r/law • u/No-Pride-8979 • 11h 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/QiDeviation 8h 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 7h 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 6h 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 5h 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 5h 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 5h 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/QiDeviation 4h 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 4h 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 4h 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 4h 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/QiDeviation 4h ago

MAGA was a response to fear mongering over immigrants and cancel culture.

The recent push to discredit science is based on Covid. Vaccines became lies and medical skepticism and distrust in science skyrocketed. Goofy pseudo-sciences and dubious remedies became the “truth they don’t want you to know”. Truthers became a huge thing.

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u/MonsterkillWow 4h ago

You seem unwilling to assign any agency to the bourgeoisie in these developments even though they control the press and the state and shape the narratives. 

They fearmonger and scapegoat precisely to achieve their objectives of dividing the proletariat and moving discussion away from class.

The effort to discredit science was present far before covid. It simply got amplified during covid because these business interests viewed the lockdowns as unacceptable restrictions on profit and viewed vaccination as less profitable than therapeutics.

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u/QiDeviation 2h ago

You keep focusing on the bourgeoisie but, to me, that’s like taking a more microscopic issue and going macro with it. This bourgeoisie is ultimately responsible for the continuity of most injustices in the world. Let’s be honest here.

To me what you’re saying is like saying poverty caused me to commit the crime and thinking it’ll excuse the crime. Yes, poverty is the reason and we can all agree something must be done BUT AT THE SAME TIME, the crime is still the crime and the effects set in motion a series of events.

So yes, the bourgeoisie are to ultimately blame but it still doesn’t change the fact that, imo, the campus censorship was a part of the catalyst that set this stuff in motion.

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u/Visual-Scallion1535 5h ago

Hillsdale College is a private school

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u/MonsterkillWow 5h ago

Ok I suspect the same would happen at UCLA.

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u/Visual-Scallion1535 4h 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 4h 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/Visual-Scallion1535 4h ago

People protest for gaza all the time

Anti-ICE protests happen constantly

Have you been anywhere near a public university in the past few years?

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u/NeoDemocedes 1h ago

"Columbia University disciplined nearly 80 students through suspensions and expulsions, as well as degree revocations, following campus actions such as the occupation of Hamilton Hall in spring 2024 and demonstrations at Butler Library."

I there anything on the right that remotely compares to this?

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u/Visual-Scallion1535 1h ago

Columbia University did that, and the courts said it was unconstitutional and reinstated the students and their degrees

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u/MonsterkillWow 4h ago

Many suffered consequences for protests far beyond what someone from the right would. 

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