Sunday, January 31, 2021
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Friday, January 22, 2021
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Friday, January 15, 2021
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Monday, January 11, 2021
Let's Talk About Freedom of Speech by Kenneth Quinell on Facebook
Okay, let's have a talk about freedom of speech. A lot of people, across the spectrum REALLY don't understand the concept, either on a philosophical or practical level.
Starting philosophically, people seem to think that freedom of speech means you can say whatever you want and face no repercussions. No part of that is true. Freedom of speech laws actually are specifically designed to protect political speech from punishment by an opposing government. It's there to prevent government from punishing their opponents, and thus falsely keeping control of government through the use of government power. Freedom of speech laws are EXCLUSIVELY about government and provide no protections in any other context.
So, big picture, the only thing that the First Amendment provides you is protection against the government punishing you for your POLITICAL speech and even that isn't close to being universal.
There is no conception of freedom of speech where you can just say anything you want. There are always things that you can be punished for by just saying them. This has always been the case and it's what we want. Even when a thing is legal to say, the government can limit the time and place where you can say it. To tie these together, you can't walk into a school and graphically describe how you are going to murder children in front of children. And we don't want people to have that freedom. And no law would protect that speech anywhere.
There are some that claim limiting any speech is a slippery slope to worse things. This is utter nonsense. "Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy. What that means, essentially, is that it ISN'T HOW THE REAL WORLD WORKS. 100% of the time when someone says "it's a slippery slope," they have stopped talking logically and are no longer representing reality. Also, we know that this particular slippery slope isn't true. After World War II, Germany banned all Nazi speech and imagery and you know what happened? Everything got better for basically everyone. Germany, the least free country, likely in the world, as of 1945, is now more free than the U.S. and, literally, in every measure-economic, social, etc.-Germany does better than the U.S. now. Banning seditious hate speech can't harm a society and, in fact, helps create a freedom among the population that allows them to thrive. When people aren't constantly afraid of facing off against right-wing, seditious hate speech, it frees them up to do better things than hide in fear.
People are also under the false impression that free speech doesn't come with any responsibility. That's utter bullshit. That's an abusive way of thinking. If you talk someone into committing suicide and they do it, you are responsible for that act. Your speech caused it. Same thing if you incite a riot. Or an insurrection.
The good news, practically speaking, is that what I'm describing here is already how things work. It doesn't really matter what any individual person thinks about it, philosophically, we have laws that determine these things, not personal opinion. So in our system, the freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. But that part of the amendment is like three words long, so there's literally no detail on what that phrase means. That has been determined, over the years, by legislation and Supreme Court rulings, with the Supreme Court interpretation being the final say (barring a constitutional amendment to overturn the Court, a thing that has never happened in response to freedom of speech cases).
So here's how it actually works:
-You can say whatever you want, because prior restraint of speech is only legal in certain circumstances and because it's largely impossible to do.
-You are ALWAYS subject to consequences for your speech. There's no such thing as "I can say whatever I want and nobody can do anything about it." No. Others can ALWAYS do something about your speech. At a minimum, they can say nearly anything they want to about you and your speech, because that's literally the same thing, in terms of rights.
-Individuals can always sanction you for your speech. People can say or do anything legal in response to your speech.
-Organizations can always sanction you for your speech, except government. You can be fired. You can be demoted. You can be banned. You can be blocked. You can lose your membership. Whatever. The only reactions to your speech that aren't legal are those reactions that are illegal for other reasons. Like they can't murder you for your speech, but they can say "you should die" as a response to your speech.
-There are no real religious exemptions to this, meaning that saying "in the name of God" before your speech doesn't provide you any additional protection. Religious people don't have more or different speech rights, it's the same for everyone.
-The government can punish you, too. There are a fuckton of exceptions, all determined to exist by the Supreme Court, where the government can punish you. Here are just SOME of the exceptions that definitely already exist right now:
Incitement of criminal activity: If you say something that is LIKELY to incite or produce illegal activity, you can be charged with a crime. "Let's break into this building" while standing in front of it holding a trash can and looking like you're going to throw it through the window would not be protected speech. More recently, it's been determined that inciting someone to suicide is not protected, either.
False statements of fact: This one is a little complicated and you're probably safe in minor contexts, but there are a variety of things that you say that, if false, can be criminalized or be subject to civil penalties. Libel and slander, for instance, are not protected. If I post that "person X is a pedophile" and I'm actually using a real person's name instead of person X, if that person isn't actually a pedophile, then they can sue me and they'll likely win (there are some exceptions, including satire and public figures, to an extent).
Obscenity: Things that are considered obscene can be punishable by law, including pornography. This one is SUPER vague and is completely inconsistent across the country. It's completely left to local standards. So basic pornography could be punishable by law somewhere like, say, Utah, with it's massive Mormon population, and legal in, say, Florida, where there are no laws. The only universally-agreed upon thing that is always obscene in every jurisdiction is child pornography, but ONLY when it's literal. Pretend child porn is protected in some places (although it shouldn't be). I imagine snuff films would be obscene everywhere, too, but most jurisdictions haven't had any snuff film legal cases, so it really hasn't been tested.
