Free speech is, along with a few other apparently antiquated ideas like the inalienable right to self defense, property rights, and equality under the law is under attack by the (illegitimate) Biden administration. The idea that words are illegal is firmly rooted in monarchist and totalitarian visions of governance, and it sure does look like we just got both of those. Free Ricky Vaughn
Biden’s Department of Justice is now prosecuting formerly prolific, online personality, Ricky Vaughn (A.K.A. Douglass Mackey) for illegal memes. This is a hammer blow to the First Amendment and a blatantly political prosecution.
A younger and more naive version of your writer would have assumed that The Supreme Court would gleefully smack this obscenity, but as the article points out, our current political divide includes wildly different opinions of what what constitutes free speech, and based on recent indications of the court’s cowardice, one should not be hopeful. The restrictions on speech in a free society should be carefully constructed to be limited in scope, and difficult to use. But over the last two or three generations, the thoroughly co-opted American Academia has produced an ocean of ignoramuses who simply do not know the history of speech and how dangerous speech restrictions have been during much of human history. So mean speech and nasty speech and disturbing speech has become indistinguishable from speech that should be controlled. In fact, an important and controlling precedent, Brandenburg v. Ohio held that speech must be allowed “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Even in the labyrinthine and opaque minds of the justices of the Supreme Court, it should be abundantly clear that suggesting to a bunch of dimwits that they should vote by text does not rise to anywhere near that definition. And the use of an anti-KKK statute is even more offensive! But as has been pointed out so many times in the recent past, their violence is speech, and our speech is violence. What is so troubling is that significant restrictions on speech will often lead to violence, because without the natural right of political expression, what is left?
