Free Speech in America in 2017.

UC Berkeley cancels another conservative speech.


//The University of California, Berkeley's decision to block another conservative lecture, this time featuring popular author Ben Shapiro, rightfully sparked a fresh round of disgust among free speech advocates on Wednesday.

The school is under heavy fire from conservatives for a series of First Amendment controversies that unfolded over the course of the last school year, even facing a lawsuit from Young America's Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans over Ann Coulter's canceled lecture in April. Between the riots that blocked Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking and the university's decision to cancel Coulter's lecture, Berkeley has become a high-profile battleground of the contemporary campus speech movement.During a Senate hearing last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, criticized the school in his remarks decrying the state of free speech in higher education. In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ardently defended her state's flagship university.

"I know of no effort at Berkeley, at the University of California, to stifle student efforts to speech," she said at the time, continuing, "And if there is a specific effort, I would certainly appreciate it if people brought that to my attention."

Ben Shapiro is happy to help.

"If there is no effort to stifle free speech at Berkeley," Shapiro responded in an email to the Washington Examiner, "why has Berkeley failed to protect Milo Yiannopoulos' event, cancelled Ann Coulter's event, and now makes excuses about lack of availability for a speech already cleared by the College Republicans?"//

Forced speech is unconstitutional...

....except in California where the Gospel of Abortion must always be shared.

//A federal judge earlier ruled that such forced speech is peachy keen because the communication is simply “factual.” Now, a Court of Appeals is allowing the law to go into effect. From the San Francisco Chronicle story: A federal appeals court has refused to block a new California law requiring religiously sponsored antiabortion clinics known as “crisis pregnancy centers” to notify patients that the state makes reproductive health services, including abortion, available at little or no cost. The clinics argued that the law violates their freedom of speech. The state-mandated notices are “the equivalent of a referral for abortion,” attorney Francis Manion of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal organization, said in a court filing this week. But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied a request by three Northern California clinics Wednesday for an injunction that would have blocked the law while they challenged its constitutionality. The panel of Judges Edward Leavy, Milan Smith and Sandra Ikuta, all Republican appointees, said the clinics were unlikely to prevail in their appeal of a federal judge’s ruling allowing the law to take effect Friday. Needless to say, abortion clinics do not have a similar requirement of forced factual speech, such as informing women that counseling and support is available to them to maintain their pregnancy for free, with phone numbers and locations of where the help can be found.//

Because the Left has shown how effective it is.

Indeed.


“Is this the type of country we want to live in?” That is the question posed by Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson, a pair of waggish conservative commentators, as they ponder the fate of the d.j. who got fired for playing “Blurred Lines.” They are the authors of a new book titled “End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun).” They argue that what might seem like hypersensitivity is actually a form of political combat. Borrowing from the language of soccer, they write, “America is turning into a country of floppers, figuratively grabbing our shins in fabricated agony over every little possible offense in hopes of working the refs.” Kirsten Powers, a liberal—though a heterodox one—and a Fox News pundit, delivers an even starker verdict in “The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.” She detects, among those she might once have considered ideological allies, “an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people,” which often takes the form of meta-intolerance—that is, intolerance of any view that is judged to be intolerant.

The Last of the Classic Leftists.

When leftists cared about Free Speech.

Nat Hentoff is a leftist I respect because he has always been principled about the First Amendment.(He is also pro-life, I believe.) The statement that he makes that "free speech is for people we hate" is such a throwback to the leftism of a prior generation.

And at 88, he thinks that Obama is "the most dictatorial president ever."

America - Now with more Hope and Change...

...and speech regulations designed to protect politicians from voters.

New York's "Shut-Up Rule."

Only Nixon could go to China 

                           - Ancient Klingon Saying

And because I like contrarians:

Whitlock, penning a commentary for ESPN, hit hard from the very first words of the column he posted Tuesday following NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s ban on Sterling: “In our zeal to appear righteous or courageous or free of bigotry, a ratings-pleasing mob hell-bent on revenge turned Donald T. Sterling — a victim of privacy invasion and white supremacy — from villain to martyr.”

Whitlock further calls Silver “a rookie commissioner” who penalized Sterling, whom Whitlock characterizes as “a flawed man whose rights were violated.”

More from Whitlock:

Mob rule is dangerous. Well-intentioned, TV-baited mobs are the most dangerous. They do not consider the consequences of their actions, and they’re prone to take a simple-minded, instant-gratification approach to justice rather than a strategic one.

