When Dissent Became Treason
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
People "shouting fire in theater" is not protected speech as a way to say that free speech protections are limited with respect to certain content. This phrase comes from Schenck vs United States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States that ruled that it was Constitutional to arrest someone for distributing anti-draft fliers. So be very careful what you wish for with regard to limits on free speech, you just might get it.
An excerpt from the 9-0 decision makes a pretty concise case, especially the latter part:
"Allowing the broadest scope to the language and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is well understood that the right of free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances. There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which has never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or 'fighting' words-those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. 'Resort to epithets or personal abuse is not in any proper sense communication of information or opinion safeguarded by the Constitution, and its punishment as a criminal act would raise no question under that instrument.' [Cantwell v. Connecticut]"
https://web.archive.org/web/20080906001323/http://laws.findl...
We can argue about definitions of 'obscene', 'likely to cause a breach of the peace', etc. But to treat freedom of speech like an unassailable, all-or-nothing fundamental assumption is not helpful.
As the original article points out, the first half of the 20th century was dark time. And I'd be surprised if the present day court would rule the same way if the literal facts of the Chaplinksy case were repeated.
It's an example of what I was talking about above: it's right that you aren't allowed to use your freedom of speech to incite violence. But the court in Chaplinsky extended that to protect the violent. It's a good thing that courts have been moving away from that heckler's veto.
But I fear the way the politics of outrage is going, in 40 years time we will back to authoritarian norms that brought us two world wars.
Still, speech isn't somehow inherently harmless or different from other actions that we take. It's bad to take someone's things with a knife, but I'd say that it's even worse to take someone's humanity with a word.
"You cannot, sir, take from me anything that will not more willingly part withal – except my life, except my life, except my life." -- William Shakespeare
But a demagogue sure can. I guess it would be more accurate to say that they take humanity from a lot of people who belong to certain classes with a lot of words, but that's a messier metaphor.
The thing that makes people so keen to find limitations on free speech in particular is that they are often keen to supress what someone else is saying and are casting about for an excuse that they can stretch in their favour.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
"Trope Seven: "Fighting words"
Example: "There are two exceptions from the constitutional right to free speech – defamation and the doctrine of “fighting words” or “incitement,” said John Szmer, an associate professor of political science and a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte." McClatchy.com, May 4, 2015.
No discussion of controversial speech is complete without some idiot suggesting that it may be "fighting words."
In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.
That's almost always irrelevant to the sort of speech at issue when the media invokes the trope."
I think "fighting words" is still a real thing in this sense: If I go into a bar, and say the wrong thing about someone's mother, the law is not going to be surprised that they throw a punch at me.
But in our current culture, it has to be narrow. Otherwise, Antifa is going to claim "fighting words" justifies them brawling in the streets. And, legally, it does not justify it at all.
You're incredibly mistaken, and if you act on this misinformation, you're going to find yourself in prison for assault and battery. The "fighting words" doctrine has been repeatedly narrowed over time by subsequent decisions (and may not even exist anymore), and never excused any violence in the first place. It was an exception to free speech, not the provisions in the criminal code that prohibit violence.
He'll be imprisoned for insulting someone's mother?
The case you cited is an example that we already have limitations on free speech. That case is tragic from my perspective because I would likely try to petition people to avoid a draft, too, should it happen now.
Nitpick: "shouting fire in a theater" is protected speech. It's not protected if you lie when you shout it. The risk of injury to others is possible either way, but your intent is what protects you.
Falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater is ALSO protected by first amendment (Supreme Court reversed their opinion in 1969 btw). I clarified more in this other comment[1].
Under this, distributing communist fliers is protected by the first amendment. What is not protected is Antifa's call to 'immediately' riot against their perceived enemies. The element of time is important in imminent lawless action test.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Some see:
"As our newspapers and TV screens overflow with choleric attacks by President Trump on the media..."
While others see:
"As our corporate, left-aligned media powerhouses overflow our news feeds with biased/false statements about President Trump..."
Ultimately, this just goes to show that the media has become a protected class, which -- just in case it isn't evident -- is a bad thing.
The news outlets that Trump attacks are not independent little offices run by scrappy street journalists, but enormous corporate behemoths with clear cut political alignments and agendas, with goals so identical that you literally see the exact same wording in politicized headlines across several major networks. This goes for both the left and the right (though the proportion is lopsided to the left).
The real journalists are the ones being demonized by the media and government alike (that's how you know they're reporting something actually being hidden away from the people), some of whom are living out their lives locked up in embassies.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/17/politics/comey-memo-press-jail...
> But, the suggestion from a sitting President of the United States to the FBI Director that journalists be jailed for reporting on classified information is, in and of itself, a stunning statement that goes beyond even Trump's most virulent anti-media statements to date.
This is some pretty strong "how dare he?! Trump is making wild, evil statements that no other president would ever make!" rhetoric, and it's also absurd considering Obama's (and Bush's) entire presidency was plagued with issues where he wanted to prosecute reporters that reported on classified information [1].
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-...
For another example where he's gone much further off the rails than any recent president, how about his repeated pitch that we should change libel laws so that he can sue journalists?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/30/media/libel-laws-donald-trum...
Thankfully, criticism of public figures is pretty well locked in by the supreme court on first amendment grounds, so he'd need a new constitutional amendment to do this. But he does love to talk about it.
