Signaled Virtue

Sorry about the long hiatus. You might imagine I've been busy since October 7th.

Freddie deBoer recently published an article which I think summarizes the arguments of the useful idiots in the civil liberties camp right now: essentially, if you don't support the speech of pro-Hamas entities who call openly for the murder of Jews, you don't support free speech.

The sophistry in deBoer's and other's arguments to this effect is marvelous. The core argument here does three things:

1. It vastly expands the amount of protected speech above and beyond any previous definition, including as would be practiced by the originators of free speech as a politically protected item (i.e., the American founding fathers);
2. It dismisses the teeny-tiny possibility that statements to the effect of “we will murder Jews” may have a chilling effect on Jews and their speech;
3. It conflates nonviolent speech by racist people – the kind which was permitted for the Skokie, IL rally that never took place – with violent speech by racist people, and absurdly suggests that both should be equally protected.

deBoer's article is also dishonest with supporting evidence – for every example of Palestinian censorship, I can personally name a minimum of 5 examples where openly genocidal and defamatory speech was upheld by content moderators as “not in violation of Community Guiderulelines” or whatever – and emphasizes the viewpoints of the settler Jews in the West Bank (who are, as a whole, racist and violent towards Arabs and Palestinians) to paint the Jews who might have a few issues with expanding the classes of protected speech to include incitement of violence as secretly trying to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

I don't think deBoer is an antisemite. I do think whoever planted this idea into the heads of these civil liberties useful idiots is an antisemite and did so to provide a veneer of legitimacy to the whines by genocidal groups in the U.S. of “censorship.” But deBoer should really know better than to make the absurd claim that incitement of violence is protected. (And yes, when his examples include the banning of SJP, which sends its money to Hamas, and the censure of Rep. Tlaib, who called for the murder of Jews “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” as instances where free speech was not upheld, it is clear he is advocating for the protection of speech which indues and/or directly causes violence).

Let's read Brandenburg v. Ohio together:

The second film showed six hooded figures one of whom, later identified as the appellant, repeated a speech very similar to that recorded on the first film. The reference to the possibility of “revengeance” was omittted, and one sentence was added: “Personally, I believe the ... should be returned to Africa, th' Jew returned to Israel.”

You might correctly infer this speech came from the KKK. Notable is that it does not call for violence (“revengance”) and instead advocates for discrimination without any mention of violence.

The Court upheld the statute on the ground that, without more, “advocating” violent means to effect political and economic change involves such danger to the security of the State that the State may outlaw it. Cf. Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U. S.380 (1927). But Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. See Dennis v. United States, 341 U. S.494, at 507 (1951). These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

You can advocate a political philosophy that includes revolution against corrupt governments, for example, but you can't yourself “incite or produce” imminent lawless action. When groups chant “death to Jews” or the euphemistic variant “from the river to the sea” outside a synagogue, there is no genuine argument – either in law or in philosophy – that can view it as protected speech. When those same groups say, in private or public, that what Hamas did was great and should be encouraged – same thing. The people who today say that these groups are miraculously protected would probably call the police in a blind panic if they received a death threat: the same exact kind of speech we are now dealing with en masse.

As we said in Noto v. United States, 367 U. S. 290,297-298 (1961), “the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” See also Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U. S. 242, 259-261 (1937); Bond v. Floyd, 385 U. S. 116, 134 (1966). A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments... Measured by this test, Ohio's Criminal Syndicalism Act [under which the KKK member was convicted, leading to this case] cannot be sustained.

I will personally give you $100 in Monopoly money if you can make a serious argument that these rallies are not “preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”

People and organizations which shield this speech alongside actual protected speech undermine their commitment to the actually protected speech. If they gain enough traction I think it will set back the current push to expand free speech protections by multiple years. Nobody in their right mind will want to protect free speech if it also means protecting murderers from prosecution for telegraphing their intention to murder. I hope people like deBoer remain on the fringe of the free speech movement.