RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/29/turns-out-alexander-vindman-is-the-dopey-hack-we-all-thought-he-was/

Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who helped plot the botched impeachment of former President Donald Trump in what amounted to a failed coup attempt, thinks Tucker Carlson should be “censured” for saying things Vindman doesn’t like about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

In a tweet Thursday responding to a trailer Carlson posted for his new documentary, “Patriot Purge,” Vindman asked, idiotically, “How is this different than yelling fire in a crowded theater? Carlson is attempting to incite a riotous mob. He should be censured. I’d like to hear the arguments for/against this being protected speech.”

Well since you asked, the argument for Carlson’s documentary being protected speech is right there in the Bill of Rights, on the first page, where it says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. That includes reporting and commentary that some people, even disgraced former Army officers who try to remove duly elected presidents, disagree with.

It’s embarrassing for Vindman that this needs to be spelled out for him, but “protected speech” under the First Amendment includes pretty much everything except a handful of specific situations, none of which remotely have to do with Carlson’s documentary.

For example, you can’t call for imminent lawless action (or incitement). You also can’t issue what’s called a “true threat,” which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” Fighting words is another, quite limited category of unprotected speech that’s restricted to face-to-face interactions meant to provoke a violent reaction from the person being addressed. Not covered in any of these categories is, say, political reporting and commentary that Vindman doesn’t like.

Vindman, the man who broke the chain of command and illegally leaked the contents of a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a “whistleblower” in order to jump-start the Ukraine impeachment circus, is also confused about what “yelling fire in a crowded theater” means. People like Vindman always invoke the fire-in-a-crowded-theater line every time they want to justify censorship, and every time they reveal their bone-crushing ignorance.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/january-6-insurrection-hoax/

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.”

Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all.

An “insurrection,” as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that “got out of hand.”

At the rally preceding the events in question, Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”—these were his exact words—in order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent? Probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government? Hardly.

I know this is not the narrative that we have all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on “our democracy” since 9/11, since Pearl Harbor, and even—according to Joe Biden last April—since the Civil War! 

Note that phrase “our democracy”: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by “our democracy” is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about “the people’s house,” she doesn’t mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.

I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed supporter of Donald Trump who was shot and killed on January 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the January 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a stand-alone event. 

On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power. 

In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax. The story of that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration. 

From before Trump took office, the Russia collusion hoax was used as a pretext to create a parallel administration shadowing the elected administration. Remember the Steele dossier, the fantastical document confected by the “well-regarded” former British spy Christopher Steele? We know now that it was the only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens.