Department of Justice, Justice

Jeff Sessions Promises To Use 'Free Speech' To Stamp Out Free Speech

Jeff Sessions even managed to work in a defense of hate speech, which you don't see every day.

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Jeff Sessions (Generated by JG JPEG Library)

As we’ve been reporting today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke at Georgetown Law Center in an event designed to limit the free speech rights of students and faculty who disagree with Jeff Sessions. The hypocrisy from Sessions, and the Georgetown Law professors who did his bidding, would be shocking if we still had the capacity to be shocked by rank hypocrisy.

Please read here for the play-by-play of how things went down. And be embarrassed for Georgetown, a once proud “T-14” law school which today seems farther away from “elite” status than ever before.

The set up for the Sessions speech was gross, but the content of his thoughts were those of a fledgling tyrant. Sessions promised “enforcement” of free speech protections, but didn’t even veil that what he means by that is to stamp out peaceful protests.

Here’s the transcript of Sessions’s remarks, as published by the Department of Justice. Many will focus on the end, where Sessions said his Justice Department will: “enforce federal law, defend free speech, and protect students’ free expression from whatever end of the political spectrum it may come.” He promised to file Statements of Interest in campus free speech issues.

He did NOT threaten to withhold government funding from universities that fail to follow Jeff Sessions’s version of free expression, which is notable because he has repeatedly threatened to withhold crime fighting funds from “sanctuary cities.”

But the real danger from the Attorney General was not exposed through his threats of legal action. Aside from turning their mascot into Pepe the Frog, there’s little the Justice Department can do to make the world easier for Milo Yiannopoulos.

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As with all these Trump people, the danger isn’t legal, it’s in the dog-whistle to the very worst people in our country. Here’s Sessions completely mischaracterizing the “heckler’s veto.”

College administrators also have silenced speech by permitting “the heckler’s veto” to control who gets to speak and what messages are conveyed. In these instances, administrators discourage or prohibit speech if there is even a threat that it will be met with protest. In other words, the school favors the heckler’s disruptive tactics over the speaker’s First Amendment rights. These administrators seem to forget that, as the Supreme Court put it in Watson v. City of Memphis more than 50 years ago, “constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise.”

This permissive attitude toward the heckler’s veto has spawned a cottage industry of protestors who have quickly learned that school administrators will capitulate to their demands.

If this sounds like a reasonable statement to you, you haven’t played the tape through to the end.

Let’s say a university invites a controversial speaker to campus, AS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME NOW BECAUSE FREE SPEECH ISN’T UNDER ATTACK. That controversial speaker will be met with protest, BECAUSE PROTEST IS A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TOO. What happens then? In the world of Jeff Sessions, the “protester” isn’t exercising his rights freely as an American citizen, no, he’s a “heckler” trying to suspend somebody else’s right. The protester — who the First Amendment was designed to protect — becomes the enemy. The establishment stooge invited to speak, becomes the victim.

And the cops? Well Sessions just told universities that if they unleash their dogs on “disruptive” protesters, Sessions and the Justice Department will have their back.

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Speaking about protests that disrupted an event at Middlebury College, Sessions said:

This is not right. This is not in the great tradition of America. And, yet, school administrators bend to this behavior. In effect, they coddle it and encourage it.

This seems like a good time to point out that the Sessions Justice Department is still trying to prosecute people who laughed at Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing. When Jeff Sessions says “heckler” your Spidey-sense should tingle, because what Jeff Sessions thinks should be done to “hecklers” isn’t in the BALLPARK of a robust understanding of the First Amendment.

You’ll note what we haven’t talked about yet: hate speech. Jeff Sessions managed to give a whole speech about “free” speech without mentioning the role universities and society has in regulating unprotected speech that promotes violence and genocide.

In fact, Sessions went in the opposite direction and gave what amounts to a defense of hate speech.

There are those who will say that certain speech isn’t deserving of protection. They will say that some speech is hurtful—even hateful. They will point to the very speech and beliefs that we abhor as Americans. But the right of free speech does not exist only to protect the ideas upon which most agree at a given moment in time.

As Justice Brandeis eloquently stated in his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

And let me be clear that protecting free speech does not mean condoning violence like we saw recently in Charlottesville. Indeed, I call upon universities to stand up against those who would silence free expression by violence or other means on their campuses.

At a given moment in time? THERE IS NEVER A TIME WHEN NAZIS MUST BE TOLERATED! Free speech does not EXIST to protect Nazis, IT MUST BE PROTECTED FROM NAZIS.

Jeff Sessions talks like a man who knows that in some “moments in time” his beliefs would have let him own people, while at other moments in time, his beliefs would have gotten his house burnt down by William Tecumseh Sherman. Sometimes Sessions is on top, sometimes he’s not, and he talks about Free Speech as the thing that allows him to exist comfortably in all timelines.

IN FACT, Sessions is an authoritarian and racist individual whose beliefs should be (yes) SHOUTED DOWN, BY ALL GOOD PEOPLE, IN ALL TIMES.

The reason Sessions and his ilk want their free speech more thoroughly “protected” from protesters is because their beliefs cannot survive committed opposition. Again, go back and read the play-by-play, it is SESSIONS who needed a “safe space” to spew his rhetoric, because in a fair fight in the marketplace of ideas, Sessions loses every time he gets North of Fort Sumter.

The Founding Fathers didn’t REBEL so a tool of the government could empower institutions of learning to crack heads of students who dare to protest. Jeff Sessions is out here writing an alternative history where King George won but was nice about it.

I expect that most quality institutions and universities will ignore Jeff Sessions and continue to promote the free speech rights of all their students, not just their Nazi ones who happen to be favored by the government “at this moment in time.” I also expect that, again, “quality” institutions will continue to protect their students from hate speech and violence.

But, certainly, some universities will start cracking down on non-violent protests. Which just gives more students the opportunity to be heroes.

Free speech isn’t free. Jeff Sessions just raised its cost. I’m sure that there will be a lot of students willing to pay.

Attorney General Sessions Gives an Address on the Importance of Free Speech on College Campuses [Department of Justice]

Earlier:

Law School Snowflakes Demand Safe Space Over Jeff Sessions Talk

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