Progressives take aim at the 1st Amendment

[Anti Federalist]

After eviscerating most of the bill of rights, along with their neo-con pals on the "right", leftist progressives are now taking aim at limiting the 1st Amendment as well.

How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/politics/first-amendment-conservatives-supreme-court.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FFreedom% 20of%20Speech%20and%20Expression&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

Trump supporters signing a poster promoting free speech at a rally in 2017 in Berkeley, Calif.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

By Adam Liptak

June 30, 2018

WASHINGTON — On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.

The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion.

Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

The Citizens United campaign finance case, for instance, was decided on free-speech grounds, with the five-justice conservative majority ruling that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending by corporations. The government, the majority said, has no business regulating political speech.

The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace and corrupt democracy.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

And an increasingly conservative judiciary has been more than a little receptive to this argument. A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras.

As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights.

In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.

There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

“Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”

Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987. “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote in 1971 in a law-review article. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

Changing Interpretations

In the great First Amendment cases in the middle of the 20th century, few conservatives spoke up for the protection of political dissenters, including communists and civil rights leaders, comedians using vulgar language on the airwaves or artists exploring sexuality in novels and on film.

In 1971, Robert H. Bork, then a prominent conservative law professor and later a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee, wrote that the First Amendment should be interpreted narrowly in a law-review article that remains one of the most-cited of all time.

“Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

But a transformative ruling by the Supreme Court five years later began to change that thinking. The case, a challenge to a state law that banned advertising the prices of prescription drugs, was filed by Public Citizen, a consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader. The group argued that the law hurt consumers, and helped persuade the court, in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, to protect advertising and other commercial speech.

The only dissent in the decision came from Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court’s most conservative member.

Kathleen M. Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that it did not take long for corporations to see the opportunities presented by the decision.

Conservatives in Charge, the Supreme Court Moved Right

“While the case was litigated by consumer protection advocates,” she wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “corporate speakers soon became the principal beneficiaries of subsequent rulings that, for example, struck down restrictions on including alcohol content on beer can labels, limitations on outdoor tobacco advertising near schools and rules governing how compounded drugs may be advertised.”

That trend has continued, with businesses mounting First Amendment challenges to gun control laws, securities regulations, country-of-origin labels, graphic cigarette warnings and limits on off-label drug marketing.

“I was a bit queasy about it because I had the sense that we were unleashing something, but nowhere near what happened,” Mr. Nader said. “It was one of the biggest boomerangs in judicial cases ever.”

“I couldn’t be Merlin,” he added. “We never thought the judiciary would be as conservative or corporate. This was an expansion that was not preordained by doctrine. It was preordained by the political philosophies of judges.”

Not all of the liberal scholars and lawyers who helped create modern First Amendment law are disappointed. Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University, who wrote a seminal 1971 article proposing First Amendment protection for commercial speech, said he was pleased with the Roberts court’s decisions.

“Its most important contributions are in the commercial speech and corporate speech areas,” he said. “It’s a workmanlike, common sense approach.”

Liberals also played a key role in creating modern campaign finance law in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision that struck down limits on political spending by individuals and was the basis for Citizens United, the 2010 decision that did away with similar limits for corporations and unions.

One plaintiff was Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, who had challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 presidential primaries — from the left. Another was the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York affiliate.

Professor Neuborne, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said he now regrets the role he played in winning the case. “I signed the brief in Buckley,” he said. “I’m going to spend long amounts of time in purgatory.”

To Professor Seidman, cases like these were part of what he describes as a right-wing takeover of the First Amendment since the liberal victories in the years Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court.

“With the receding of Warren court liberalism, free-speech law took a sharp right turn,” Professor Seidman wrote in a new article to be published in the Columbia Law Review. “Instead of providing a shield for the powerless, the First Amendment became a sword used by people at the apex of the American hierarchy of power. Among its victims: proponents of campaign finance reform, opponents of cigarette addiction, the L.B.G.T.Q. community, labor unions, animal rights advocates, environmentalists, targets of hate speech and abortion providers.”

The title of the article asked, “Can Free Speech Be Progressive?”

“The answer,” the article said, “is no.”

Shifting Right

The right turn has been even more pronounced under Chief Justice Roberts.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a larger share of First Amendment cases concerning conservative speech than earlier courts had, according to the study prepared for The Times. And it has ruled in favor of conservative speech at a higher rate than liberal speech as compared to earlier courts.

The court’s docket reflects something new and distinctive about the Roberts court, according to the study, which was conducted by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis; Andrew D. Martin, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the dean of its College of Literature, Science and the Arts; and Kevin Quinn, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

“The Roberts court — more than any modern court — has trained its sights on speech promoting conservative values,” the study found. “Only the current court has resolved a higher fraction of disputes challenging the suppression of conservative rather than liberal expression.”

The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 was almost exclusively concerned with cases concerning liberal speech. Of its 60 free-expression cases, only five, or about 8 percent, challenged the suppression of conservative speech.

