I’m not concerned about being “helpful.” I’m concerned about actually surviving this resurgence of fascism, and making sure that my kid survives it.
Anyone who defends said fascism for whatever reason is not my ally; full stop.
I’m done talking to you now.
Good day.
Your argument basically breaks down to “If we allow A then we must allow B” which makes the assumption that A=B where A is stopping Nazi hate speech and B is stopping antifa speech. Ignoring that Antifa isn’t holding rallies or making speeches there is still the simple problem that A =/= B. We cannot logically equate Nazi hate speech with those who fight for freedom. This should be obvious to anyone and why I have no fear the criminalizing Nazi speech specifically would lead to the slippery slope you hand wring about.
Indeed, we have legal precedent to suppress certain kinds of speech while still protecting the freedoms of the people. The low hanging fruit is yelling fire in a theater. This is prohibited because a reasonable person would see yelling fire as risking the lives and well being others. Similarly, a reasonable person can see that calling for racial violence, national socialism, and the subjugation and elimination of anyone who does not fit the Nazi ideal as being a threat to the safety and well being of others. When we pretend this is not the case, arguments such as yours may sound reasonable. They are not. Nazism represents a clear and present danger to the United States, it’s people, it’s government, and indeed the world. I cannot see how anyone might argue otherwise. So, it is with this in mind that we may move forward and call for the criminalization of Nazi speech and activity.
Finally, I’d like to point out that by skirting the law, many Nazis these days are able to avoid arrest by making sure they do not target a specific person or commit any violence themselves. Instead, they encourage violence from their followers leaving them in the legal sweet spot. This is terrorism by proxy. It is a way to abuse the freedoms which a nation may protect while behaving in a manner that would otherwise be criminal by using a loophole in our laws which clearly needs mending. Without mending this loophole, the real possibility exists that these people may flourish and that our nation will suffer for it.
I think that’s the large part of the rub in the discussion. With all due respect, I think you make a mistake when you cannot separate defending a civil liberty and defending “fascism.” That’s why I brought up the ACLU, and its history of defending all our civil liberties by defending those most of us would consider odious.
Look at a bunch of the speech cases from the early part of the 20th century and you’ll see that this isn’t really new territory as far as the principles at issue. The state sought to punish advocacy of communism & socialism under the guise of public safety and the notion that we simply couldn’t tolerate these dangerous ideas.
You have a good day as well!
That proposition has come to be wildly misunderstood by the public and actually stands for the opposite proposition in the courts. The exception demonstrates how narrowly those kinds of regulations must be construed. Shouting “fire” in a theater is most definitely legal in any number of circumstances–an empty theater, as part of a play, or if the speaker and audience know that the utterance isn’t likely to actually produce panic.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about whether we think it is wise to expand the “clear and present danger” test to criminalize broad categories of speech based on ideology, as opposed to the current understanding. Thanks for the interesting conversation, in any event.
Stop right there.
If you had any actual “respect” for others, you would have stopped replying to me after I made it clear that I have no further desire to engage you.
I’ll ask politely one more time; please stop addressing me.
You obviously either have no ideas what you are talking about, or you are thinking of the GDR, or you are arguing in bad faith.
Being a Nazi in word and deed, from calling for the extermination of Jews and other people to showing off Nazi insignia and the Nazi salute is illegal in Germany. Ideas are not.
That’s a totally fair point about some sloppy language on my part.
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Thanks.
Thanks! I agree, there’s nothing really exciting here. It’s basically the court saying “The speech may or may not be protected but there’s enough going on here that we need to have a full trial and hear all the facts so we’re not just going to throw the lawsuit out right away”.
Yup.
And why is there this difference? Because the KKK kills Black people, while ISIS threatens White people.
It’s White Supremacist to the core. The “right” of White people to promote genocide and terrorism has never been available to people of colour.
I have to disagree with this, having personally seen and heard public calls for the destruction of the “blue eyed devils” made in Philadelphia by people of color. In the 1970s it was not at all uncommon; Muhammed Ali did it on TV.
