After the October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s fully justified military response, the usual suspects lost their hive mind. College Campuses showed their hate and intolerance by protesting in the name of a group of people who, by most accounts, support Hamas by a margin of 80 to 20. More than 80% of “Palestinians” are okay with terrorist groups committed to wiping Israel and every jew in it off the map.
In other words, you could say you got what you voted for, but they’d do it again by a large margin. College kids and their indoctrinating faculty couldn’t wait to march and accuse, and ‘mostly peaceful protest’ in a manner that often exceeded their First Amendment protections.
Making a campus so caustic and dangerous that Jewish students had to fear for their lives is not covered by 1A, but the profs and the Unis didn’t do much, if anything, to protect them. They assumed a right or other in defense of bad behavior, and at least a few lawsuits are still pending. Brown, who turned off cameras to protect protesters, including professors and a few illegal aliens who may have overstayed their student visas, is going to get sued for not turning them back on, but the same sort of hubris applies to a recent move by Schumer and the Democrats in the US Senate.
Both know better but can’t help themselves. Ideology comes before law, order, common sense, public safety, or the Constitution.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unveiled a resolution to condemn podcaster Tucker Carlson and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes on Monday for their recent interview together.
The measure, supported by all 47 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, would be a symbolic endeavor to denounce Fuentes’s antisemitic views and Carlson for giving him a platform in October on his news show.
No one ought to object to Schumer or anyone else taking issue with anything having to do with Nick Fuentes. Plenty of folks across the divided Aisles have taken issue with Tucker over this or something else. Citizen Schumer or any of the other Dems in the US Senate feigning outrage is free to pretend disgust at the subject, its advocate, or the Tucker Carlson Network for giving it a larger audience than it deserves.
Whatever Tucker’s intentions, he’s exposed Fuentes’ unpalatable ideological proclivities and intellectual gymnastics to an audience he might not hope to reach otherwise, for good or bad. Sure, some black pilled yutes might decide that this is the justification they need to become a Jew hating bastard, but how many more were tuned into and against that culture and the risk of it all?
Yes, Virginia, there are people like this in your America, and they aren’t all Democrats, though I can’t say for certain what Fuentes’ political proclivities are beyond his own self-interest. It’s a trait he may share with Shutdown Chuck Schmer and the 47 Democrats in the US Senate. They don’t much care for Jews either, even if or when they are Jews themselves. Their indirect advocacy for Islamic terror via support of the Palestinian project (one of many), whose purpose is not a state for a people but a base of operations to erase Israel, makes this resolution spurious at best.
However much of an asshole you think Fuentes is, he seems to believe what he says, whereas Senate Dems are playing games. Chuck E’s resolution is a challenge to Republicans who, should they refuse to sign on, can be labeled as Fuentes-loving anti—semite Nazis all the way to November 2026. He and his “colleagues” aren’t at all concerned about how many receipts anyone might have, exposing the Congressional Democrats as aiders and abetters of actual harm against Jews. And while that’s a thing, Schumer’s “resolution,” while not binding or ever meant to be anything like the law, is an abuse contrary to the protections enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
In furtherance of the government’s obligations under the First Amendment are numerous prohibitions, two of which are relevant to this Schumer resolution condemning Carlson. First, the government may not evaluate the content of political speech and act upon that evaluation. Thus, it may not pick and choose what speech it likes and praise it and what speech it hates and condemn it.
Doing the latter — which is what Schumer proposes the Senate should do to Carlson — leads to a second prohibition. The government may not chill the exercise of the freedom of speech. Chilling consists in government behavior — direct or indirect — toward speech that gives the speaker or writer or those similarly situated pause or fear before uttering expressions.
Chuck the person and any of the Democrats who have followed him into the trap he set for himself have a 1A right to rant about Fuentes or Carlson with as much or as little vim as they do about them or anything else. What they can’t do is formalize it as government action, but here they are doing it.
The question then isn’t whether you think someone’s speech or beliefs are offensive, but whether a partisan group with government agency and a history of speech intimidation and censorship is more or less dangerous to your natural rights than a holocaust denier with a Hitler hard on who scored an interview with Tucker Carlson.
U.S. senators using their offices to speak as individuals about issues over which they are allegedly outraged are protected. Signing on to Senate Resolutions that express that outrage looks a lot like intimidation to suppress expression.
Does the government have the freedom of speech? Under the natural law, it does not, as only human beings have natural rights. The government is not a naturally existing being. It is an artificial construct based on a monopoly of force in a given — sometimes changing — geographic area. In order to exist, government takes assets from persons in its geographic area via taxes and negates some of their freedoms via laws and regulations.
Whatever the government takes and whatever it negates, it may not abridge the freedom of speech, directly or indirectly, by taxes or threats or commands or prohibitions or praises or chilling. If it could, then we’d have not even the semblance of a representative democracy in Washington or anywhere else.
There is such a thing as government speech, but its emissions are limited, or are meant to be, to the exercise of the powers the people grant it. An expression that the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution exist to constrain so that, in its exercise, it does not infringe upon natural rights.
None of which is much use if the Republicans that the Democrats are trying to corner can’t make that case as a reason for not signing on, but they should.
I recognized early on that some factions in government and the infrastructure that undergirds the censorship industrial complex saw the pro-Palestine protests as an opportunity to suppress protected speech. To get people on the right to support silencing it. Some did, but most did not, and here we find ourselves in the same brackish pool of swamp water.
My position is no different. All speech that is not defamatory (and the window on this is tiny) or immediately incites violence is protected. Even when we find ourselves in those very fine gray areas, we must be careful not to chill speech.
No matter how offended you might be by Fuentes or Carlson, Schumer’s resolution is more offensive. We can ignore Fuentes and turn off Carlson. The government never goes away, and the likes of Schumer and his Dem cabal are forever looking for ways to suppress speech. If we do not push back, we’ll find ourselves arrested for Facebook comments and memes based on their interpretation of meaning, not yours or anyone else’s.
Great Comments on Steve’s Substack (Or Ian can rewrite them here).