The proportion of challenges to restrictions on conservative speech has steadily increased. It rose to 22 percent in the court led by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1969 to 1986; to 42 percent in the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist from 1986 to 2005; and to 65 percent in the Roberts court.

The Roberts court does more than hear a larger proportion of cases concerning conservative expression. It is also far more likely than earlier courts to rule for conservative speech than for liberal speech. The result, the study found, has been “a fundamental transformation of the court’s free-expression agenda.”

In past decades, broad coalitions of justices have often been receptive to First Amendment arguments. The court has protected videos of animal cruelty, hateful protests at military funerals, violent video games and lies about military awards, often by lopsided margins.

But last week’s two First Amendment blockbusters were decided by 5-to-4 votes, with the conservatives in the majority ruling in favor of conservative plaintiffs.

On Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that requiring health clinics opposed to abortion to tell women how to obtain the procedure violated the clinics’ free-speech rights. In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that was a misuse of First Amendment principles.

“Using the First Amendment to strike down economic and social laws that legislatures long would have thought themselves free to enact will, for the American public, obscure, not clarify, the true value of protecting freedom of speech,” Justice Breyer wrote.

On Wednesday, in announcing the decision on public unions, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was applying settled and neutral First Amendment principles to protect workers from being forced to say things at odds with their beliefs. He suggested that the decision on public unions should have been unanimous.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” he wrote. “Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues — say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.”

In response, Justice Kagan said the court’s conservatives had found a dangerous tool, “turning the First Amendment into a sword.” The United States, she said, should brace itself.

“Speech is everywhere — a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it),” she wrote. “For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

[Cleaner44]

Democrats are completely lost right now. This is just another reason to appreciate Trump. He has caused the left to go so crazy that they have surrendered being champions of working class Americans and the 1st Amendment. Now they are branded as caring more about Mexican citizens than they care about American citizens. Between their abandonment of traditional left wing positions and the in fighting of socialists vs establishment liberals, they won't have a cohesive message for years.

It used to be that the left stood for the 1st amendment and the right stood for the 2nd amendment. Now the right can be the champion of both and the left is standing around crying about losing the losing the supreme court for generations. These are good times!

[Swordsmyth]

Democrats are completely lost right now. This is just another reason to appreciate Trump. He has caused the left to go so crazy that they have surrendered being champions of working class Americans and the 1st Amendment. Now they are branded as caring more about Mexican citizens than they care about American citizens. Between their abandonment of traditional left wing positions and the in fighting of socialists vs establishment liberals, they won't have a cohesive message for years.

It used to be that the left stood for the 1st amendment and the right stood for the 2nd amendment. Now the right can be the champion of both and the left is standing around crying about losing the losing the supreme court for generations. These are good times!

It is long past time we took their best issues away from them and now they are giving them up voluntarily.

[enhanced_deficit]

Bipartisanship between MAGA Republicans and Pelosi Dems could make things happen :




US President Donald Trump speaks during a post-election press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2018.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he's open to working across the aisle with Democrats to regulate social media

In a lengthy press conference a day after the midterm elections that saw the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, Trump was asked if social media companies were unfairly censoring conservative voices and if he would work with the opposition party to rein in their power.
"Believe it or not, I'm really one that really likes free speech," Trump told reporters. "A lot of people don't understand that. When you start regulating, a lot of bad things can happen. But I would certainly talk to the Democrats if they want to do that. And I think they do want to do that."

[acptulsa]

There are two separate issues going on here. They are being framed in terms of Left v. Right, but that isn't the heart of the matter.

On the one hand, we have money and influence being used to silence speech. Electronic platforms silence dissent, and because they are corporate, not government, the First does not apply. But DARPA invented the net (or was it Al Gore? :rolleyes:), the CIA financed Facebook, and there is some question how much government involvement there actually is. Clearly if the net is in any way a government platform then any citizen has a right to express his or her political beliefs on any corner of it. This current round of censorship is unconstitutional in that case.

On the other hand we have money and influence being used to modify and magnify speech. Individual American stockholders in corporations clearly have constitutional rights, not because they're stockholders, but because they're citizens. But when they buy stock, does that transfer their rights to the corporation? If as individuals they are limited in the campaign contributions they can make, do their limited rights translate into unlimited rights for the corporation? Does their stock turn a corporation into a citizen? What turns a group of citizens with limited rights into a corporation with unlimited rights? Do these unlimited rights, combined with limited liability, turn stockholders into super-citizens--or is it only the corporate officers, who spend the "speech money" and commit the crimes they are not liable for who become these super-citizens?

And above all, is money really speech?

I, for one, am not impressed by the way these questions are being answered. And adding the quasi-"liberal v. conservative" noise to the conversation is only obscuring the real issues.

[Origanalist]

There are two separate issues going on here. They are being framed in terms of Left v. Right, but that isn't the heart of the matter.

