The business advertising almost completely ignored the most significant change in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. Not surprisingly, that’s because it makes Walz seem like an conservative and a foolish in one fell sweep:
J. D. Vance: The most sacred straight under the United States politics is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misconceptions. Kamala Harris wants to apply…
Tim Walz: …]inaudible ] threatening or love conversation…
J. D. Vance: … the power of state and Big Tech to silence citizens from speaking their minds. That did much outlast democracy in the face of this day. Republicans and Democrats should both accept repression, in my opinion. This inspire one another. This argue about ideas, and then let’s arrive up later.
Tim Walz: You ca n’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the exam. That’s the Supreme Court exam.
J. D. Vance: Tim. Flames in a crowded drama? You guys wanted to ban users from Facebook because they claimed young children should n’t wear masks.
CBS News ‘ Norah O’Donnell: Senator, the government does have the floor.
Tim Walz: Sorry.
Okay, this analyze what happened below. Walz challenged Vance on Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the fate of democracy they would n’t be so adamantly pro-censorship. Especially, Walz has previously said, very wrong from any legal or moral aspect, that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation”.
Walz interjects to, near as I can tell, try and understand that he was also talking about limiting” threatening” thoughts or “hate speech”. Interestingly, I looked at numerous discussion transcriptions, and none of them had this quite loud exclamation included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the piece about” threatening or hate talk” is quite obvious. In any case, Walz is doing a terrible task of defending himself.
The legal requirements for” threatening” speech or incitement may become clearer, but it’s still a laden issue. As for “hate speech”, he has no notion what he’s talking about. You may not like it, but “hate talk” is totally protected conversation. The First Amendment is definitely a right to insult people without lawful sanction, also gratuitously. Then, policing speech is just a device for government persecution. After all, who defines what constitutes “hate talk”? Walz appears to be suggesting that he wants to imprison people who do n’t use preferred pronouns and similar terms.
But the coup de grace for sinister ignorance is Walz saying,” You ca n’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the exam. That’s the Supreme Court exam”. Now, if you have any knowledge of First Amendment issues, civil libertarians will scurry out in hives when the “fire in a packed drama” line comes to mind. Unsurprisingly, a few years ago, The Atlantic published a very good article about the meaning behind the word:
In actuality, though, shouting” Fire” in a packed theater is never a large First Amendment hole permitting the rules of speech. The phrase was written in a manner unrelated to those that did n’t involve yelling, fires, crowds, or theaters. In a Philadelphia federal court, Charles T. Schenck, the general secretary of the United States Socialist Party, was found guilty of breaking the Espionage Act by printing advertisements that decried the defense review as illegal.
Justice Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court in a six-paragraph opinion on March 3, 1919, that Schenck’s conviction was justified because the leaflets advocated for preventing military recruiting and constituted a” clear and present danger” during a time of war. We acknowledge that in many cases and in typical circumstances, the accused would have been protected by their legal rights to say everything that was stated in the round. ” But the figure of every action depends on the conditions under which it is carried out. The strictest rules for free speech did not prevent a person from” shoving up flames in a theater and causing a panic”
In essence, arresting persons for handing out anti-war poetry was justified by comparing it to shouting flames in a crowded drama, but the rest of the content is worth reading for the whole story. Which is unjustifiable. Eventually, Holmes himself made a radical change in his own argument a year later, and Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 overturned the Supreme Court decision above pretty definitively. ” Fire in a crowded drama” was not a reliable” Supreme Court test” as Walz put it, and it’s been utterly useless as a matter of law since Walz was in kindergarten.
This is not a trivial issue around. I have no desire to defend what transpired on January 6 ( though I do believe that many people received unfair legal penalties for participating in the riot and that this was done out of partisan disgrace ). However, Vance is completely correct to say that Jan. 6’s embrace of censorship by the Democratic Party is far more disturbing than anything else.
How do I know this? Well, to begin, unlike Jan. 6, repression has affected much more people and is an ongoing problem. This release is suing the State Department for promoting Big Tech repression equipment in a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire and the state of Texas. The State Department defends their actions as part of a frightful campaign to combat “misinformation,” which is routinely defined as any news that liberal academics and federal bureaucrats do n’t believe is politically appropriate.
Earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, who knowingly spread lies about President Trump treasonously colluding with Russia to undermine a fairly elected president, sent a letter to tech companies telling them to censor “false, hateful, and violent content” because it is a” threat” to the upcoming election. But who decides what information is false, cruel, or harsh here? There is no elected official in charge of deciding who gets to say what, despite Adam Schiff’s reputation as an unworthy judge of these things. And sending papers that attempt to intimidate personal companies into thwarting Americans ‘ most fundamental constitutional rights… nicely, maybe we live in more civilized days, but I can imagine how the Sons of Liberty may have responded to for a politician.
And it’s not just officials, the First Amendment is also being constantly undermined by the persons who, in theory, have the biggest play in protecting it. The silence of our corporate media is yet another indication that they secretly believe that censorship of rebellious citizens is required. How exactly do they expect journalism’s current business model to succeed if they continue to refuse a vaccine that does n’t actually prevent the disease, stubbornly point out the octogenarian the White House has dementia, and wo n’t vote for who they are told to?
The truth is that less people are likely to read this article right now because it is being constantly suppressed by Big Tech. Even if I did n’t have the documents to prove that this publication was being unfairly and unconstitutionally targeted for suppression by the feds, the mere fact that I had to type “vaccine” in the previous paragraph was probably sufficient to warn The Algorithms that this article will always appear on page six of any relevant search results. The resident in me only accepts this as easy tyranny, despite the poet in me wanting to take note of the twisted humor of an article warning about the obliteration of the First Amendment being constantly censored.
I wo n’t tell you how to vote, unlike so many of my peers, who, alas, believe my parents have sincerity in telling their friends that I sell used cars to avoid the humiliation of admitting to being a journalist. However, it is accurate to say that Tim Walz and his supporters detest the First Amendment and detest it in all respects.
And when people like that get in power, we all lose.