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According to Joseph Rizoli the First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly only extend to those with government-issued permits to exercise those rights (The real haters at Charlottesville, Aug. 15). Thus, the counter-protesters to the supposed non-haters had no right to assemble, no right to speak freely, only to stay home and shut up. Anything else is hate, according to Mr. Rizoli.

Of course, theres no excuse for either side throwing bricks or anything else at the other side, except perhaps insults, even without a permit. You, know, its the free speech thing. I notice, however, that Mr. Rizoli did not mention driving a car into the counter-protesting haters, apparently because having a permit to exercise ones First Amendment rights also allows attacking those without a permit with a 3,000-pound, deadly weapon.

The MetroWest News frequently publishes the First Amendment on the editorial page. Mr. Rizoli should read it, contemplate it, and try to understand it.

K. A. Boriskin

Bellingham

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Letter: Peculiar First Amendment interpretation - MetroWest Daily News

As a journalist, I like to think I know a little something about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like most students in the United States, I studied the Bill of Rights in grade school and learned the First Amendments protections by rote: freedom of speech, religion, assembly, petition and the press. (That last one is now my bread and butter.)

In later years, I dove a little deeper by reading landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in college like Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, in which the court found in 1969 that black armbands worn to protest the Vietnam War were protected symbolic speech.

That was the same year the court decided Brandenburg v. Ohio, and determined that government could not punish public speech, including that of KKK leader Clarence Brandenburg at a 1964 Klan rally, unless it is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to spur such action.

Im no constitutional scholar, but I do know that protections exist even for hateful speech, the kind reported extensively in the aftermath of the white nationalist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., where ensuing violence claimed the life of 32-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Even though most Americans would agree that the racist rhetoric spewed by Neo-Nazis, the KKK and other hate groups is vile and unsettling, many of us would likely also agree that it, too, must be shielded by the First Amendment to avoid creating an environment ripe for censorship and censure.

There it is, folks, the slippery-slope argument. End of story.

Well, not quite.

Im getting sort of sick and tired of all the absolute-constitutional-rights talk. Theres nothing absolute about constitutional rights, said Justin Brooks, a professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego.

Brooks said as much in a post he shared on Facebook last week, along with a photo of tiki-torch bearing white nationalists gathered on the University of Virginia campus. He added, Hate speech should not be protected speech.

The post attracted many responses and prompted a robust debate among friends and colleagues. It also prompted a call from the Union-Tribune.

Brooks said he disagrees with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has long held that there is no general exception for hate speech under the First Amendment, but has identified a few well-defined and narrowly limited exceptions that include obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement and true threats.

(The court) has drawn the line you have to be inciting violence in order for it to be restricted, Brooks said. What bothers me about this discussion is it doesnt recognize how hurtful some of that hate speech is. At a certain point, speech can actually cause harm to individuals.

He said he understands the fear many Americans and the courts feel about the prospect of regulating hate speech, because defining it is subjective. But he argued that it is possible to draw a narrow definition that regulates public displays of hate, based on race, gender, nationality, ethnicity and sexual preference.

There is no doubt that the hate speech promoted by the KKK and Nazis causes harm to the members of our community who are targeted, Brooks said. Therefore, it is appropriate to regulate that speech.

He didnt need social media to know his views on the subject are unpopular, particularly among others in legal community. (See: slippery slope.)

Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union represented Jason Kessler, organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in a lawsuit to keep the far-right groups permit to protest at a downtown park.

In response to criticism, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero wrote a statement explaining the nonprofits decision to represent white supremacist demonstrators in court. In it, he acknowledged that speech alone can have hurtful consequences, but argued that the airing of hateful speech allows people of good will to confront the implications of such speech and reject bigotry, discrimination and hate.

Preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality, he wrote.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield

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How far do the First Amendment's protections go when it comes to hate speech? - The San Diego Union-Tribune

You know our representatives have gone off the deep end when they begin considering imposing a tax on the First Amendment to raise more government revenue. But unfortunately, thats the reality were now living in.

