The Brandenburg test demonstrates why speech like this IS protected by the 1st Amendment and criminal penalties are unconstitutional. That case dealt with pretty much the same principle you’re getting at, with a KKK speaker being criminally punished for the same type of speech on the same principles you’re talking about here. The SC in that case held:
Accordingly, we are here confronted with a statute which, by its own words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action. Such a statute falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The Brandenburg test works like this: making a speech that says “Bury the n****r” is protected by the First Amendment. Giving a speech while pointing at a specific person and telling the crowd “Someone should kill that person” can be punished IF such a statement is actually likely to produce imminent action.
Now, if your’e arguing that Brandenburg should be replace with something else, that’s fair (even though I disagree), but that test leads to the opposite conclusion you’re using it for here.
With all due respect, when we’re talking about limiting free speech in broad categories like this, it goes a little beyond that. These aren’t details, they’re the core principles of how our speech is protected. And I also think those other examples I raised show that the devil is very much in the practical when one is restricting speech like this.
I really didn’t mean for those questions to be rhetorical, by the way–do you think that the kinds of speech I referenced could/should also be criminalized?
With all due respect, I know of at least one federal judge who feels this speech did not pass the Brandenburg test. This piece of shit Nazi called on his people to unleash a trolley storm against this woman’s family which pretty much invalidates the rest of your argument as being based upon a lack of knowledge concerning the events being discussed.
As currently interpreted… It’s been interpreted differently in the past and may so in the future. By calling them “core principles” you wrongly suggest that these principles are immutable and fixed. This is clearly not the case and never has been.
If you are referring to “extolling the virtues of the KKK” no I do not. I feel that should be dealt with by society and not the government. However, if the threat from such organizations continues to grow and harm society I feel it is the duty of our government to protect our society from harm. Indeed, many feel that is their chief responsibility. So I put it to you again, these Nazi’s, if allowed to flourish unhindered, will ultimately lead to a reduction in freedoms for us all.
Ok, we nee to clarify what speech we’re talking about when referencing “this speech.” When I used that term, I was referring to the broad category of Nazi speech you appeared to be referencing in your earlier post when you said “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.” I understood that to be a category of speech beyond the specific speech at issue in the case referenced in the story, i.e. that you are arguing we could/should criminalize Nazi speech in general. But if I am mistaken please let me know and I apologize.
I haven’t read the judge’s full opinion here, but I would guess that I likely agree with her reasoning if she ruled that organizing harassment was not protected speech. I am not arguing that this case is wrong or that this particular person’s speech was protected, I am taking issue with what appears to be your larger point.
I should clarify: I do not believe these core principles are immutable. Quite the opposite, I think they are fragile and endangered, always. I believe that they are have have been under attack constantly in just about every period of our history, and unless vigorously defended by people like the ACLU, they will erode and go away. There have always been examples of unpopular and unpleasant speech that people have wanted to restrict, and there always will be.
Which is why I think the marketplace of ideas should vigorously attack these ideas, and decent people everywhere should repudiate them and shun anyone who espouses them. I want these ideas and the people who espouse them driven to extinction, and I want to preserve our best values in the process.
But giving the state more power over speech in the way you suggest is not something I support for any number of reasons, the most obvious being that I don’t want Donald Trump (or someone like him) to have the power to designate something as “hate speech” and criminalize it accordingly.
ETA:
Not for nothing, but that’s pretty much the rationale that was put forth for prosecuting (or trying to prosecute) Communist speech as well.
The extreme right has a goal of eliminating freedom of speech.
That is why they claim everything they do is covered under freedom of speech - the strategy is either they get legal permission to do it, or they get a precedent that unpopular speech can be punished - it’s win/win.
Generally speaking the courts have figured this out and done the right thing. Online pundits, not so much.
Fortunately, in this case they got a third option: get a judge applying very sensible and well-established rules that distinguish what is protected and what is not in a way that is very hard to disagree with. Instructing a group of people to harass someone you don’t like is not protected speech anymore than telling someone to kill someone for you is.
But there may be another “win” for them if they are able get “centrists” to side with them; to see them as being reasonable while “the left” is unreasonable in their advocacy for “censorship”.
was? all we have done is move the ‘bad guys’ from communist to middle eastern terrorists. I think it was what? 10 or so years ago a couple was arrested for attending a middle east peace conference and giving money to the wrong organization. We label a group a terrorist organization and then we can arrest people for supporting them. But somehow home grown terrorist organizations don’t get the same treatment.
Which is what I’m vehemently opposing, if for some reason that is unclear. But eroding our speech protections in the way you’re suggesting enables the state (which means whoever happens to be holding the reins of the apparatus) to do just what you’re pointing to against the boogeyman du jour. It’s those principles of “protecting society” by limiting speech that are so dangerous, in my opinion, because we can all agree that Nazis are terrible and we want them to go away. The edge cases of speech protection are the most important to defend because they’re the easiest to erode.
And to avoid any confusion, it is and should be legal for someone to stand up and give a speech praising Hitler or Bin Laden or Bob Dobbs or whoever. I don’t want Trump to have the power to outlaw speech from Antifa, which means that we can’t have the power to outlaw speech from Nazis.
I’m seeing some discussion about what this ruling actually stands for. Does anyone have a link to a copy of the ruling? (I looked for a link but didn’t see it, but maybe I just need more coffee). In this kind of ruling, I would expect a LOT of nuance which typically gets lost in news reports.
Reading this thread I feel the same us vs them energy that boiled over after 9/11.
Back then: Bomb all the axis of evil countries because they aren’t real people just hateful.
Today here now: Deny Nazis milk for their kids because they need to be suppressed.
Nazis are humans, citizens. Just because they are an enemy doesn’t mean we need to adopt their fighting style. Blanket stereotypes about everyone in a group being subhuman are what we are fighting AGAINST right?
And for the record, only conservative hawks and fascists were calling for the extermination of the “axis of evil” nations. Even a cursory glance outside the Fox News bubble would have filled you in on that.
And yes, the judgment doesn’t really have much, if anything, new to say about frozen peaches.
Basically, the anti-semitic stuff is perhaps protected (although there seems to be some issue about the level of protection to which it is entitled given the fairly strong indication that it had less to do with Anglin wanting to make a public argument about how horrible Jews are and rather more to do with his private beef with Gertz over the alleged treatment of Spencer’s mother, making it therefore a matter of ‘purely private concern’), the harassment is not.
As the judgment puts it:
The Court cannot find that Anglin’ s speech is unprotected on the basis that it evinces a
morally and factually indefensible worldview. […] That said, it hardly makes sense to conclude-as Anglin contends-that Anglin’ s posts and sponsored troll storm are entitled to additional protection because of their anti-Semitic content.
It should also be legal to shout down that someone, deplatform them. I’m very much for kicking the them in the nuts, too, but not on legal grounds - just out of common decency.
Nazism is no opinion. It is a crime. Appropriating the Nazi greeting is a crime in Germany, and rightly so.
The US, forgive my being blunt on this, may go fuck themselves in the knee with their free speech absolutism if shouting “Heil Hitler” is part of it.
Fuck Nazis.
Nie wieder is a promise. And it’s not only for German nationals. Never forget that.
The only way you could possibly write this statement with a straight face is from a position of privilege where no one you know is the target if the sort of hatred this ideology espouses.
Nazi ideology killed, literally, millions of people, changed the political face of the planet, and and is predicated on the idea that the vast majority of humans on this planet are lesser beings not worthy of living.
That’s not a game. That’s not a ”thought exercise”. That’s not an opportunity for equality or compassion. That’s bigotry or genocide.
Society - as in the vast majority of societies on this planet - rejected the notion that such ideology deserved any sort of protection at all.
Those not part of the privileged classes that Nazi’s approve of live with the effects of hatred and bigotry constantly. Their lives, and well-being are, to most people, worth far more than this vapid ideology of providing safe harbor and tolerance to Nazi ideology.
First of all, I am not making an argument based on efficacy. It would probably be effective to combat any number of unpleasant and/or dangerous groups if the state had the power to criminalize their ideas, but that doesn’t make it right.
Second, I think Germany is a pretty good example of why you don’t want to give the state the power to effectively criminalize ideas.
I think the KKK should go the way the dodo and I hope it happens in my lifetime, but that doesn’t mean that we
I’m always puzzled by this notion that abuse of free speech (or any other civil liberty) in one context justifies abuse in another.
But to be clear, I think investigation of people who publicly support violent extremist groups is both appropriate and entirely legal. And the freedom of speech means that if you do so, you may have to bear social consequences for that speech. But we’re talking about criminalizing broad categories of speech here.
Except, it isn’t. It’s a moral crime of the first order and should be rejected by all decent people strongly and unequivocally, but “Nazism” simply isn’t a legal crime. And it can’t be made one without fundamentally degrading and eroding all our civil liberties.
No, this isn’t some hypothetical about what could happen somewhere down the road if some bad person came to power. We’re there, friend. The reason Trump isn’t able to criminalize speech based on these kinds of grounds is because he can’t, and we both know he would in a moment if he could. Handing the state that kind of power has never seemed like a worse idea than now, frankly.
But to address your referenced point re: a “declaration of intent to commit genocide.” Is that yardstick applied to speech other than Nazis, or is there some way to limit the principle to them?
Having eliminationist rhetoric against an existing ethnic group in the central text or manifesto of an ideology (example) strikes me as a good limiting measure.
Do you see a variant of Nazi ideology that isn’t predicated on anti-Semitism, racism, and other bigotries against assorted “undesirables” who need to be eliminated from society by main force? One that, when put into practise, doesn’t inevitably end in an intent to carry out on threats of violence or coercion?
