Tag Archives: free speech

It’s Broader than That

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Dominic Green, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression, wrote of the German government’s attempt to censor—to bar from public viewing—a movie that was, by most accounts, badly done schlock (Green’s term). The rationale was that the movie depicted unrepentant and graphic violence by German vigilantes against Germany’s “immigrants,” the illegal aliens present in that nation.

German regulators’ problem with Citizen Vigilante wasn’t its depiction of unspeakable acts, but their unmentionable perpetrators. For years, European governments did their best to deny that mass immigration, notably from majority-Muslim societies, correlated to documented rises in the number of sexual crimes, especially gang rape.

Green closed his piece with this:

We like to think of the arts as our conscience, pushing social problems to our attention. If Europeans must rely on cinéastes of Mr Boll’s caliber to depict Europe’s current problems, it’s because no one else wants to admit their nature and extent.
Mr Boll has illuminated the crisis of political legitimacy and social order that is rapidly unraveling Europe’s peace. His film was censored to keep the peace. That shows the severity of the continent’s crisis, and the fragility of Europe’s peace.

It’s broader in scope than that, though. Government censorship, of nearly anything in any milieu, is a clear and dispositive sign of the intellectual bankruptcy, arrogance of Knowing Better, of cowardice of the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict it. Even the (legitimate) censor of slander is after the fact, not preemptive.

If the citizenry cannot speak freely, they cannot be free. It’s on those citizens in their aggregate—We the People as we put it in the opening phrase of our Constitution—not just individual makers of bad movies or one-off rich idealists, to change out those politicians who would limit our speech.

Equal Time is Obsolete

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That’s the claim of Thomas Hazlett, an economics prof at Clemson University and chief economist at the FCC late century, in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Critics say it has outlived its usefulness, as today’s media landscape offers a cornucopia of platforms unknown in 1920s America. The critics are right, except for one thing: The rule has never been useful and has always functioned mostly to suppress coverage for challengers.

On the contrary, the media routinely suppresses coverage, not just for challenger politicians in general, but for politicians on the right side of American politics, whether candidate or incumbent—and not just in politics: media routinely suppresses coverage of much of the discourse, on any subject, from the right.

We have The New York Times announcing around the time Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016 that there no longer could be balanced news reporting; news writers must take (the Left) side.

We have broadcast network anchors announcing that there are not two sides to arguments, in many cases there is only one side—and news anchors Know Better what that correct side is.

We have major newspapers announcing that they will no longer publish letters to their editors that dispute man-caused climate warming; that science is, those editors pronounced, settled.

We have media in general spiking stories that disputed the Russia hoax and the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop.

We have social media actively censoring posts from the right, even canceling the social media accounts of Conservative Presidential candidates and a variety of other accounts containing postings of information from the right.

Hazlett added this claim:

“Equal time” requirements tax free speech and turn debates into media circuses. The networks won’t broadcast them, and major-party candidates boycott them.

This is risible on its face. The former is the “media’s” decision, and their decision to not broadcast the debates is an obvious argument for the equal time law. The latter is a politician’s decision and is wholly irrelevant to the question of equal time legitimacy. Equal time requires outlets to offer equal time to all candidates; it does not require all candidates to participate.

The Radio Act of 1927 might need tweaking to bring it into the 21st century, but its principle—equal time for political candidates—remains highly useful.

Free Speech in Illinois

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Particularly, free speech in Progressive-Democratic Party reigned-over Illinois. A charitable organization, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender, wants to register as a charitable organization in Illinois, but it’s being blocked by the State’s Secretary of State, Alexi Giannoulias.

Giannoulias’ rationalization is that a State law, the General Not for Profit Corporation Act, bars the use of terms like “regular democrat,” “regular democratic,” “regular republican,” “democrat,” “democratic” or “republican”  in any organization’s name without the party’s prior permission. It doesn’t matter that these terms are entirely generic and not—nor being generic, can they be—trademarked or copyrighted in any way.

DIAG is being blocked from registering in Illinois because it opposes Party’s support for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions so they more closely resemble the opposite sex over those procedures’ permanent effects, especially in children. The use of “Democrats” in the organization’s name is just an excuse, and DIAG, along with Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have sued the State and Giannoulis over the legitimacy of that part of the law.

This is the level of free speech that Party allows in Illinois: what is freely spoken is what Party says its subjects are free to speak.

So Much for Liberty

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Contempt for ordinary citizens is the order of the day in the United Kingdom, which has fallen and can’t seem to get up.

[T]he [British] government is moving to allow jury trials for “indictable only” offenses such as murder and “either way” offenses with likely sentences of more than three years in prison. Judge-only “swift” courts will hear cases ranging from burglary and theft to sexual assault and stalking. Judges will also sit without a jury in fraud and financial cases deemed too complex for jurors.

This is…disappointing. It’s also a revival of the 350-year-old Bushell’s Case but with the addendum of eliminating the case’s question altogether. Bushell’s Case was a trial of a couple of government-defined religious miscreants during which the presiding judge refused to accept the jury’s acquittal verdict and jailed the ringleader, Edward Bushell, until he voted for the judge-approved verdict. That case was resolved on appeal in favor of Bushell and British commoners generally, extending as the appeal finally ruled habeas corpus to those commoners as well as the nobility.

Now the British government is moving to go beyond that presiding judge’s position and eliminate juries altogether in a vast number of cases. No juries, no verdicts that run counter to the government’s position.

This revival also is a clear expression of the contempt with which British government men and women hold their subjects: commoners are just too grindingly stupid to understand many kinds of cases, and so they must be led away so their Betters can handle them without any pesky commoner interference.

Juries? We ain’t got no juries. We don’t need no juries! We don’t have to show you any stinkin’ juries!

Free Speech vs “Free Speech”

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom pretends to favor free speech even as he attacks it and seeks to limit it. Under Newsom,

California law requires companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that “do business” in the state—which can mean having a single employee or contractor in the state—to detail how speculative climate-related risks could affect their businesses.
Companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue will also have to report their CO2 emissions, including those from suppliers, customers, and contractors. Some 10,000 companies will have to comply with the first rule, and more than 5,000 with the second.

This is nothing but government-mandated speech, which is antithetical to speech freedom

Activist Federal judges are playing their role in this limitation [emphasis added].

A lawsuit by the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups argues that the mandated climate disclosures violate the First Amendment by compelling business to speak on an intensely controversial subject. The state claimed in response that it is regulating business conduct, not speech—ergo, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
Federal Judge Otis Wright in August rejected this defense, but he agreed with the state that the climate disclosures are constitutionally kosher because they implicate commercial speech, which merits a lower level of scrutiny under the First Amendment. This blurs a crucial distinction between commercial and non-commercial business speech.

This is even worse. Wright demonstrated his activist judicial bent by directly tying in our 1st Amendment and then saying it doesn’t apply to some (government disfavored) speech. Wright has directly attacked, with this position, the freedom Americans are explicitly allowed under that Amendment’s speech clause.

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….

There’s nothing in that clause that segregates speech into categories of speakers or of types of speech. No law abridging, means exactly that, neither more nor less.

At bottom, free speech is like the longstanding saw about pregnancy: either we have free speech, or we do not. There is no such thing as “a little free speech” or speech that is “somewhat free.” Most Americans understand that. It’s instructive that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and activist judges do not. We can fix the one promptly through our elections. Fixing the other will take longer, but we can fix it, too, through our elections as we choose Congressmen and Presidents who will nominate and then confirm judges who adhere to the text of our Constitution and our statutes rather than to their personal views of “social needs.”