Fake News, Ted Cruz, and the Freedom of Speech
As much as I despise Senator Cruz & disagree with the majority of his political beliefs, I despise lies even more. So here I am, a socialist with a libertarian streak, defending Ted Cruz. Here's why.
I saw this meme floating around on social media this morning and, like most people, had an initial knee-jerk reaction of, “fuck Ted Cruz”.
But unlike most Americans, I did my due diligence before cementing an opinion. I knew better than to believe the corporate media spin because the truth is rarely reported on the surface. To discern the truth you must do a minute or two of digging. That is, if you actually care about reality. It’s really not that hard.
Watch the encounter for yourself:
So a parent was at a school board meeting, upset over the school’s mask mandate, and mocked the board members with a sarcastic Nazi salute. This parent was calling them Nazis, not ascribing to Nazism.
Ted Cruz defended the right to do so because, however distasteful or hyperbolic you may think it was, that parent was exercising his/her freedom of expression. That was the point that Ted Cruz made to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland as an example of an incident that had been grossly mischaracterized as "domestic terrorism". Merrick Garland even agreed.
But if the Daily Beast's misleading headline and the false memes this faux-controversy inspired were to be taken seriously you would think Ted Cruz had been defending Nazis rather than the principle behind free speech rights. (SOURCE)
CNN, of course, couldn’t resist jumping on the partisan bandwagon. (SOURCE)|
The Senator's timing was not just awkward, coming on the anniversary of the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a gunman yelling, "All Jews must die," killed 11 people attending Saturday morning services. It was even worse, because just days before Cruz's curious tirade, a Jewish organization released a survey of anti-Semitism which should worry all Americans and motivate responsible citizens, especially the country's leaders -- including Cruz -- to try to take positive, constructive action.
Instead of acting like a statesman in the midst of a growing crisis, Cruz took what has become the road more traveled, trying to score points, provoke an emotional response, and perhaps get noticed, approvingly, in the farthest fringes.
CNN certainly had the right to post such nonsense, as this also falls under free speech, but it wasn’t honest and it isn’t journalism.
EVEN IF!
It’s worth noting that even if this parent were being an anti-semite and she had made a genuine Nazis salute, this would still be covered under free speech laws.
Grotesque? Yes.
Offensive? Yes.
Morally wrong? Yes.
But legal…? Yes.
Case in point, a handful of Nazis held a small rally in Chicago back in 1978. How did the liberal citizens of Chicago react? They exercised their own right to free speech and staged a counter-protest. (SOURCE)
As they stood at attention behind three rows of barricades and a rigid phalanx of police under a large Alexander Calder sculpture, the Nazis were pelted with eggs, rocks, wood and bottles. One onlooker tried to throw a can of soda at them, but was quickly subdued by the police. Six protesters were arrested.
Unable to be heard, the Nazis, having made their promised appearance, gave the “Sieg Heil” salute, ended their rally and ran back into the Federal Building from which they had been led to the plaza.
Yes, you read correctly. Six of the protesters were arrested. None of the Nazis were, not because the cops were Nazi-sympathizers, as liberals today would quickly (and wrongfully) conclude, but because those protestors went beyond their right to free speech. The Nazis didn’t.
The majority of counter-protestors didn’t win the war of opinion because of the handful who threw objects. As the headline indicates, they won because they drowned out the Nazis hate speech with good speech. Which is how it should be.
One of my brightest students once asked if I supported banning hate speech, citing a classmate who was repeatedly called a faggot. I asked him to share his thoughts first, and he said people shouldn’t be allowed to say offensive things that hurt other people, which goes to show you just how badly we are failing to properly educate our children. It’s not that he failed to learn from history, it’s that he hadn’t been taught the right lessons in the first place.
I told my student that it’s important to understand that the 1st Amendment doesn’t just protect the speech you like, but all speech (with very few exceptions and there are already laws on the books for that). Just because something being said offends you does not mean it should be banned, censored, or otherwise silenced. If that were the case, South Park would have never gotten a second season.
Bizarrely, it’s traditionally been liberals who fought against the book-burning mentality. Somehow this has been completely flipped and liberals either aren’t conscious of it or have knowingly decided to reject their own ideology (in which case, they aren’t liberals anymore). Political correctness, cancel culture, etc. are the very antithesis of traditional liberalism and symptoms of a serious problem the Left must recognize and address.
My theory is that parents have coddled their children so relentlessly, raised them in such a protective bubble that shielded them from anything upsetting, that we now have a generation too emotionally-stunted to handle being offended. Hell, even using the wrong pronoun is enough ==to spark outrage from the liberal youth of today. Hence their incessant need for safe spaces, which simply do not exist.
Their hyper-intensive conflict-avoidance has become so pronounced that even civil debate has been rounded up to be arguments that should be avoided. Try talking to someone under 25 about why it’s unfair to allow trans-women, who have the biological strength of men, to compete against biological women in physical competition. To speak up or challenge prevailing narratives (or at least what are perceived to be accepted narratives) automatically means to offend, and if being offensive is always wrong and compliance is always celebrated… well, you can see how that enables the rise of totalitarianism.
MORE SPEECH
But we cannot placate this overly-sensitive generation while at the same time we cannot simply ridicule them into growing up. It’s a difficult problem to resolve.
All we can do is continue to emphasize that the correct answer to bad speech is always more speech, never censorship, and lead by example. Because when you remove the right for someone to speak, regardless of what is being expressed, you are taking diplomacy off the table and ensuring a heightened risk of physical conflict. For better or worse, we all have a right to be heard. Ted Cruz was simply arguing what was once a foundational liberal position and in response liberals are painting him as a Nazi-sympathizer.
Maybe he is (who knows?) but he certainly wasn’t illustrating it by advocating for free speech rights. Not at all.