Free Speech For Me...

"First it's bullshit, then it's normalized, then it's policy, then it's law."

This is the left-wing progression of how they get things done, whether it's Obamacare, or gay marriage, or "trans" rights. Or, as in this case, criminalizing the words (and ultimately, the ideas) of your opposition. Of course, for years now, the left has wanted to make disagreeing with them a crime, and now, apparently, is the time they've decided to try to make it happen.

So Democratic propagandist/bulldog Howard Dean has of late been making some embarrassingly ill-informed statements on Twitter to the effect that the 1st Amendment was never intended to protect "hate speech" and similarly, there have been think pieces along these same lines published in the NY Times and the New Republic.

Yeah, it's bullshit, but Obamacare started out as bullshit, too.

This is the progression noted in an article by John Nolte. His point is that Dean knows full well that what he's peddling is bullshit, but he has a specific endgame in view:

Dean wants to normalize a fascist argument into something acceptable among America's elite, something that will eventually be found acceptable within the judiciary, and eventually result in a Supreme Court that finds it acceptable.

And so the big question is, of course, who is it exactly who gets to decide what constitutes "hate speech?" Why, a bunch of liberal judges, of course! Who else did you think Dean (and the NYT and TNR) had in mind? Remember, for Dean and his ilk, "our violence is free speech, but your free speech is violence" is sound, progressive legal theory.

But here's something. Perhaps Dean would not have the support of Bernie Sanders, who, surprisingly, sounds like he's kind of old school about the whole "free speech" thing, i.e. he believes it also applies to people he disagrees with:

“Obviously Ann Coulter’s outrageous―to my mind, off the wall. But you know, people have a right to give their two cents-worth, give a speech, without fear of violence and intimidation,” he added.

The senator from Vermont also slammed protesters who said Coulter shouldn’t be given a platform to speak at the university, calling them “a sign of intellectual weakness.”

“If you can’t ask Ann Coulter in a polite way questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world?” he said.

Heh. When you've lost Bernie Sanders...

posted by OregonMuse at 11:32 AM

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