Anyone advocating for narrowing the protections of the 1st Amendment to allow for similar restrictions on “hate speech” in the US needs to make peace with the reality that these same restrictions will inevitably be weaponized to limit and punish the speech of the less powerful who are criticizing institutions like the church or the police or AIPAC. That’s not a slippery slope argument, it’s just a recognition of how our system works.
I’m shocked that you think that isn’t already happening to us.
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That would be shocking if it were a premise for what I wrote, but thankfully that’s not the case.
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Just because right-wingers will inevitably twist and abuse a law or regulation or process made in good faith is not an excuse not to do the right thing. Craven appeasement only serves the fascists.
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And no, cracking down on genocidal language is not “caving” on free speech. It’s understanding the difference between politically motivated speech and genocidal languge. If some people believe that they need to protect the right to call for the mass murder of others, that’s saying much more about them than about actual free speech rights.
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I’d imagine these types in Rwanda in the 1990s, people like Loy wringing their hands about banning this media outlet.
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I’m not sure what “right thing” you’re endorsing, so it’s not much of a choice at all. No reasonably decent person wants hateful speech to proliferate, but as the poster above observed:
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But please note that I wasn’t arguing that we shouldn’t try to place limits on hate speech, only that we need to be very careful about the language of such laws.
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Putting legal restrictions on speech that promotes genocide or incites violence against others based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. As noted above, it’s taken as a given that right-wingers will use those restrictions in bad faith. That shouldn’t make us fearful about enacting reasonable laws like this proposed Canadian one.
I looked at the law that Yoy and his fellow bothsidesists at The Atlantic are clutching their pearls over. It’s well-considered and meant to address the very real problem of social media platforms supercharging violent hate speech.
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You also did a great job of pointing out that bad actors already get away with suppressing the free speech of ideological opponents without the proposed restrictions.
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Indeed, and the reason we have to to very, VERY careful about such laws is exactly as you lay out. I think you put it very well when you said
And, for what it’s worth @gracchus, speech “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” is already outside 1st Amendment protection since Brandenburg.
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True, but the fear creeps in there too. Outside of the second impeachment, I haven’t seen any prosecutor go after Biff for his 6 Jan speech that incited the insurrection, and when asked why not the usual punt is that he was just exercising his First Amendment rights.
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Brandenburg falls short in the modern context, though. In it the court pretends there is no connection between direct violence and those who instigate it through hate speech. In a modern context, there are networks of “foot soldiers” who are recruited, radicalized, and funded by bad actors who knowingly remain at arm’s length of Brandenburg’s “imminent lawless action” test but who nonetheless pick a target and point these throwaway troops at it. The imminent lawless action standard needs to be modernized to recognize these networks and the thugs who build and utilize them.
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And should have been convicted, as many serious people argued passionately.
And the DC Circuit ruled that the civil cases against him for inciting the riot can proceed:
In my opinion that is far easier to advocate in the abstract than to accomplish without incredibly dangerous unintended consequences. But I appreciate that there is a real cost to a lot of speech that isn’t theoretical.
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My therapist recently gave me some sage advice about stopping unhelpful thoughts as they form in my mind, before they can take root and do harm;
No “woulda/coulda/shoulda’s.”
We must deal with the present, as it is the only thing we can actively change for the better.
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Taking some of the shackles off of RICO would probably do the job. What the court lacked in Brandenburg was a direct link between the Klan’s speech and subsequent violence that speech incited. In the modern era it is much easier for a ringleader to direct distributed networks of domestic terrorists, but the digital footprints of such activity are more apparent and permanent. We’d have a much easier time enforcing RICO without the “imminent” part of the standard.
Why does it matter if someone reacted to a hate-filled violent rant by doing violence to the target of the speech 30 seconds later in person vs 30 days later after watching the screed on YouTube?
This part of your post worries me. You seem disconnected with the fact that the “cost” is in lives and in the freedom of our society. People limit what they do, what they say, and where they go every day because of domestic terrorists who pull this shit. Why should we accept that in the name of some amorphous lie of “free speech?” Or in fear of a “slippery slope” that is no worse than what we’re already dealing with?
Where are the free speech absolutists when it comes to Gaza protesters at Columbia and USC?
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Far right racist groups knew this and planned for it in the 80s and 90s… they adopted the “lonewolf” strategy, which gave us OKC bombing but left the far right networks largely intact.
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Well, you may disagree with the reasoning, but the answer to that question has been pretty well developed and gets to the heart of much of the way we in the US regulate (or don’t regulate) speech. When you take the “imminent” part out of the test, you’re necessarily going to be giving the state the power to criminalize a LOT more speech than it has now. We appear to disagree about whether that’s a good thing or not.
In any event, it’s a disingenuous cop-out to pretend that if one disagrees with limiting speech in particular ways that must therefore be insensitive to the real-world cost civil liberties carry. That’s a cudgel, and it’s just as silly in this context as it was when the pearl-clutchers insisted that anyone not on board with the Patriot Act didn’t care about the victims of terrorism. Neither you nor I have the market cornered on empathy.
It’s erroneous to just assume to know someone else’s state of mind or motivations, not to mention rude.
It is a fact that we all have blind spots because we are human and therefore, fallible.
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That’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant. I was critiquing your wording, which read to me like you were willing to accept the cost (that other people paid) of free speech. It was your words, not your position, which rang alarm bells for me.
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