People once wondered — perhaps not very seriously — whether falsely shouting “Fire!” in a theater and telling hit men “Here’s $50,000; you will get the rest when you finish the job” count as speech that should be protected as a matter of right.
They do not.
And it’s not so puzzling that freedom to exercise a legitimate right does not entail license to violate the rights of others.
But some people are eager to prohibit us from uttering statements that don’t come within twenty parsecs of such alleged quandaries. These censorious ones include big-tech firms and big DC politicians like, for example, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a bully urging social-media firms to crack down harder on the speech of “‘antivax’ groups.”
Such persons seem to think that the First Amendment as presently worded, at least the part protecting freedom of speech, is a big dumb mistake. What would they like it to say instead?
Maybe:
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, unless a would-be speaker wishes to dispute government-endorsed or Google-Twitter-Facebook-Amazon-endorsed conclusions about medicine, vaccines, pandemics, masks, lockdowns, transgenderism, euthanasia, abortion, or election fraud; to spend ‘too much’ money on campaign speech; to utter ‘hate speech’ about chess pieces; to speak freely; etc.”
But then the First Amendment would be about as valuable as yesterday’s toilet paper as a bulwark against tyranny.
Don’t flush our freedom of speech.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Rewriting Amendment Number One”
The Right’s major flaw is attributing logic and reason to the Left’s motives.
The Left has zero interest in what is logical or reasonable, which leads them to dismiss incidentals like God-given rights.
What matters to the Left is its agenda. They will say and do anything, however illogical and unreasonable, to advance their goal, whichi is control over others? Which incidentally proves to be very profitable to them, or have you not noticed that at least half of every dollar average Americans earns is taken by government, and most of that to advance Leftist goals.
I don’t know what Senator Stolen Valor’s complaint is. Wasn’t it free speech that enabled him to spin the tale of his completely fraudulent military service that ultimately turned out to be 2 ply?
Congress having social media giants act as it’s agents to censor opponents under the threat of removing their protection from liability is just as much violation of the Constitution as if they made a law.
Disingenuous to imply otherwise.
Its
Once the first ‘hate speech’ codes were implemented in schools and on college campuses, the 1st Amendment lost a good part of its value. It has been losing ground ever since. Even keeping your mouth shut isn’t good enough for the Left. It’s their way or the highway. After all, now ‘silence is violence’.