The US presidential election is far from over, but that hasn’t stopped Joe Biden (or his handlers, at least) from acting as if he’s already in the Oval Office. Biden’s team have already set up a legally-fictitious “Office of the President-Elect”, so what policy directions are we likely to see, should Biden actually win?
There’s the boiler-plate leftist obsession with “systemic racism”, not to mention the pie-in-the-sky lunacy of the “Green New Deal”.
But there’s far, far worse: under a putative Biden administration, Americans can look forward to the trashing of one of their most revered constitutional freedoms.
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition leader for U.S.-owned media outlets, Richard Stengel, supports restricting free speech and creating new guidelines that would make “hate speech” a crime.
In a Washington Post op-ed published last year, Stengel, who served as President Barack Obama’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, suggested the government should make “statutes to penalize speech” that is offensive.
This is directly contrary to the First Amendment and every Supreme Court judgement that has ever interpreted it.
Worse, it would mark a decisive turning-point in American culture: away from the invidualist, liberty-minded ethos that has defined America from the days of the Founding Fathers, to an alien, communitarian mindset that subverts the freedom of the individual to the demands of the cry-bully mob.
“All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting ‘thoughts that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect,” he added.
Stengel said one reason for his thoughts on free speech was that “the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?
Because that’s what freedom of speech means.
Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech. –
Noam Chomsky.
Note also that Biden’s lackey’s first example to run to is Islam? In other words, Biden is sidin’ with those Muslim leaders who want to re-instate blasphemy laws. Biden’s policy is not just alien to American culture, but to the Enlightenment itself.
While Stengel correctly noted that the Supreme Court has ruled that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” can be restricted, the court has also ruled that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.
In the 2017 case of Matal v. Tom, the Supreme Court ruled that the government did not have the right to prohibit the registration of trademarks that are “racially disparaging.”
Further, hate speech laws, which are popular in Europe, are actually used to stifle political dissent rather than hold people accountable for violent speech, according to The Intercept.
“Those laws have frequently been used to constrain and sanction a wide range of political views that many left-wing censorship advocates would never dream could be deemed ‘hateful,’ and even against opinions which many of them likely shared,” the article notes.
Even in New Zealand, where free speech is supposedly a guaranteed right, the government has taken it upon itself to ban works from public view and to send the Stasi knocking on citizens’ doors, for saying the “wrong” thing in public.
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