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Comment by charliebwrites | Hacker News Reader

This is why the First Amendment is so important

“[w]hen a nation is at war, many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” Schenck v. United States (1919)

"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia

Thank you. It really is disturbing how many people want to take us back to the Wilson era. Civil liberties are a good thing, folks!

The legal term has its own wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Yes because with the first amendment, a president can’t sue news organizations for saying mean things and get them to pay him personally $15 million a piece (Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC) and teachers can’t be fired for quoting racist comments of a dead podcaster.

https://cbs12.com/news/local/matthew-theobold-florida-martin...

Eh, there was a lot of media censorship during WWII.

It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.

> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."

https://www.army.mil/article/199675/u_s_army_press_censorshi...

> It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.

Happens even without a war, just saying...

Let me rephrase that: it's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment using war as a pretense.

It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment whenever it suits their interests, using whatever plausible-enough pretense they can find.

So we give up our rights when at war? Why not always be at war? Eastasia has always been at war with us.

Hauntingly, they’re actually calling the ME “west asia” now.

In my copy of animal farm, there’s actually a foreword relevant for this discussion. It goes into Orwells difficulty getting things published around ww2 as there was speech that whilst legal was frowned upon during wartime.

Yes and yes.

It's unfortunate life isn't black and white, but that's the way it is.

Guess why the US now has a "Department of War".

“It’s fine because it happened during WWII, the only thing we base history off of to determine limiting rights is fine. Dumber less informed people did it, so should we!”

If you believe Trump wouldn't be doing things like this if America was actually facing direct consequences for its warmongering, I have a bridge to sell you.

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