I Freely Renounce My "Right" To Lie And Promote Bigotry When The Cost Of That "Right" Is The Lives Of Others

THE SCRIBBLING PROFESSIONS, the media have always had an interest in being able to publish anything they wanted without any regard for its consequences, that is apart from those absolute bans on publication and "speech," which they maintain as absolutely as they do "free press", are in its members interest, such as people who can be accused of stealing their literary property and making a profit off of it.  The legal fictions absolutely banning the alleged stealing of valuable scribblage and that to which scholars and "scholars" object is a huge exception to "free speech" absolutism for which those who maintain that ideological stand have little problem standing for.

And the ersatz heroes and heroines of "free speech - free press" etc. and their lawyers have had very notably flexible standards, I have before noted that heroine of such bilge as Lillian Hellman who paid her famously "free speech" lawyer Ephraim London big bucks to swallow his previous claim to fame to sue Mary McCarthy when Mary McCarthy told the truth, that Lillian Hellman was a prodigious liar and falsifier who, it should be noted, infamously stole the heroism of a woman who actually was in the anti-Nazi resistance to make herself a heroine in one of her alleged memoirs, the story made into the allegedly based-on-life movie which, no doubt, much of its audience mistook for truth, "Julia".  

The hypocrisies of the writing profession and so-called journalism on the issues of speech are so many, going from the subtle to the blatant, that it has provided me with lots of material over the years.  The language used to describe speech that is malignant in its content and obvious goals, terms such as "objectionable speech," "speech you don't personally like," "offensive speech," when applied to the kind of thing that leads to people being attacked, oppressed and murdered is speech of monumentally cynically calculated dismissal by those who never expect such speech will impinge on the lives of themselves or those they allegedly care about.  

And lets clear that up right now.  No lawyer, no judge, no "justice" no scribbler or babbler who would knowingly put at risk those they allegedly care about in this way, any of them DO NOT REALLY CARE ABOUT THOSE THEY PUT AT RISK.  Not putting people at such risk, putting their physical safety and lives at risk over the ersatz value of protecting hate speech is an act or real caring.  That is as true for family members as it is unknown Women, Black People, People of Color, LGBTQ, etc. who you have no real affectionate or personal connection to.  I don't think the civil liberties lawyers really do care about those their work victimizes. I dare you to explain how facilitating their endangerment on behalf of those who hate them and can be whipped up by those words is an act of caring.*

When it is lawyers, judges and "justices" who dismiss the clearly intended and frequently delivered harms of such speech, who often approve of that harm - and here I would name a long list including those sitting on the bench right now, including names like Powell, and Rehnquist and Roberts, Alito, Thomas, etc. many of the big names in the affluent ranks of civil liberties lawyers, that cynical and calculated dismissal will lead the scribblers and media to either excuse or praise those cynical and often evil men and women.

In an article in the very self-interested New York Times last year there was hand-wringing over the fact that a lot of younger lawyers who work in or are associated with one of the most misrepresented of all allegedly virtuous groups mistaken as liberal, the ACLU, were questioning its devotion to free-speech absolutism in face of the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-facism among those who the old ACLU could be counted on to represent or support in court.  It mentioned the Virginia ACLU who facilitated the neo-Nazis in Charlottsville Va.

A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.

In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.

The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. With too few police officers who reacted too passively, the demonstration turned ugly and violent; in addition to fistfights, the far right loosed anti-Semitic and racist chants and a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. Dozens were injured in the tumult.

Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”

A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.

Which, of course, is easy to say if YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES are not under direct danger from the Nazis and fascists the ACLU represent as the major part of their fundraising schtick - a few of the higher salary levels at the ACLU are mentioned in the article.  

The blood of the victims of those the ACLU and the judge facilitated are rightly seen as being on their hands as much as those they enabled and, through that, encouraged.

Perhaps more should be considered as to just what it is that makes the speech facilitated by the ACLU and the judge is "repugnant".  

If hate speech were merely words of dislike or innocuous insult implied in the civil-liberties language, they would not achieve that level of objectionablity.  

Such speech isn't repugnant due to it offending the delicate sensibilities of the genteel and well heeled, IT IS REPUGANT BECAUSE IT GETS PEOPLE ATTACKED, MAIMED AND KILLED.  To maintain the line of not only the largely majority white affluent lawyer male and, in some cases, female civil liberties industry personnel, they cannot really believe themselves and their loved ones to be in any real danger from it.  I would go so far as to say that many of their minority members and allies who have a greater expectation of their loved ones or even themselves being the targets of hate speech must have become professionally acculturated to ignoring that risk out of professional advantage.

The twisted morality of such genteel-well-heeled professionals who will go home to their lives of protected affluence allows them to separate themselves from the consequences of what they champion AND THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT BOTH ADVOCATING HATE SPEECH ON THE PART OF LAWYERS AND ITS PERMISSION BY JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" ARE ACTS FACILITATING ITS RESULTS.

So is writing that kind of virtue-signaling liberalish, really libertarian, journalism or scribblage, babbling such babblage.  The blood of the victims of white-supremacists, fascists (in the American context that is a tautology) and Nazis is on those lawyers, those judges, those "justices" the virtuous journalists and scribblers AND THOSE WHO DONATE TO THAT FACILITATION OF THE RESULTS.   In the case of the New York Times, the defense of which is the substance of the comment this is an answer to, it has been right in the middle of this because, in pursuit of its profitable ability to print untruth in the Sullivan case, it got one of the stupidest and most dangerous decisions a sometimes  muddled court made in its favor.  It could have asked to print a harmless retraction and paid the court costs during the first hearing and the judge may well have let them off for pennies, instead, for the want of and cost of fact checking of a paid ad in that rag, the demons of lies was unleashed in the name of the First Amendment.   I have to wonder if hate speech had not the year before gotten a Supreme Court "justice" killed instead of a president if they would have felt so virtuous in handing down that decision by an all-white, affluent, lawyer staffed Court.

* The old ACLU style dodge "if they can suppress the speech of Nazis they can suppress the speech of anyone" is a symptom of how susceptible otherwise allegedly intelligent People are to slogans that that, itself accentuates the danger of such speech.  In the United States, in the golden age of "free speech-press" it is the benevolent and positive speech which has not flourished as hate-talk-jockery, hate talk TV, FOX, etc. have swamped the truth with hate talk and lies.  That theory is so disproved in real life that its maintenance is evidence for the study of popular delusions.

As a gay man who has several times experienced real violence due to my identity and a lifetime of threats, I'd rather sacrifice the privilege to lie and spout hate that the likes of the ACLU have protected -WHICH, IF I USED THEM, I WOULD KNOW I WAS DOING SOMETHING WRONG - in favor of the safety and security of other members of targeted minorities and Women.  You can take my "right" to lie and spread hate from me and I doubt I'd feel anything but an enhanced practice of using speech and writing responsibly and morally.