#do you think that people like milo yiannopolous and richard spencer should be allowed to speak at colleges then?? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aridara · 7 years

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Part 2 of my reply to @literally--hitler. To recap: I’ve asked people who defend the Nazis’ right to “free speech” -

Can you name one single group (a workplace, a political party, a website, an entire culture…) where hate speech and harassment was permitted because “FREEZE PEACH”, that did NOT quickly became overrun by bigotry, with said bigotry getting more present and more aggressive?

- L--H wrote a bullshit answer, and I’m replying to it.

Part 1 is here.

...marxists who advocate for violence against huge portions of the population get a pass.

"Stalinists". L--H meant "Stalinists".

And since bigots - especially Nazi and alt-right-leaning bigots - love to label any opposition as “cultural marxism”: no, this isn’t enough to make me hate all left-wingers.

it doesnt even do much about actual neo-nazis...

Unbelievably, L--H got one thing correct.

& only occasionally focuses on anti-sjws & alt-righters who have gotten too popular instead.

Let me guess three names of such anti-sjws and/or alt-righters that got banned for being “too popular": cultureshift, takashi0, your-uncle-dave.

By the way: the alt-right is literally steeped in and/or colludes with white supremacists, anti-semites, Neo-Nazis, Islamophobies, homophobies, white nationalists, and anti-feminists.

& yet, for all the toxic aspects of tumblr & for all we joke about what a “hellsite” it is, those people are in the minority.

I seriously boggle at this part, because L--H has just spent painting multiple groups as raging bigots that go completely unstopped, and that therefore should be opposed... and then deny it to be a problem. Like, pick one - either it’s a problem, or it isn’t.

Here's the thing: Tumblr took a long time implementing a decent reporting and blocking system; in that time, guess what happened?! The bigotry steadily increased, with bigots continuing to spread lies about, threaten and attack their targets, and driving said targets to leave the website. Even though the "report" function is still mostly useless except in the most blatant cases, the block function helped a whole fucking lot in cutting the bigotry away from its targets. Hell, just by judging by how the bigots turned from "If you don't like what I'm telling you, just ignore me" to "If you block me, you're a coward" indicates that they do know that the blocking is a tool that actually helps the victims of bigotry.

& of course thats how it works. most people arent neo-nazis or “kill all men” types. or do you think they are?

That's not what I've said. I've said that bigots, if left unchecked, tend to drive away everyone else. This isn't rocket science.

I’ve cutted out the rest of L--H’s paragraph, since it was, in my own words, "someone having sex with a strawman of their own creation”. I hope at least it was consensual.

inb4 “muh third reich”. shut up & read some actual history on the subject. the nazis didnt come to power by civil debate. they came to power because violence had been normalized as a part of politics at that point in german history.

Question: how, pray, did the bigotry of Nazis became normalized?

Answer: Because Nazis were allowed a platform DESPITE their violence; the Nazis then used said platform to normalize their violence against minorities such as Jews and the disabled, and allow it to enter the institutions.

Here, have a couple of articles on the matter.

now, just to put what this assclown is asking for in perspective, lets take a look at some of the things that have been called “hate speech” recently, since hes already pulled the “muh slippery slope dont real” argument:

criticizing of the actions of a protest movement (womens march, blm, antifa)-

This tidbit was accompained by pictures of a couple of tweets from “Jon Jafari”, where said Jon literally referred to multiple pacific mass protests of an U.S. President as an "insurrection". Not "protest", "insurrection".

Note that L--H seems to believe that declaring the women’s march - which was absolutely pacific (mostly because the police has more problems justifying violence against a group mostly composed by white women, than justifying violence against a group mostly composed by black people) - to be an “insurrection” is absolutely A-OK. That confirms it: bigots don’t take offense to oppressed people protesting their oppression in the wrong way. They take offense to oppressed people protesting their oppression in any way, including “Could you please not do that?”.

Not to mention that it doesn't matter that, regardless of the fact that Trumaraparaparapompappah was democratically elected*, he still is a masssively racist and bigoted individual with zero self-control towards any attack to his ego. (*: Despite the fact that he lost the popolar vote by the biggest amount in history.)

criticizing a large, powerful political movement (feminism)-

This was accompained by a slice of an article that called out Sargon of Akkad for his relation with the Alt-Right. Feminism isn’t mentioned anywhere in said slice.

The "alt-right" is steeped in neo-Nazism. Hell, its founder Richard Spencer believes that White people need to take back America via "peaceful ethnic cleansing*" and once published uncritically an essay named "Is Black Genocide Right?"**, among other things. (*: There has never been a “peaceful” ethnic cleansing in history.) (**: According to said essay, the genocide of black people does have positive points.)

As for Sargon of Akkad, despite having some genuinely progressive and/or liberal positions, also pulled shit like claiming that racism and sexism do not exist in the West despite any evidence of the contrary, or supporting the harassment campaign GamerGate.

numerous political speeches on college campuses, including by a speaker who has specifically denounced white nationalism

This specifically refers to Milo Yiannopolous, who is a fucking transphobe who tried to appease to neo-Nazis multiple times. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, but claims to not be a duck, it's still a fucking duck.

a man wearing a medal his father was awarded for resisting soviet occupation of hungary

So, I've actually checked this one, and apparently people assumed that Gorka was a Nazi sympathizer on the basis of the following:

The medal is the Order of Vitéz, or Order of the Valiant. During the WW2 period, there had been a schism in the Order, with some members opposing the Nazis and others collaboring with them.

Gorka is a far-right-leaning Islamophobe.

He explicitly stated that he and the Trump staff will keep using the "fake news" accusation - regardless of whether those news are actually false or not - until the media stops attacking Trump.

offensive jokes, or more accurately, jokes that someone took offense to, since taking offense is a choice-

This coming from someone who takes offense at "down with cis". Nah, dipshit, if the audience doesn't laugh, it's because you made a shitty joke.

But anyway, this tidbit in particular is about Disney deciding to sever ties with PewDiePie after he made a video where he paid two unsuspecting guys to make a "Death to All Jews" "joke". Because apparently, private companies have no right to decide "Nah, we don't want to do this anymore" even if they have no legal obligation to actually "do this". </sarcasm> Newsflash: "right to free speech" is not "right to force a private person/company to give you their platform".

having a livestream with the wrong sort of person

I honestly have no idea what L--H is talking about, mostly because they do a fucking shitty job at gathering sources. But given the levels of honesty so far, I guess it was something along the lines of "X had a livestream with Y who is an asshole; people pointed Y's assholery to X; X doesn't care".

actually enforcing the current united states immigration laws

I'm counting this as a double lie. First lie: Trump didn't enforce the current US laws, he made new laws on top of the old ones (which, I remind you, are already one of the strictest immigration laws in the entire world). Second lie: L--H is assuming that those laws were reasonable. They weren’t - those laws were massively bullshit* and have been rightfully declared uncostitutional.

*: Some examples of said bullshit: If you were already in the system and asking for a visa or a green card, but didn't get it yet, you're fucked. If you got a visa/green card, but no US citizenship yet, you're fucked. If you had a double citizenship where at least one country is one of the banned ones, you're still fucked. It doesn't matter if you never ever saw that banned country.

supporting the current president of the united states

Here's the thing: Trump is racist, sexist, and overly bigoted. That was evident well before the election, and was made abundantly clear during the electoral race. Which means that anyone who willingly voted for Trump belongs to one of these categories:

Knew about Trump's bigotry, and thought it was a point in his favor. These voters were bigots.

Knew about Trump's bigotry, and thought it was a point against him, but still voted for him because of the other stuff he promised. These voters were willing to ignore blatant bigotry in order to get a President that they liked.

Knew about Trump's bigotry, but thought that he only did so because “he only does that to convince people to vote for him”. These voters were willing to vote for someone who thought being a blatant bigot was justified. Also, these voters had no idea whatsoever what Trump's "real" policies were. If you couldn't trust Trump when he said bigoted things because "he only said that so that people will vote him", then you couldn't trust Trump when he said "reasonable" things, because he might've done that solely so that people would've voted him.

Didn’t know about Trump’s bigotry, despite it being absolutely evident and documented. These voters were massively ignorant.

sharing pictures of a cartoon frog

This ones refers to Pepe le Frog. Specifically, it refers to when Wendy’s reblogged a Pepe meme without realizing it was connected to the Alt-Right. It almost certainly wasn’t done because Wendy’s is neo-Nazi, but sure as heck their staff didn’t bother to learn about the meme.