Removing Donald Sterling from the NBA solves nothing. It sets a precedent that will likely boomerang and harm the black players and coaches who are shocked and outraged that an 80-year-old man with a documented history of bigoted actions also has bigoted private thoughts.

Whitlock also taps into larger issues regarding freedom of speech and invasion of privacy:

A right to privacy is at the very foundation of American freedoms. It’s a core value. It’s a mistake to undermine a core value because we don’t like the way a billionaire exercises it. What happens when a disgruntled lover gives TMZ a tape of a millionaire athlete expressing a homophobic or anti-Semitic or anti-white perspective?

Mark Shea often cites the "Nancy Kerrigan Rule" - "even victims can be jerks."  Sterling is a typical over-privileged rich guy who has earned his downfall, and yet there is something very wrong in this day and age of constant surveillance and micro-recordings about invasions of privacy being the basis of social and contractual sanctions.

Letting their inner totalitarians out to play.

I've been in a long debate with an atheist "free-thinker" on Unbelievable over the Eich issue, and it is amazing how deeply he is into justifying the principle that people who hold bad opinions deserve to be punished for those opinions

David French at NRO writes:

No, the radical Left isn’t just “ceding” the free-speech high ground to conservatives, it’s deeding it over — a free gift of one of America’s most important cultural and legal traditions. This is a high-stakes gamble — one apparently built on the idea that generations of leftist-dominated education and pop culture have sufficiently changed our nation so that we’re willing to turn our backs on pluralism and religious tolerance (not just tolerance of other religions but also tolerance of religion itself). It’s an idea born in Leftist urban and campus enclaves so walled-off from the rest of American life that many of these people could honestly declare they don’t know a single conservative Christian.

But this new intolerance — as it directly confronts orthodox Christianity — is now colliding not just with free speech but with millions of Americans’ source of deepest meaning and purpose. 

.

Liberalism and Free Speech:

Free Speech is not necessary when Liberals are in control

JAMES TARANTO: Welcome to the Collective: Justice Breyer turns the First Amendment on its head.

In his plurality opinion in yesterday’s free-speech case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts notes an anomaly in contemporary “liberal” First Amendment jurisprudence: “If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades–despite the profound offense such spectacles cause–it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”

We’d take the point a step further. The examples Roberts cites all involve fringe political expression. But the First Amendment also protects outré speech outside the political realm–most notably pornography, the subject of a great deal of Supreme Court jurisprudence over the past few decades, in which judicial liberals took the lead in expanding free-speech rights.

In recent years something of a consensus has emerged. When the court extended First Amendment protection to “depictions of animal cruelty” (U.S. v. Stevens, 2010) and violent video games (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011), the decisions were written by Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia, respectively, for 8-1 and 7-2 majorities.

So why have the court’s “liberals” adopted a hostile attitude toward political speech, which has long been understood as being at the core of First Amendment protection? In his McCutcheon dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer elaborates the theory behind this odd development.

Because they’ve decided that free debate isn’t a winner for the collective.

Welcome to Civilization 3.0

All your liberties belong to us. 

In short, once one adopts the Progressive view of freedom of speech as only going so far as to protect the public interest in a well-functioning marketplace of ideas, there is no obvious reason to limit reduced scrutiny of government “public interest” regulation of speech to campaign finance regulations.  Nor is it obvious why the Court should give strict scrutiny to speech restrictions that don’t directly affect the marketplace of ideas, instead of just using a malleable test balancing “speech interests” versus other interests.

Not surprisingly, then, Breyer is the Justice who is least inclined to protect freedom of speech in a variety of contexts.   And it’s troubling that his three liberal colleagues joined his opinion today. Josh Blackman and I wrote three years ago, “Breyer’s apparent ascendance as doyen of the Court’s liberal wing threatens to roll back decades of pro-liberty precedents, and to destroy the consensus on the Court that freedom of speech and other essential rights must not be sacrificed to the shifting whims of legislative majorities.”  I hope to be a failed prophet.

Not my America any more.

Wearing an American Flag can be suppressed because it can lead to violence in schools.

Today’s Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School Dist. (9th Cir. Feb. 27, 2014) upholds a California high school’s decision to forbid students from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. (See here and here for more on this case.)

