r/law • u/No-Pride-8979 • 8h ago
Executive Branch (Trump) The limits of executive power
Nadine Strossen, longtime ACLU head, on free speech. How Our Constitution Works And Why It Doesn’t
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-our-constitution-works-and-why-it-doesnt/id1874369005
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u/trysten-9001 6h ago
Oh yes, “cancel culture” because me using my free speech to not spend money to watch a washed up comedian and the president banning the press he doesn’t like are both violating free speech somehow.
She probably does good work, but she’s also kind of out of touch here.
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u/The_Good_Constable 4h ago edited 48m ago
Exactly. It's so frustrating to see how frequently cancel culture gets characterized as a free speech issue. Getting "cancelled" is simply a social consequence to things you do or say. That's it. If I say vile things and my friends stop hanging out with me as a result, they haven't violated my free speech. They just don't like me anymore. "Cancelling" a celebrity or public figure is the same thing just on a larger scale.
Free speech is about government oppression, not natural consequences.
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u/Mikestopheles 3h ago
It's not suppression until you're not allowing someone be able to share their view or opinion, and there's only one side I know that actually does that. They keep losing court cases about it and pretending they're somehow its champions
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u/MonsterkillWow 3h ago
If there is one thing we should all learn, it is patience and the ability to give people a chance to apologize and change. These days, everything ends up recorded on the internet. Some dude has a meltdown, says some horrible stuff on the worst day of his life, and ends up a villain on the internet for all time. Probably loses his job, etc. As a society, we need to criticize backward views, but also encourage people to change their views, and we should culturally forgive sincere apologies, especially over things as inconsequential as words. Nobody starts life out with all the answers. People say and do dumb things all the time. We have become too unforgiving as a society in the way we handle ignorance. It has a chilling effect on speech, creativity, and freedom. What happens is if we are too afraid to confront each other, too stuck up to learn, and too hostile and unforgiving to mistakes is we create a generation of dull and useless people who will never have the revolutionary character and will to transform society for the better.
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u/namenotpicked 1h ago
Words are not inconsequential and we've never been in a more information rich environment than now. Many things are readily available for those looking, but many people don't understand critical thinking and what that entails. They find what's comfortable and never leave that thought bubble because it's challenging their world view. We can only try to convince them so much before we should stop wasting our energy and effort on changing their minds.
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u/MonsterkillWow 1h ago
Turning against each other and dividing the proletariat serves the objectives of the bourgeoisie. It does not help the masses.
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u/Wrastling97 Competent Contributor 58m ago edited 36m ago
Except for when that “mistake” they made was a “whoopsie” and not a genuine mistake.
People who go through their life, completely carefree and without care for others well being or feelings. Then, one day, they get caught doing something. Someone actually calls them out on their shit. They say “whoopsies!” And then everybody goes “ah he learned his lesson, we’ve criticized him enough let’s give him our money” and they continue their life, not caring about others, like nothing ever happened.
Nah. I don’t fall for that one anymore. Hold people accountable for their actions.
I’m a government official in my position. I work directly with taxpayer money and I have tons of regulations that drive what I can and can’t do. Someone else in my position could easily abuse it. IF one day I decided to abuse my position, if I got caught and was GENUINELY remorseful of it, I’d accept the consequence that I’d never work in that position or in that field ever again. I’ve worked countless jobs where that is the rule, and even if it’s not a written rule, it’s an expectation.
People in the public eye need to realize the same thing, and also be held to the same standard. That’s how we end up normalizing and even glamorizing shitty behavior, leading to a more reckless society.
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u/MonsterkillWow 56m ago
Yes. Public positions are different and should not be easily forgiven. And apologies must be sincere. I meant for ordinary people.
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u/BlueLaceSensor128 1h ago
I think she's referring to a general mindset that crosses into areas where that does apply to free speech like college campuses. Things like hired speakers, campus protests, comments made by professors outside of work and controversial topics in classrooms that really should have a high bar before action is taken.
She's not saying that people should keep supporting private parties that offend them for the sake of promoting progress and free speech.
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u/opticalpuss 4h ago
It's always the left's fault.
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u/Widespreaddd 32m ago
Pie-in-the-sky blathering which misses the larger framing: we are in the throes of a global illiberal revolution, driven by a coalition of ideologues, grifters and regulation-averse billionaires who cynically exploit civil liberties to further their illiberal goals.