Fun fact: that the Pepe le Frog meme is now absolutely connected to alt-right movements is not up to debate.

drinking milk

How niceexpected of L--H to not give any context to whatever the fuck they're saying. Unfortunately for L--H, I am not nice to bigots, therefore I’ve decided to give said context:

Some white supremacists think white ethnic identity has a geographic, historical correlation with the body's tolerance for milk — specifically, the production of the lactase enzyme that allows humans to break down lactose. On 4chan, the internet's hate speech hit factory, one anonymous poster laid this thesis out using the following graphic from a study in Nature, showing hotspots of where certain populations have higher milk tolerances. The discussion thread also contained references to seemingly benign academic studies of "Lactose tolerance in a Slavic population," conversations about whether modern industry has tainted the purity of milk, and several milk-based poems about white pride.

There are numerous threads where white supremacy claims milk-drinking as a new staple of ethnic purity. Source: 4chan

When the brigade of trolls at the LaBeouf installation were accused on camera of racism by Paperboy Prince, a famous Washington Wizards fan and entertainer who has since become a top target of 4chan derision, they claimed it was actually a stance against the "vegan agenda." Judging from the eugenicist rhetoric across online hate speech communities like 4chan and 8chan, it appears that the "vegan agenda" is a potential proxy term for conspiracy theories about a globalist Jewish agenda. But given the sheer mass of alt-right accounts spewing out calls of "Down with the vegan agenda," it could refer to any number of right-wing targets. The whole milk-chugging, anti-vegan narrative is complicated by a number of factors, not least of which being that Adolf Hitler was possibly vegetarian for a short time, or that there are many places in Africa where milk is a dietary staple. Then again, white racial purity is a fragile pseudo-science, so trying to find a sound explanation is a tall order anyway.

...& if you think no journal out there will publish an article about how a famous person is sending secret white supremacist messages by drinking milk because that famous person said something they disagreed with, or because it was a slow news day, you clearly havent been paying attention. not being interested in a crappy looking remake made you a sexist last year.

Not liking a remake solely because there are now women in the main roles does make you a misogynist. Deal with it.

making a video sarcastically depicting yourself as a nazi to mock the fact that people keep calling you a nazi

No, people called out PewDiePie because he thought that making Holocaust jokes was funny. By the way: do you think the Holocaust to be funny?

...and then we have this gem:

[A snippet of an image that states "Apologies can camouflage messages that may still be received and celebrated by hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center says."]

that just says it all. apologies are hate. war is peace. freedom is slavery. ignorance is strength.

Fun fact: there is no trace of that quote from the original source (supposedly, the SPLC). Which means that is quite likely that quote was completely made up, and L--H believed it to be a real thing that the SPLC said. Congratulations.

I’ve cutted out the last paragraph, which can be summed up with "Insults, insults, insults, and a drawn picture of a vomiting girl for some reason".

#debunking a lot of bullshit #antifeminism #racism #tw neo-nazism

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dearyallfrommatt · 4 years

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Never Give A Fascist An Even Break.

So you’ve probably seen the above floating around Twitter, maybe it’s made its way to Tumblr, I don’t know. In a nutshell, it’s a recording of alt-right butthole Richard Spencer having a full-on meltdown after being escorted away by police from the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, back in 2017 that resulted in the death of activist Heather Heyer.

What’s particularly interesting about this audio, about a minute in length, is how unambiguously it shows just what Spencer really is and what he champions, especially when he faces any sort of resistance. Apparently, this will come as a shock to some people. I know, right?

Previously, Spencer had been normalized in the mainstream press like The New York Times as a fresh new kind of hate monger, one that kept his cool and looked sharp doing it, a Nazi you could have a drink with. CNN, the network so loathed by the very people who think Spencer is worth listening to, had him on as a guest as recently as this past July. Even liberal magazine Mother Jones, in a stunning display of poor judgement, referred to him as a “dapper white nationalist”. We have to listen, they said. Marketplace of ideas or something like that, they said. Or maybe it was free speech, I don’t know.

