AS FAR AS I HAVE ever seen, I have been the only person anywhere who has been making this argument for the past two decades. It was, as I recall, the topic of my first disagreement with Duncan Black and a number of his ACLU type commentators back in the earliest years of this millennium. Apparently it convinced one person who I know reads me:
Steve Simels, blog malignancy
Phineas T. Gage
20 hours ago
Beg to differ.
There is no, nor should there be, Constitutional right to lie with impunity. We need vastly stricter libel laws.
There would have been no Rush Limbaugh, hate radio and Fox News without the Sullivan decision.
And free speech absolutism is as dangerous and stupid as gun rights absolutism.
Nice to know I have some persuasive ability even against the greatest of resistance. I assume that is due to even Simels realizing that hate-speech is effectively dangerous in producing violence, terrorism, discrimination and genocide, something that I will compliment him on realizing as those in the media, those on the secular left and even many on the religious left pretend that most terrible of lessons in the school of experience isn't obvious on behalf of the ACLU style reading of the goddamned First Amendment and the blathering blather of "civil liberties" lawyering. I will note that in recent years, well after I started making that argument online, I've come to understand some lawyers Of Color, some Feminists have said similar things. Those who are most likely to be victims of hate speech and the violence it inevitably incites and encourages. And it always does
Hey -- when you're right, you're right.
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