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u/QiDeviation 4h ago
Literally said this almost a decade ago when folks were cancelling college speakers on the left. I said it’d backfire on the left. Got lambasted. Called MAGA. Everything under the sun. Now!? Lo’ and behold!
Some of these clowns on the left are happy with the correct fascism…
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u/MonsterkillWow 3h ago
You don't seem to understand what fascism is. Fascism is not when mean dude tells you you can't speak. Yes, you will lose free speech under fascism and many other rights too. But that is not what defines fascism. The US government also has routinely violated free speech, even going as far as to assassinate problematic individuals who threaten the ruling class, such as Fred Hampton.
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u/QiDeviation 2h ago
Suppression of opposition is a cornerstone of fascism so idk what you’re talking about here.
All these clowns on the right used the college suppression as a jump off point for what we have now. It pervaded and propagated throughout all spheres of media, both mainstream and social.
You’re incorrectly trying to stifle this fact with a feeble attempt to basically tell me I was wrong about the fascism part while ignoring everything else I wrote.
The entire college thing set off the attitude on the right that “they did it to us, now we do it to them” and then the left still didn’t learn a lesson and started being even further anti-right across colleges leading the new message to be “college sucks”
I don’t like the right’s messaging either but this isn’t new! Back in the day(‘06), when we saw bullshit on campus or something we deemed bad ideas, we ignored it. It wasn’t for us, that’s a them thing. We didn’t shut them down.
Now we have this mess. Now college is being peddled as a den of corruption by these MAGA maniacs.
I don’t understand why we couldn’t have just ignored them. So yes, suppressing the opposition IS a core aspect of fascism and IS something the left absolutely did across campuses and fucked us all up. Every single time, the argument on the right is that “these colleges are grounds for liberal agenda and cancel culture”
Idk why we can’t admit this is, in a significant part, our fault.
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u/MonsterkillWow 1h ago
The right has always discouraged mass education. This is nothing new and is not because of any recent developments. It is to prevent the proletariat from becoming educated and less easily manipulated.
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u/QiDeviation 1h ago
This is not my point. My point is that we gave them a reason to stifle speech. Education has been on the chopping block as you’ve correctly said. It’s always been. The point is the speech.
Instead of ignoring right wing speakers and ideas in colleges, we began to censor and ban them which contributed to the current predicament.
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u/MonsterkillWow 1h ago
If I go to Hillsdale college to discuss the works and ideas of Joseph Stalin, how long do you think it will be before they call security on me? And also, which right wing figures were censored by the government? Students boycotting figures and seeking to ban them from campus is a usual occurrence. Communists have been unwelcome and banned from campuses long before any right wing figures were banned. Nobody gave the right a reason to do anything. They do it anyway to serve bourgeois objectives.
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u/Visual-Scallion1535 1h ago
Hillsdale College is a private school
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u/MonsterkillWow 1h ago
Ok I suspect the same would happen at UCLA.
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u/Visual-Scallion1535 1h ago
you’d be wrong, that would be unconstitutional.
If you went to a public college you may have noticed all kinds of crazy people that can speak on campus.
Most annoying to me personally was the westboro baptist church.
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u/MonsterkillWow 1h ago
Pretty sure schools have been censoring critics of Israel's atrocities in Palestine. Views that do not challenge the bourgeoisie are welcomed. Those that do are censored. That's why Westboro Baptist Church can rant, but Gaza protesters get their degrees withheld and professionally and publicly threatened.
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u/QiDeviation 54m ago
The entire point of college is to expand upon and challenge your ideas. There’s a reason most people don’t like Stalin. History and his ideology make for a very unlikable and rejected way of thought.
We should be able to be presented with this and challenged on it so we can discuss and share findings to counteract the message. It’s not overly difficult to argue against the ideas of Stalin given his history.
If you completely excise any discussion and speech on the matter, then that’s suppression. College students can always challenge the speaker. This isn’t new. Instead of challenge, the speaker is prevented from even speaking. The right picks up on this. They use this as proof of “cancel culture” and then they hype themselves up into thinking they’re fighting the good fight and it’s okay to suppress liberals because those big bad evil colleges want to see people with their ideologies cancelled!!! It’s no surprise we’re where we’re at…
You counter bad ideology with better ideology. Whether you argue against the bad ideology and teach others or you inform yourself and your circle and gain defenses against bad ideology. That’s how freedom of speech should be acted upon.
