Constitutional Law

Wisconsin Punishes Free Speech

The goal of so-called "Free Speech" advocates has always been to limit minority dissent.

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Black man at a lunch counter? That kind of thing can now get you expelled from the University of Wisconsin.

You show me a “free speech” absolutist, I’ll show you a hypocrite who is more interested in defending the rights of Nazis than the rights of the oppressed.

The First Amendment, once a bedrock guarantee of dissent in a free society, has been captured and deployed as another tool of the establishment. It’s now just another weapon in the arsenal of a majoritarian culture hellbent on stamping out dissent and protest.

The University of Wisconsin passed a rule that will allow them to expel students who “disrupt” approved campus speakers. The university says that students have to “listen to both sides.”

“Perhaps the most important thing we can do as a university is to teach students how to engage and listen to those with whom they differ,” system President Ray Cross told the regents. “If we don’t show students how to do this, who will? Without civil discourse and a willingness to listen and engage with different voices, all we are doing is reinforcing our existing values.”

I’m sure there’s a George Orwell novel where students are “shown” how to listen to ideas they flatly reject. If you strap me down and stick toothpicks in my eyelids, I’ll “engage with different voices” whether I want to or not.

Look, forcing people to pretend ideas on ethnic separatism and white supremacy are equally valuable as ideas on, say, tax cuts is a KEY strategy in the Nazi/Alt-Right takeover of America. These people NEED regular society to treat them with respect and dignity.

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People aren’t born intolerant. They have to learn it. Where better to teach them how to hate minorities and women than at the University of Wisconsin? The state already helped elect Trump, now they’re willing to help the next Trump learn how to hate. It’s a perfect victory for white supremacy in America.

White free speech advocates will, of course, carefully separate out the right to “protest” from the right to “disrupt.” They’ll say “I’ll defend to the death the right to protest ideas I agree with” — though, curiously, you’ll never see any of these white guys actually at the press conference defending the right of minorities to protest. But they’ll turn around and say that nobody has the right to “disrupt” another’s exercise of their free speech.

For these white guys, somebody can stand on the street in front of my house calling me “n***er” all day, but the minute I “disrupt” the ability of his jaw to move up and down, I’m the “intolerant liberal” who doesn’t respect the First Amendment. They’ll defend the right of the Nazi to go to Wisconsin and tell all the white people there that Jews are weakening America, but the minute a group of students shout LOUDER than that guy, they can be expelled for “refusing to listen.”

These people don’t believe in “free speech,” they believe in the majoritarian tyranny of speech. They have turned the First Amendment INTO A JOKE. It is now only to be employed by those in power AGAINST those without power.

I keep saying “white” free speech advocates, and that terminology will bother some (white) people. From the white perspective, free speech is a “concept” that can be deployed equally by any race. White guys LOVE to say that “Without free speech, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement would have failed.”

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I wish these guys would keep MLK’s good name out of their intellectually dishonest mouths.

Martin Luther King was arrested (by white people) 29 times. TWENTY-F**KING-NINE. Free speech didn’t “save” Martin Luther King from the white man’s police, and free speech didn’t catch a bullet for him in Memphis.

Every time that brother spoke, he took his very life in his own hands. Every time he went to a church, white people threatened to firebomb the church. The VIOLENCE of those who opposed him, hounded him every place, every time he spoke, until they eventually got him.

Which is why King did a lot more than talk. Martin Luther King protested. He DISRUPTED. He VIOLATED the laws and norms of his time in order to highlight the immorality of those laws and norms.

Under these new policies, Martin Luther King would have been expelled from the University of Wisconsin. RICHARD SPENCER would not. Whenever your intellectual ideas result in you defending Richard Spencer’s right to speak, but expelling Marin Luther King for his civil disobedience, you’re not a “defender of the First Amendment.”

You’re just a tool.

Put another way: Whites Win, Again. The black man has no First Amendment rights the white man is bound to respect.

University of Wisconsin approves free speech policy that punishes student protesters [Chicago Tribune]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.

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