You Have the Right to Say Whatever You Want

And so do I

A CORRECTION

Jordan Peterson, the “neofascist creep” (h/t Ian) who often appears on The Joe Rogan Experience, is no longer employed by The University of Toronto. He “retired” in 2021 citing “The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business.” He literally calls them “DIE” mandates. All of this is completely on-brand but also raises questions not only about Peterson’s long tenure at the University (he joined the faculty in 1998) but also why he was granted tenure in the first place.

A POINT OF CLARIFICATION

For the record, I do not pick the Good Human of the Week—you do. Everybody gets one vote—including me. I count the votes and then announce the results. I don’t always agree with the winner(s), but I report them with some of your comments.

PERSPECTIVE

I received an email about the latest Good Human of the Week. Many of you chose Neil Young because he requested that his entire music catalogue be removed from Spotify to protest the fact that the streaming service gives a platform to Joe Rogan and his dangerous dissemination of COVID disinformation.

“Whatever happened to free speech?” the email reads. “If you don't like what's on don't listen. I personally hate the fucking guy and all he stands for but that's not reason enough. Get some perspective.”

I have perspective and this is it: Punishing an individual or a private corporation—by pulling advertising or canceling subscriptions, for example—for spreading disinformation or condoning racism is not a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That reads as follows:

Only the government can violate an individual’s right to free speech. Here are a few examples of the Supreme Court’s ruling against the government for trying to curtail an individual’s or a group’s First Amendment Rights.

• In the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio the free speech rights of a member of the Ku Klux Klan were upheld. During a rally, Clarence Brandenburg, a KKK leader, had spoken about the possibility of “revengeance” against Blacks (although that’s not the word he used) and Jews. Charged with advocating violence, Brandenburg was convicted, fined, and sentenced to one to ten years in prison. In its decision overturning the conviction, SCOTUS ruled that an individual cannot be punished for such abstract advocacy of violence.

• In 1968, a 19-year-old man named Paul Cohen was arrested for wearing a jacket in a Los Angels courthouse with the words “Fuck the Draft” written on it. His intention was to protest the Vietnam War. He was arrested for disturbing the peace not because he was protesting but because he used an obscenity. Cohen was convicted and appealed the decision.

  The California Court of Appeal upheld the conviction saying that "offensive conduct" meant "behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace.” In the 1971 case, Cohen v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the defendant. Justice John Harlan wrote, “while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric.”

  [Interesting footnote: Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the dissent in which he argued Cohen’s wearing of the offending jacket was conduct not speech and therefore not protected by the First Amendment—it is one of the rare instances in which I disagree with that brilliant man.]

• In 2006, Albert Snyder, the father of Matthew Snyder, a marine who died in Iraq, sued the Westboro Baptist Church for protesting at his son’s funeral with signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags” (their go-to). Snyder claimed “this case is not about free speech; it’s about targeted harassment.” A jury found for the plaintiff and awarded Snyder $11 million. The Supreme Court, however, ruled 8 to 1 in favor of Westboro Baptist. Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”

Tucker “Fish Sticks” Carlson, a white-nationalist traitor, can get on a soap box in the middle of Times Square every day and spout dangerous, racist, anti-American garbage and nobody can stop him. He can’t be arrested; the government cannot interfere in any way with his right to say whatever he wants. This does not mean, however, that Carlson is entitled to have a cable show that appeals directly to millions of people every weeknight. It does not mean that he is entitled to receive millions of dollars in compensation.

Carlson’s right to free speech does not invalidate our right to free speech. It does not demand that we sit on the sidelines powerless in the face of his practically unfettered attempts to sow division, stir up anti-immigrant and anti-Black sentiments, and do his part to destroy American democracy. We can refuse to watch his show, yes, but we can also ask our cable companies not to carry Fox. We can boycott any advertisers who support Carlson’s show. We can speak out against him in any way we see fit. We can do everything in our power to try to take away his platform. (And we should.)

If we’re going to have any chance of winning this fight against the very powerful and malign anti-democratic forces staring us down, we need to understand the terms of the fight and the weapons at our disposal. Perpetuating our own ignorance is an unforced error that automatically gives our enemies an advantage. We need to do better.

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1/24/22-1/30/22

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Looking at the daily top ten posts for the week, Ben Shapiro held 26 of the 70 top ten posts. Dan Bongino took 8. Last week it was 21 and 9 respectively.

Only one left-leaning organizations made the lists: Occupy Democrats, with five spots in the top 70.