The court points out that the rights of students in public high schools are limited — under the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist.(1969), student speech could be restricted if “school authorities [can reasonably] forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities” stemming from the speech. And on the facts of this case, the court concludes, there was reason to think that the wearing of the T-shirts would lead to disruption. There had been threats of racial violence aimed at students who wore such shirts the year before:

On Cinco de Mayo in 2009, a year before the events relevant to this appeal, there was an altercation on campus between a group of predominantly Caucasian students and a group of Mexican students. The groups exchanged profanities and threats. Some students hung a makeshift American flag on one of the trees on campus, and as they did, the group of Caucasian students began clapping and chanting “USA.” A group of Mexican students had been walking around with the Mexican flag, and in response to the white students’ flag-raising, one Mexican student shouted “f*** them white boys, f*** them white boys.” When Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez told the student to stop using profane language, the student said, “But Rodriguez, they are racist. They are being racist. F*** them white boys. Let’s f*** them up.” Rodriguez removed the student from the area….

At least one party to this appeal, student M.D., wore American flag clothing to school on Cinco de Mayo 2009. M.D. was approached by a male student who, in the words of the district court, “shoved a Mexican flag at him and said something in Spanish expressing anger at [M.D.’s] clothing.

Indeed, something similar happened the day of the 2010 incident that led to the lawsuit. After the principal 2010 ordered the students to change their shirts (or to go home with an excused absence), the students got threats of violence:

In the aftermath of the students’ departure from school, they received numerous threats from other students. D.G. was threatened by text message on May 6, and the same afternoon, received a threatening phone call from a caller saying he was outside of D.G.’s home. D.M. and M.D. were likewise threatened with violence, and a student at Live Oak overheard a group of classmates saying that some gang members would come down from San Jose to “take care of” the students. Because of these threats, the students did not go to school on May 7.

The court therefore concluded that, under Tinker, the principal’s restriction of the students’ speech was permissible:

Here, both the specific events of May 5, 2010, and the pattern of which those events were a part made it reasonable for school officials to proceed as though the threat of a potentially violent disturbance was real. We hold that school officials, namely Rodriguez, did not act unconstitutionally, under either the First Amendment or Article I, § 2(a) of the California Constitution, in asking students to turn their shirts inside out, remove them, or leave school for the day with an excused absence in order to prevent substantial disruption or violence at school.

This is a classic “heckler’s veto” — thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence. “Heckler’s vetoes” are generally not allowed under First Amendment law; the government should generally protect the speaker and threaten to arrest the thugs, not suppress the speaker’s speech. But under Tinker‘s “forecast substantial disruption” test, such a heckler’s veto is indeed allowed.

The 9th Circuit decision may thus be a faithful application of Tinker, and it might be thatTinker sets forth the correct constitutional rule here. Schools have special responsibilities to educate their students and to protect them both against violence and against disruption of their educations. A school might thus have the discretion to decide that it will prevent disruption even at the cost of letting thugs suppress speech.

Yet even if the judges are right, the situation in the school seems very bad. Somehow, we’ve reached the point that students can’t safely display the American flag in an American school, because of a fear that other students will attack them for it — and the school feels unable to prevent such attacks (by punishing the threateners and the attackers, and by teaching students tolerance for other students’ speech). Something is badly wrong, whether such an incident happens on May 5 or any other day.

And this is especially so because behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?

50 Years ago schools couldn't stop students from wearing jackets saying "Fuck the Draft."

Now, students can be prevented from wearing an American flag....because it provokes hatred...among Americans.

Good job liberal immigration policies.

Good job liberalism

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

And by now the left doesn't find "free speech" to be useful to the movement.

"Should Neo-Nazis be allowed Free Speech?"

Over the past several weeks, free speech has gotten costlier—at least in France and Israel.

In France, Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, an anti-Semitic stand-up comic infamous for popularizing the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute, was banned from performing in two cities. M’Bala M’Bala has been repeatedly fined for hate speech, and this was not the first time his act was perceived as a threat to public order.

Meanwhile, Israel’s parliament is soon to pass a bill outlawing the word Nazi for non-educational purposes. Indeed, any slur against another that invokes the Third Reich could land the speaker in jail for six months with a fine of $29,000. The Israelis are concerned about both the rise of anti-Semitism globally, and the trivialization of the Holocaust—even locally.

