Posts Tagged ‘Free Speech’

There Is No Hate Speech. Only Zuul.

Monday, June 19th, 2017

Today the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed what conservatives, libertarians and honest liberals have been arguing for some time now: when it comes to the First Amendment, there’s no “hate speech” exemption:

From today’s opinion by Justice Samuel Alito (for four justices) in Matal v. Tam, the “Slants” case:

[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote separately, also for four justices, but on this point the opinions agreed:

A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an “egregious form of content discrimination,” which is “presumptively unconstitutional.” … A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.

And the justices made clear that speech that some view as racially offensive is protected not just against outright prohibition but also against lesser restrictions.

This is a great blow to Social Justice Warriors looking to limit or eliminate the speech of their political opponents as “hate speech.”

Thank God for the First Amendment, or we might be looking at situations like Canada’s, where you can be fined for using unapproved pronouns.

LinkSwarm for February 3, 2017

Friday, February 3rd, 2017

It’s been a weird, busy week here at BattleSwarm World Headquarters, including a bunch of job interviews and having my iMac in the shop most of the week. Now I’m back up and running, and even have that OS upgrade (to El Capitan) I’ve been putting off for longer than you would believe (I was running Mac OS 10.6.8).

All of which explains why today’s LinkSwarm is somewhat abbreviated.

  • Democrats retreat from reality:

    “Real people” are what the Democratic Party is sorely missing. By real I do not mean the members of a specific ethnic or religious or cultural or regional group but simply those men and women who are uninterested in the latest trend embraced by the left. For the Democratic Party to win again, it would need to recapture voters in the Midwest and Appalachia who supported Barack Obama twice but felt so disillusioned and dejected by the end of his second term, so utterly unenthused by the bland and corrupt technological illiterate the party nominated to replace him, that they embraced an outsider who promised to upend the system. The Trump era is just beginning, but so far Democrats have been much more willing to retreat into their ideological cubbyholes, or ascribe the election results to (take your pick) James Comey, fake news, or Russian subversion, than to acknowledge the power of nationalism and populism. It’s their loss.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Democrats still don’t get it:

    3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

  • Over at Ace of Spades Open Blogger helps articulate what I call the “How my liberal Facebook friends helped elect Trump” theory:

    Let me start by saying that Donald Trump is a reactionary phenomenon and most of us who voted for him are, by definition, reactionaries. And I would argue that most of this is due to social media.

    When one looks at the left wing, you can basically separate the institutional left from what I call the soft left. The institutional left consists of the political players and their lackeys, media, academics, street agitators and the like. These are the people that shape the direction, agenda, strategy and tactics of the left.

    The soft left are the voters. They don’t give much thought to anything other than their preferences, which the Democrat party caters to very effectively. They are, traditionally, passive players.

    Now I’ve understood since the Clinton years that the institutional left was actively seeking to harm me. Historically they’ve primarily done this through policy while other tactics such as demonization, othering, character assassination and lawfare were generally reserved for powerful political players and institutions on the right.

    During the Obama years, we saw a radical shift. No longer were the Tom Delays and the Rush Limbaughs of the world the exclusive targets of what Bill Clinton labeled “the politics of personal destruction.” Your average citizen was now in the cross hairs as well.

    I first became aware of this during the Joe the Plumber episode when the media relentlessly attacked a citizen simply for asking, on his own property where Barack Obama was a guest, a question that happened to make their Boy-King look silly.

    I thought it was a one-off due to the threat that Plumber’s inquiry posed, but soon after the examples piled up–the slandering of the Tea Party movement, targeting of Christian wedding photographers, the harassment of the Memories Pizza owners, etc…

    Which leads me to social media, Facebook specifically.

    As this dramatic shift occurred, we began to see another shift within social media, one that reached its apex during the 2016 presidential election. That was the politicization of everything, not just by the institutional left, but by the soft left as well.

    Where before the voters on the left were mostly passive receivers of Cultural Marxism, they had now become active participants via propaganda, slander, social shaming, and otherizing. This meant that conservatives were now being assaulted on two fronts, both from the institutional left and the soft left.

    Every conservative who is active on Facebook knows what I’m talking about. After decades of Americans keeping their politics mostly to themselves, suddenly our feeds were jammed up with political invective.

