Podcast: Restoring the Constitution-First Amendment Under Attack
This week, Federico Lines, of States Rights Radio, and I discussed the First Amendment as it faces attacks from the “free speech warriors” in the GOP and CONservative media.
The podcast (link here) can be found here:
https://www.spreaker.com/user/16611197/tonight-s-episode-its-called-freedom-of-
The First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Before getting into it, let’s start with the principle. It’s simple, I may not like what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it. That’s it. Pretty simple.
We do need to understand when free speech is no longer free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently gave some examples such as when protests become violent or when there are true threats and intimidation.
“The categorical exceptions to the First Amendment are few, narrow, and carefully defined. To protect freedom of expression, they must remain that way….
Our campuses are roiling in reaction to armed conflict. The subtext of horror and violence weighs heavily on both those speaking and those listening. This is a fraught time.
For nearly 25 years, FIRE has worked tirelessly to protect and preserve freedom of expression on campus. In our experience, extremely challenging and emotionally charged moments like the one in which we now find ourselves are when expressive rights most need delineating and defending. Times like this may seem to present the most righteous justifications for bending the rules in one direction or the other, to either permit the censorship of protected speech or to allow unprotected speech or violence to go unpunished. But we cannot let either happen.
Now as ever, it is vital for all of us — students, faculty, administrators, alumni, law enforcement, elected officials, and the general public — to hold steadfast to the First Amendment, remaining both cognizant of its carefully defined exceptions and confident in its continuing protection. FIRE will stay on task.”
But it’s not that simple for the authoritarians who call themselves Democrats and Republicans. They hate free speech. They have no principle.
And the censors are working very hard now that there’s a conflict overseas that should not be our business, but America’s arrogance knows no bounds as billions will be stolen from us to send to foreign nations in direct contradiction to our founders:
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/podcast-restoring-the-constitution-f3a
The madness of crowds is on display as the collectivists will strip all of us of every last liberty if they get their way.
Of course, the “right” has told us how much they hate censorship and they hate “safe spaces” on college campuses. Now, the GOP and CONservative neocon mouthpieces are demanding “safe spaces” and people losing their jobs for wrong think, as I detailed some of those stories recently:
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/israel-first-says-new-house-speaker
I’ve stated before the both “sides” of the political circus will make the same exact arguments, just at different times and with different targets. Enter Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Recently, Jews for Peace held a protest at the U.S. Capitol where they sang some songs and called for a ceasefire. About 300 were arrested.
Greene’s response, they’re “insurrectionist.” And she was serious about it.
The hypocrisy is astounding. The “left” calls January 6ers “insurrectionists.” Greene calls Jews for Peace “insurrectionists.” My goodness, this is looney toon territory.
Ryan Cristián for Last American Vagabond stated:
“You end up making sure it’s (insurrection’s) meaningless because you’re just lobbing the same dumb thing back. But guys, that’s your two-party illusion for ya. It’s not really about what you think it is.”
(segment at 2:43.25 mark)
“They claim they’re for peace, but they’re shooting me birds. I’m a member of Congress and they’re treating me this way.”
Oh, poor little Marjorie. Somebody flipped her off. The horror, the tragedy. She’s an important person. She deserves respect.
Give me a break.
But Greene’s not done there. Brian Shilhavy wrote for Vaccine Impact that:
“Some of those same alleged proponents of ‘Free Speech’ are the loudest voices in government trying to censor anyone who does not support the Zionist-controlled corporate media and dares to bring attention to the plight of innocent Palestinians and their children being mass-murdered in Gaza right now, where the latest reports now say that over 9,000 Palestinians have been killed, with nearly 4,000 of those deaths being children….
This attack on the First Amendment by the Zionists has become so fanatical, that a resolution to censor the speech of U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, whose crime is that she is Palestinian and has been re-elected twice by her fellow American citizens in Michigan, has relatives in the West Bank and Gaza who have suffered, and recently joined a ‘Cease Fire’ rally in Washington D.C. together with Jews who also are calling for a cease fire, was proposed by several Zionist lawmakers.
How dare she!
Not even calls for a cease fire will be tolerated by the Zionists, as they believe it is the duty of Americans to commit mass murder and genocide of all the Palestinian people, including their children, because that is what America does, just as it did to the Japanese during WW II by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people all in the name of war and ‘national security.’…
Any view but the Zionist view to kill as many innocent women and children as possible is now speech that must be censored by the U.S. Government according to many of our “elected” officials. And if they have to lie about people who are pushing for peace by slandering them, it is all justified to continue the killing and genocide of Muslims….
