ketanji brown and the template of doom

trading literally everything for "a little safety"

a lot of people seem disappointed by the outing that murthy v missouri (formerly missouri v biden) had at SCOTUS yesterday, and perhaps for good reason. this is an incredibly important case, perhaps the most important first amendment case our our generation. at issue is whether the government can bully, prod, or require that social media ban or censor speech. do they get to decide what can and cannot be spoken in the modern day public square? because this is obviously their intent and they have been up to their necks in it for years.

i asked a gatopal™ close to the case about this and he said he was disappointed in the fact that our side did not make a sufficient case that the government got everything wrong all covid and used censorship to hide it.

as one of the ones who was decatformed for being right, this really hits home for me. so many of us were just following data, presenting results, checking one another, and allowing ourselves to be checked, but none of it mattered. only the answers mattered and if the answer was not to federal liking, defenestration from casa del bluebird followed.

and it was not just covid. it was election lies, laptops, woke and riots and DEI. you name it, phalanxes of censors decided if you could say it. when elon fired 70% of twitter, he was not firing anyone useful. he was firing the censorship industrial complex.

but the a greater problem here is not “the censors were wrong” or “the censors lied” it’s that anyone granted them this frame to begin with where “maybe it would be OK so long as it served a good purpose.”

because it isn’t OK.

ever.

not even if they happen to be right.

this is a binary. allow your speech right to be taken for any reason and you do not have a right anymore, you have a negotiation about a privilege and it’s one you’ll always lose in the long run.

emergency power begets emergencies like jam begets ants.

it’s ALWAYS the same.

and this matters because several of the supreme court justices do not believe in rights. at all. they literally see the first amendment as “hamstringing the government.” it’s not enough for the government to speak, the government has a obligation to take steps to protect us and if it cannot impose a prohibition of speech, then how is it supposed to do that?

listen to it yourself. it’s chilling.

this woman sees your rights as a problem to be circumvented. for your own good.

worse, she thinks it’s “duty” to do this.

her hypothetical was whether the government can intervene if there is a “contagion of children harming themselves following exposure to online speech.” pretty wild idea given how the trans, child masking, school closures, and child covid jabbing issues that got such full throated support from the state and where the dissent that wound up being correct was silenced.

it’s clearly the state that is the threat and not the solution in these matters. i struggle to find a counter-example. from the food pyramid to absurdist attacks of grievance cults, it’s always the state pushing the misinformation and vilifying dispute. hell, these people shill for keynesian economics and lysenko level pharma care.

so what is one to say to this idea that the first amendment is a threat to government?

well, i for one say “good.”

it’s supposed to be.

the whole point of

is that we the people stand paramount to the state. these are our rights and no one gets to take them.

it does not have asterisks.

the reason state may want to usurp them is irrelevant.

we get to have religion. they cannot abridge our freedom of speech or our press or our right to assemble or to petition the government for redress.

social media is all those things.

and they need to be kept utterly out of it, ESPECIALLY when they think they know best.

curing wrongspeech

the cure for wrong speech is always more speech, never censorship.

the purpose of the constitution and of the bill of rights is to protect us from government.

and government should be afraid of its people, not people their government.

anything else is shameful.

ms brown seems to want a world where the state can and must step in when in all its paternalistic wisdom and glory it deems that we the people must be protected from ourselves lest we speak with one another and become convinced of badthink.

but this is a blood soaked and banal idea with a worse than checkered past.

it’s the worst idea of all. anything else we could come up with pales in comparison.

censorship is the inversion of discourse.

it prevents debate and actual answers from emerging. this is why they like it.

everyone should speak and the reputation economy should sort this out.

we should be judged by the insight of our ideas, not the quality of our state sanctioned credential.

this must be so because states sanction terrible things for terrible reasons and speech is the start of the bulwark against this.

imagine if no one could tell celebrities online that they were stupid. would this make them smarter? would there be any check on idiocy?

let’s take a provocative example.

the year is 1913. a new set of national anti-miscegenation laws are coming up before the congress. they do not seem popular enough to pass. so the white house decides they must put a finger on the scale and ban speaking against them and shutters press that writes in opposition telling editors “not in your paper if you want to keep it.”

we good with that?

or might we want some free speech in here?

they were sure it was for your safety and to stop “irreparable harm” from the mixing of races. many people believed this quite fervently. “scientists” wrote “papers.”

how about banning speech in favor of allowing female suffrage? there are certainly many governments that would have happily done so to preserve the “moral good.”

in such a circumstance, might ketanji now want rights and not federal fiat?

“we’ll get smart people to do smart things and they will only do the good ones and never the bad ones because they know the truth and will faithfully implement it and only use these vast powers for happy, enlightened things and never for evil” is the philosophy of someone about to be a serf.

kowabunga

it’s not even childish. children are smarter than that. it’s a special kind of willful ignorance that comes from presuming one will always be in power and by ignoring coyote’s law that “before granting any power or prerogative to the state, first imagine it wielded by the politician you hate most because one day, it will be.”

i wonder if ms brown would still like her ideas in a second trump presidency?

she is the full flower of the fears of our framers: leviathan without limits, the state as power paramount to the people.

arguing over whether the state got it right or wrong as they abridged your right to speak and the freedom of the pixel press to carry it is to lose the game before it starts.

it does not matter if those prevented from speaking were wrong.

what matters is that the state suppressing their speech is wrong.

always.

private actors may do as they like, but the state is different because the state wields coercive force and using private actors as extensions thereof by threatening or bribing them is just proxy war.

to set the state and its catspaws against we the people is the very definition of tyranny.

consider hunter’s laptop:

this was a true story.

it was called false.

speech about it was suppressed.

the press (NY post) was barred from social media over it.

because the government said so while lying its scuzzy little face off and knowing full well it was lying.

people were petitioning it for a grievance. they were sharing true facts relevant to an election, facts that showed the corruption of the actual candidate, not just his offspring.

and the state shut it down with unaccountable power to preference its chosen politics and to benefit itself.

this is literally every single thing the first amendment was intended to prevent. and the justice put on the bench by the guy whose kid this was just stood up against it and seeks to keep this power for her patron.

is there really anything left to say?