To Americans, these actions in France and Israel seem positively undemocratic. The First Amendment would never prohibit the quenelle, regardless of its symbolic meaning. And any lover of “Seinfeld” would regard banning the “Soup Nazi” episode as scandalously un-American. After all, in 1977 a federal court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to goose-step right through the town of Skokie, Illinois, which had a disproportionately large number of Holocaust survivors as residents. And more recently, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a church group opposed to gays serving in the military to picket the funeral of a dead marine with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”

While what is happening in France and Israel is wholly foreign to Americans, perhaps it’s time to consider whether these and other countries may be right. Perhaps America’s fixation on free speech has gone too far.

Actually, the United States is an outlier among democracies in granting such generous free speech guarantees. Six European countries, along with Brazil, prohibit the use of Nazi symbols and flags. Many more countries have outlawed Holocaust denial. Indeed, even encouraging racial discrimination in France is a crime. In pluralistic nations like these with clashing cultures and historical tragedies not shared by all, mutual respect and civility helps keep the peace and avoids unnecessary mental trauma.

30 years ago, my law school prof Richard Delgado wrote a book saying "no."

It's taken that long for this idea to go mainstream.

What the Hell happened?

Obviously, the left doesn't find free speech useful any more.

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?//

QED

"We are just awakening to the need for some scrutiny or oversight or public attention to the decisions of the most powerful private speech controllers..."

Having won their revolution, the liberal New Class wants to make sure that all new revolutionaries are suppressed.
 

Remember when liberals were big supporters of free speech?

The NYT floats the idea of a regional or internal panel to censor YouTube.

Ann Althous observes:

"We are just awakening to the need for some scrutiny or oversight or public attention to the decisions of the most powerful private speech controllers..."

... lawprof Tim Wu told the NYT, which has an article that seems to be searching for a way to legitimate making private companies like Google suppress free speech.

Mr. Wu offered some unsolicited advice: Why not set up an oversight board of regional experts or serious YouTube users from around the world to make the especially tough decisions?
 

Oh, yeah, an oversight board of regional experts.... Isn't that what you want? Panels of regional experts bearing down on the free speech we have through private internet services like YouTube?

ADDED: Here's that conversation I had with Bob Wright last year about the applicability of free speech values to the work of private corporations.

Los Angeles Times floats trial balloon for a shariah-compliant America. The LAT runs a column explaining that the First Amendment really doesn't apply to blasphemy (against The Prophet pbuh). The LAT doesn't mention whether pissing on a crucifix is no longer merely "transgressive performance art that provokes middle-class Americans to re-evaluate their religious commitments and is therefore perfectly hunky-dory." Because Christians don't issue fatwahs. Look it's really simple - stop apologizing to barbarians. This LAT article is interesting from another standpoint.

First they came for makers of crappy Islamic films, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a maker of films... ...then a high-ranking Obama DOJ official refused to answer a question about whether they would refuse to entertain the proposal of a law or regulation criminalizing speech critical of a religion. Video here.

Sharia law in effect in America.

Glen Reynolds writes:

"THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, POLITICALLY TROUBLESOME INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS WOULD BE HARASSED BY THE AUTHORITIES — AND THEY WERE RIGHT!"

Alleged ‘Innocence of Muslims’ filmmaker taken in for interviewing by deputies.
This running gag isn’t as funny as it used to be. Imagine the uproar if we had a Republican in the White House — but it’s the absence of uproar over these tactics that is really revealing. It’s going to be really hard for the press and pundits who should be raising a stink about this, but aren’t, to play their “have you no decency?” games during a Republican Administation. They’ll try, of course, but they should be treated with the contempt they deserve. And that should start now, actually.

From the LA Times:

Just after midnight, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Arab world.

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies escorted a man believed to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to an awaiting car. The man declined to answer questions on his way out and wore a hat and a towel over his face. He kept his hands in the pocket of a winter coat.

Sheriff's officials could not be reached by The Times, but department spokesman Steve Whitmore told NBC4 that deputies assisting the federal probation department took Nakoula to the sheriff's substation in Cerritos for interviewing.

[Updated at 1:40 a.m. Saturday: Whitmore told the Times that Nakoula was taken in for a voluntary interview with probation officials and has not been arrested or detained.]

Authorities waited until most media had left for the day.

Earlier Friday, sheriff’s deputies had to escort attorneys through a scrum of news cameras into Nakoula’s home. This time, authorities only had to avoid a lone photographer for The Times and a few other lingering reporters.