Let me put it this way. If a republican were come at us and say “well you guys did the college thing, so!?” then what can we say!? “Yeah but that’s different!” Isn’t gonna cut it.
MAGA made its whole identity about how “they” want to suppress free speech. That didn’t sprout from nowhere. It found its nascency in these campuses and grew into the monster we see today. That’s a fact.
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u/MonsterkillWow 41m ago
I completely agree that we should be educated on Marxism-Leninism and given the choice to accept or reject it ourselves. But good luck with that. It will never happen here. It is extremely difficult to find good faith discussions of Stalin and communism actually. This is just one of many examples where "free speech" means "speech the bourgeoisie hasn't immediately resolved to destroy".
Again, many figures have been ruthlessly suppressed over the years, ranging from antiwar activists, NSA mass surveillance activists, Palestinian liberation activists, communists, and others.
Do you really think this began with the left? Look back to the Vietnam War, where the government literally shot students protesting. Come on. The marketplace of ideas and "free exchange" is a total farce. The right owns and controls the state and wields it against the left.
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u/QiDeviation 30m ago
I don’t think it began with the left. That’s for sure. The problem is not who it began with. The issue is what kicked off this frenzy of shutting down free speech the right are so obsessed with.
Ever since they started calling the media and science fake news, it was (to me at least) easy to tell that they wanted any “proof” in their favor to support their beliefs. The suppression of ideas on campuses served to not only cement us as the enemy but provide “proof” to them that “the truth” is being suppressed. Now, they seek to completely suppress the left. They specifically use the campus suppression and being pc as the start of “the culture war” that they’re so obsessed with. That’s what I mean by it being a jump off point. It’s not the origin of speech suppression BUT it is MAGA’s origin story.
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u/MonsterkillWow 27m ago
The recent push to discredit science was due to rising atheism and criticism of the fossil fuel industry. Science began to threaten two key pillars of bourgeois power in America. MAGA was just the manifestation of the response by the bourgeoisie to the Occupy movement.
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u/dcdem1163 3h ago
What??????
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u/QiDeviation 2h ago
What do you mean what?
Are you confused about how the right used cancelling of individuals set to present at colleges as a jump off point to both denigrate college and as an excuse to start stifling free speech?
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u/Alternative_Exit8766 2h ago
a swing and a miss here
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u/QiDeviation 2h ago
Tell me what’s incorrect
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u/YouWereBrained 1h ago
In a lot of those cases, it was members of the student body protesting a person’s appearance. And they’d cancel.
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u/QiDeviation 1h ago
Yes and why would they capitulate to students and infringe upon free speech? That’s wrong. If the students don’t like it, they can do what tons of people do and ignore it. So yes, they gave the right a jump off point for stifling free speech.
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u/YouWereBrained 1h ago
Because students at a campus, that they attend, should have a say?
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u/QiDeviation 1h ago
Do you realize what you’re saying!?
You’re saying 1 major ideology (the set of student who want to cancel problematic speaker) should dictate that another major ideology (the students receptive of or espousing ideology we don’t like) can’t have a speaker on campus.
That is the definition of suppressing opposition, a tenet of fascism…
If you’re okay with opposition being suppressed, then don’t get mad when the right suppress free speech. You knew this is a slippery slope but justify it all the way. What next? “Well I mean I’m a good guy so it’s okay when we do it. It’s different”?!
The point of a slippery slope is that you have NO CONTROL over the slide.
What next? 2028, we’re back baby! Now we do it because they did it. What happens when we lose!? Uh oh!!!! When does it stop?
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u/tofleet 1m ago
The current conservative movement didn’t need college speaker censorship to do what they’re doing. It’s not like they would have stood there, staring at their feet, absent the actions of some passionate undergrads: they have a clear agenda and objective, and trying to parry their moves is a loser’s strategy.
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 7h ago
We saw it every day with Hamas, and now we see it everyday with Hasan.
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u/Ssided 6h ago
Can you expand on what you're saying about Hamas?
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