[WASHINGTONEXAMINER] Howard DeanFormer Dem governor of Vermont or Rhode Island or one of those dinky states. Howard lost his bid to be president by shrieking and screaming and acting like a loon. Then they made him chairman of the Dem national campaign committee, where he continued doing the same things only nobody paid any attention....
thinks "hate speech" is not protected by the First Amendment. A New York University professor was given space in the New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
to deride the idea of "a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks" and to defend protestors who, using violence, shut down a speech that was to be delivered recently by Charles Murray, the social scientist. A political science professor at Middlebury, the college where Murray was barracked, jostled, and threatened, apologized to the perpetrators for inviting Murray.
Justification of modern, left-wing fascism
...a political system developed in Italy symbolized by the Roman
fasces-- thin reeds, each flimsy in itself but unbreakable when bound into a bundle. The word is nowadays thrown around by all sorts of people who have no idea what they're talking about...
and spineless capitulation in the face of it is becoming more common. The illiberal tide is rising. This isn't just a thing among wacky rich kids at colleges that aren't worth the fees they charge. No, a growing minority on the left argues against the principle of free speech and against the idea of open debate. They use bad law and bad philosophy for their arguments.
They would, without a doubt, gravely regret the consequences if they got their way, for the results would be pernicious.
Ann Coulter, the right-wing provocateur, was invited to speak at the University of Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,, Berkeley, recently, which infuriated campus holy warriors. Some of them protested and threatened massive disruption, at which the university caved in and canceled Coulter's speech. The censors -- they are thought police, the same ilk as book burners -- had won. They deployed the threat of violence to silence a voice that disagreed with them.
Former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean thought this was just fine. Citing a tasteless Ann Coulter joke about Timothy McVeigh blowing up the New York Times building, Dean wrote on Twitter "Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment."
Dean is an ass. He is flatly wrong, as every scholar of the First Amendment could show. Hate speech, crazy speech, idiotic speech, communist speech, fascist speech, racist speech, sexist speech -- they're all protected by the Constitution. Incitement to violence, speech actually urging people to attack others, is a rare exception to the freedom of speech. But joking that you wished someone were dead doesn't count as incitement.