns or birth name for a transgender person?

Say yes to any of those questions and then dare to voice those views in anything louder than a whisper and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms.

This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility, and love what comedian George Carlin referred to as fascism pretending to be manners is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized, and tyrannical.

In the past few years, for example, prominent social media voices have been censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram for voicing ideas that were deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Most recently, Twitter suspended conservative podcaster Matt Walsh for violating its hate speech policy by sharing his views about transgendered individuals.

The greatest female Jeopardy champion of all time is a man. The top female college swimmer is a man. The first female four star admiral in the Public Health Service is a man. Men have dominated female high school track and the female MMA circuit. The patriarchy wins in the end, Walsh tweeted on December 30, 2021.

J.K. Rowling, author of the popular Harry Potter series, has found herself denounced as transphobic and widely shunned for daring to criticize efforts by transgender activists to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

Ironically enough, Rowlings shunning included literal book burning.

Yet as Ray Bradbury once warned, There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Indeed, the First Amendment is going up in flames before our eyes, but those first sparks were lit long ago and have been fed by intolerance all along the political spectrum.

Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.

Offensive, politically incorrect and unsafe speech: Political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and a growing hostility to those who exercise their rights to speak freely. Where this has become painfully evident is on college campuses, which have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and red light speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.

Hateful speech: Hate speech speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation is the primary candidate for online censorship. Corporate internet giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook continue to re-define what kinds of speech will be permitted online and what will be deleted.

Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on extremism, the government has partnered with the tech industry to counter online propaganda by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks. In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted.

In fact, the Justice Department is planning to form a new domestic terrorism unit to ferret out individuals who seek to commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of domestic social or political goals. What this will mean is more surveillance, more pre-crime programs, and more targeting of individuals whose speech may qualify as dangerous.

The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning, and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

The end result is mind control and a sleepwalking populace.

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

We have allowed our fears fear for our safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc. to trump our freedom of speech and muzzle us far more effectively than any government edict could.

This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority marching in lockstep with technofascism.

Yet be warned: whatever we tolerate now whatever we turn a blind eye to whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes hate or extremism, we the people might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at http://www.rutherford.org.

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The Age of Intolerance: Cancel Culture's War on Free Speech - Overton County News

While Jehovahs Witnesses have chosen to temporarily suspend their door-to-door ministry due to the pandemic, their activity was almost permanently banned by one U.S. village in the late 1990s that is until the United States Supreme Court stepped in with a historic 8-1 decision on June 17, 2002, declaring the local ordinance unconstitutional.

As the 20th anniversary of that precedent-setting decision nears, some Highland County, Ohio residents wonder what their lives would be like if one of their neighbors had not knocked on their door and shared a life-changing message with them.

Constitutional scholars marvel at the outsized impact the decision has had on the protection of free speech for all, agreeing with Justice Antonin Scalias opinion in the case, The free-speech claim exempts everybody, thanks to Jehovahs Witnesses.

If Jehovahs Witnesses had not come to my door, said Dorothy Williams, my life would be over, figuratively and literally. It was a life-saving experience. My search is over. That lost feeling, that feeling of What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? is gone. There was this hunger, this actual searching, but I didnt know where to search.

Williams was contacted by local Jehovahs Witnesses engaging in their door-to-door ministry in 2011 and was baptized a year later.

The 2002 Supreme Court decision in Watchtower v. Village of Stratton affirmed that a local village ordinance in Stratton, Ohio, requiring a permit to knock on doors violated the rights of any person who wanted to engage in free speech with their neighbor, including Jehovahs Witnesses, who practice door-to-door evangelizing. The Court overturned two lower court rulings that upheld the ordinance, and thus paved the way for all citizens to maintain open dialogue with their neighbors on any number of issues, including environmental, civic, political or educational.