But what Trump was allegedly asking for is well within the norms of other Western countries, has been done through the back door by previous US administrations and is a far cry from silencing the media.
No... no it does not. You might as well have posted pictures of kittens and claim they lead to the same conclusion.
There's a subtle implication here that the likes of Julian Assange are "real journalists" and are somehow noble, which is laughable. Assange (and WikiLeaks) have just as much political alignments and motives that all other media organizations have. Just because he's stuck in an embassy and doesn't have hordes of cash behind him doesn't mean he isn't just as biased.
Quite frankly, WikiLeaks as a whole is no more trustworthy than CNN or Fox, and may be even less so. One of the most powerful (and hard to detect) ways to be biased in reporting isn't by printing attack articles against your enemy, but rather by not printing attack articles against your "friends". WikiLeaks does this every time they choose not to publish evidence damning people they support, which I'd be willing to bet happens more often than we all know.
While we're on the topic, WikiLeaks also commits some pretty atrociously biased editorializing whenever they post new material. They used to just be a site that posted raw information ("here are the emails that were leaked"), but now they also add their own silly commentary to it ("here are the emails and this is what you should think about them"), often with hilariously bad analysis.
I'd bet it doesn't happen all that frequently. If you were a source and Wikileaks refused to publish, wouldn't you just take your material elsewhere and make it known Wikileaks tried to squash a story?
I only wonder how many times similar things happen but we don't hear about it because the source doesn't have the connections/credibility to make WikiLeaks' refusal known.
Judging them on fair and balanced reporting misunderstands there role.
(Julian Assange is not the best example of this though, because he seems to have done stuff wrong well outside of just what he publishes.)
Their commentary on what they release is inconsequential. What matters is the actual, real, documents that they release.
If other people have a different opinion on what the narrative should be then they should release documents of their own.
But that still doesn't change the truth of the previous documents.
Document 1 says: "President ABC bombed a school in Syria today, killing 50 people."
Document 2 says: "This action was carried out after President ABC learned that the school was being used as a base for terrorists, and only terrorist combatants were killed during the bombing."
Both documents are real, but only releasing document #1 and keeping document #2 secret is a very easy way to shift the narrative against President ABC.
But even amongst those that do still read the source material, if they read the commentary beforehand they are still likely to have their perception influenced a certain way, even if only subconsciously. Psychological priming is a thing.
after having done marketing for my own company, i just expect that anything that makes it onto a screen and into my attention span has an agenda and special interest behind it, spending money to make it visible.
literally nothing you see is unbiased, not even personal blogs. i think this is the most valuable takeaway from the 2016 election.
Trump is tame and politically correct compared to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was an unabashed racist, who screened "Birth of a Nation" in the White House, a pro-KKK film that portrayed the Klan as a heroic force to control hordes of savage black males that wanted to rape white women.
Steve Bannon’s film career was directly inspired by Leni Riefenstahl, according to his former colleagues. Watching Birth of a Nation in the White House is tame compared to making the propaganda director the chief strategist.
0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/alex-jones-infowars-...
While president of Princeton University, Wilson had discouraged blacks from applying for admission, preferring to keep the peace among white students and alumni.[282] Wilson's History of the American People (1901) dismissed lynchings committed by the Ku Klux Klan of the late 1860s as a lawless reaction to a lawless period. The President defended them, writing that "[the Klan] began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action".[283]
Wilson's War Department drafted hundreds of thousands of blacks into the army, giving them equal pay with whites, but in accord with military policy from the Civil War through the Second World War, kept them in all-black units with white officers, and kept the great majority out of combat.[284] When a delegation of blacks protested the discriminatory actions, Wilson told them "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." In 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois—a leader of the NAACP who had campaigned for Wilson believing he was a "liberal southerner"—was offered an Army commission in charge of dealing with race relations; DuBois accepted, but he failed his Army physical and did not serve.[285][286] By 1916, Du Bois opposed Wilson, charging that his first term had seen "the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that [blacks] had experienced since the Civil War."[286]
Cabinet heads appointed by President Wilson re-segregated restrooms and cafeterias in their buildings. During Wilson's presidency, the film The Birth of a Nation (1915) became the first motion picture to be in screened in the White House.[287] The film, while revolutionary in its cinematic technique, glorified the Ku Klux Klan and portrayed blacks as uncouth and uncivilized. After seeing the film, Wilson felt betrayed by his old friend Thomas Dixon Jr., who wrote two books the movie was based on, and did not like or endorse the film; he tried to stop its showing during the World War.[288] Biographer Cooper rejects the claim first made in 1937 by a magazine writer who said that Wilson remarked: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true"; an eye witness reports that Wilson said nothing.[289][290] During Wilson's term, segregation was ordered in the Washington offices of the Navy, the Treasury, and the Postmaster General. Then suddenly, photographs became required for all new federal job applicants. After black leaders pressed him, President Wilson explained he was trying to "reduce friction," and that he "sincerely believe[d] it to be in their interest."[291]
Under Wilson, racial segregation was quickly implemented at the Post Office Department. Many African American employees were downgraded and even fired. Employees who were downgraded were transferred to the dead letter office, where they did not interact with the public. The few African Americans who remained at the main post offices were put to work behind screens, out of customers' sight.[292]"
Banning speech in public only drives it underground and reduces the possibility of argument.
odd thing to rename.
reminds me of freedom fries.