Recently, the Daily News and Washington Times reported that party leadership is considering replacing the failed border adjustment tax with revenue raisers from former Rep. Dave Camps (D-MI) 2014 tax reform plan. Allegedly, one of the top contenders for replacement is his old advertising tax provision, which would scrap advertisings full deductibility as a business expense and make it only half deductible, with the other half being amortized over a ten-year period.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) are too smart to let this tax go into their soon to be released tax reform proposal. If it arises, they must use their knowledge and instincts to kill the provision, because passing such a tax would undoubtedly be political and economic suicide.

Against Our Founding Values

Perhaps the chief spark of the American Revolution was Great Britains imposition of an advertising tax the Stamp Act on the colonists, which was perceived to be a huge cost burden and an unnecessary limit to residents accessibility of important news. The tax was so unpopular that American citizens began unionizing and engaging in mob violence against stamp collectors. Parliament was forced to repeal the provision after just one year, but the colonists never forgave and never forgot. They ended up declaring their independence and engaging in armed rebellion against their mother country just years later.

Unconstitutional

After the colonists won that war and formed their own country, they established the First Amendment, which served as a safeguard against any future regulations of free speech.

By holding back Americans money for over a decade, the Camp ad tax proposal would be violating that amendment by essentially making free speech a dollar and cents game. Only those who could afford to do without the money would be able to continue.

Its clearly unconstitutional, and as constitutional scholar Bruce Fein at Huffington Post and litigation attorney Christopher Cooke at The Hill have detailed, theres plenty of Supreme Court precedent to prove it. Under the plan, advertising would be treated worse than every other business expense that receives full expensing, making it a clear violation of the First Amendment that would lead to the bankrupting of local newspapers and radio stations. This would keep communities in the dark about whats going on around them, all while adding more monopoly strength to the already-powerful cable news giants. Essentially, it would do exactly what our founding fathers tried to prevent.

Economic Growth Killer

Going against our founding principles and governing documents is bad enough, but the worst part about this tax is that it wont even be successful at what its brainchild intended for it to do fill Washingtons coffers.

There are few things that naturally stimulate the economy more than advertising spending. Reports have shown that annually, ad tax spending generates approximately 16 percent of the United States economic activity, as well as 14 percent of total U.S. employment. Thus, imposing such a tax will reduce federal revenue by hampering the many parts of the economy that are dependent on advertising.

An ad tax was already tried on the state level, and not surprisingly, it failed miserably. After campaigning on not raising taxes, Republican Governor Bob Martinez (R-FL) approved an ad tax, which destroyed $2.5 billion in personal income and washed away 50,000 jobs. The tax actually cost the state money the taxs administrative costs ended up exceeding the tax revenue.The public was rightfully outraged at the taxs futility, prompting the New York Times to report that Martinez suffered political embarrassment in his first year in office by having to shift from ardent support of the tax to advocating its repeal.

Conclusion

Clearly, including the Camp advertising tax in the so-called 2017 tax reform bill would be economic and political suicide, especially for the party that is supposed to be championing limited government and constitutional policymaking. A large portion of the House of Representatives understands this, which is why 124 members signed onto a bipartisan Dear Colleague letter to congressional leaders, stating: The potential for strengthening our economy through tax reform would be jeopardized by any proposal that imposes an advertising tax on our nations manufacturing, retail and service industries. The ball now lies in the Big Six tax reformers hands. Will they do whats best for the economy and the American people, or whats most pleasing to corporate donors and cable news talking heads?

Steve Lonegan is the former Mayor of Bogota, NJ and a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. Steve is the former New Jersey Chairman of Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential campaign, a former senior staffer for Americans for Prosperity and the American Principles Project, and a Republican candidate in several high-profile national political races.

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Lonegan: House Leadership Must Kill the First Amendment Tax - Breitbart News

In the marketplace, traditionally understood, when a company produces a poor product or mistreats its customers, it faces market disciplinenew ones come in and steal market share. Thats the theory, at least.