On the one hand, we have money and influence being used to silence speech. Electronic platforms silence dissent, and because they are corporate, not government, the First does not apply. But DARPA invented the net (or was it Al Gore? :rolleyes:), the CIA financed Facebook, and there is some question how much government involvement there actually is. Clearly if the net is in any way a government platform then any citizen has a right to express his or her political beliefs on any corner of it. This current round of censorship is unconstitutional in that case.

On the other hand we have money and influence being used to modify and magnify speech. Individual American stockholders in corporations clearly have constitutional rights, not because they're stockholders, but because they're citizens. But when they buy stock, does that transfer their rights to the corporation? If as individuals they are limited in the campaign contributions they can make, do their limited rights translate into unlimited rights for the corporation? Does their stock turn a corporation into a citizen? What turns a group of citizens with limited rights into a corporation with unlimited rights? Do these unlimited rights, combined with limited liability, turn stockholders into super-citizens--or is it only the corporate officers, who spend the "speech money" and commit the crimes they are not liable for who become these super-citizens?

And above all, is money really speech?

I, for one, am not impressed by the way these questions are being answered. And adding the quasi-"liberal v. conservative" noise to the conversation is only obscuring the real issues.

There is one hell of a lot of that going around.

[AuH20]

Democrats are completely lost right now. This is just another reason to appreciate Trump. He has caused the left to go so crazy that they have surrendered being champions of working class Americans and the 1st Amendment. Now they are branded as caring more about Mexican citizens than they care about American citizens. Between their abandonment of traditional left wing positions and the in fighting of socialists vs establishment liberals, they won't have a cohesive message for years.

It used to be that the left stood for the 1st amendment and the right stood for the 2nd amendment. Now the right can be the champion of both and the left is standing around crying about losing the losing the supreme court for generations. These are good times!

Once they secured power, the natural progression was to outlaw speech hostile to their agenda. All of their platitudes are bullshit. Yes, there a few liberals mixed in, but most are dyed in the wool progs. Progs heavily outnumber actual liberals on the left.

Notice that most of the people on our side, wish to be left alone to our own devices. The only time we kinetically mobilize is when we are being fiercely attacked, which has been going on for quite sometime.

[Swordsmyth]

There are two separate issues going on here. They are being framed in terms of Left v. Right, but that isn't the heart of the matter.

On the one hand, we have money and influence being used to silence speech. Electronic platforms silence dissent, and because they are corporate, not government, the First does not apply. But DARPA invented the net (or was it Al Gore? :rolleyes:), the CIA financed Facebook, and there is some question how much government involvement there actually is. Clearly if the net is in any way a government platform then any citizen has a right to express his or her political beliefs on any corner of it. This current round of censorship is unconstitutional in that case.

On the other hand we have money and influence being used to modify and magnify speech. Individual American stockholders in corporations clearly have constitutional rights, not because they're stockholders, but because they're citizens. But when they buy stock, does that transfer their rights to the corporation? If as individuals they are limited in the campaign contributions they can make, do their limited rights translate into unlimited rights for the corporation? Does their stock turn a corporation into a citizen? What turns a group of citizens with limited rights into a corporation with unlimited rights? Do these unlimited rights, combined with limited liability, turn stockholders into super-citizens--or is it only the corporate officers, who spend the "speech money" and commit the crimes they are not liable for who become these super-citizens?

And above all, is money really speech?

I, for one, am not impressed by the way these questions are being answered. And adding the quasi-"liberal v. conservative" noise to the conversation is only obscuring the real issues.
Corporations are nothing more or less than groups of people and those people have a right to buy the services of other people to broadcast their speech.
Even if money isn't speech the government has no right to decree limits to citizens' use of their money, ALL campaign finance limits are unconstitutional, you could argue that Congress can limit candidates and require them to disclose the sources of their donations due to A1S4:


The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

But Congress can't even do that for Presidential elections because they are not empowered to do so and they are technically state level elections for electors.

[AuH20]

Here's the game.

(1) Champion free speech, so you can turn the culture tide.

(2) Shut down those very same rights, when you have finally turned society on it's ear

[Swordsmyth]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/images/misc/quote_icon.png Originally Posted by Cleaner44 http://www.ronpaulforums.com/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=6647311#post6647311)

Democrats are completely lost right now. This is just another reason to appreciate Trump. He has caused the left to go so crazy that they have surrendered being champions of working class Americans and the 1st Amendment. Now they are branded as caring more about Mexican citizens than they care about American citizens. Between their abandonment of traditional left wing positions and the in fighting of socialists vs establishment liberals, they won't have a cohesive message for years.

It used to be that the left stood for the 1st amendment and the right stood for the 2nd amendment. Now the right can be the champion of both and the left is standing around crying about losing the losing the supreme court for generations. These are good times!




Once they secured power, the natural progression was to outlaw speech.

And yet we have self proclaimed libertarians and even anarchists (LOL) calling for just that right here on this site.

[acptulsa]

And yet we have self proclaimed libertarians and even anarchists (LOL) calling for just that right here on this site.

No one is calling for a limitation if speech here, and you know it. One minute you're allowing that money might not be speech, the next you're calling money speech again.

We know you're elitist and corporatist. But not everyone has your faith that he who has the most gold makes the best rules.

We have gotten in this insufferable liberal paradise you despise so much by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with commercials, encouraging the media to refuse to name candidates who can't afford to be their customers. Short-circuiting Jefferson's 'diligent press' with money may be a corporatist value, but it's not a tenent of the constitutionalist.

Politicians hire corporations to give free stuff to liberals, and those corporations buy enough television to give their pet pols name recognition even among zero-information voters. Your money-is-speech "conservative values" are not only not particularly constitutional, they are shooting you in the foot.

[Swordsmyth]

No one is calling for a limitation if speech here, and you know it. One minute you're allowing that money might not be speech, the next you're calling money speech again.
I never allowed that money for speech might not be speech, I just made the point that even if it wasn't Congress can't limit it.

And YOU did call for limitation of speech, YOU called for a ban on political ads.


We know you're elitist and corporatist. But not everyone has your faith that he who has the most gold makes the best rules.
Typical leftist lies.


We have gotten in this insufferable liberal paradise you despise so much by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with commercials, encouraging the media to refuse to name candidates who can't afford to be their customers. Short-circuiting Jefferson's 'diligent press' with money may be a corporatist value, but it's not a tenent of the constitutionalist.
We have gotten into this mess for many different reasons but allowing the government to limit speech so that only the MSM that was always owned by the corporations you so despise gets to speak isn't the answer.

[WarmPotato]

(Sees title) - Typical Progressives :P

[acptulsa]

I never allowed that money for speech might not be speech, I just made the point that even if it wasn't Congress can't limit it.

A fine line to skate. And a pointless point to make, considering Congress limited individuals to $2300.


I And YOU did call for limitation of speech, YOU called for a ban on political ads.

That isn't a ban on what can be said, it's a ban on paying people to repeat it. You would deny there's a difference, but there is. I called for no censorship of speech. I merely suggested ending the practice of paying for speech to be repeated and amplified.

Lying about what I said is not only a transparent trick, it's yet another violation if those forum guidelines you seem uniquely immune to.


ITypical leftist lies.

You are literally saying there is no one on earth who doubts that the person with the most gold makes the best rules.


IWe have gotten into this mess for many different reasons but allowing the government to limit speech so that only the MSM that was always owned by the corporations you so despise gets to speak isn't the answer.

No, it isn't. Which is why I never suggested anything of the sort. As anyone with a lick if honesty and a speck of sense can clearly see.

[Swordsmyth]

A fine line to skate. And a pointless point to make, considering Congress limited individuals to $2300.
So your argument is that because they do something unconstitutional they should do more of it?




That isn't a ban on what can be said, it's a ban on paying people to repeat it. You would deny there's a difference, but there is. I called for no censorship if speech. I merely suggested ending the practice of paying for speech to be repeated and amplified.
Which is a direct violation of the rights of those involved and of "freedom of the press" which is specifically protected in the 1stA.
You are a typical leftist that wants to use government to silence your opposition and thinks it will never come back to hurt them.




You are literally saying there is no one on earth who doubts that the person with the most gold makes the best rules.
No, I'm saying you lie and twist things when you make claims about what I believe, like you just did AGAIN.




No, it isn't. Which is why I never suggested anything of the sort. As anyone with a lick if honesty and a speck of sense can clearly see.
That is exactly what you promote, nobody would be allowed to buy ads and the media that is owned by the very corporations you despise would get to speak to the public as much as it wanted without any competition.

[acptulsa]

So your argument is that because they do something unconstitutional they should do more of it?



Which is a direct violation of the rights of those involved and of "freedom of the press" which is specifically protected in the 1stA.
You are a typical leftist that wants to use government to silence your opposition and thinks it will never come back to hurt them.




No, I'm saying you lie and twist things when you make claims about what I believe, like you just did AGAIN.



That is exactly what you promote, nobody would be allowed to buy ads and the media that is owned by the very corporations you despise would get to speak to the public as much as it wanted without any competition.

So in your ideal world a person should pay for his free speech, and if he wants more free speech he should buy stock in a corporation to buy it for him, and he should buy commercials on Jefferson's "vigorous press" so his candidate doesn't become He Who Must Not Be Named like the man the site you're on is named for did, and even though this is exactly how Adelson and Soros helped make this Soviet States of America we're in now, you have faith this will create a conservative paradise? Is that about it?

A body sure has to work hard to buy himself some "free speech".

[Swordsmyth]

So in your ideal world a person should pay for his free speech, and if he wants more free speech he should buy stock in a corporation to buy it for him, and he should buy commercials on Jefferson's "vigorous press" so his candidate doesn't become He Who Must Not Be Named like the man the site you're on is named for did, and even though this is exactly how Adelson and Soros helped make this Soviet States of America we're in now, you have faith this will create a conservative paradise? Is that about it?
Life isn't fair and some people have more wealth and power than others, any attempt change that like the one you propose will however only make things worse as I have pointed out.