    It wasn’t just directed at politicians. It was personal–a relentless litany of insults and abuse, first at the Tea Party and then Trump supporters. Most of it was generalized, but the message was clear. They held our kind in contempt and didn’t care who knew it. In fact, they seemed to be in a contest to see who could broadcast it the loudest.

    Most conservatives were hurt by this. We tend to keep our politics relatively private, both out of decorum and respect for our relationships with people whose politics differ from ours. The message that these public posts sent to us was that our “friends” on the left didn’t respect or value us enough to avoid giving offense.

    As someone who has been following politics since high school, I tend not to trust my own instincts what the average voter thinks. I’m simply to close to the subject. My wife, however, is a fairly low-key traditionalist who doesn’t care to immerse herself in that world and so I use her as my political weather vane.

    And so I knew that there was a storm brewing when she snapped down her phone over breakfast one day after reading Facebook and told me how sick and tired she was of her friends’ political posts.

    “When they say those things,” she fumed, “they’re talking about our family.”

    “I’m so sick and tired of being told that I’m a bad person because I disagree with someone’s position on abortion or transgender bathrooms. Who do they think they are to tell everyone what they’re required to believe?”

    The hurt had turned to anger and quiet resolve.

    The left sought to reprimand the right. What they did was alienate it. Their social media echo chamber only served to steel conservative misgivings about Donald Trump, if for no other reason than we simply couldn’t abide by being pushed around for another 4-8 years.

    It’s one thing to know that your friends disagree with you. It’s another to realize that they think you’re stupid, uneducated, a bigot, bully, sexist, jerk and everything that’s wrong with the world.

    It’s then that you realize that it’s not just the institutional left that yearns to place its boot on your neck, it’s your left-wing neighbors, friends, coworkers and even family. When you see attacks on regular citizens cheered and reinforced by people on Facebook, your worldview changes radically.

    You can no longer believe that they don’t really understand what they’re voting for. It becomes clear that they do–they’re voting to turn you into a second class citizen, an “other” who is not due the same rights and courtesies as their exhalted tribe of Right Thinkers.

    We loathed Obama and all the Marxist cockroaches surrounding him. Now we were beginning to loathe his supporters.

    Donald Trump had exposed the press for the lying, shameless partisan hacks that they are. But social media exposed the soft left, the formerly passive Democrat party support.

    This is why the left never saw it coming. They took over public spaces and shouted down the opposition with personal attacks. Horrified conservatives withdrew from engagement, but we didn’t disappear.

    We seethed with resentment and contempt.

    And it drove us to the polls, quietly and without fanfare, like assassins in the night.

    The left still doesn’t know what hit him. They’re still too busy screeching, insulting, protesting, rioting, and trying to manipulate the rules to ask the simple question: Why?

    I’ll tell you why. We see you. We see what you’ve become. And we’re not having what you’ve been dishing out any longer.

  • The rise of the alt-left intifada. “Just like ISIS and Hamas have found the use of unique hashtags on social media to recruit and radicalize, unique hashtags are now being used by groups here in the U.S. that call for violence, protest, resistance and anarchy. By the use of these unique hashtags with a call to action to a specified group and location, the online mob becomes a real world-mob that can cause damage, disruption and violence, like we just witnessed in Berkeley.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Why Democrats have declared war on Trump: They’re terrified:

    I believe it stems from the inability of many Democrats to accept their defeat in November, or to understand that the people of mainland America — that heartland between California and New York — overwhelmingly rejected their elitist vision and collectivist values.

    During the campaign, Donald Trump made a number of specific promises to the American people. Over the past 10 days, he has been fulfilling them one by one and the Democrats are tearing out their hair, because they know what this means for 2018.