Too bad its not true right now, at least not on the Internet.

Google and Apple, with a combined 98 percent market share in mobile-phone operating systems, have banned Gab, an upstart Twitter competitor with a free-speech policy quaintly modeled on the First Amendment itself, from their app stores. Google cited hate speech as its reason for exclusion; Gab doesnt censor. What few people yet understand is that Google and Apple have used their duopoly status to revoke the First Amendment on mobile phones. Because the Internet is now majority mobile, and a growing majority of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, the First Amendment is now effectively dead in the mobile sphere unless policymakers act to rein in the tech giants who serve as corporate gatekeepers to digital speech.

Twitter ran into controversy last year when it was accused of censoring conservative voices. Gab founders Andrew Torba, an alumnus of Silicon Valleys prestigious Y Combinator accelerator, and Ekrem Bykkaya saw a market opportunity for a competitor focused on free speechnot just for conservatives but for dissidents globally. Last August, they launched Gab, a Twitter-like app where, according to company spokesman Utsav Sanduja, Whatever is permissible under the First Amendment is what Gab allows onto its site.

Gab grew slowly but has now reached over 200,000 usersa substantial number, though tiny compared with Twitter. It generated modest revenue through a freemium model, wherein users could pay to upgrade to a Pro level. Gab pulled off a coup by raising $1 million through crowd-funded investment. The company says that it is planning an Initial Coin Offering with its own digital currency based on the Ethereum standard. In short, Gab is a real company, with legitimate founders, a business strategy, revenue, more than 200,000 users, and seven-figure funding.

Apple and Google dont agree. Gab built an app for Apples iOS operating system, but Apple wouldnt approve it. This means that iPhone and iPad users cant use the Gab app because users cant install applications on those devices unless Apple approves them. Gabs Android app was available through Googles app store until yesterday, when Google banned it, citing violations of its hate-speech policy. In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people, a Google statement read. This is a long-standing rule and clearly stated in our developer policies. While Android users can install unapproved apps, its a cumbersome process, and being kicked out of the app store reduces the apps reach.

No doubt, a number of far-right groups have found a home on Gab. I tried Gab myself when it first came out, finding it functionally an interesting mix of Twitter and Reddit, but with too many far-right users for my taste. So I dropped it. Gab also courted trouble with provocative moves like publicly announcing a job offer for James Damore after Google fired him and taunting Silicon Valley after its crowd-funding success. It also uses a green frog as its logo. Gab claims that this is not the controversial Pepe the Frog, identified with the alt-Right, but rather inspired by the plague of frogs from Exodus. Even if this is true, the logo choice seems like a deliberate provocation.

But its difficult to credit Gab as a white-supremacist site when its cofounder is a Turkish Kurd and Muslim. Bykkaya, who says Ive never supported Trump for a minute in my entire life, is concerned about speech repression in his part of the worldfor good reason, as Turkey is infamous for its violations of free speech and for locking up journalists. Gab spokesman Sanduja is a South Asian Hindu from Canada.

Gab points out that other major social-media platforms have hosted ISIS activity, and child-porn rings, facilitated drug dealing, and carried live streams of murder, torture, and other crimes. Yet all are still allowed by Google. Google itself actually hired Chris moot Poole, founder of the notorious website 4chan, known not just for offensive speech but also for the distribution of hard-core pornography. Police have made multiple child pornography arrests associated with 4chan. There remain multiple 4chan apps in Googles app store.

At a minimum, Apple and Googles decisions about offensive app behavior are arbitrary. This is a problem the market cant easily solvebecause there is effectively no market. Both the Apple and Google app stores are private markets owned by those companies, which act as their effective governments. You cannot easily start a new mobile business without their permission. If your app follows the First Amendment, theres a good chance that youll be rejected. Regardless of how one views Gab or any other application or group, two Silicon Valley companies should not be the governors of the mobile Internetwhich, in due course, may be indistinguishable from the Internet itself.