And of course, everyone has seen him take that well-deserved punch last January that launched a thousand memes, which apparently hurt his delicate feels more than the sock to the jaw. Even so, by October he was speaking at the University of Florida, my alma mater for whatever that’s worth, as the president of the National Policy Institute, a “think tank” based in Arlington, VA. He wasn’t invited by the university, though. Indeed, they denounced Spencer because he’s a fascist douchenozzle and a smelly racist, but being a state university they had to rent him the space and just had to charge students and alumni up to $500,000 for added security.

Amusingly enough, this audio was released by former ally and two-bit grifter Milo Yiannopolous. Formerly good buddies, the two had a falling out after Milo went all pro-pedophile, blowing his con and causing American conservatives to abandoned their Gay Best Friend. Milo’s fall from grace has seen him recently begging for money and losing book deals while pissing on his former fanboys.

Here’s a quote from Spencer’s whine. Trigger Warning: All sorts of racism and antisemitism.

“I win! They fucking lose!” he continued, before railing against Jews and non-whites, whom he said should be subservient to people like himself. “Little fucking kikes, they get ruled by people like me,” he snarled. “Little fucking octoroons! … My ancestors fucking enslaved those fucking pieces of fucking shit! I rule the fucking world! Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me!”

Well... what can you say? Are you really surprised? You shouldn’t be. Though tech-savvy and media smart (supposedly), Spencer and his alt-right are the same foul racists, antisemitic poltroons, and general bigots we’ve seen from the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party and Christian Identity adherents and John Birchers and any manner of human garbage that has infested the American soul since the country started.

It should be noted, of course, that this has yet to be independently verified (as of 2 a.m. Monday morning) and, naturally, we shouldn’t believe Milo goofy ass as far as we can throw him. Nevertheless, whoever’s voice that is, that’s what white supremacy says. That’s what Richard Spencer has been espousing since he broke on the scene, even if he said it nicer and calmer and more controlled manner than that. Well-spoken racist dickbags are still racist dickbags.

Even though this was released late Sunday evening, so we don’t have the corporate media’s take on this particular egg on their face, wingnuts are already starting to cut their losses. Sleazy wank stain Jack Prosobiec is trying to distance himself and blame everything on Jake Tapper. Well, Bumble Jack, believe you me, there’s plenty of blame to go around, so buckle up. Your time is going to come eventually, I imagine.

Now, children, what can we learn from all of this? Well, for one, when someone tells you what they are, believe them. If we, as a culture, reject bigotry, white nationalism, white supremacy, antisemitism, general hatred, and all the rest like we say we do, why should we even give cheap rats like Spencer a second look? After the aforementioned suckerpunch, conservatives and not a few liberals wrung their hands and clutched their pearls at the incivility. “Why must we engage in violence,” they mewled. “Can’t we defeat his ideas with discourse and debate?”

See, here’s the thing: his ideas have already been discredited and discarded, so everything the geek says should be disregarded no matter how sharp his suit is or how friendly is. This may come as a shock to you, fellow honkies, but there is no “debate” with someone who wants to eliminate rights for large segments of the population or, if they’re being honest, just full on eliminate those segments of the population. In the ‘90s, we called Richard Spencer “David Duke”. This ain’t the first rodeo with this sort of clown.

We owe him no consideration and no debate. Read your Karl Popper, specifically the Paradox of Tolerance, if you need more persuasion. However, after treating these guys as the pitiful butt of jokes and guilt-free villains in video games at best and the outright scum of the Earth at worst, I really can’t understand why it’d behoove us to even bother.

I know I’m not the only one to say it, but Donald Trump did not bring us Richard Spencer. When it comes to America’s bigotry against historically oppressed groups, he is merely a symptom, not the cause of the disease. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Spencer - the people who agree with him outright or just those who tacitly allow the sufferance of his ideology - brought us Donald Trump. Way, way too many people were just waiting on someone in “charge” to give them the okay; treating guys like Spencer seriously helped encourage that environment

The scales should not be falling from our eyes on this one. We really, really should know better. We shouldn’t allow the corporate media to get away with shit like this. We all share a little guilt on this one. Next time, don’t be so easy on complete bastards, okay?