However, in what is perhaps one of the most hypocritical acts ever seen in the history of the U.S. Congress, it was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia that actually filed the motion to censor her fellow U.S. Congresswoman. Greene has been one of the most vocal supporters of ‘Free Speech’ constantly complaining about how the Left has tried to censor her.
Greene accused Tlaib of ‘leading an insurrection’ at the Capitol when she joined together with Jewish pro-Cease Fire protests….
Is not the hypocrisy here unbelievable? They don’t like it when the events on January 6, 2021 are referred to as an “insurrection,” but they are just fine with using the exact same term to describe peace activists who peacefully protested in D.C. to call for a cease fire.”
Greene literally attempted to censure Tlaib for speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally and call for peace. Meanwhile, bloodthirst neocons like Lindsey Graham are declaring there’s “no limit” in how many civilians he’s willing to see slaughtered.
Luckily, 22 Republicans voted against Greene’s attack on the First Amendment. For that, they get ignorant, stupid CONservative media attacking them.
One of those in the GOP voting against it was Thomas Massie, probably the only member of Congress who actually has principles. Massie said:
“Free speech isn’t just about protecting the speech that you like, it’s especially about protecting the speech you don’t like. Jesse Watters Primetime guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy. “I think the protest was an expression of speech. Now, the other reason that I voted against this resolution, the language was modelled after a resolution that I voted against two years ago that calls the January 6th protesters insurrectionists. It’s wrong to call the January 6th protesters insurrectionists and I think it’s wrong to call the people that were with Rashida Tlaib insurrectionists. So, those were my two reasons for voting against it.”
Now, I’m pretty confident that nearly every member of Congress, including Tlaib and Greene, should be censured for something. I’ll go further, they should be removed. But to attempt to censure Tlaib for her speech shows Greene’s utter contempt for the First Amendment. You don’t need to like Tlaib or agree with what she said. But if you cannot see that it was clearly First Amendment protected speech, you are an authoritarian.
Free speech has been under attack for a while, especially as it pertains to Israel. In 2019, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), Omar Barghouti, was prevented from coming to the United States despite having all the required travel documents. He was prevented because he was going to speak on college campuses which is “illegal” in 37 states, mostly Republican.
The BDS movement calls for boycotts of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
Again, one does not have to agree with or like what that movement has to say, but if you don’t realize that is First Amendment protected speech then you’re an authoritarian. CONservatives decry how their speakers are treated on college campuses. Then they turn around and say these speakers aren’t allowed to speak. Hypocrisy, plain and simple.
And these anti-BDS laws and new “hate crime” laws, championed mostly by the GOP, propose definitions of “antisemitism” that’s “so wide” and so broad that criticism of Israel’s government is considered “antisemitic,” according to The Guardian. Such absurdity. The Republicans literally telling Americans they can’t criticize government. And they’re not even talking about the American government but rather a foreign government.
One of the worst offenders is Ron DeSantis, who I have written about his attacks on the First Amendment before:
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/florida-republicans-target-the-first
https://sethhancock.substack.com/p/florida-gov-desantis-denounces-blogger
This year, he signed a ludicrous “hate crime” law under the guise of going after “antisemitism” which creates a felony with up to five years in prison for things such as vandalism and littering if the government deems it was done out of hate. Of course, such acts are already illegal, but if the government deems you’re motivated by “hate” you will suddenly become a felon rather than generally face a fine.
It gets worse. It makes it a third-degree felony to make fun of someone’s clothing if its considered “ethnic or religious.” And in 2019, DeSantis signed a bill that is dangerously vague and purports to criminalize “antisemitism” by setting up any criticism, justified or not, of anyone who happens to be Jewish as criminal.
And for both bills, DeSantis traveled to Israel to sign them on taxpayer funded junkets. I don’t care where you stand on the issue of Israel-Palestine, that should outrage anyone who claims to be conservative. DeSantis literally used taxpayer dollars to travel to a foreign nation for politics. And those bills target the liberty of Floridians. What a disgrace.
And now, with the current conflict, DeSantis is now sending an undisclosed amount of weapons and ammunition to Israel via a cargo plane that also includes body armor, drones, healthcare supplies and helmets. This after he literally attacked the First Amendment rights of college students by forcing colleges to suspend Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) groups.
