Flag-burning is protected speech. Like you can literally set a physical metaphor for the United States on fire and it is the official policy of the United States that you’re allowed to do that and we’re gonna defend your right to do that.
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Free speech doesn’t mean I get to say the r-word on Twitter, it means I get to say to the U.S. government I fucking hate you and everything you stand for and the government is only allowed to reply ok thank you for sharing your feelings.
That is what the First Amendment refers to rather than 'private retaliation', yes, the First Amendment does not and never has said "people are allowed to say whatever, whenever, and nobody can say 'get out of my house' or 'I don't want to be your friend any more'."
I told my son the other day (he's 17, don't worry) that one of the things I really am proud of as an American is being able to tell the President to fuck off
The other thing that immediately springs to mind is the Americans with Disabilities Act (and the corresponding IDEA Act for education). Sadly, that too is threatened by these monsters...
I've been thinking a lot recently about Marc Lendler's free speech seminar, the one class that had me actually *read* Schenk and Brandenburg and the Nazis in Skokie and the Pentagon Papers decision
Lendler wrote a great book in 2012 about an early free speech case. (I did not work on it, I bought it with actual dollars and think it's great--published by an academic press but very readable.) https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700618767/
He was (and I assume remains) more of a free speech absolutist than I am, and sometimes got visibly eye-roll-y about students shouting down Ann Coulter or whatever but arguments had a healthy pedagogic vibe
Important: if I say I fucking hate this OTHER government and everything it stands for, the U.S. government also can only say ok thank you for sharing your feelings.
And not only free speech, you also have an entirely separate right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Including grievances about how it supports other governments’ misconduct.
“Freedom of speech” is a concept that existed prior to being written into the First Amendment, where it was established that the government shall not abridge it. For the rest of us, it is a value competing with all other values.
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that's the point
His (still-redacted! decades later!) FBI case file from his days as a Vietnam War protestor.
Even the paranoid, power-drunk FBI of the 60s was hiding COINTELPRO shit, not tweeting it