#it came from twitter #if you think i'm tagging any of those assholes you're crazy #yes racism is a thing #punch a nazi

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nancydhooper · 6 years

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Randazza: Trump, Twitter, The NFL, and Everything

By Marc J. Randazza

The NFL says that players must stand (or remain in the locker room) during the National Anthem. No more "taking a knee." In the same week, Trump lost a case that says that the "interactive space" in his tweets is a "public forum" and thus he can't block people who criticize him. And, perhaps I did too much LSD in the 80s and 90s, but I see the two as intertwined. The real problem we have is that freedom of expression is the crown jewel in the American enlightenment, but that jewel is tarnished by the fact that our public square is increasingly privately owned. Privatization of the "public square" threatens to render the First Amendment meaningless.

We gotta fix that – or the First Amendment will only really exist in a few tiny spaces — "free speech zones" surrounded (literally or figuratively) by fences to keep the nasty stuff inside.

The NFL

The whole "take a knee" thing needs little explanation. Starting in 2016, some NFL players protested racial inequality in policing by taking a knee during the national anthem before games. The protests began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick who initially sat during the anthem. He then had a talk with Nate Boyer, a veteran and former NFL player, who convinced him that sitting during the Anthem was disrespectful. However, the two agreed that taking a knee was a more reverent way to get the same message across.

Personally, I find the whole thing rather ineffective. Take a knee, don't take a knee. Nobody ever changed their mind about how cops behave or racism or anything over an NFL player taking a knee. But that isn't the test for whether the speech has value.

I may find the protest foolish, but I respect the hell out of Kaepernick for doing it. I support any player who wants to do it. If there's one thing that is supposed to differentiate the USA from the rest of the world, it is our purple-mountains-star-spangled commitment to freedom of expression. The second most patriotic thing we have is the National Football League.

Don't start with me with baseball, a boring ass adaptation of a crumpet-eating fairy-assed game from England that is primarily played by Dominicans. Basketball? Yeah, we invented it, but at its core it is a stupid game. Sure, we're the goddamn best at it, and unless we're playing it against the Croatians, we're going to win 101 times out of 100. The Canadians may have a "football league," but it would more appropriately be called the NFL's recycling bin. No other country even tries to compete with us in football. It is America's game. So it goddamn ought to reflect American values, as best it can.

Allowing protest and dissent ought to be ingrained at a chromosomal level if you think that you're amber-waves-of-grain entitled to wave the red, white, and blue.

So fuck the NFL for this policy.

And let me slap you across the face right now if you're starting with a comment like "well actually the NFL is a private employer, so it can have any policy it wants." This morning, I downed an entire mug of espresso, and 10 minutes later I took a huge shit that knows more about Constitutional law than you and your entire family ever will.

This isn't about what the NFL can do, it is about what it ought to do.

And dammit, the NFL ought to let its players take a fucking knee if they want to.

I will go get that shit out of the toilet and throw it at you, as if I were a caged chimp, if you start with the "oh, the NFL policy is just like Nazi Germany!" If that's your view, then correct it in the next 3 minutes, or you get sterilized when I am dictator. No, no, no, no, you fucking imbecile. Sure, Trump has expressed his view that you should "get out of America" if you don't stand for the anthem. That is a dumb-ass-moron position. But, it is hardly the government extending its hand down and pressing on the scale.

Do you think NFL players should shut up and do their job? Ok, fair enough. But, what makes you think that an NFL player can't be a voice of moral leadership? Remember Chris Kluwe? Back before it was cool to say you were in favor of gay rights, Kluwe had the balls to stand up and voice his support (I respected him for that). Did it matter? I think it did. Kluwe doesn't say much now, except for stalking articles about me, whining about who my clients are. Whatever, Kluwe, start shit with me and I'll just have my friend, Mercedes Carrera, intellectually kick your ass again.

But back to the subject at hand: If you think that the players ought to shut up and do their jobs and keep politics out of football, then lets try that.

No, lets really try that.

