I’m not claiming that at all. I’m claiming that all Nazi speech (as opposed to all speech by individual Nazis) is by definition uttered threats. Absent German-style laws in the U.S. that might provide a future basis for making it illegal.
Unless he’s working at HitlerBurger that statement is not one of Nazi ideology, even if he is a Nazi.
Here’s an theoretical example more grounded in history: “We must build more autobahns for citizens to drive upon in their Volkswagens.” It may seem as innocuous as “would you like fries with that?”, but in fact it was an ideological policy statement predicated on the elimination of a class of person from the citizenry in a way that “we must build an interstate highway system for citizens to drive upon in their Fords and Buicks” was not.
We’re discussing Nazi speech here (e.g. a statement like “harass those race traitors out of town”) rather than speakers who are Nazis.
A foundation established by Zinke and run by his wife, Lolita Zinke, owns land in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana. Lesar’s developer is planning to build on some of the land, Politico reported this summer. The proposed hotel and retail stores that the developer wants to build in Whitefish also stand to boost property values in a nearby parcel of land owned by the Zinkes.
Seems like a lot of right-wing scumbags have decided to make Whitefish the a test market for a national rollout.
I dunno. White nationalists threaten to kill my brother and his wife because they’re a mixed race couple.
They’re terrorists. Just because they have white skin and claim christianity as their faith doesn’t make them better than isis or al quaeda.
I think that not tolerating these people in public spaces makes everyone else safer. Being a given race isn’t a threat to anyone. Espousing nazi ideology is a threat to pretty much everyone.
Xeni and BB, when you do things like this with your headlines, you do more than just engage in a little harmless hyperbole or sloppiness: you perpetuate misinformation. The notion that “hate speech isn’t protected” gets thrown around all the time by people looking to regulate speech or ban protests or generally limit the protections that make the US second to none when it comes to protecting unpopular (and unpleasant, make no mistake) speech, and that notion is just plain wrong.
The simple presence of a Nazi represents the threat of violence. When one opens their mouth, the threat is amplified no matter what they say.
This forum is not a court of law but I do see your point. You are correct that the courts should not punish a Nazi for saying something like “we need milk from the store”. Punishment for that sort of thing should always come from the people. The store should not sell them milk. The restaurant should not serve them food. The man on the street should not fail to punch them. Their existence in any form should not be tolerated by society and when they get uppity and decide they want to spew their toxic filth from their pinched mealy mouths, that’s when the law should step in and put them behind bars for the good of humanity.
This is clearly true. Fascist ideology only ever ends with one thing: violence against the vulnerable. Those espousing it are causing this violence. The only value fascist ideas have is as an example of what not to do.
I don’t think it follows that just because it’s vile and harmful that it should be illegal. Something can be really bad and still not a good idea to illegalize for two reasons: 1) It’s difficult to clearly distinguish edge cases, and the consequences of a false positive are significant 2) Enforcing a ban would require creation of harmful institutions or power structures.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t destroy fascism, it just means we should probably not look to the law as a good tool for accomplishing it.
This, of course, leads to numerous questions of what that would or could look like in practice.
What principle would allow us to jail people for speech like that, while protecting other forms of unpopular/unpleasant speech? Would just Nazi speech be criminalized, or would, say, a man giving a speech extolling the virtues of and recruiting for the KKK or a guy praising the values of ISIS also be subject to prosecution?
I believe that has been well covered in not only this but many other discussions. I think the current Brandenburg test answers your question nicely
The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND
The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
“…where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” Brandenburg v. Ohio , 395 U.S. 444
Hand wringing about the legalities isn’t going to do any good and it’s important to remember that our laws are not fixed or immutable. Though promoting Nazi ideology is currently protected, there is no reason we can’t go back to older standards that protect the community from the imminent threat of national socialism, racial superiority movements, and other speech which leads to societal harm. If these people continue to push the people with their Nazi filth, you can bet that the public will tire of it and push lawmakers to tighten the reigns on such speech. In other words, their hiding behind the protections of the 1st will ultimately lead to less freedom for us all.