There are many different causes of our problems, some of which we may be able to remedy somewhat by reducing government but giving government power to limit speech will only make things worse.

[acptulsa]

Life isn't fair and some people have more wealth and power than others, any attempt change that like the one you propose will however only make things worse as I have pointed out.

There are many different causes of our problems, some of which we may be able to remedy somewhat by reducing government but giving government power to limit speech will only make things worse.

You sure are a broken record. You love to repeat that limiting money to amplify speech is limiting speech. 'Giving government power to limit speech' is a cute tag line well calculated to frighten any libertarians, but it only works on those who can't see it's pure shyllshit.

So, the bottom line is the Bushes were swamp RINOs, but you're partisan enough to argue until Doomsday their SCOTUS nominees can do no wrong, even when you have no leg to stand on. Got it.

[Danke]

"To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan"

Oh Jesus Christ!

Sticks and stones may break my bone...

Stop censoring people with whom you disagree (like Alex Jones) and let the Citizens decide for themselves what to listen to.

[CaptUSA]

There are many different causes of our problems, some of which we may be able to remedy somewhat by reducing government but giving government power to limit speech will only make things worse.

Well, well... Since when do you not want to grow government to keep it from growing??? If this was a different issue, you'd be making the exact opposite argument:

"Government needs the power to limit speech because certain people will use that speech to limit your liberty!" <seems pretty ridiculous when you apply it to other realms, eh?>

[acptulsa]

Well, well... Since when do you not want to grow government to keep it from growing??? If this was a different issue, you'd be making the exact opposite argument:

"Government needs the power to limit speech because certain people will use that speech to limit your liberty!" <seems pretty ridiculous when you apply it to other realms, eh?>

Government can always count on partisans to abandon their principles when they think they can gain a little power by doing so.

The sad thing is they cling to "conventional wisdom", meaning hundred-year-old models of the way things are, like the antiquated notion that rich people contribute to Republicans. The cold hard facts of Soros, Adelson, Gates and the city of Hollywood are inconvenient truths that get blocked out, and that's how the Swamp tricks them into shooting themselves in the foot.

[Anti Federalist]

Stop censoring people with whom you disagree (like Alex Jones) and let the Citizens decide for themselves what to listen to.

This is not allowed comrade.

We made jokes about it and laughed when it happened, when government, by fatwa, decreed how much water your toilet can use.

If the citizen cannot decide for himself how much of his water to use, or his gasoline his car uses, or million other examples I can cite, that citizen certainly cannot be trusted to decide what he wants to listen to.

[Swordsmyth]

You sure are a broken record. You love to repeat that limiting money to amplify speech is limiting speech. 'Giving government power to limit speech' is a cute tag line well calculated to frighten any libertarians, but it only works on those who can't see it's pure shyll$#@!.

So, the bottom line is the Bushes were swamp RINOs, but you're partisan enough to argue until Doomsday their SCOTUS nominees can do no wrong, even when you have no leg to stand on. Got it.
Typical spin, I never said Bush nominees could do no wrong and you are the one who has no leg to stand on, that is why you won't debate the merits of your idea to give government more power and thereby give the corporations that own the MSM more power.

[Swordsmyth]

Well, well... Since when do you not want to grow government to keep it from growing??? If this was a different issue, you'd be making the exact opposite argument:

"Government needs the power to limit speech because certain people will use that speech to limit your liberty!" <seems pretty ridiculous when you apply it to other realms, eh?>
Nice strawman, the few places I believe government has a legitimate role are entirely different.

[Swordsmyth]

Government can always count on partisans to abandon their principles when they think they can gain a little power by doing so.

The sad thing is they cling to "conventional wisdom", meaning hundred-year-old models of the way things are, like the antiquated notion that rich people contribute to Republicans. The cold hard facts of Soros, Adelson, Gates and the city of Hollywood are inconvenient truths that get blocked out, and that's how the Swamp tricks them into shooting themselves in the foot.
More progressive nonsense, the very people you hate would be empowered by the things you suggest.

[Occam's Banana]

The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing [...]

Well, there's your problem, right there.

For the umpty-umpth time, the Anti-Federalists turn out to be absolutely right ...

(Even Alexander Hamilton scores some "stopped clock" points - the so-called "Bill of Rights" has indeed become nothing more than a list of revocable permissions magnanimously granted to the Mundanes, and not at all a list of prohibitions to be applied to the Federales ...)


[L]iberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights.

In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.

There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

“Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”

Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987. “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote in 1971 in a law-review article. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal wannabe Thought Police, that they are endowed by their Creator own sanctimonious self-righteousness with certain unalienable Rights Grievances, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness Bêtes Noires, Pet Peeves and the pursuit of Outrage ..."

