First Amendment 101

No court, judge or prosecutor has suggested that the world’s greatest winner doesn’t have the right to say everything he said above, channeling one of his historical heroes. There is no gag order relating to any of his angry, paranoid rantings and projections that does not involve threats and intimidation of witnesses or public officials involved in his prosecutions.

He is free to do his dead-on imitation of the Führer, or to state that Hitler was a great person, and so unfairly misunderstood. He may describe in detail how he’d like to bring back an American version of Herr Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, or even declare that he loves Hitler, as it was Kanye West’s every right to say, whether he meant it or not.

The First Amendment covers a lot of fucked up and despicable things a person could say or write. You have the ACLU defending fucking Nazis’ right to spread Nazi propaganda as a First amendment issue, which it is.

A category of speech not protected by the First Amendment is fighting words, words which are intended as nothing more than a pugnacious “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”. Words whose only intent is to create ill will, stir rage and cause a lingering threat of imminent violence are not protected speech. If violence happens once as a direct result of your speech, and violence happens again after a similar speech and violence continues to happen as a result of your speech, then your speech has been shown to incite violence and is no longer protected by the First Amendment.

The scope of First Amendment protections for your violence-producing speech will be argued about by well-paid First Amendment experts for hire until the next riot your identical lies produces, then it will be argued about again, because the precise scope of fighting words has been narrowed by the Supreme Court over the years [1]. Like the high bar the ethics-free nine built for finding corruption of public officials, which now requires an explicit, provable agreement that both parties knew the deal was corrupt before corruption may be found. USA! USA!!!

[1] results of a quick search for an update on the 80 year old Fighting Words Doctrine:

Fighting words are words meant to incite violence such that they may not be protected free speech under the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court first defined them in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire (1942) as words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words

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