The Chris Moeller Archives

Upsetting opinions

Liberals need to be very careful about how far they’re willing to go to extend hate crime laws in the U.S. criminal code. In Europe, where virtually no country has a tacit free speech protection equal to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, these same laws have for some time been applied in instances when unpopular leftist views were being espoused. In France in 2008, a leftist activist named Herve Eon was fined 30 euro ($39) simply for holding a banner up to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s car that read “get lost, jerk.” Eon’s words were echoing precise ones spoken by Sarkozy a short time before to a French citizen that had refused to shake his hand.

One of the most draconian restrictions across several nations has been hate speech laws applied to activists that have promoted the economic boycott movement against Israel. In 2009, several activists in France were convicted of “inciting racial hatred” for applying boycott stickers to pieces of produce imported from Israel. Contrary to popular belief, countries like France, Britain, and Germany are not necessarily more democratic than the United States, and with stricter speech laws on the books, none of these countries has seen a decrease in neo-Nazi activism, white nationalism, or in hate crimes.

But it could happen here. Virtually the whole of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate believes that this boycott movement against Israel, an apartheid state, amounts to anti-Semitism, and such hate speech legislation has already seen light in legislative chambers. Also in Congress we have seen a frightening number of representatives (that is, a number greater than one) advocate publicly for denying First Amendment protections to Islamic radicals based on the Constitutionally-flimsy pretense that these individuals don’t believe in free speech themselves and therefore don’t deserve it. It’s not an outsized leap to imagine a “terrorist” label applied to Black Lives Matters activists. Fourteen states have already seen bills introduced that would attempt to add police officers to hate crime categories as a way of targeting BLM activists with imprisonment. Here in Iowa (as in five other states), the legislature has seen fit to criminalize the secret video recording of conditions inside large hog confinement facilities with these whistle blowers and secret recorders identified by many as “terrorists.”

After Charlottesville, there has been a mushrooming advocacy, visible online and elsewhere, coming from the left end of the political spectrum to have private tech companies, and even the state, limit the platforms for speech. The fundamental concept of free speech, however, is to allow an open marketplace of ideas so that the best ones will win. And since Charlottesville, we’ve actually seen a powerful push-back against the mainstreaming of overt white supremacist ideas, and even a weakening of the “alt-right” and neo-Nazi movements-- effectively by splitting them. The term “alt-right” has become a political liability within a very short period of time. A large subsequent rally mapped for the west coast was cancelled, young anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activists have figuratively sprinted away from the Nazis and the KKK that helped populate the Virginia rally, the Breitbart news agency has now disowned the “alt-right” label, and the most visible member of the alt-right movement, Steve Bannon, was fired by a president that is loath to accept criticism or admit mistakes. None of this happened because viewpoints were suppressed in the legal code, but by the fact that protestors were met on the street by a larger number of anti-fascist and left-wing counter-protestors. Few of these nationalists have likely changed their minds and they certainly haven’t gone away as a whole, but they have gone running away from their “brand,” having lost an enormous number of moderate sympathizers in their cause. This is the marketplace of ideas at work.

It shouldn’t be necessary to list all of the once-unpopular views-- opposing war, racism, sexism, and homophobia-- that now hold majority support thanks to our Constitutional protections. That document does not exist other than to protect minority rights from the tyranny of the majority. For liberals, abandoning the First Amendment is abandoning the greatest tool that exists in this country to fight injustice.

posted by CM @ 10:14 PM