Jacob Thompson wrote about this for Wine Press News. DeSantis twisted language in the SJP toolkits to accuse them of materially supporting Hamas despite there being no explicit or implicit support.
By the way, even if you vocally supported a group like Hamas, that’s your First Amendment right. You have the right to vocally support whatever groups or causes, no matter how heinous they are. You don’t have a right to commit violence or incite violence in the name of them.
Side note, the American and Israeli governments have actually provided material support for Hamas, unlike SJP. They created Hamas, after all. Just saying.
“I have covered just how evil and despicable DeSantis really is in a number of reports, and this just only adds to it. You can read up on them here.
Let me be perfectly clear here: I am by no means defending and condoning Hamas for a nanosecond, neither am I ‘pro-Palestine.’ As a matter of fact, the King James Bible says in Proverbs 4:27: ‘Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.’
That being said, what DeSantis is doing, out of his own mouth, is overthrowing the 1st Amendment, based on a statement he thinks he can twist. What DeSantis has done again displays how this jerk is a vindictive authoritarian, who will seek to ban basic civil liberties and speech whenever it disagrees with him, and when bribes are on the line.
Not only that, all these people continue to showcase that could give a rat’s behind about America. Instead of doling out cash and aid for its own people that could seriously use it, they all instead throw cash at everything else without hesitating.
As I have been warning and pointing out, this war is being used to justify a whole new wave of censorship under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism.’ This is literally the same thing that was done under George Bush post-9/11; but just like then, the people are walking right into it all over again, just as they did with The Covid War and the Ukraine war.”
And while we’re talking about hypocrisy, Donald Trump is now proposing “free” college because he was offended by seeing people supporting Palestine on some campuses. He wants to create the “American Academy” by stealing (“taxing”) the endowments of private universities. Trump proposes anti-American socialism because he hates the free speech he is seeing.
Local Abuses of Free Speech
Lines and I also discussed social media as it pertains to cases in front of the Supreme Court.
FIRE has filed amicus curiae for two cases. FIRE reports:
“The first case, O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, involves school board trustees who used their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to solicit feedback from constituents, invite the public to board meetings, and answer questions. But when the trustees got tired of two concerned parents’ probing commentary, the trustees blocked the parents.
In an attempt to justify their censorship, the trustees argued they were acting as private citizens, not as government officials. These were just personal accounts, they claimed. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, like most courts judging similar cases, didn’t buy this argument. Instead, it correctly examined the content and appearance of their pages and determined the trustees had ‘clothed their pages in the authority of their offices and used their pages to communicate their official duties.’
The second case, Lindke v. Freed, diverged from that commonsense rule. There, a city manager used his Facebook page to conduct official business but blocked a critic whose comments he disliked. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit departed from other courts that have considered similar cases, holding that the city manager’s censorship did not violate the First Amendment. It’s his personal page, the court said, and ‘presenting himself as city manager’ and ‘talking about his job’ isn’t enough ‘to transform a personal page into an official one.’
So which is it? Do public officials have to listen to their critics if they open their social media accounts for official business? Or can they silence their opponents, so long as they label their social media accounts as ‘personal’?
Well, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. FIRE’s briefs argue as much, asserting that if public officials use social media to conduct official business, they should not be able to duck their First Amendment obligations. And once officials use the accounts for official business, the First Amendment prohibits them from discriminating against opposing views.
Political officeholders often recognize and embrace the power of social media. From mayors to district attorneys, congressional representatives to police chiefs, public officials from America’s smallest towns and largest cities alike use social media to connect with citizens. Many officials — including President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — continued to use their personal social media accounts to communicate with the public while in office. And those ostensibly ‘personal’ accounts often have many more followers than their formal, government-operated counterparts.
Government officials can’t have it both ways: Officeholders who opt to use their social media accounts as tools of governance forfeit the right to cancel critics or delete unfavorable comments. Public officials can’t ‘mute’ protests with which they disagree, nor can they ‘block’ a public commenter’s criticism. On social media, it should be no different.”
I’ll throw in a few stories I came across after the podcast last night. In my home state of Illinois, a town has ticketed a reporter for asking too many questions. And in California, a middle school student has been banned from afterschool activities for wearing eye paint to a football game. The eye paint was black, the color of the schools team, and the school called it “blackface.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/illinois-city-tickets-reporter-asking-215033882.html
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/middle-schooler-suspended-banned-for-wearing-blackface
From the federal level down to local, there are authoritarians trying to censor us. Don’t let them, and don’t cheer them on because they’re on your “team.”