Your dying First Amendment

Killed by Leftists, Demorats, Progressives, anarchists and, of all people, aided and abetted by the American Media Maggots.

Whose speech and freedoms will likewise be suppressed.

This used to be true. Is it now?

And even some Republicans who lack actual testosterone or estrogen.

Wait. I take that back. Too many Republicans operate on estrogen though they appear as males.

Stop. Perfect time for this video.

So why the big concern over freedom of speech? Because of past, recent and continuing incidents involving the lack of it on American college campuses. This video summarizes appropriately.

That was the view of a college professor, who accurately reflects the views on way too many American college and university campuses today. Most of these are, of course, funded by American Taxpayer cash.

Your First Amendment freedoms are at stake.

Further, your overall American freedoms are also at stake which, of course, is what makes this nation more exceptional than most any other.

What other nation has this:

Amendment I

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 the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Leftists and Demorats will tell you our nation is evil on its face and is everything but exceptional.

But where do Leftists or Demorats actually mention freedom? Where is it that they wish to add to your freedoms in any fashion, instead of removing them? Removing them and then occasionally selling them back to you at a massive profit? Come on, Al Gore only wants $15 trillion of your taxpayer dollars.

Those freedoms buttressed and solidified by the sacrifice of 419,000 US soldiers and civilians in WWII. Yet what passes for state-of-the-art thought on US freedom of speech today by a politician — a Demorat politician mind you — is this.

He couldn’t be more wrong. The First Amendment exists not to protect pablum speech, but specifically challenging speech.

First, let’s be honest: there is no real definition for “hate speech.” It, like pornography, is in the eye of the beholder. The unsaid crux of the biscuit is, naturally: just who determines “hate speech”? That is the key.

Courts have ruled that the First doesn’t protect outright threats, speech that would tend to provoke a personal fight, and child pornography. “Hate speech” is not included as an exception.

KKK speech is protected. Symbols, like a burning cross, are protected. The Westboro Baptist Church is protected.

An interesting point from Politifact:

The Supreme Court has established a general principle that a government administrator can’t decide to charge a group a higher fee for event security based on anticipated public reaction to the content of the event, and a lower court found that this applies to colleges, too. So if Berkeley is basing its security decisions on what it expects Coulter to say, that could pose a problem.

We heard what one professor thinks of free speech. Another example of what passes for state-of-the-art thought on US freedom of speech today by “educators” is this, from the NYTimes.com:

What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech

by Ulrich Baer

Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding.

Translated: the surfeit of emotional, sensitive snowflakes are in fact traumatized by certain speech. Their horror should not be delegitimized.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

Translated: censorship isn’t really the removal of free speech; it’s a guarantee not to offend. Offense is a much worse condition than that of the removal of speech itself. Restricted speech is a “public good.”

But listen to this.

In such cases (“when those views invalidate the humanity of some people”) there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

Perfect. Who needs actual speech? In public? Just go to the internet. Meanwhile, we as Leftists will keep our politically-correct stranglehold on what it is you can hear and read.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth.

Again, Leftists proving there is no real “good” or “bad.” There are simply events that occur on a sliding scale created of their own highly-informed thinking.

We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.

You see? A “sophisticated understanding.” This is akin to saying that because some poor people cannot actually afford to go out and purchase a firearm, we need to eliminate the Second Amendment.

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks.

Uh, yes it is. You lie. The exceptions are delineated above as determined in US courts.

It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.

Now it gets grotty. At first blush the paragraph above is nothing but mush. I provide this accurate translation for you: if only one of a delineated set of protected species are offended, even in the slightest, that speech is deemed hateful.

Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

Translated: speech is now hateful when you question someone.

Here is a sentence that doesn’t even warrant reproducing in its entirety.

Unlike today’s somewhat reflexive defenders of free speech.  .  .

“Reflexive defenders of free speech.” In times past that was considered a positive feature, a wonderful attribute. Now, according to “educators,” that’s a glitch, a quirk, a serious problem requiring repair.

What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse.

Please tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse are being quashed? Examples please. Be specific.

We should thank the student protestors, the activists in Black Lives Matter and other “overly sensitive” souls for keeping watch over the soul of our republic.

Of course. Thanks, Berkeley and other US universities, for rioting and burning and blockading and threatening so that opposing views cannot be remotely considered on campus. They really are “closed campuses” with regard to alternate views, theories and speech. Closed. Walled off. It is truly suppression by violence. On the part of Leftists.

Here is what Judge Andrew Napolitano said of this specific editorial.

Light to make the cockroaches scatter.

You know you have a serious problem when even Bill Maher skewers Leftists blocking free speech.

That’s an individual on a TV show. What happens when you have a mammoth tech giant like Google censoring from within? From DCClothesline.com:

Google’s Schmidt: “We’re Not Arguing For Censorship, We’re Arguing Just Take It Off The Page”

by Chris Menahan

Google is not going to “censor” their search results, they’re just going to take search results “off [their] page” to “essentially have you not see it.”

Say what?

In a video from March 23 that’s just now going viral, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked by Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo how they plan to deal with extremist content. Eric Schmidt responded by mixing in “fake news” with “extremist things” and suggested their computer algorithms will determine what’s true:

“My own view on most of this sort of extremist things as well as fake news in general is that it’s essentially a ranking problem. We’re very good at detecting what’s the most relevant and what’s the least relevant. It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else.”

Read that again. “We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else.”

And this isn’t censorship how? You’re taking it off the page. Where “else” are you putting it?

You see, of course, just who makes this determination of censorship or hate speech, yes? Me? No. You? No. Leftists.

As far as Leftists are concerned, it is precisely your freedoms that put the world in its predicament today.

It is your freedom of speech that suppresses any number of individuals and makes them feel less a person. It is your Second Amendment that stacks bodies like cordwood and forces young black males to kill each other in large urban venues. It is your ability to drive where you want when you want that has polluted our skies and clogged our cities. It is your ability to eat what you want that has resulted in obese young people and poor people. It is your freedom to manufacture goods and create a mighty industrial base that has resulted in competition globally, which is a terrible idea and rife with pollution, greed, capitalism and consumerism. It is your freedom to regulate borders which has resulted in people unable to enter the US and partake of the Free Cheese available within. It is your freedom to be independent and sovereign which has closed off globalism and failed to consolidate power into a smaller, brighter, more enlightened band of clear-thinking individuals. It is the freedom to embrace religion which creates societal judgments which conflict with secularism. Islam not included.

When you have no Second Amendment, you have no First Amendment. When you have no First Amendment you have no freedom whatsoever.

As Europe is in a terrible cultural war with globalism and sovereignty, so is the United States.

“Hate speech”? I think you know who determines that and why.

Power. Control.

BZ