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Bob Scott Placier's avatar

As George Orwell wrote, "Freedom is the right to say no." Mr. Eduardo expresses well one reason why I am a FIRE member.

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Leo Francis's avatar

I am not exaggerating when I say that this 303 v. Elenis case is one of the more frightening episodes in my lifetime. Why? Because it should have been an open and shut unanimous decision, but it wasn’t.

From the article:

“The Court’s decision in Smith’s favor—ruling that ‘the United States is a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands’—protects all of us from imposition on our ability to express ourselves.”

How did three Liberal Supreme Court justices manage to vote against that principle? This article offers the culture wars as an explanation, and certainly some kind of Left Wing echo chamber may have played a role. But it shouldn’t have. It is more or less the job of Supreme Court justices to rise above factional ideologies. And the fact that the Liberal judges failed to do that in this case shakes my own commitment to the Democrat Party to its core. To be blunt: I don’t want any more liberal judges on the court if they’re going to be voting against free speech.

But that state of affairs leaves me politically homeless. We have, on the one side, the social-justice Left abandoning free speech in its ends-justifies-the-means mania for a better world, and, on the other hand, we have the populist right attempting a coup and violently attacking the Capital building to keep Trump in power.

And I’m out. I can’t align myself with either of those two groups. Strange and disturbing times indeed.

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