    Democrats are terrified that Trump will succeed.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The war between President Trump and the bureaucracy. “Not only are there two Americas. There are two governments: one elected and one not, one that alternates between Republicans and Democrats and one that remains, decade after decade, stubbornly liberal, contemptuous of Congress, and resistant to change. It is this second government and its allies in the media and the Democratic Party that are after President Trump, that want him driven from office before his term is complete.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • DHS Secretary John Kelly says that the border wall should be finished in two years. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Other McCain has more on the Berkeley riot.
  • Milo (congrats liberals, your hate has tuned him into a one-named celebrity like Bono or Cher) talks about being the object of SJW wrath in the center of it:

  • Mother killed by President Trump’s travel ban is a hoax. She died five days before he even issued the order.
  • Army selects Sig Saur as it’s new official pistol.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott cuts funding to Travis County over the sheriff’s refusal to enforce immigration laws.
  • Women send Gov. Abbott soiled tampons.” Because that’s a dandy way to prove to moderates that feminists aren’t deranged lunatics.
  • “I Don’t Dress For Men, I Dress For The Sea Witch That Cursed Me.” Parody site, just in case that was unclear.
  • “The left is why they leave the left”

    Friday, September 18th, 2015

    When you start grabbing a third pull quote from a piece is when you realize that it needs a post of its own. Such is the case with this Nick Cohen piece on why Jeremy Corbyn’s election has finally forced him to leave the left. Though centered on UK politics, much of it applies to the social justice warrior/victimhood identity politics left in this country as well.

    The shift of left-wing thought towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic has been building for years. I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it. But slowly, too slowly I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.

    Snip.

    In 2007 I tried to make amends, and published What’s Left. If they were true to their professed principles, my book argued, modern leftists would search out secular forces in the Muslim world — Iranian and Arab feminists, say, Kurdish socialists or Muslim liberals struggling against reactionary clerics here in Britain — and embrace them as comrades. Instead, they preferred to excuse half the anti-western theocrats and dictators on the planet. As, in their quiet way, did many in the liberal mainstream. Throughout that period, I never heard the BBC demanding of ‘progressives’ how they could call themselves left-wing when they had not a word of comfort for the Iraqi and Afghan liberals al-Qaeda was slaughtering.

    The triumph of Jeremy Corbyn has led to What’s Left sales picking up, and readers acclaiming my alleged prescience. Grateful though I am, I cannot accept the compliment. I never imagined that left-wing politics would get as bad as they have become. I assumed that when the criminally irresponsible Blair flew off in his Learjet, the better angels of the left’s nature would re-assert themselves.

    What a fool I was.

    Snip.

    The fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.

    Snip.

    The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.

    I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    “Come on America. Nobody has free speech any more. Why should you?”

    Wednesday, June 10th, 2015

    Pat Condell on that pesky First Amendment that keep oppressing progressives by hurting their precious feelings.

    Bill Maher on the Charlie Hebdo Killings

    Friday, January 9th, 2015

    Bill Maher once again states the obvious to those unwilling to listen, harkening back to the days when liberals believed in free speech rather than labeling it “hate crimes.”

    A few quotes:

  • “In 10 Muslim countries, you can get the death penalty just for being gay. They chop heads off in the square in Mecca. Mecca is their Vatican City. If they were chopping the heads off of Catholic gay people, wouldn’t there be a bigger outcry among liberals?”
  • “There are certain people in the world who want waivers on free speech.”
  • “Hundreds of millions of [Muslims] applaud an attack like this.”
  • The second half of the interview is Maher on the Bill Cosby accusations. But at least watch the first six minutes.

    (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)

    Dispatches From The Twitter Wars

    Thursday, July 17th, 2014

    These seem like parts of he same story:

  • Todd Kincannon Silenced: South Carolina lawyer Todd Kincannon, “The Honey Badger of American Politics,” has been forced off Twitter and barred from selling his book by government action:

    If you are receiving this email, it means you ordered a copy of my book. Yet no one has received any copies yet, and I owe you an explanation why.

    I am presently legally barred from fulfilling the order. The South Carolina lawyer disciplinary authorities—government officials—have determined that my political and religious commentary is “unethical.” I am legally barred from sending you a copy of my book at this time. (Well, I could send you a copy, but I could be disbarred for it.)

    This is the culmination of a two year secret investigation of me by the South Carolina Commission on Lawyer Conduct and the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel, two entities that have taken the position that the First Amendment simply does not apply to lawyers. Unsurprisingly, no Democrat lawyers have been targeted so far as I know, and the people in charge of the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel have solid Democrat voting histories.

