{"id":87715,"date":"2022-11-15T15:26:45","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T21:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=87715"},"modified":"2022-11-15T15:26:45","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T21:26:45","slug":"87715","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=87715","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The left\u2019s newest stealth attack on free speech<\/a><\/p>\n

America\u2019s two most important rights are free speech and the right to bear arms. Without the first, no people are free; and without the second, there is no first. Totalitarians always go after both; that is, they silence and disarm them. For decades, the left has been open in its war on the Second Amendment. They\u2019ve struggled more with the war on speech, but they may finally have come up with a new approach that will sneak around constitutional muster.<\/p>\n

When it comes to speech that incites violence or is otherwise imminently threatening, the law has always been clear: The threat must be very explicit and imminent for the speech to lose its First Amendment protections. At the most simplistic level, saying, \u201cI wish so-and-so were dead\u201d is not an actionable opinion. However, saying, \u201cI\u2019m going to kill so-and-so this week\u201d or \u201cYou all need to kill so-and-so; I\u2019ve got a plan\u201d is criminally actionable speech. (The standard is more sensitive when speech is directed at the president, of course.)<\/p>\n

This constitutional limitation on making (conservatives\u2019) political speech criminally actionable has long vexed the left. They\u2019ve trained their young acolytes that speech is violence (so much so\u00a0that\u00a0almost half of college students<\/a>\u00a0say \u201chate speech\u201d should get the death penalty) but, so far, courts haven\u2019t fallen for that gambit. Unless speech creates an imminent threat, it gets a pass.<\/p>\n

Lately, though, the left has come up with a new concept that seeks to say that any speech that opposes leftist policies is actual and imminent \u201cterrorism.\u201d Or as leftist academia calls it, \u201cstochastic terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christopher Rufo discusses the concept in an\u00a0important City Journal essay<\/a>. He begins by revealing that he is being identified as someone who is directly responsible for the attack on Paul Pelosi:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.<\/p>\n

In an\u00a0opinion piece<\/a>\u00a0for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual\u00a0reporting<\/a>\u00a0on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of \u201cstochastic terrorism,\u201d which he defines as \u201cideologically driven hate speech\u201d that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence.<\/p>\n

On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss my reporting, and, hours later, the alleged attacker, David DePape, radicalized by \u201cQAnon\u201d conspiracy theories about \u201cDemocratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles,\u201d broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rufo points out that he had no contact with DePape, that he did not target DePape with his communications, and that it\u2019s highly unlikely that DePape had ever come across Chris Rufo\u2019s words. But according to Bryn Nelson, Rufo is in the line of liability for inciting violence against Paul Pelosi. How\u2019d he do that? \u201cStochastic terrorism,\u201d of course.<\/p>\n

The scheme works like this: left-wing media, activists, and officials designate a subject of discourse, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, off-limits; they treat any reporting on that subject as an expression of \u201chate speech\u201d; and finally, if an incident of violence emerges that is related, even tangentially, to that subject, they assign guilt to their political opponents and call for the suppression of speech. The statistical concept of \u201cstochasticity,\u201d which means \u201crandomly determined,\u201d functions as a catch-all: the activists don\u2019t have to prove causality\u2014they simply assert it with a sophisticated turn of phrase and a vague appeal to probability.<\/p>\n

Though framed in scientific terms, this gambit is a crude political weapon. In practice, left-wing media, activists, and officials apply the \u201cstochastic terrorism\u201d designation only in one direction: rightward. They never attribute fire-bombings against pro-life pregnancy centers, arson attacks against Christian churches, or the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice to mere argumentation of left-wing activists, such as, say, opposition to the Court\u2019s decision in\u00a0Dobbs. In those cases, the Left correctly adopts the principle that it is incitement, rather than opinion, that constitutes a crime\u2014but conveniently forgets that standard as soon as the debate shifts to the movement\u2019s conservative opponents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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In other words, your opinions are terrorist threats that, ideally, should lead you to a long stint in a federal prison, while my opinions, which may be considerably more violent and imminent than yours, are nevertheless the beneficiary of First Amendment protections. Although the left hasn\u2019t managed yet to criminalize stochastic terrorism, it is already using it successfully (with help from the DOJ) to silence speech it doesn\u2019t like.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Lately, I\u2019ve taken to reminding people of what the President of Turkey, Recip Erdogan, was\u00a0reputed to have said<\/a>\u00a0some twenty-plus years ago: \u201cIn the mid-1990s, the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was quoted as saying, \u2018Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democrats are getting ever closer to their train stop. At that point, you can expect the Constitution to morph from being the shield of citizens against a tyrannical government into being the sword of government against those citizens who refuse to get with the program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The left\u2019s newest stealth attack on free speech America\u2019s two most important rights are free speech and the right to bear arms. Without the first, no people are free; and without the second, there is no first. Totalitarians always go after both; that is, they silence and disarm them. For decades, the left has been … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,8,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-rights","category-rkba","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87716,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87715\/revisions\/87716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}