[Swordsmyth]

Well, there's your problem, right there.

For the umpty-umpth time, the Anti-Federalists turn out to be absolutely right ...

(Even Alexander Hamilton scores some "stopped clock" points - the so-called "Bill of Rights" has indeed become nothing more than a list of revocable permissions magnanimously granted to the Mundanes, and not at all a list of prohibitions to be applied to the Federales ...)



"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal wannabe Thought Police, that they are endowed by their Creator own sanctimonious self-righteousness with certain unalienable Rights Grievances, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness Bêtes Noires, Pet Peeves and the pursuit of Outrage ..."
Even here we have "libertarians" and "anarchists" who want government to control speech:


I'd rather take a page from the playbook of the War on Tobacco and outlaw political advertising.

I remember when it was illegal for Big Pharma to advertise their wares. Seems to me repealing that law led to nothing but trouble.

Certainly campaign advertising budgets give the media one hell of an incentive to promote the candidate who got the most bribes campaign contributions.




Paid commercials are not free speech. Free speech happens when free people converse.

Only a corporate tool calls paid messages "free" speech--especially in an era when individual political donations are strictly limited but for corporations, the sky is the limit. Please keep exposing yourself like this.






https://i.pinimg.com/564x/47/d3/e1/47d3e180cfe792d2e07bb072aa810d80.jpg

[Occam's Banana]

There is a problem. A law is passed to fix the problem. Now there are two problems ...

[acptulsa]

Even here we have "libertarians" and "anarchists" who want government to control speech:

How many times do you need to repeat the same statement and conveniently delete the fact that you aren't talking about speech itself, but money to broadcast speech?

You figure repeating the same misleading statement a certain number of times will hypnotise people into thinking it isn't misleading? Just out of curiosity, how many times do you figure you have to repeat yourself before people magically forget you're leaving out key details? Twelve? Twenty?


There is a problem. A law is passed to fix the problem. Now there are two problems ...

Swordshyll doesn't see a problem. He doesn't figure the Bill of Rights says they can withhold your inalienable rights on a whim. He figures you have an ironclad right to buy them for cash.

[Swordsmyth]

blather

You called for a speech ban, not only is that self-evidently wrong but it would give the corporations and politicians you claim to oppose even more power.

[acptulsa]

You called for a speech ban...

Right, because if you can't talk on a paid commercial, you can't talk at all.


...not only is that self-evidently wrong but it would give the corporations and politicians you claim to oppose even more power.

Right, because the more television spots a corporation can buy, the less power it has.

Or should I use your best, most rational usual argument: :rolleyes:

So, are your posts, like television commercials, pre-recorded? Because they couldn't be more repetitious. Though I notice that while you continue to call money "speech", you have grown enough brain cells to stop calling it "free speech".

[Swordsmyth]

Right, because if you can't talk on a paid commercial, you can't talk at all.
LOL, any ban on any kind of speech is a speech ban.
A ban on handguns is a gun ban, a ban on semi-autos is a gun ban, a ban on full-autos is a gun ban, a ban on internet posts is a speech ban, a ban on leaflets is a speech ban and a ban on radio/TV ads is a speech ban.



Right, because the more television spots a corporation can buy, the less power it has.

Who owns the MSM? Corporations.

Who gets covered in the news? Politicians.

You would leave them with the only voices able to reach a mass audience.

I can't believe I have to explain this on a "libertarian" forum.

[acptulsa]

LOL, any ban on any kind of speech is a speech ban.

Who owns the MSM? Corporations.

Who gets covered in the news? Politicians.

You would leave them with the only voices able to reach a mass audience.

I can't believe I have to explain this on a "libertarian" forum.

They're basically in that position now, thanks to your Bush RINO-packed court limiting the donations of American citizens while allowing companies--even those owned by the very same foreigners you're scared to death might be voting--to enable candidates to buy all the repetitious amplified speech they want. Interesting you ignore that, offer no solutions to that, tacitly effectively approve of that, while screeching half-truths in multiple threads about my method of addressing it.

Got solutions? Or just a yen to turn half a dozen threads into platforms for libel? Or do you even consider it a problem that foreign business owners have more right to buy our candidates name recognition than U.S. citizens do?

As for your constant spam that I'm anti-speech, may I remind you I'm not talking about amplifying the speech of civilians, but of politicians? After all, campaign contributions don't speak for themselves (well, maybe so to speak), they enable the politicians to speak louder. What other part of the Bill of Rights do you figure is about guaranteeing the government and the politicians rights, rather than limiting their ability to interfere with us? Do you think guaranteeing the right of foreign-owned corporations to enable the amplification of the words of politicians--usually sitting politicians--is really the Original Intent of the framers of the Bill of Rights? Shall I take a page from your playbook and run around the forum posting in a dozen unrelated threads that you think the Bill of Rights should apply only to politicians and not to American civilians?