Nakoula has told the Associated Press he was a logistics manager on the "Innocence of Muslims" movie, not the director. He told a Coptic bishop Thursday that he had no role in it, the clergyman told The Times.

Nakoula is believed to use the alias Sam Bacile, which was the name a caller who took credit for the film gave to the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal.

On Friday, U.S. courts spokeswoman Karen Redmond said the Office of Probation in the Central District of California is reviewing whether Nakoula, who was convicted on bank fraud charges, violated terms of his probation in relation to the video and its uploading onto the web.

He had been ordered not to own or use devices with access to the Web without approval from his probation officer -– and any approved computers were to be used for work only. "Defendant shall not access a computer for any other purpose," the terms read.

Restrictions were also placed on him enlisting others to get on the Internet for him.

So, it's now permissible for the courts to deny rights of freedom of speech where it has nothing to do with protecting the public from a crime?

I can understand this if Nakoula was using the internet to scam people, but insofar as the video involved only religious or historical or political speech, then it should be protected by the Constitution, even if Nakoula asked for money.

The principle is not so far off from that which got Judge Howard Broadman in trouble for making norplant a condition of probation for convicted child-abusing parent. The point being that Constitutional rights cannot be abridged any further than necessary to protect the public.

Moreover, this looks like Hell. The Muslim world demanded that America prosecute this individual because of the film. The Muslim world killed Americans and attacked our embassies in order to pressure America to prosecute this individual because of the film. Now - Lo and Behold - we can say to the Muslim world that America is prosecuting this individual because of the film.

That gives the appearance that the Muslim world can force America to take actions against its principles by violence.

That's outrageous and dangerous.

Corporation defends free speech.

YouTube tells White House it will not remove video blamed for sparking riots.

As anti-American rioting continues tonight in as many as 20 countries around the world, the White House has finally decided to make a definitive display of power — against YouTube. And YouTube isn’t backing down.

As Twitchy reported earlier, the White House contacted YouTube and requested they review the video which the Obama administration insists is responsible for sparking the attacks against several American diplomatic outposts. Press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today that the riots were “in response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration,” even as mobs in Gaza burned the American flag and an effigy of President Obama.

Choosing to get tough against a video rather than the mob is certainly the easier course, but not even Google, owner of YouTube, seemed intimated by this administration. A YouTube spokesperson said in a statement:

We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what’s OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere. This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.

It seems that YouTube has more of a commitment to its corporate charter than the Obama administration has to the Constitution.

Obama Administration acts as censorship arm of Islamofascists.

Obama administration asks Youtube to review the video that the Islamofascists used as a pretext for attacking Americans; the LA Times "outs" the video's producer.

Obama administration officials also flagged the trailer to YouTube and asked the company to review whether it violated the website's terms of service.

If we're going to have anti-blasphemy laws, I want them official and passed by Congress and reviewed by the courts. I don't want this executive-only implementation of a despicable law.

By the way, the LAT does, yes, tell jihadists exactly where the filmmaker lives, so they can kill him:

But Duarte's deputy city manager said she had been told by sheriff's officials that the permits to shoot the movie had been issued to Media for Christ. An actor who appeared in the movie, Tim Dax, said he was paid $75 a day in checks drawn on the bank account of Abanob Basseley Nakoula — a name linked to the Cerritos property where Nakoula Basseley Nakoula resides. The home's distinctive front door with triangle windows in a half-circle pattern is visible in the 14-minute trailer for the movie posted on YouTube.

Tolerance and Free Speech: The Moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

In this case, the latter is a weird mix of multiculturalism and victim identity politics and Islamic vitimo-triumphalism.

Disturbing Calls For Censorship In America By Professors, Journalists, U.S. Diplomats, And Egyptian Government:

In response to a film that mocked Mohammed, journalists on MSNBC, a professor, and the Egyptian government called for punishment of the film’s producers. Prominent left-leaning law professors have similarly advocated that such speech be restricted, citing customary international law. Their position, if accepted, would seriously menace free speech in America, and harm the publishing and film industries. (At the UN, the Obama administration has also lent qualified support to restrictions on “hate speech” and speech that incites hostility to Islam and other religions.)

