Those crazy "PATRIOTIC" Democrats: Free Speech Edition

yes but there is something good about protecting the rights of Nazis to speak and march

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie

 

allow me to play the "what about" card then: if Trump says a bunch of wild ass things but doesn't himself personally believe them, then it makes it okay? only being partly facetious here

 

I'll break a personal rule this once and actually respond to you Deck (haven't put you on ignore like some others). My side of the aisle is the DEMOCRATIC side of the aisle. I am a registered Democrat, have always voted Democratic, and right now as it just so happens I'm mostly ashamed of being a Democrat. I feel about being Democrat how I imagine the Never Trumpers must feel to be Republican. My side of the aisle is your side of the aisle--which is what makes the sense of betrayal and the ugliness being demonstrated by Democrats all the more painful for me. And why skewering Democrats who deserve skewering -- and I figure if you're a Democrat for whom the skewering shoe fits, wear it -- is about all the entertainment I can enjoy these days. I hate hypocrisy. I hate pretension. I admit that I am a conservative Democrat. Such a thing DOES exist, ridicule emanating from this forum or elsewhere notwithstanding. Laugh all you want and put all the words in my mouth and thoughts in my head, as mind-readers in the D&D apparently are wont to do . . . but it won't change the fact of who I am or what I believe. You seem to have made a habit of personalizing the intellectual disagreements you apparently have with me, and that's fine, I generally ignore that habit. But here you are simply making an incorrect assumption and making incorrect statements. You are simply wrong.

 

may I recommend

 

why we need the First Amendment. "If the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment were consistently supported by most Americans, of course, there would be little need to enshrine them in the Constitution. The whole point of a constitutional guarantee is to protect fundamental rights against the whims of passing majorities."

https://reason.com/2019/10/25/a-sur...opular-thats-why-we-need-the-first-amendment/

A Survey Finds Speech Restrictions Are Pretty Popular. That's Why We Need the First Amendment.
Most respondents, especially millennials, favored viewpoint-based censorship, suppression of "hurtful or offensive" speech in certain contexts, and legal penalties for wayward news organizations.
Jacob Sullum | 10.25.2019 5:30 PM

The First Amendment is unpopular…which is why we need the First Amendment. A recent survey commissioned by the Campaign for Free Speech underlines that point, finding that most Americans support viewpoint-based censorship, suppression of "hurtful or offensive" speech "in universities or on social media," government "action against newspapers and TV stations" that print or air "biased, inflammatory, or false" content, and revising the First Amendment, which "goes too far in allowing hate speech," to "reflect the cultural norms of today."

That last position was endorsed by just 51 percent of respondents, compared to 42 percent who disagreed and 7 percent who had no opinion. But 57 percent favored legal penalties for wayward news organizations, 61 percent supported censorship of "hurtful or offensive" speech in certain contexts, and 63 percent said the government should restrict the speech of racists, neo-Nazis, radical Islamists, Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccine activists, and/or climate change skeptics.

On a more heartening note, the idea of tasking "a government agency" with "reviewing" the output of "alternative media sources" mustered support from just 36 percent of respondents, although the opponents still fell short of a majority. Likewise with a law against "hate speech," which 48 percent favored and just 31 percent opposed.

"The findings are frankly extraordinary," Bob Lystad, executive director of the Campaign for Free Speech, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Our free speech rights and our free press rights have evolved well over 200 years, and people now seem to be rethinking them."

We have no data for prior years from this poll, which was conducted by CARAVAN Surveys in early September with a sample of about 1,000 adults. It is therefore hard to say, based on these results, whether Americans are actually "rethinking" their support for freedom of speech or simply expressing the qualms they've always had.

Survey data from the Freedom Forum Institute indicate that the share of Americans who think "the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment go too far" has fluctuated quite a bit since 1999. It was 29 percent in a survey conducted this year, which is higher than in the previous four years but far from a record during that period.

Still, the breakdown of responses by age in the Campaign for Free Speech survey does not bode well for the future. On almost every question, millennials (ages 21 to 38) were more likely to support speech restrictions than older respondents were. But contrary to what you might think, people with college degrees were less inclined to favor speech restrictions than respondents who either did not attend or did not complete college.

If the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment were consistently supported by most Americans, of course, there would be little need to enshrine them in the Constitution. The whole point of a constitutional guarantee is to protect fundamental rights against the whims of passing majorities. While Lystad is right that a decisive turn in public opinion against freedom of speech and the press could jeopardize these liberties in the long term, it's not clear we are experiencing such a shift.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason.


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