Category: Free Speech

In Summary

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I feel compelled to say something about President Trump and recent events, but realize that I would merely be repeating things I’ve said in my few most recent posts. So I will briefly summarize, and then move on to other things in 2021.

1. The President did not meet any legal definition of incitement.

2. The President’s claim that the election was stolen has not actually been thoroughly investigated, much less disproven. The narrative — that the courts rejected it so it can’t be true — is nonsense: evidence is examined in trial, not in pre-trial review. We simply don’t know the extent of the fraud, and we don’t know that the President is wrong — nor to what extent.

3. I condemn unlawful riots, regardless of the motivation of the rioters. I condemn the 500+ riots of 2020 brought to us by a demonstrably false claim that police disproportionately kill young black men and do so with impunity. I condemn the one riot of 2021 brought to us, I believe, by people who believe the as yet unresolved claim that fraud determined this election.

4. If the President has been “unpresidential,” I can live with that: at no time since his inauguration has he been treated in a presidential fashion. Having never been shown the respect due his office, I won’t fault him for his behavior now.

5. And, finally, I think that there is no sense or justice for impeaching a President for making a claim that hasn’t been disproven and may be true or mostly true, and who has committed no crime.

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Powerful institutions silence opposing voices so that they can lie with impunity. The truth can defend itself: being the truth is always its greatest strength, and it will almost always prevail — if it is allowed to speak. This is why tyrants control the press, imprison dissidents, and force confessions.

The gravest injustice this year is not the 501st lawless riot. It is the silencing of so many voices by powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Be wary of anyone who tells you that depriving people of their voice is in everyone’s best interest.

“The Fourth Branch of Government”

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Last night Amazon, Apple, and Google shut down Twitter’s competitor, a small social media company called “Parler.”

Twitter has been blocking and censoring conservative voices for a long time. When they became blatant about it, and particularly after blocking the nation’s fourth largest newspaper for running a factually correct story that was critical of candidate Biden’s son Hunter, people began leaving Twitter and moving to Parler, which promised free speech without bias and censorship.

So the tech giants shut Parler down.

They have “reasons.” Tyrants always have “reasons” until they don’t need reasons anymore and can just do what they want.

Don’t let anyone convince you that this is just or right. We have very narrow laws that limit certain kinds of speech. They’re narrow for a reason, the product of centuries of legal wrangling and debate. What the tech giants are doing is saying that the laws aren’t good enough, and that, “for the common good,” it’s necessary to restrict speech beyond what the law prohibits. They’re taking it upon themselves to decide which protected speech is worthwhile and which is not, and to prohibit us from engaging in the kind they don’t think is worthwhile.

There is a new elite rising, a class of smart, young, educated, well-paid person who believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to say things that experts — that is, that their preferred experts — think are incorrect. They think that their superior intelligence, information, and judgment give them the right to silence views they consider harmful or irresponsible.

They will go on at great length to make their case, but it always come back to this: free speech is good, but only if it’s the *right* speech. Laws aren’t sufficient to protect us from wrong thinking, and so they’re going to help out. For the common good. For the people.

Tell them to stuff it.

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As one of those smart young technocrats commented yesterday on one of my posts:

“We are witnessing the halted of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking….”

So let me ask you: do *you* remember voting for Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon to represent you, to govern you, and to decide what you can and can’t say? Can you find this “fourth branch of government” in the Constitution?

Bigger Than Trump

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Having now reviewed everything I can find on what the President actually said at the protest in D.C., I can state with confidence that he did not cross a line into legally actionable speech. The bar set for classifying speech as criminal is pretty high, and the President did not even come close to meeting it.

Try to set aside what you think about President Trump. That’s a stretch goal for a lot of us, but let’s stretch: consider, for just a moment, that there might be an issue here that’s bigger than the President himself, and that could have repercussions that go far beyond January of 2021.

Those who call for the President’s removal from office are asking that punitive action be taken — in fact, that the most punitive action which can be taken, in the case of the Chief Executive, be taken — for his exercise of constitutionally protected speech.

Let that sink in. If the most powerful man in the United States can receive the highest punishment which Congress can mete out for the non-crime of speaking in a way that offends many people, then what protection does anyone have to speak freely? What does it mean to set a precedent that a sitting President can be removed from office for constitutionally protected speech?

During the Kavanaugh hearings, I argued that it was critical that the Senate confirm the nominee following the vague and unsubstantiated allegations made by Ms. Ford. A failure to do so would diminish the Senate’s authority by signaling that any future nominee could be derailed by nothing more than an unverifiable claim of past misbehavior.

Something even greater than that is at stake here. If we remove the sitting President, a man who received, barely two months ago, the support of more than seventy million Americans, that decision should be rooted in the most profound and solid Constitutional reasoning. Anything less elevates virtue signaling above the Constitution, and both endorses and enshrines the left’s view that the right not to be offended transcends freedom of speech and the rule of law.

If this disregard for law and the Constitution were coming only from the left, from people who already held neither law nor the Constitution in high esteem, I could almost overlook it as merely more of the unprincipled toxicity of the progressive movement. But some on the right are falling for this too.

It’s time to put one’s feelings about the President aside, and to take a hard-headed look at the law and the Constitutional principles that are at stake. Everyone’s right to free expression is in the dock right now. That serves a left that has already embraced censorship and controlled speech. We on the right must do better.