Free Speech

Being A First Amendment Hero Is Easy When The Cost Is Other People's Blood

Your indignation would be a lot more interesting to me if it weren't quite so covered in crap.

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(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Yesterday was a great day for First Amendment absolutists. Truly, I think they had a ball surveying the weekend’s carnage and spitting out hot takes about how now, more than ever, it’s important to defend the right of actual Nazis to speak their minds. I like to imagine all these First Amendment heroes writing in the same room, hairy man-chests puffed out, breathing deeply the rewards of intellectual consistency in the face of practical horror.

It must have been fun. I read Popehat’s well-written deep navel gaze down the slippery slope — into the abyss where he and others feel compelled to defend the speech rights of “literal Nazis” not as some “hypothetical,” but as a real thing happening in modern times — but I just couldn’t stop thinking about how many dead bodies would have to be brought to their door before the stench ruined the free speech party. Clearly, one isn’t enough. I don’t even know if you can be an American lawyer if you can’t step over one dead body on the way to making your point. But the literal Nazis killed 5 to 6 million Jews, and I have to believe that there’s some body count between one woman and 6 million people where at least some of the First Amendment guys would deviate from their deeply held beliefs and tell the current Nazis to SHUT THE FUCK UP, preferably before they control so much of the government that it’s too late to stand up to them.

It’s not that I think the government should step in, now, and regulate the freedom of expression. As Popehat and everybody with half a brain points out, handing powers over to this administration, run by this fledgling tyrant, would be the worst of all possible worlds. The resistance forces are lucky one of our own was murdered this weekend. Had it be one of the Trump voters, history would remember Charlottesville alongside the Reichstag fire.

If the First Amendment is going to come under serious attack, it’s not going to be from the left, it’s going to be from the assortment of goons and stooges currently running the Republican party. The Justice Department just demanded 1.3 million IP addresses from an anti-Trump site. Amazingly, THE NAZIS are not the ones at risk from this government.

That’s why all these First Amendment takes badly miss the mark. These speech warriors have spent years telling us that the First Amendment is under siege from… Millennials. These guys will go to the mattresses every time a 20-year-old with an Instagram following doesn’t sit quietly when Ann Coulter comes to her campus to call her a whore for wanting free birth control. But this weekend a woman was attacked with a car for (wait for it) EXERCISING HER FREE SPEECH RIGHTS, and all the First Amendment defender crowd can think to write are reasons to defend THE NAZIS WHO KILLED HER.

FUUUUUUUUUCK you people. Ain’t nobody got time for your “first they came for the Nazis” inverse prattle today.

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Heather Heyer isn’t the only actual free speech martyr who has been largely ignored by those who purport to defend the freedom of speech. These First Amendment heroes, they’ll always tell you that the only “cure” for hate speech is “more speech.” You know who tried to live that truth? Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche. Those were the two guys who stood up to a man spouting hate speech at a woman wearing a hijab on a train in Portland. Those guys got stabbed to death trying to fight in the “marketplace of ideas” with only their words.

People are out here DYING. That’s the final hypothetical. People are actually dead because they stood up to hate speech. If all you can think to do is to write or Tweet or status-update about the importance of protecting the hate speech, you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.

Maybe some of you First Amendment types can dip your mighty quills into the blood of actual patriots lying dead in the streets and scratch out something more useful to say? If you think freedom of speech is so damn important, THEN USE YOURS to say something that will help us stop these people. Heather Heyer’s voice was silenced, which one of you free speech warriors will rise to take her place?

The great Millennial menace to free speech will be here tomorrow. These phantoms you swing at will be here to haunt you tomorrow. TODAY, we need your help beating back the forces that are actually murdering people.

We. Are. Losing. Christ alive, speech isn’t going anywhere. But your black, brown, and Jewish friends might be if these guys keep winning. Don’t you understand, your speech rights will be the SECOND casualty, not the first. And people like me won’t be around to say “I told you so.”

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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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