    I encourage you to do discuss this matter in public and on Twitter and Facebook, and you are free to contact the people involved to complain. Here are some excellent talking points: (1) This is just like the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal, because I am being targeted for my political commentary but absolutely no Democrat lawyers are being targeted. (2) Anyone with half a brain understands that the genuinely offensive things I say are merely to provoke the Left and are my distinctive brand of political commentary. (3) If my political activism wasn’t effective, no one would be trying to shut me up. (4) Unlike the Mozilla controversy and other examples of private boycotts, the South Carolina lawyer disciplinary authorities are government agents who are punishing private citizens for political and religious advocacy that is not to their liking. (5) This is book burning, plain and simple. (6) If I lose my right to speak freely because I am a state licensed professional, anyone in a state licensed profession is subject to having their free speech rights taken away from them. (7) This case is one of the absolute best arguments against state licensing for professions. Once government gets its dictatorial foot in the door, everyone in the room becomes a slave to whatever group of petty tyrants happens to run that wing of government at any given point in time.

    The reason for my silence about this matter until now is that I truly thought they would come to their senses about all of this. In fact, they indicated to me more than once that they would not punish me for political or religious commentary that was not to their liking, after initially demanding that I stop saying anything offensive on Twitter. (That was why I briefly stopped using profanity on Twitter in late 2012, in case you were wondering what that was all about.)

    However, in early June, just as I was preparing to send out my book, I received an unexpected notice from the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel that the investigation was going to continue because of comments I made on Twitter regarding a left wing political activist named Col. Morris Davis, a frequent guest on MSNBC. (I have no indication that Col. Davis has anything to do with this—it appears a supporter of his filed a bar complaint on me, the seventh or eighth complaint filed on me in recent times.)

    As a result of all this, I have prepared and filed a lawsuit in federal court. Please read the attached complaint that was filed earlier this evening. I will fight this matter all the way to the United States Supreme Court if I have to. Surrender is not in my DNA. However, I have no choice but to stop tweeting and hold off sending out copies of my book or engaging in any other advocacy until the federal court gives me clearance to do so without fear of professional repercussions.

  • Twitter parody account @Salondotcom, which mercilessly mocked the far left victimhood identity politics of @salon.com, has been suspended. This unleashed a #freesalondotcom Twitter storm of parody.

  • Instapundit suggests conservatives should be waging more lawfare against the left. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there.” Kurt Schlichter’s new book Conservative Insurgency evidently makes the same point.
  • One Lakeway Man’s War Against Speed Traps

    Sunday, December 26th, 2010

    Meet Lance Mitchell, the man who runs speedtrapahead.org. He not only founded a website to warn people about speed traps, he actually stood up the road from one in his home of speedtrap-crazy Lakeway in his bright orange “Speed Trap Ahead” t-shirt…and got arrested for his troubles. The charge? Among others: illegal signage. For wearing a t-shirt.

    Federal courts have pretty regularly held t-shirts to be a form of free speech (see Boroff v. Van Wert City Board of Education, for example), so it’s no surprise that all the charges were dismissed, and Mitchell has reached a settlement with Lakeway on his own lawsuit.

    (Hat tip: Fark.)

    This Week in Jihad for November 24, 2010

    Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

    Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

    Sadly, Jihad doesn’t wait for American holidays, so here’s a roundup of related news:

    NRA’s Sell-Out: It’s Official

    Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

    The NRA officially announces they’re selling out to the Pelosi congress’ anti-free speech agenda.

    This is a bad decision that will cause them to lose members. You don’t knife your friends in the back to make deals with your enemies, and you don’t make deals with the butcher to stand aside while he slaughters the other animals in exchange for being eaten last. And as long as Pelosi is Speaker, “pro-gun Democrats” can only be considered as pro-2nd Amendment as Bart Stupak was pro-life, i.e. right up to the point that it becomes a choice between their “principles” and the dictates of the Democratic leadership, and then their principles can be bought off with a empty promise.

    Members should still contact the NRA at all levels to know this is unacceptable. You can also call them at 1-800-672-3888, or use the NRA PVF fund form.

    NRA Selling Out on Free Speech to Obama/Pelosi/Reid?

    Monday, June 14th, 2010

    So the reports go that they’ve cut a deal on the anti-free speech DISCLOSE Act. Pelosi and company are besides themselves with joy.

    Members might want to contact the NRA at all levels to know this is a very bad idea. You can also call them at 1-800-672-3888.

    And here’s the NRA PVF fund form.