If I Don't Agree, Is It Hate Speech?

Three things just happened for me in a kind of Confluence of Truth.

First, my favorite young writer, Jonah Goldberg, Editor-at-Large for NRO and son of Lucianne, found his new bopk, Liberal Fascism number three on the NYTimes best seller list. And I began a quest for a recorded ccopy or someone to read it to me.

Second, I read where the French fascist, LePen had been convicted of “Hate Speech”, and given a three month prison sentence (suspended) and a 14,000-Euro fine. His “crime” was to write and say in a speech that Nazi occupation of France “was not all THAT bad...”

Third, words of a member of Code Pink,instigators of the Berkeley (CA) City Council’s attempted Bum’s Rush of Marine recruiters from the center of that city. What she said was:

“It is my understanding that my right to free speech means I can say anything I believe without recrimination....”

In other words, she can CRIMINATE. But you and I, and the free press, or other protesters cannot RECRIMINATE, meaning DISAGREE with her.

If we do, in some places (say, like La Belle France or Boston ?) we are guilty of HATE SPEECH.

Of course, all this reminded me of a great column of Jonah’s in which he branded Jacques Chirac’s France “La Fromagerie des problemes du Monde!” Cheese Factory for All the World’s Problems...)

The roots of Fascism are in the refusal of an enraged and bombastic minority to suffer others the right to have any contradictory opinion or the right to advance any contrary evidence. Mussolini began as a “liberal” pamphleteer in Calabria. He morphed to smother opposition, Hitler’s original stance was as left-socialist anticommunist antisemite. NAZI is an abbreviation of National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party.

I believe everyone has the right to CRIMINATE and you and I have the right--- Providential as well as Constitutional—to RECRIMINATE. That is, to disagree.

It is very sad that the courts of France have begun to erode this right, bought at the price of so much blood in rvolution and re-revolution so dear to the heart of Thomas Jefferson. Will our courts follow suit? Is FASHION so powerful in the 21st century as to trump logic?

It is equally sad, and much more ominous for free Americans, that many pea-brained politicians in this country scurry about in indulgent subversion attempting to isolate a definition for “hate speech”.

This is equal to taking the blindfold off the eyes of Justice, sowing the seeds of lawless autocracy, parent of totalitarian fascist mind-control.

Beware.