Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Castro, Maduro and their ilk are all predictable: They suppress free speech and freedom of the press. In Nazi Germany, if you denounced Hitler's regime, you ended up in a concentration camp or exterminated.
In Stalin's U.S.S.R., you ended up in a gulag, or liquidated. In present-day China you end up in a "re-education camp" or dead. And what has become of freedom of speech and the press in Cuba and Venezuela?
Over our history in America numerous efforts have been made to squelch speech critical of the government and unpopular causes, beginning with the Sedition Act (1798). But since the passage of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court, time and again, has acted to keep the government and many other well-meaning Americans from "re-writing" our First Amendment — which still reads, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" — to instead read, "Congress (or the States) may make some laws ...."
The court, instead of agreeing that unpopular political speech and offensive speech should be prohibited, suppressed or silenced, has suggested the constitutional remedy to be "counterspeech."
In 1927, in Whitney v. California (concurring opinion), Justice Louis Brandeis explained what "counterspeech" entails:
"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
More recently, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in U.S. v. Alvarez, (2012), "The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth."
Then in Citizens United, Kennedy wrote: "It is our law and our tradition that more speech, not less, is the governing rule."
You can pore through our high court's decisions forever, and you will find no case holding that burning someone else's building, looting a neighbor's business, or destroying a publicly erected historic statue or a church is a constitutionally protected form of speech.
The First Amendment protects your right to peacefully protest by wearing a shirt that says "Defund the Police" or by destroying a statue that you own and have erected in your own front yard. But it gives you no right to "protest" by burning your neighbor's flag, throwing rocks at police officers, or burning books you've dragged from the university library that you deem offensive, hate-filled, racist, bigoted, etc.
Once you start burning, destroying and looting public property or the property of others, you cease being a constitutionally protected "protester" engaging in First Amendment protected speech and become a criminal, a fascist, a thug, etc.
The fact that you believe that your motive for acting like one of Röhm's Brownshirts is pure, does not make your actions any better than those of the Brownshirts.
It has been argued that "very few right-wing personalities have been blocked from speaking on campuses."
That isn't a defense. It's a pathetic admission — an admission that leftist mobs are blocking at least some conservative speakers.
Do you recall the CNN story about how protests against Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California-Berkeley turned into riots? Did the university not cancel the event owing to the mob action? Was Yiannopoulos one of the "very few right-wing personalities that have been blocked?"
Why were there many empty seats at President Trump's recent rally in Tulsa?
Was that because TikTok users proposed that Trump opponents could reserve tickets they had no intention of using to block Trump supporters from getting tickets? Were not two of the entrances to the rally blocked for a time? Were the president and his supporters among the "very few right-wing personalities that have been blocked (at least partially)?"
How about Ben Shapiro at UCLA? Professor Mike Adams at the University of Montana? George Will at Scripps College? Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University? Michelle Malkin at American University? Jason Riley at Virginia Tech?
So where do we go from here?
Does "no law" still mean "no law?" Or does it mean the government can make some laws abridging freedom of speech? And if the government can't shut down speech, why is it acceptable for an un-elected violent mob to do so?
What lies and distortions were Yiannopoulos, Trump, Shapiro and the others planning to spew that could not have been adequately dealt with by rational "counterspeech"?
If today's left can employ intimidation and violence to shut down speech it deems "offensive," what happens when the "Thermidor" follows the "Reign of Terror."
This piece was published originally in the Moline Dispatch, Rock Island Argus and QC Times on July 18, 2020
Copyright 2020, John Donald O'Shea
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