In 2015, Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake (R) and John McCain (R) revealed in a joint oversight report that nearly $5.4 million in taxpayer dollars had been paid out to 14 NFL teams between 2011 and 2014 to honor service members and put on elaborate, “patriotic salutes” to the military. Overall, they reported, “these displays of paid patriotism [were] included within the $6.8 million that the Department of Defense (DOD) [had] spent on sports marketing contracts since fiscal year 2012.” (source) (other source) (other source)

The NFL took millions of dollars in propaganda money from the military. So the WHOLE FUCKING THING is one big ball of political propaganda. At least the kneelers are honest and open about it. You fucking rubes who stand up during the anthem don't even remember that it wasn't even a thing until 2009. And, can someone remind me who was president during 2011 and 2014 when we were shoveling barrels full of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of billionaires to make sure that the uneducated slobs in the stands were sufficiently reminded of the message that "America" means bombing the living shit out of people thousands of miles away?

So lets put a pin in that… millions of taxpayer dollars flowing toward the NFL for propaganda purposes. And lets add in the billions that the NFL and its teams get in taxpayer subsidies.

Twitter (and all of Silicon Valley) – the New Censorship

After the 2016 election, the Left freaked the fuck out. Quite honestly, none of us thought Trump could be elected. And the morning after, the Trump derangement syndrome set in. Nowhere did it set in more heavily than in Silicon Valley. So, the platforms immediately got to work making sure that they did their part to ensure that we would have a "blue wave" washing away our sins. They got to work banning anyone perceived as "alt-right." It started with literal Nazis, and then it continued to those who might associate with them, to others who simply harbored conservative views. All of this was under the opaque guise of "safety."

It was all bullshit, and we all knew it. If you didn't know it, you were willfully blind.

I don't have a lot of love for Richard Spencer's speech. I don't even like Andrew Anglin's speech, and I'm his goddamn lawyer. I do like Milo Yiannopolous, but that's beside the point. The point is that they started with speakers that would be easy to ban — speakers who lots of people disliked. And they proved that there wasn't a goddamn thing we could do about it.

And very few people saw this as the alarming move that it was. But, as Twitter, Facebook, GoDaddy, PayPal, Stripe, etc. all got into line — shaving off a large percentage of right wing speech, the left cheered. Yay! Maybe we can win next time! Yay Resistance! Go fuck yourselves — you're not a member of any "resistance" unless you just might get captured or killed — and you're certainly not part of any "Resistance" when you control most of the new public square, and you use that virtually monopolistic power to shut down debate.

The fact is, Twitter, Facebook, and Google are the new public squares, and that gives them incredible power. And they are using that power exactly the way a power-drunk dictator would use it — to try and suppress speech they don't like. If you're on the Right, you bemoan. If you are on the Left, you're probably cheering it (just the opposite of the tribal alignment on the NFL issue). But, if you're on the Left and you're cheering it, you're also probably the kind of person who would let a rabid chimp out of its cage if you thought it would tear off your enemy's face — not realizing that it will also turn on you and rip your face off, and your balls, and then probably sodomize you as it ate the back of your head.

Because one day, the CEO of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Google is going to want to run for president. And then, you fucking idiots, they'll have nothing stopping them from suppressing any and all speech that supports their opponents. You'll have the equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi buying power by owning all the private networks.

A few of us see this danger. That's why I volunteered to work on a case for Jared Taylor, suing Twitter for banning him. Twitter filed an Anti-SLAPP motion, and we just got our opposition in. (Complaint, Memo ISO Anti-SLAPP, Opposition to Anti-SLAPP). The case went pretty well so far – if you want to read the transcript, here it is. At least one judge found that the suit has some merit — at least enough to move forward.

Naturally, many have criticized the case — especially since there are many who find Section 230 to be something worthy of religious devotion.

Section 230, for the uninitiated, is a law that was passed during the Clinton administration, which gives Silicon Valley immunity from virtually all lawsuits based on content provided by others. This is why you can post something obviously defamatory on Twitter, and even if Twitter knows it is defamatory and knows it is harming you, it can, and will, say "Fuck you, See 47 U.S.C. § 230."

Now when the Silicon Valley giants said "Fuck you, Section 230" in the past, it at least had some semblance of philosophical honesty in it. Until recently, Silicon Valley loved freedom of speech. The whole promise of the Internet was that we were going to see an explosion of diversity of thought. For a brief period, we did. Some of it was awesome — and some of it was not. We got more porn, more humor, more political engagement, Mr. Spock Ate My Balls, and we also got racist websites, sexist websites, and every other kind of scoundrel online that we could think of. But, we all expected that the marketplace of ideas would flourish. I would like to say it did.