Fighting words: If your words legitimately lead people to engaging against violence against other people, that speech isn't protected.
Threatening government officials: It's specifically illegal to threaten anyone in the presidential line of succession. This would include the president, vice president, speaker of the House and all cabinet-level secretaries.
There are others, such as intellectual property restrictions and copyright laws and other things that could be relevant, but I think I've covered most of the relevant political ones.
One caveat, just because speech "isn't protected," doesn't mean it's automatically illegal. A separate law would still have to criminalize it (or provide civil penalties) and that law can't be ex post facto, meaning that if someone took part in activity while it was legal, then it was made illegal and they stop doing it, they can't be punished for doing it when it was legal.
So, in summary, freedom of speech doesn't mean and has never meant "you can say whatever you want." Limitations on speech are not only not illegal, they're common, and banning evil speech is not just legal, it's the morally correct way to go and it produces better outcomes for nearly everyone in society. A BUNCH of people from the failed insurrection engaged in criminal speech, beyond other crimes they committed.
You've actually been duped in believing that speech is the highest freedom. It's not, legally or morally. There are people who claim that they would die to protect the speech of others. So you're saying you would be willing to die to protect the right of a Nazi to call for the extermination of all Jewish people? Or LGBTQ people? Or other such evil speech?
Then you're on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of morality and you're willing to die for people who want to kill you. That's not honorable, nor is it patriotic. It's called "being a sucker."
Saturday, January 9, 2021
Friday, January 8, 2021
Impeach and Convict. Right Now by Bret Stephens
Impeach and Convict. Right Now.
Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute.
By Bret Stephens
Jan. 6, 2021
It wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic.
The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate is to reconvene immediately to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again.
To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president.
From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics.
He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too.
All this was obvious — but was not enough to stop him. America in 2015 had many problems, many of which had gone too long ignored and were ripe for populist exploitation. But by far the biggest problem of that year was that a major political party capitulated to a thug. And the biggest problem of every subsequent year has been that more and more of that party has excused, ignored, forgiven, colluded in and celebrated his thuggery.
Think of Mike Pompeo, our sycophantic secretary of state, who in March 2016 warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution,” and who, after the election had been called for Biden in November, promised “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
The Republican Party is now walking to the edge of moral irredeemability. I say this as someone who, until 2016, had always voted the straight Republican ticket and who, until this week, had hoped that Republicans would hold the Senate as a way of tilting the Biden administration to the center. I say this also of the party generally, and not of the courageous individual Republicans — Brad Raffensperger, Mitt Romney, Denver Riggleman, Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse (the list is depressingly short) — who have preserved their principles, maintained their honor and kept their heads these past five years.
But there is no getting away from the extent to which leading party members and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media are complicit in creating the political atmosphere in which this Visigothic sacking of the Capitol took place.
The legal hucksters, from Rudy Giuliani to Mark Levin, who promoted demonstrably debunkable claims about electoral fraud, are complicit. All of those supposedly sober-minded conservatives who encouraged the president to “pursue his legal options” (knowing full well they were bunk, but with the assurance that they would settle doubts about the validity of the vote) are complicit. The 126 House Republicans who signed on to the preposterous brief supporting the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election — flicked away in a single paragraph by the Supreme Court — are complicit. Ted Cruz, whom I once described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline” but who turns out to be considerably worse, is complicit. Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate cynics, who tried to obstruct Biden’s election certification in a transparent bid to corner the market on Trumpian craziness, are complicit. Mike Pence, who cravenly humored Trump’s fantasies right till the moment of constitutional truth, is complicit. (If there’s an argument against Trump’s removal from office, he alone is it.)
Some of these charlatans are now trying to disavow Wednesday’s violence in carefully phrased tweets. But Cruz, Hawley, Pence and the other Bitter-Enders have done far more lasting damage to Congress than the mob that — merely by following their lead — physically trashed it. Broken doors can be fixed. Broken parties cannot.
Above all there is the president, not complicit but wholly, undeniably and unforgivably responsible.
For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule.
For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday — forgive the cliché, but it’s apt here — their chickens came home to roost.
Every decent society depends for its survival on its ability to be shocked — and stay shocked — by genuinely shocking behavior. Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been an assault on that idea.
There is only one prescription for it now. Impeach the president and remove him from office now. Ban him forever from office now. Let every American know that, in the age of Trump, there are some things that can never be allowed to stand, most of all Trump himself.
Thursday, January 7, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson: Today The Confederate Flag Flew in the United States Capitol
January 6, 2021 (Wednesday)
Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.
This morning, results from the Georgia senatorial runoff elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.
With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it has on voter suppression to stay in power.
Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden the winner.
Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified votes.
More than 100 members of the House announced they would object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near the votes they needed to make their objections stick.
So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.
But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election. They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol, Hawley raised a power fist.
In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress to “save our democracy.”
As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation.
Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz, along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a Ku Klux Klan tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.
They carried with them the Confederate flag.
Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.
As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was “borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant the certification was being derailed.”
At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.
As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.
By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.
He did not mention the president.
By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J. Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and praised them.
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”
The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.”
Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to be doing the same.
At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.
Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.
Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
Sunday, January 3, 2021
Friday, January 1, 2021
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