A Conservative Takes on Bondi

Francis Menton, a conservative who blogs at The Manhattan Contrarian, warns against Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent threats to prosecute what she calls "hate speech."

Given how poorly most Americans understand what freedom is or why it is important, I'd have to say he did a reasonably good job. Namely, Menton quickly takes the implications of Bondi's threats to the concrete level by showing how that all works out in practice.

After briefly pointing out -- I doubt reminding would apply to anyone in this Administration -- that the First Amendment exists to limit the power of the government, Menton's task is made easier by conditions on the ground in the country we rebelled against:

Our Supreme Court has drawn a line under the First Amendment that makes almost all "hate speech" constitutionally protected, short of incitement to imminent violence.

If you think that that line might not make sense, consider the alternative. Over in the UK, they have seen fit to criminalize "hate speech." The main statute is the Public Order Act of 1986, with subsequent amendments.

...

With these statutes on the books, the UK is now reaping the consequences.

There is a fundamental difference between our "free speech" regime, and the British "hate speech" regime. Our right of free speech is a right of individuals against the government. It restricts the government as to what speech it can prosecute criminally. The "hate speech" regime now in force in the UK does the opposite: it empowers police and prosecutors to pick and choose whom they want to arrest and prosecute. Unfortunately no prosecution regime is ever completely objective or politically neutral, and thus inevitably "hate speech" ends up defined as most of the speech of our political adversaries, but never the speech of our allies. In today's UK, that proposition is getting taken to absurd extremes.

Menton then considers what has happened under these laws to Britons who have said things that many of today's American conservatives would be sympathetic to.

It's the kind of warning that worked in our nation's past: How else would one otherwise get a population mostly religious or sympathetic to religion to accept the idea of separation of state and religion? Religious wars and persecution are such horrors that one need not realize that separation of religion and state is just a part of the individual's right to intellectual freedom to support it.

What would happen if the other party, once in power, acted like this? Has long been a potent warning.

I fear that that warning is losing its potency. The tribalists who enthusiastically support Trump seem oblivious or indifferent to his many violations of the law, abuse of power, and eagerness to test or overrun constitutional safeguards -- e.g., the judiciary and the legislature respectively. Blind trust is not a quality of the imaginative, and other complaints that Trump is ignorant or wrong too often meet with a wall of denial or dismissal.

If everything is a-okay as long as "our guy" is doing it and one cannot conceive of "our guy" no longer being in power, who among members of Trumps personality cult, cares if "people like me" are having a rough time in some other part of the world.

If conservatives continue to pander to the type of person who can't be bothered to think long-range, they will suffer exactly the fate they can foresee. Such is "winning" under Trump and his ilk.

-- CAV