I guess I had better not try. That's yet another guideline violation that it seems only you can get away with.

[Swordsmyth]

They're basically in that position now, thanks to your Bush RINO-packed court limiting the donations of American citizens while allowing companies--even those owned by the very same foreigners you're scared to death might be voting--to enable candidates to buy all the repetitious amplified speech they want. Interesting you ignore that, offer no solutions to that, tacitly effectively approve of that, while screeching half-truths in multiple threads about my method of addressing it.

Got solutions? Or just a yen to turn half a dozen threads into platforms for libel? Or do you even consider it a problem that foreign business owners have more right to buy our candidates name recognition than U.S. citizens do?

As for your constant spam that I'm anti-speech, may I remind you I'm not talking about amplifying the speech of civilians, but of politicians? After all, campaign contributions don't speak for themselves (well, maybe so to speak), they enable the politicians to speak louder. What other part of the Bill of Rights do you figure is about guaranteeing the government and the politicians rights, rather than limiting their ability to interfere with us? Do you think guaranteeing the right of foreign-owned corporations to enable the amplification of the words of politicians--usually sitting politicians--is really the Original Intent of the framers of the Bill of Rights? Shall I take a page from your playbook and run around the forum posting in a dozen unrelated threads that you think the Bill of Rights should apply only to politicians and not to American civilians?

I guess I had better not try. That's yet another guideline violation that it seems only you can get away with.
And your solution is MORE government control?

As things stand ordinary Americans can band together in groups to buy ads to counter the corporations and politicians, you supported McCain-Feingold that would have limited that.

The answer to your concerns is LESS government, reduce campaign finance restrictions.

It is disgusting that you have the gall to come on a libertarian forum and call for government speech control.

[acptulsa]

And your solution is MORE government control?

It is disgusting that you have the gall to come on a libertarian forum and call for government speech control.

Government control of government is still a more libertarian position than out of control government.

What's disgusting is you coming here to say it's good if government and corporations have the power to shout down and drown out private American citizens. An incumbent's campaign is still government speech.

Now. How repetitive shall we make this conversation? Are you going to cut and paste previous posts--or the off topic and out of context posts you posted in those other half a dozen threads?

I find it amusing your behavior us so embarrassing that I can quote you in my sig and get it deleted by the mods.

[Swordsmyth]

Government control of government is still a more libertarian position than out of control government.

What's disgusting is you coming here to say it's good if government and corporations have the power to shout down and drown out private American citizens. An incumbent's campaign is still government speech.

Now. How repetitive shall we make this conversation? Are you going to cut and paste previous posts--or the off topic and out of context posts you posted in those other half a dozen threads?

I find it amusing your behavior us so embarrassing that I can quote you in my SIG and get it deleted by the mods.
Political speech is the most important kind of speech protected by the 1stA, you don't get to ban it just because you don't like some people, this thread is the perfect place for this conversation, you are taking aim at the 1stA for all to see and exposing that you are a progressive.

[acptulsa]

Deja vu all over again.

So Swordshyll thinks the Bill if Rights exists to give rights to politicians, and has no problem with apportioning greater rights to companies with zero U.S. stockholders than to U.S. citizens. Surprise, surprise.


...exposing that you are a progressive.

LOL. Because everyone who ever disagrees with the Bushes' SCOTUS RINOs is a prog, right? Well, I've heard stupider definitions. Just not often.

[Swordsmyth]

Deja vu all over again.

So Swordshyll thinks the Bill if Rights exists to give rights to politicians, and has no problem with apportioning greater rights to companies with zero U.S. stockholders than to U.S. citizens. Surprise, surprise.



LOL. Because everyone who ever disagrees with the Bushes' SCOTUS RINOs is a prog, right? Well, I've heard stupider definitions. Just not often.
"Everyone Tulsa doesn't like should be banned from speaking"

What other rights do you think people should need your permission to exercise?

[jmdrake]

There are two separate issues going on here. They are being framed in terms of Left v. Right, but that isn't the heart of the matter.

On the one hand, we have money and influence being used to silence speech. Electronic platforms silence dissent, and because they are corporate, not government, the First does not apply. But DARPA invented the net (or was it Al Gore? :rolleyes:), the CIA financed Facebook, and there is some question how much government involvement there actually is. Clearly if the net is in any way a government platform then any citizen has a right to express his or her political beliefs on any corner of it. This current round of censorship is unconstitutional in that case.

On the other hand we have money and influence being used to modify and magnify speech. Individual American stockholders in corporations clearly have constitutional rights, not because they're stockholders, but because they're citizens. But when they buy stock, does that transfer their rights to the corporation? If as individuals they are limited in the campaign contributions they can make, do their limited rights translate into unlimited rights for the corporation? Does their stock turn a corporation into a citizen? What turns a group of citizens with limited rights into a corporation with unlimited rights? Do these unlimited rights, combined with limited liability, turn stockholders into super-citizens--or is it only the corporate officers, who spend the "speech money" and commit the crimes they are not liable for who become these super-citizens?