Looking back on the two decades since the decision, its clear to see the wide-ranging impact that Watchtower v. Stratton has had on free speech for all, said Josh McDaniel, director of the Religious Freedom Clinic at Harvard Law School. This is just the latest of some 50 Supreme Court victories by Jehovahs Witnesses that have helped establish and broaden First Amendment jurisprudence throughout the last century.

The village of Stratton became a center of controversy in 1998 after the mayor personally confronted four Jehovahs Witnesses as they were driving out of the village after visiting a resident. Subsequently, the village enacted the ordinance Regulating Uninvited Peddling and Solicitation Upon Private Property, which required anyone wishing to engage in door-to-door activity to obtain a permit from the mayor or face imprisonment.

Jehovahs Witnesses viewed this ordinance as an infringement of freedom of speech, free exercise of religion and freedom of press. Therefore, they brought a lawsuit in federal court after the village refused to modify their enforcement of this ordinance.

Our motive for initiating the case was clear: We wanted to remove any obstacle that would prevent us from carrying out our scriptural obligation to preach the good news of the Kingdom, said Robert Hendriks, U.S. spokesman for Jehovahs Witnesses. Making it a criminal offense to talk with a neighbor without seeking government approval is offensive to many people, but particularly to God, who commanded Christians to preach the gospel.

While Williams continues to engage in a productive ministry through letter writing, phone calling and virtual visits, she is looking forward to knocking on doors again.

Its unlikely that I would have ever reached out to Jehovahs Witnesses on my own, Williams admitted. I was 76 years old and attending three different Bible studies. I thought maybe I would find the answers. I never thought Jehovahs Witnesses were my answer. Im still learning, but I know now where to find the answers. It was very valuable.

We are thankful that we have the legal right to practice our ministry from door to door, Hendriks said. When the time is right and conditions are safe, we hope to visit our neighbors in person once again.

This victory is one of more than 250 rulings in cases brought by Jehovahs Witnesses in high courts around the world that have expanded the rights of people of all religious faiths.

It's hard to point to any organization, let alone a religious organization, that has had such a profound impact on the shaping of constitutional law over many decades in the Supreme Court," said Harvard professor McDaniel.

For more information on the Stratton case, go to http://www.jw.org and type Stratton in the search field.

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Protecting free speech: Local residents reflect on impact of 2002 historic Supreme Court ruling as 20th anniversary nears - The Highland County Press

To listen to the gun lobby, the Second Amendment provides an absolute constitutional right for an individual to own an array of armaments and ammunition free from regulation by the state. These advocates select from the amendments text only what supports their individual-freedom view, but they ignore entirely the imperative that precedes, the framing device of the whole thingto protect the security of a free State. Read in full, the text of the amendment is not a prohibition on gun regulations but, rather, a requirement of certain regulations necessary for protecting that security and freedom.

Gun-rights activists point to the 2008 Supreme Court decision in Heller v. District of Columbia as finally establishing, some 219 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, an individual right to possess a gun in the home, which they proclaim extends to assault rifles and sundry other weapons enabling individual bearers to inflict mass destruction of human life. In their view, the ordinary citizen is bound by a constitutional covenant to suffer the risk that others might use their military-style weapons to murder childrenor churchgoers, or grocery shoppers, or concertgoers, but especially childrenbecause it is the person, not the gun, who does the killing in the Second Amendments name. We the people must endure this risk, we are told, because otherwise the rights of some to keep and bear Armseven against childrenoutweigh our collective need for safety and security. The constitutional protection of some to keep the weapons that they sometimes bear against us collectively is too important a right necessary for individual freedom to contemplate regulations that would, or even might, reduce our risk. We are told that the right to individual ownership of armaments like AR-15 platform assault weapons, with minimal or no real restraints on purchasing, is necessary for an armed populace to keep the threat of a tyrannical government at bay.

