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Im 7-foot-4 and three times as smart as you. The president of Trinidad and Tobago bugged my smart TVlast summer and recorded me watching Moonshiners marathons. Disgraceful! Did you notice the cool new flag hanging on my porch? The design is called a Swastika. I created it.

The First Amendment, by the way, was a cockamamie idea, promulgated by men who favored powdered wigs and wooden teeth.

For those of you scoring at home, the preceding rant included outright lies, unprovable assertions, reckless accusations, infantile insults and provocative bravado. What do they have in common? Theyre all protected by the First Amendment and the right to free speech which isnt entirely free.

There is a price to pay when one has to listen ascousin Wilbur enlivens Thanksgiving dinner with pointed political discourse. Or when an extremist peddling incendiary rhetoric shows up at the local university intending to elicit mushroom clouds of outrage. Or when the president of the United States tweets yet another prefabricated whopper.

Unprecedented and dangerous times?

Been there, heard that, says Saint Marys College politics professor Steve Woolpert, whose academic research includes the Constitution and Supreme Court.

Its not pretty, and it doesnt make you feel great to be a citizen of a country where this stuff is going on, Woolpert said. Its not unprecedented. Look tothedebate over ratifying the Constitution. The rhetoric was extremely heated and nasty. Around the Civil War, it was worse, because people were killing each other. People were being more virulent in their rhetoric then.

Thats difficult to believe given howIowa Congressman Steve King recently advocated for stringent immigration policies: We cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies.

Or the dismissive manner with which President Donald Trump regards courts and judges.

Or the Brentwoodman who has decided to fly the Confederate flag outside his house as a history lesson. Neighbors who have been subjected tothe drive-by honks and hollers no doubtwish free speech could be a bit more serene.

The First Amendment is something people support in the abstract, Woolpert said. Support for free speech is quite limited when it comes to speech we hate. Ideally, what would happen is that it would broaden their understanding of why free speech is important.

It didnt work that way Feb. 1 when MiloYiannopoulos, then a senior editor at right-wing website Breitbart, was scheduled to give a talk at UC Berkeley. It was unlikely his message would find a receptive audience on a college campus in the liberal-leaning Bay Area. But he had the right to deliver it. Instead,his right to free speech was abridgedby demonstrators at a cost of more than $100,000 in property damage.

Woolpert is right. We tend to regard the First Amendment as a subjective document, embracing those passages we can conform to our world view. Itcould probably be said for the entire Bill of Rights that we revere it more than we understand it.

Or as our president said recently:

If the Constitution prevented me from doing one or two things, Id chalk that up to bad luck, Trump said after his revised travel ban was struck down by a judge. When literally everything I want to do is magically a violation of the Constitution, thats very unfair and bad treatment.

Could be worse.

Woolpert reminds that our second president, John Adams, signed into lawthe Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the government. Such an act enacted today, of course, would result in the extermination of many websites and most cable news outlets.

I can remember the civil rights era when people were having crosses burned on their lawn and people were being shot and lynched for asserting their (free speech) rights, Woolpert said. And despite all that, the First Amendment, it seems to be aprinciple that people support.

Excerpt from:
No worries, Trump First Amendment still protecting free speech, even yours - The Mercury News