Attacking so-called “hate speech” has proven an effective Trojan horse technique by BLM and Antifa social justice warriors, who have incorporated Critical Race Theory (CRT) into their pernicious plans to dismantle the Constitution. After all, who wants to defend hate speech? But connecting the jurisprudential dots reveals that the whiter-than-snow “cause” of inner-city black suffering is the battering ram to bypass the very liberties that nurtured the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements. Might this chaos extend even to the point of criminalizing silence as hate speech?
CRT does not hide its plans. Quoting Audre Lorde, BLM brazenly declares:
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Note that “genuine change” means attacking good police, burning black businesses, and physically assaulting people whose ideas you don’t wish to hear. Actions speak louder than words: “genuine change” means destruction, not healing; hate, not love; dictatorship.
United States Supreme Court precedents hold that Nazis rightfully assemble on state land, and the KKK has a right to preach its hate on public streets. These are classic liberal court cases, a product of the once-tolerant left. Yet today’s far left says the First Amendment is an instrument of oppression, not liberty:
CRT scholars have critiqued many of the assumptions that they believe constitute the ideology of the First Amendment[.] … [I]nstead of helping to achieve healthy and robust debate, the First Amendment actually serves to preserve the inequities of the status quo; there can be no such thing as an objective or content neutral interpretation in law[.] … [S]ome speech should be viewed in terms of the harm it causes, rather than all speech being valued on the basis of it being speech; and there is no “equality” in “freedom” of speech.
This slippery slope eviscerates the First Amendment: the issue in Skokie was whether government may ban speech by Nazis that Jews (including actual Holocaust survivors) found deeply traumatizing. The Court held that “feelings” are not a standard to proscribe speech.
CRT “scholars” seek to splice a host-killing new gene into America’s constitutional DNA, to alter that standard of “speech that incites violence” to “speech that makes snowflakes melt.” If speech is “viewed in terms of the harm it causes,” what harms are inflicted to others’ Constitutional liberties if their speech is prohibited because of the potential subjective insult to the hearer — as with, say, Confederate flags, or religious scriptures, or the misapplication of evolving pronouns? Next up are “microaggressions” and the crime of silence.
The left abuses the very free speech protections it seeks to destroy, telling others their “silence is violence” (silence as hate speech!). Meanwhile, BLM and Antifa employ violence-inciting speech that is not protected by existing law (see, e.g., Brandenburg: speech is not protected if it is “likely … to incite imminent lawless action”). In fact, Facebook has censored conservative free speech that would be shielded under existing precedent while advancing unprotected incitement-to-violence speech by BLM and Antifa. Here is revealed the “brave new speech world” of CRT.
Critical Race Theorists wish to eviscerate the Constitution and replace it with…something undefined:
Unlike traditional civil rights … critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law[.] … Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery[.] … [H]ate speech, which targets mainly minorities, gays, lesbians, and other outsiders, is almost always tolerated, while speech that offends the interests of empowered groups finds a ready exception in First Amendment law.
But this is patently false. Consider the now-common “R” word — “racist” — employed routinely by the left to attack “empowered groups,” who have no “ready exception” as defense. No evidence necessary. Destroying character and attacking someone at the deepest level. Isn’t that hate speech?
Some say wishing someone Merry Christmas is “devastating“ hate speech, but excoriating opponents as racist is fair game. This is CRT in practice, just as it is socialism in practice: “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”
Vermont’s capital city spearheaded a “Black Lives Matter” mural which was painted on the street with almost no notice, at state expense, under the initiative of a sole councilor. When a group of citizens sought to add a “Liberty and Justice for All” statement and American flag, these public officials exhibited CRT in action:
Citing a legal opinion obtained from the city’s attorney, [Mayor] Watson said the council could comfortably deny [the] request, suggesting the Black Lives Matter mural it permitted to proceed could be viewed as “government speech” — negating the First Amendment argument advanced[.] … Watson said she believed it would be inappropriate to paint the image of the American flag on a city street.
Thinking themselves untouchable through their “government speech” contrivance, these public officials openly condemned any “government speech” other than theirs:
I’m not against the concept of “liberty and justice for all,” I think it’s a great aspirational statement, but right now it’s a farce in America[.] … It’s maybe something to aspire to, but until we can recognize that Black lives matter, I don’t think “liberty and justice for all’ is alive and well in America.”
Our laws call this “content discrimination.” But the principles of our Constitution are a farce to Councilor Casey:
I don’t think there’s any center with racism[.] … I’m not interested in meeting somebody in the center, as a sign of unity, if they don’t believe Black Lives Matter[.]
That’s right — it’s his way or the highway (only you can’t paint on his federal highway turf for his personal expression of “government speech”).
A 2017 poll revealed that 71% of Americans “believe that political correctness has done more to silence important discussions our society needs to have. … [Twenty-eight percent] instead believe that political correctness has done more to help people avoid offending others.” Connor Casey’s dictatorial political correctness intrudes itself unconstitutionally to “avoid offending others,” while he spews ignorant and offensive speech while sitting as an elected official.
With free speech, such fatuous edicts will die the death of all vain elitist imaginings. Foreshadowing today’s dispute, Justice Douglas opined in Brandenberg (quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Gitlow v. New York):
If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.
That is, the Critical Race Theorists and BLM should dominate America, if their ideas hold sway in the free exchange of ideas. Their toxic ideology cannot withstand even cavalier scrutiny, though, which is why dissent is verboten.
Critical Race Theory and BLM activists depend on silencing opposition in order to install their “social-warrior dictatorship.” These ideologies demand that their voices be paramount, displacing anachronistic concepts of universal liberty and equality as unachievable and intolerable, so that they can “beat the master at his own game” — use the freedoms Americans prize against them. Voices (faiths?) that disagree will be silenced as hateful. White silence is targeted as evidence of imputed racism, itself violent hate speech that must be criminally sanctioned, or elicit reeducation.
Welcome to Amerika.
Do not go quietly into that dark night…
John Klar, American Thinker