And above all, is money really speech?

I, for one, am not impressed by the way these questions are being answered. And adding the quasi-"liberal v. conservative" noise to the conversation is only obscuring the real issues.

So.....RPF is wrong for banning Eduardo? 9/11 Truth threads shouldn't be relegated to Hot Topics? We are participating on a platform that doesn't allow everyone to post everything everywhere. Hmmmm.....

[acptulsa]

Swordshyll has nothing to add, but thinks whoever adds the last post wins.


https://youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE


So.....RPF is wrong for banning Eduardo? 9/11 Truth threads shouldn't be relegated to Hot Topics? We are participating on a platform that doesn't allow everyone to post everything everywhere. Hmmmm.....

Right you are. But at least we can say that the CIA didn't finance Josh and Bryan's startup.

Unlike Fedbook. So we're clearly not as dead wrong as Zuckerberg.

[Swordsmyth]

Swordshyll has nothing to add, but thinks whoever adds the last post wins.


https://youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
Tulsa can't defend his position so he attacks his opponent instead, kind of like how he wants the government to silence anyone he disagrees with.

[acptulsa]

Tulsa can't defend his position so he attacks his opponent instead, kind of like how he wants the government to silence anyone he disagrees with.

Irony so thick you can slice it with a knife...

[Swordsmyth]

Irony so thick you can slice it with a knife...
What goes around comes around.

[acptulsa]

What goes around comes around.

And some things deserved to be protected from later edits--like you calling for letting Washington control internet content outright.



P.S. I would consider supporting a "Free speech" web-hosting/search engine/file hosting service as a part of the post office, they would be the ones to run a "net neutrality" ISP as well.

That's the libertarian way to get the government out if it, by God!

[jmdrake]

Swordshyll has nothing to add, but thinks whoever adds the last post wins.


https://youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE



Right you are. But at least we can say that the CIA didn't finance Josh and Bryan's startup.

Unlike Fedbook. So we're clearly not as dead wrong as Zuckerberg.

Hmmm...interesting point that I hadn't looked up.

https://dailyreckoning.com/revealed-facebooks-cia-connections/

So the CIA, Facebook and Peter Thiel are connected. Peter Thiel is connected to Bilderberg and Donald Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/10/peter-thiel-paypal-co-founder-to-be-delegate-for-donald-trump


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPis68U7bdo

[Swordsmyth]

And some things deserved to be protected from later edits--like you calling for letting Washington control internet content outright.



That's the libertarian way to get the government out if it, by God!
That doesn't call for government control, it says that the Post Office could provide an alternative.

[acptulsa]

That doesn't call for government control, it says that the Post Office could provide an alternative.

Yeah, because the postal service is clearly out of control, right?

A federal government alternative to free speech is what you've been advocating throughout this thread.

All I called for was just enough of a mute on the politicians that the people can be heard. That's what made you go ballistic.

As if the Bill if Rights was intended to allow the government to do whatever it damned well pleases.

[Swordsmyth]

Yeah, because the postal service is clearly out of control, right?

A federal government alternative to free speech is what you've been advocating throughout this thread.
:upsidedown:The World Turned Upside Down:upsidedown:

I called for private citizens to be given their right to buy and sell campaign ads and that is a "federal government alternative to free speech"?

In the other thread about the Post Office I pointed out that those who want the government to force private companies to follow "Net Neutrality" regulations should instead want the Post Office to provide a neutral alternative that is covered by the 1stA and that is a "federal government alternative to free speech"?

You are the advocate of government speech control as opposed to free speech and just like a typical progressive you twist the facts into knots and call black white and day night.

[acptulsa]

I misspoke. Suggesting a way to help citizens speak louder than politicians and international corporations didn't cause him to go ballistic.

It actually caused him to go postal.

[Swordsmyth]

I misspoke. Suggesting a way to help citizens speak louder than politicians and international corporations didn't cause him to go ballistic.

It actually caused him to go postal.
You can spin it all you want and it won't change the fact that you want to give government the power to say who is allowed to speak and how they are allowed to do it.

If you think that power won't be used against you then you are truly delusional.

[acptulsa]

The thing you're defending is being used against the people right now, thanks to your beloved Bush Swampublicans on the Court.

[Swordsmyth]

The thing you're defending is being used against the people right now, thanks to your beloved Bush Swampublicans on the Court.
And you want us to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

The solution is less government not more.

How can you be this ignorant after being on this site since 2008?

Are you the same tulsa that joined in 2008?

[acptulsa]

How can you be this ignorant after being on this site since 2008?

I've been wasting my time learning the site guidelines.

[Anti Globalist]

Any one who takes aim at the 1st amendment is a traitor.

[AZJoe]

“Please forgive me, O left-wing guardians of allowable opinion, for I have expressed an unapproved thought.” - Thomas Woods (https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/im-not-sorry-for-being-normal/)