Then came 2016.

In the lead up to the election and in the aftermath of it, the Left lost its fucking mind. Campuses went into overdrive banning speech they didn't like, and Silicon Valley gleefully followed suit. And we on the Left, who once hated corporations and hated the control they might have had over the market, cheered. (I didn't, but as a Leftist myself, I have to accept guilt for my tribe's sins).

Might Trump's Thin Skin Save Us?

Trump is the first "Twitter President." It makes me want to bash my head into the wall to type those words, but here we are.

He got sued for blocking critics on Twitter, and much to my surprise, a judge in the Southern District of New York held that Twitter is a "public forum" — well, at least in part. You see, she couldn't bear to actually rule that Twitter is a new public forum. I think it is. My view is consistent with the old Pruneyard decision. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980). In that case, since the California constitution has an affirmative right to free speech, it could be interpreted as requiring private property owners to allow petitioning on their property, if it is a public space. This decision is not without its detractors. If you're a private property rights guy, you might hate this decision — because it does force a private property owner to allow speech it doesn't like on its private property. But, I think that if free speech means anything, it can't simply be the victim of progress moving the town square to an enclosed shopping mall, or even online.

The judge in the Trump case held:

we consider whether forum doctrine can be appropriately applied to several aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account rather than the account as a whole: the content of the tweets sent, the timeline comprised of those tweets, the comment threads initiated by each of those tweets, and the “interactive space” associated with each tweet in which other users may directly interact with the content of the tweets by, for example, replying to, retweeting, or liking the tweet. (Op. @ 41)

She had to rule against Trump. So, she created a new "public forum" limited to the comment threads in public officials' twitter feeds.

I think her decision is open to attack. I could see a pretty clean "Twitter isn't a public forum" decision. I could also see "Twitter is a public forum." But, this half-way decision is bullshit. Lets look at it this way: Twitter bans you because you make fun of Leslie Jones' face. Now you're banned also from the "public forum" of your President's tweets. If we were to analogize it, lets say there was a public park, designated for free speech activities. We privatize the area you have to go through to get into the park. The company that owns that area you have to go through just lets anyone go in and out. But, one day they decide that they just don't want to let anyone in who has ever been a proponent of legalizing marijuana, or who claims that there is a "wage gap," or who supports "Black Lives Matter."

Hey, it is a private property owner. Tough shit if they won't let you on their property. The free speech zone is there for you if you can maybe teleport into it.

So, the Trump decision is, perhaps, the crack in the wall. But, that leaves us with the NFL, and it also leaves us with the possibility that the 2d Circuit throws out this intellectually dishonest decision.

We have the power to break this

So what the fuck do we do?

The First Amendment is a wonderful thing, but what happens if the government just decides to give away all its public spaces to corporations and individuals who support its views? Don't laugh… in San Diego, the government let a huge crucifix go up on public land in a clear establishment clause violation. Federal court ruled against the government, so the government "sold" the little circle of land that the cross was on to a private group. Private group then kept the cross up on its land. That was deemed constitutional by a three member panel of the 9th Circuit.

So how do we fix it?

How about the First Amendment restoration act?

"No private entity may receive any governmental funds nor receive any statutory immunity unless it agrees to be bound by the First Amendment as if it were a government actor."

Why not?

Imagine if the NFL had to choose between receiving taxpayer funds or allowing its players to exercise their First Amendment rights. Imagine if Facebook had to choose between Section 230 immunity and incorporating the First Amendment into its terms and conditions.

Imagine if the First Amendment got the shot in the arm that it desperately needs.

Are there problems to be worked out here? You bet. How would I apply this to the comments section here, at Popehat? Maybe that's a bit too small of an actor to be subject to this Act? I've run this by some smart people — one suggested having it only apply to any companies that might be publicly traded or federally or state regulated. That way we would have just the giants, banks, etc. That might work.

What is clear is that what we have now is a road toward disaster. Because these private constraints on public speech are getting worse, more opaque, and more restrictive — and if we don't do something soon, we won't ever be able to get a handle on it.

And then you'll be left with a First Amendment that only applies in the gazebo in your public park, on alternate Thursdays.

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