Of the remaining 35 top ten spots, 21 were taken by right-wing individuals and organizations or poseurs like Bill Maher, the hack who recently said, “I’m a hero at Fox these days. Which shows just how much liberals have their head up their ass, because if they really thought about it, they would have made me a hero on their media. Yeah, but but but that can’t happen in this ridiculous new era of mind-numbing partisanship where if I keep it real about the nonsense in the Democratic Party, it makes me an instant hero to Republicans.”

Maher went on to show his hand by saying, “The oath of office I took was to comedy. And if you do goofy shit, wherever you are in this spectrum, I’m going to make fun of you because that’s where the gold is.”

Linden can handle the truth.

NYT AND AMAZON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION

The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, moved to #1 and Jamie Raskin’s Unthinkable stayed strong at #4.

Making it’s debut on the list at #11 is American Muckraker by James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas and criminal who attacks progressive groups by doctoring evidence agains them.

Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism and  Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vax screed, The Real Anthony Fauci switched places at 13 and 12 respectively.

Some consolation is that the newly banned book Maus is at 2,3 and 7 on the overall bestseller list and The 1619 Project is at #16.

APPLE PODCASTS—NEWS

3. (up from 5): The Ben Shapiro Show. Shapiro is an anti-Muslim, anti-choice, homophobic bigot. He is, in other words, a mainstream Republican (which is pretty much what can be said about all of the others on these lists).

6. The Matt Walsh Show. Walsh is a white power transphobe whose podcast is hosted by Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

7. The Dan Bongino Show. In November 2020 Bongino was listed by The New York Times as one of the top 5 election "misinformation super-spreaders.”

10 (up from 11). Steve Bannon’s War Room. Simply put: Bannon is an anarchist who seems hell-bent on destroying America.

13. Candace Owen

16. The Glenn Beck Program. Beck is a long-time conspiracy theorist.

The only progressives shows in the top 20:

10. Pod Save America

12. Rachel Maddow

16. #SisterInLaw—celebrating it’s 1st anniversary!

Despite his continual dissemination of COVID disinformation to his 11 million monthly listeners, Joe Rogan, the guy who ingested ivermectin, has the #1 podcast on Spotify. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that his podcast has even more listeners now after last week’s controversy.

SUBSTACK NEWS

Although the top-ten is more ideologically diverse across the right-wing spectrum it contains a disturbing number of serially wrong anti-democratic writers who have way too many followers than is healthy for our nation. Every single newsletter in the top ten has tens of thousands of subscribers.

2. The Dispatch: Jonah Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of this newsletter. Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism in 2008 and continues to be wrong much of the time. He is very critical of Tucker Carlson and Fox in general, also he bad-mouths pro-Donald Republicans so that’s something. 

5. Glen Greenwald: I’m not sure how to characterize Glenn Greenwald, although I have no doubt he thinks he’s a righteous bomb-thrower. Suffice it to say that during the four disastrous years of the Trump administration Greenwald thought the best use of his time was to criticize Democrats on Fox. Since 2017 he has appeared on the network over 80 times—over half of those on Tucker Carlson’s show.

6. Unreported Truths: Alex Berenson who initially downplayed the Coronavirus and now spreads disinformation about it on right-wing media outlets, recently compared the January 6th Committee to the House Un-American Activities Commission.

7. Common Sense (Oh, the irony.): Bari Weiss, aka the “Substack grifter” (in the words of Press Run’s Eric Boehlert), who clearly fancies herself a sophisticated polemicist, seems to offer nothing but bad takes—almost always at the expense of facts. On a recent appearance on fellow-traveler Bill Maher’s show she said, “Continuing extreme pandemic measures like school closures or mask mandates will someday be remembered as a ‘catastrophic moral crime.’” Anybody who thinks the “moral crime” is the measures taken to prevent children from getting sick and dying not the willful and malignant actions of the previous administration that led to the completely avoidable deaths of almost one million people, is a person nobody should be paying attention to.

8. The Weekly Dish: It’s hard to pin down Andrew Sullivan’s political ideology. I don’t even think he knows what it is. But he’s a trans-phobe who helped popularize The Bell Curve, a racist 1994 book that claimed a connection between IQ and race. Again, he’s not on the same end of the spectrum as Berenson or Greenwald, but he is very often wrong or misleading.

Thankfully this sorry collection of propagandists, purveyors of misinformation, and liars is bracketed by the exemplary Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson at number 1 and Judd Legum’s Popular Information at number ten.