James C. Phillips and Josh Blackman: The mysterious meaning of the Second Amendment

Such a popularized version of our Constitutions meaning was in part vindicated by a conservative Supreme Court majority, whose opinion in Heller focused principally on the second half of the Second Amendment, which reads, The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Assuming that the term of art keep and bear means the same in modern English as possess and carry, and that the people refers to particular individuals rather than a political collective, as in We the People, which established the Constitution in the preamble, the right would seem to be fairly clear. (Or at least as clear as the First Amendment, which provides that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, under which the Supreme Court has nonetheless repeatedly found all manner of regulations permissiblesuch as those prohibiting incitement to violence, true threats, and advocacy for violent overthrow of the government, and those putting reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech, among many others.)

But this version of the Second Amendment ignores the first half, which reads, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State. The Supreme Court barely contemplated the texts meaning in Heller, asking no more than whether it could be given a logical link or a purpose consistent with what it dubbed the operative clausewherein the amendment, in the Courts view, protects an individual right to possess a weapon. The first half of the Second Amendment is at times also anachronistically associated with the question of whether the right to possess a weapon is tied to service in a well regulated Militiaa view the Heller majority rejected. Missing from this reading, however, is any consideration of the constitutional significance of what is necessary to maintain the security of a free State. What does this security entail? Are Americans secure in a free state when they live in fear of the next violent act that might be perpetrated by the bearer of semiautomatic weapons? Are Americans secure in a free state when they are told that more resources should be spent on arming teachers, or training students to duck and cover and keep silent, as if in a new cold war, only this time the enemy is ourselves?

Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick: The Second Amendment has become a threat to the First

The gun lobby argues that the political, psychological, and emotional attachment to the ready availability of weapons for some is a value too precious to contemplate rethinking our collective approach to gun regulation. Any regulation that might lead to imposing far more restrictive licensing and background checks, or to limiting the availability of particular kinds of weapons, would be too costly to their selective understanding of constitutional freedoms. According to the gun lobby, individuals engaged in their own fantasy of the heroic citizen equipped to do battle against tyrannical government agents would suffer incalculable collective costs were Americans to restrict their access to weapons. If the choice were the lives of children or the political imagination of a vocal group of armament activists, whose costs should matter more? The inconvenience of some or the lives of others?

The Second Amendment provides an answer. The security of a free State matters. Our security is a constitutional value, one that outweighs absolutist gun-rights claims by NRA lobbyists, or Oath Keepers and other insurrectionist groups who hold their access to weapons dear for use in an imagined anti-tyranny quest. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer the costs of the actual tyranny that living in a state of fear of mass gun violence creates.

Franklin D. Roosevelts 1941 Four Freedoms speech placed freedom from fear as one of four essential human freedoms. Translated to our modern gun crisis, this freedom can be realized only when individuals no longer have easy legal access to armaments that put them in a position to commit an act of [mass] physical aggression against any neighbor. Children today do not have this freedom from fear. Just to live in society and go to school, they must endure regular active-shooter drills, because the gun lobby has opposed any regulation that would keep weapons out of the hands of those whose activities remain legal up until the exact moment when they start shooting children and teachers. Proposals to make schools more like fortresses only add to the costs children bear rather than addressing the root constitutional problemthat insufficient regulation of guns impairs the liberties of all.

Protecting our freedom from fear does not mean that the government has complete authority to ban guns. To emphasize the amendments protections for security is not to abandon liberty. Rather, it is to recognize how excessive emphasis on the liberties of gun advocates undermines the many liberties of everyone else who seeks to live securely in a free state. The Second Amendment preserves a free state, not simply a security state.

When we Americans next hear that the Second Amendment protects a right against more effective regulation of weapons capable of imposing death on our neighbors, we should insist in response that the Second Amendment requires the opposite. It empowers a free people to regulate weapons as necessary to maintain their security and to protect their freedoms from fear and violence. We can be free, but only if we regulate gunsjust as the Second Amendment tells us.

Read more here:
Don't Forget the First Half of the Second Amendment - The Atlantic