Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

Because they’ve decided that free debate isn’t a winner for the collective.

Glenn Reynolds
April 4, 2014
Welcome to the Collective: Justice Breyer turns the First Amendment on its head.
[This was in response to this question:

So why have the court’s “liberals” adopted a hostile attitude toward political speech, which has long been understood as being at the core of First Amendment protection? In his McCutcheon dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer elaborates the theory behind this odd development.

I suspect Reynolds is correct.

And as the situation worsens for the collective they will attempt to infringe more and more of our rights.—Joe]

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15 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

  1. Attempt to infringe more of our rights? ATTEMPT? My good man, the Collective, managed by the Democrats, has succeeded beyond even their wildest dreams. Gun control is probably their only notable failure, and everyone on our side believes all the Collective waits for is some cataclysmic event to finish off the 2A and totally disarm the USA.

    This is why conflict theory tells us to strike first and rip the Collective out by the roots. Such directed conflict WILL take the Collective by surprise, as it is the one thing that they haven’t prepared very well for. What we need to be doing is deciding where OUR “red line” is, and when the Collective crosses it, decapitate the Collective. Such pre-emption is Liberty’s last hope.

    • What I meant to convey was that future infringements would be attempts. I am very aware past efforts have been successful.

    • Well, you make it sound so easy. Just rip out that Collective weed and everything will be safe again for liberty. But, it took a majority of Americans to elect the scumbags that pass these laws and appoint these judges. What is the reaction of the majority going to be when the representative to congress they voted for gets a .308 retirement plan? Applause or outrage and fear?

      Your solution to the Collective problem is the “cataclysmic event to finish off the 2A and totally disarm the USA” that they are waiting for.

      • Revolution is one of teh few places where “collective action” actually is the appropriate terminology.

        Individuals targeting the government are simply individual criminal problems to be stomped out — when a significant chunk of the population arises _collectively_ and targets the government, it is revolution.

        If your collective is a large enough chunk of the population, you win. Arms are a serious force multiplier – so to realistically overthrow the armed might of the government requires either civilian possession of arms or a nearly unanimous population. (Note that “strategic” arms, so often whipped out by anti-rights bigots as “evidence” no revolution can ever succeed, are pretty much worthless for any suppression of revolution short of genocide.)

  2. The language Breyer uses convinced me that he is not just stupid, or arrogant, but dangerous and possibly evil. It’s a blatant repudiation of how the First Amendment and the freedom of speech work on the most basic level, and if our government had a shred of integrity, there would already be a push to remove Breyer from his position for holding views so appallingly inimical to the ideals laid down in the Bill of Rights.

    • The mental gymnastics he goes through to justify his position are at once revolting and awe-inspiring.

  3. What I don’t get: Since when does money equal speech? Is this why corporations are people too? Because corporations have money?

    • Corporations are not “people” for constitutional purposes. The Left’s misrepresentation of the Citizens United decision is intentional.

      The Citizens United decision is based on the concept rather that people use corporations to organize together to speak.

    • In that case do you approve or disaprove of OKcupid’s boycott of Mozilla?

      Afterall, corporations aren’t people so why should that company have had a political stance?

      Also… the First Amendment is “congress shall make no law” not “Only people have free speech.”

      Remember, Unions aren’t people too. I know! Maybe they don’t have First Amendment rights either. No more petitioning for greviences for you unions!

    • Ever since money has been used to buy the various bits and pieces of “stuff” used to facilitate speech. If the feds passed a law saying that newspapers could only spend $100/year on ink and paper, do you think that would pass constitutional muster? I think you would since it’s “money not speech” right? The rest of use would recognize it for exactly what it is, namely a backdoor attempt to silence newspapers and infringe upon their first amendment rights…

    • It’s not just free “speech” — it is a right to a free _press_ that is included; i.e., the right to widely publicize (which takes money) your speech, that is protected.

      The only places corporations are “persons” in US law are in the _tax_ code and in _property_rights_, and only because it is the only realistically efficient way to handle corporate ownership when it comes to money. Citizens United doesn’t say otherwise, and people who claim differently are either ignorant or deliberately lying.

    • “What I don’t get: Since when does money equal speech?”

      The instant it is used in saying something, as you understand perfectly well. I can stand in my garden and shout, or I can spend money to drive into town, purchase a soap box and a megaphone and say it where some else will hear it.