The mobile-Internet business is built on spectrum licenses granted by the federal government. Given the monopoly power that Apple and Google possess in the mobile sphere as corporate gatekeepers, First Amendment freedoms face serious challenges in the current environment. Perhaps it is time that spectrum licenses to mobile-phone companies be conditioned on their recipients providing freedoms for customers to use the apps of their choice.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor ofCity Journal.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Excerpt from:
First Amendment in Peril? - City Journal

The denial of first amendment rightsled to the political violence that we saw yesterday. That was how Jason Kessler, who organized last weekends far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, explained the actions of an extremist who rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one of them. Like many on the far right, Kessler was claiming that displays of hate needed to be protected as free speechor else.

The US constitutions first amendment protects free speech much more strongly than in most democraciesa German-style law against holocaust denial would never stand in the US, for exampleand Americans support the right to say offensive things more strongly than other nations, a Pew survey found last year. But for a long time, free speech was a core concern of the left in America, not the right.

When the National Review [a leading conservative magazine] was first published in the 1950s, the vast majority of articles addressing free speech and the first amendment were critical of free expression and its proponents, says Wayne Batchis, a professor at the University of Delaware and author of The Rights First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech & the Return of Conservative Libertarianism. Today, review of its contents reveals the precise opposite.

What prompted the shift, Batchis says, was the rise of a concept that quickly became a favorite target of the right: political correctness. As Moira Weigel wrote in The Guardian last year, the concept rose to fame in the late 1980s. After existing in leftist circles as a humorous label for excessive liberal orthodoxy, it was co-opted by the right and framed as a form of limitation of free speech.

In 1990, New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein (paywall) used political correctness to refer to what he perceived as a growing intolerance on university campuses for views that diverged from mainstream liberalism. In a span of only a few months, stories about political correctness (some even deeming it a form of fascism) became commonplace in columns and on magazine covers. Before the 1990s, Weigel reports, the term was hardly ever used in the media; in 1992, it was used 6,000 times.

The idea became a centerpiece of right-wing theory, eventually leading to the popularity of the Tea Party and the election of a president, Donald Trump, who made the shunning of political correctness a political trademark.

But fighting political correctness wasnt the only thing that encouraged conservatives to embrace free speech. Money was also an incentive. Over the past decade the party has increasingly opposed any form of campaign-finance regulation, arguing that political donations are a form of free speech. Its reward came in the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United, which allowed companies and trade unions to give unlimited donations to political causes. Liberals commonly oppose this view on the grounds, Batchis says, that spending money should not be treated as a form of speech.

In the event, both Republicans and Democrats have benefited from that ruling. Indeed, in last years election, Hillary Clinton raised $218 million from super PACS, the fundraising organizations that sprang up in the wake of Citizens Unitednearly three times as much as Donald Trump. During the primaries, though, the candidates for the Republican nomination collectively raised close to $400 million (paywall) from super PACs.

Conservatives have supported freedom of speech more consistently than liberals, even when its speech that goes against their views, according to Batchis. My research does suggest that even on hot-button issues like patriotism and traditional morality, many on the right have moved in a more speech-protective direction, he says. By contrast, progressives have been more likely to advocate constraints, particularly on speech that was seen as harmful to racial minorities and women, he says.

Still, there are exceptions to this rule on both sides. Many liberals still hold to the ACLU-style civil libertarian tradition even in the face of hate speech, says Batchis, while moralistic conservatives have advocated limitations on free speech such a ban on flag burning.

In the wake of Charlottesville, the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union declared that the First Amendment does not protect people who incite or engage in violence. If white supremacists march into our towns armed to the teeth and with the intent to harm people, they are not engaging in protected free speech. And indeed, direct threats arent protected (pdf, pp. 3-4) by the first amendment. But to count as a threat, speech has to incite imminent lawless action, in the words of a 1969 Supreme Court ruling; merely advocating violence is allowed. That is why neo-Nazis are allowed to march, and to cast themselves as free-speech champions.

Read more:
How the American right co-opted the idea of free speech - Quartz