The Egyptian government said, “We ask the American government to take a firm position toward this film’s producers within the framework of international charters that criminalise acts that stir strife on the basis of race, colour or religion.” In a commentary yesterday, Prof. Peter Spiro, one of the leading international law scholars in the country, cited international norms as a justification for banning such speech: “The deplorable killing of Chris Stevens in Libya suggests a foreign relations law rationale for banning hate speech. Remember, the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it.” Earlier, he wrote, “an international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding.” State Department legal advisor Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, has also suggested that such international norms provide a justification for restricting such speech.

Similarly, journalists and a professor argued that the film’s producer should be prosecuted. The professor’s USA Today op-ed is entitled “Why Sam Bacile Deserves Arrest.” Law professor Eugene Volokh quotes them as follows:


[Professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania]: “Good Morning. How soon is [producer] Sam Bacile going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now.When Americans die because you are stupid…” “And yes, I know we have First Amendment rights,but if you don’t understand the Religion you hate, STFU about it. . . . people do jail for speech. First Amendment doesn’t cover EVERYTHING a PERSON says.” “[T]he murder of the Ambassador and the employees is wrong, wrong. But Bacile will have to face his actions . . .”

[MSNBC's Mike Barnicle] “Given this supposed minister’s role in last year’s riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where, not yet nailed down, but at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact.”

[MSNBC's Donny Deutsch]: “I was thinking the same thing, yeah.”

In reality, the minister that the MSNBC commentators blamed for the film depicting Mohammed does not appear to have been involved in its production, and the attack on our embassy in Libya that left our ambassador and three others dead appears to have been preplanned, and not inspired by recent outrage over the film after it was publicized in the Islamic world.

Nevertheless, prior to the attacks, the U.S. Embassy in Egypt not only condemned speech offensive to Muslims such as the film, but also apologized for the “abuse of free speech” in the United States. “Abuse of free speech” is a phrase used by lawyers and diplomats to mean speech that can be banned as unprotected. For example, many state constitutions contain an “abuse” exception in their free-speech clause. For example, California’s Constitution says, “Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right.” These constitutions were written mostly at an earlier time when free speech was construed narrowly to ban prior restraints on speech (one example of a prior restraint is where a government censor reviews speech before it can be published), but not to prevent criminal punishment after-the-fact for speech deemed “bad” by the legislature. Similarly, in other countries, where freedom of speech is typically narrower than in the United States, legislatures are often authorized to pass legislation prohibiting and punishing “abusive” speech.

This is one of the most amazing developments in my lifetime.

When I was in college and law school, free speech was as close to sacred as a secular society could make it. Free Speech was lauded in terms that would have made patriots blush. Political speech, most of all, was enshrined as the beating heart of all that was good and holy.

Things began to shift with the rise of the racialist left. One of my professor at UCLA School of Law, Richard Delgado, published a book entitled "Must We Defend Nazis?", where he argued that the answer was no because "racist speech," meaning, eventually, anything that the racialist left disagreed with, was uniquely bad compared to blasphemy, subversion, pro-communist exterminationist rhetoric, etc., etc. (I vaguely remember tht the book was co-written by a feminist, and, so, the feminist hobbyhorse that pornography should be banned as hate-speech against women may have been flogged around the track for a few laps.)

And, now, after 30 years, here we are.

Schadenfreude Alert.

It's hard not to feel good about this, but I'll do my best.

The tool who berated the unlucky, minimum-wage earning Chick-Fill-A employee has been fired from his position as Chief Financial Officer for Vante:

TUCSON, AZ--(Marketwire - Aug 2, 2012) - The following is a statement from Vante:

Vante regrets the unfortunate events that transpired yesterday in Tucson between our former CFO/Treasurer Adam Smith and an employee at Chick-fil-A. Effective immediately, Mr. Smith is no longer an employee of our company.

The actions of Mr. Smith do not reflect our corporate values in any manner. Vante is an equal opportunity company with a diverse workforce, which holds diverse opinions. We respect the right of our employees and all Americans to hold and express their personal opinions, however, we also expect our company officers to behave in a manner commensurate with their position and in a respectful fashion that conveys these values of civility with others.

We hope that the general population does not hold Mr. Smith's actions against Vante and its employees.

On the other hand, while Smith was an ass-hat, he was a ass-hat on his own time. He has as much right to be an off-work asshat and keep his job as anyone, particularly if his ass-hattery. I think the better move for Vante would have been to issue its press release but not to fire Smith - the key to combatting "bad" speech and all around ass-hattery is more speech, which may include pointing out that Smith is an ass-hat.


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