White people were mostly unconcerned, because they had more guns, more cops, more money… they could permit freedom of speech and conscience because those in power had little to fear. It is fear that makes people want to shut others’ mouths.
What happened to the Black Panthers and MOVE? How much legal harassment did Muhammed Ali face throughout his career, and how much more would he have faced if not for his fame and wealth?
I was correcting the idea that people of color could not and can not make such statements; they clearly can and did. I wasn’t claiming there aren’t consequences to hate speech! Nor do I dispute that the consequences of offending the wealthier majority are usually far worse than those of offending an oppressed minority.
We’re on the same side, or frankly I wouldn’t have bothered to speak to you. 
You have my respect.
People of color as a whole have never had systemic power over other people in this country; therein lies the difference.
@wanderfound said that black people didn’t enjoy the same “rights” as white people, not that they didn’t enjoy the same physical capacity as white people. There was never a question of what utterances people can emit from their mouths. The point is that hateful white people seem to enjoy “free speech” far more than any other group. America is willing to bend over backwards to ensure it is not blocking their free speech.
When Desiree Fairooz laughed during Jeff Session’s confirmation (or whatever it was) they arrested her and convicted her. It wasn’t because she expressed herself, of course, it was because she disrupted the hearing. Rakem Balogun was arrest for a Facebook post protesting police brutality because they identified him as a “black identity extremist.” They put him prison for 5 months while trying to come up with a reason to prosecute him and then didn’t prosecute him.
The thing in America is that when someone’s right to speak is taken away it’s never the speech, it’s always something else. But America silences people regularly.
I’m not saying two wrongs make a right and they should round up KKK members the way they round up black people with facebook accounts. I’m saying that free speech in America is bullshit. Not all citizens rights are treated the same.
This country was ‘founded’ on the exploitation, subjugation and oppression of POC; once it was in place, the powers that be expended and continue to expend great effort to maintain the White male cisgendered Xtian supremacy that they established, all while hypocritically extolling the ideal of liberty for “all.”
That’s a really good point, and shows up again and again in different contexts. 4th Amendment protection, right to counsel, assembly, it’s all skewed toward protecting the most powerful and the most popular.
The restrictions on speech in europe don’t seem to be stopping the rise of organized, deadly fascist groups there, though. So I don’t know if europe is really the poster child for successful policy in this case.
White supremacy in the US isn’t thriving because the courts won’t censor people enough. It’s thriving because America is literally built on white supremacy and is racist to the core. Was government-protected speech key in the advancement of slavery? Segregation? The War on Drugs? Gentrification/mass displacement? It was not. Because all of those regimes have been supported and reinforced by the political and economic establishment. Those speaking in favor of those things did not need their speech protected by the courts, because it was protected by money and power. There are always exceptions, but generally speaking, the courts have been the last resort of those opposing money and power.
More general thoughts:
If we understand that the US is fundamentally white supremacist, why would we think the government could be trusted to legislate restrictions on speech? New powers to regulate speech granted for the purposes of disempowering white nationalists will inevitably be repurposed to repress anti-racists. Knowing what we do about America, why should we expect anything else?
Some might say “think about today, we’ll deal with the unintended consequences tomorrow”. But it will take a tremendous mobilization of people to change the precedents set now. And if we can make that kind of mobilization - if we really have the power to bend the government to our will in this way…why not just mobilize now and deal with the fascists ourselves? Why this fixation on empowering the government to handle this for us? They cannot and will not protect us from fascism, only we can do that.
Except that those European factions literally grew or radicalized wildly in response to free, unmoderated, instant communication provided through American free speech absolutism promoting the concept of providing a public space for all speech. AfD is literally organized on Facebook, and the radicalization of League uses all those free speech from things like FAIR which are allowed to make up whatever they want and present it as academic in the United States - literally manufacturing a refugee crisis in Europe. It’s the same argument as gun rights advocates ignoring that guns travel from states with little control to states with lots of control.
Control of hate speech has some effect, but it is not a panacea. Other forces can overwhelm it if allowed to grow unchecked.
We don’t.
Revolution first, then fix things.
But that is not the issue at hand,