      And don’t forget assembly and redress of grievances. Getting together, planning meetings, flying to Washington and putting on a protest isn’t free, as you well know, nor is hiring someone to do it for you, nor is building a radio station. Calling my representative on the phone requires money, as did hiring someone to milk the cows, owning a horse and wagon, and paying for food and lodging along the way while one took a trip to the Capitol back in 1791.

      In fact, there can be no political speech without money, as you know perfectly well, you coy child. Even if your representatives and your Senators made a trip to your home to discuss every issue with you personally, THAT still requires money (trade of some kind). Or have you been so totally blinded by anti-capitalist rhetoric that you actually can’t see it?

      Do you actually believe that the only protected speech or assembly would be a few naked, starving people standing out in the weather talking to one another with no observers, pencils, paper, cameras or microphones? No money there, right? I mean, we can’t have people with money for pencils and paper having a voice when starving people have no voice, right? So level the playing field, right? That would certainly be close to the communist view, but then the participants would still risk being shot for doing it under communism. The state-run radio stations and newspapers then have all the voice, but those require no money at all, I suppose, if everyone is a slave, brought up and trained by the state to serve their assigned roles. Slave miners, slave engineers, slave farmers, slave factory workers making copies of things invented in the West, slave radio and TV “reporters”, and so on, with a minuscule clique of rulers living in opulence, and everyone else can die. That’s as close to your moneyless “speech” society as anyone has ever gotten.

    • They way I like to explain this is by example. Suppose I have a message I want to deliver and think that a billboard would be the best way to do that. But I can’t afford a billboard on my own. But I can find 100 other people that would donate to “the cause”. We pool our money and get our message on a billboard for a month. Should that be prohibited for some reason?

      Now suppose that instead we donate our money to a corporation formed specifically to deliver messages we almost always agree with? That corporation could be “Elect John Doe!”, “Impeach Senator Leland Yee!”, or “NRA Institute for Legislative Action”. At what point in the progression of message delivery to money donation does my support of a political message lose support of the 1st Amendment?

  4. friends:

    who decides what the “collective” is? who decides who comprises the collective? who decides what the “collective” thinks, or, in fact, what it says or when it has in fact said it?

    why, the “vanguard” of the collective, of course. the subtle issue here, is who gets to be the “vanguard” of the collective. stephen breyer obviously feels comfortable w/ the roll, as does barack obama.

    to them, the matter is straight forward. they decide the issues. they decide what is in the best interests of the collective. they decide, because they rule.

    and, in those instances where one collective’s right comes into conflict with another collective’s right, they decide whose collective right is paramount.

    this is the way it works in the euro union, which decides these things under the rubric of the “euro union declaration of the universal rights of men.” as a document, it looks much like our own bill of rights. but, at the end, instead of saying that all rights not ceded to the government belong to the people, the document says that in the instance of conflict in the rights, the interests involved shall be balanced & resolved by the euro union.

    by the bureaucrats of the euro union.

    thus is was that geert wilders, a member of the dutch parliament, was tried by the prosecutors under both dutch and euro union law for disturbing the calm of the “collective” when he insulted the religious interests of muslims in the film “fitna.”

    this is what breyer is getting at.

    and, this is what is repugnant to our constitution and heritage, and this is why breyer is a bigger threat to our liberty than barak “insane” obama. obama would curtail our right. breyer reserves the right to say how to resolve the “issue.” indeed, he reserves the right to say who raises it, who speaks for the collective, what they’ve said, and what they may say.

    the little milquetoast is a tyrant. and, he feels absolutely no need to try and disguise the fact.

    john jay

    • There is no collective, there only are individuals. Once you understand that, things get very obvious.
      There are a lot of very revealing examples to be found in Europe. The one you mention is a good one. The attempt to take away the citizenship of a member of parliament for holding the wrong views is another. (That is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a US resident.) The Dutch government view is that “the right of free speech does not include the right to offend”. Translation: you’re allowed to only those things that don’t bother anyone. (I guess this is now true in California as well.)
      One way to make sense of this is to look at article 120 of the Dutch constitution: “The constitutionality of Acts of Parliament and Treaties shall not be reviewed by the courts.” In other words, there exists a piece of paper labeled “constitution” but the government can violate it at will and no one has any recourse when they do.

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