I have long believed no one should graduate college without reading William Shirer’s magisterial book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Shirer, a journalist who witnessed Germany’s descent into terror, was a journalist, not an academic. Perhaps for that reason, his account of Hitler’s rise to the German chancellor’s office through parliamentary means and his use of assassination and concentration camps to secure total power has never been seriously challenged.
Margaret Brennan, CBS host of Face the Nation, obviously never read Shirer’s masterpiece. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have made the inane comment that the Nazis weaponized free speech when she interviewed Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio, who has a firmer grasp on history than Brennan, set her straight. The Nazis didn’t weaponize free speech, he tutored her; they abolished it.
Brennan’s weaponizing free speech comment did not come out of thin air. Brennan probably read Adam Litvak’s story in the New York Times titled “How Conservatives Weaponized Free Speech,” in which Litvak quoted Associate Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote in a dissenting judicial opinion that conservatives were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”
Indeed, the bizarre assertion that free speech can be weaponized has entered the mainstream of legal scholarship. Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor and feminist legal scholar, published an article in the Virginia Law Review that made this astounding claim:
Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful. Starting toward the beginning of the twentieth century, a protection that was once persuasively conceived by dissenters as a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers, and corporations buying elections in the dark.
My guess, then, is that Brennan’s addled notion that the Nazis weaponized free speech can be traced back to balderdash disseminated by Justice Kagan, Professor MacKinnon, and the New York Times.
With due respect to these august authorities, I believe the assertion that the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and pornographers weaponized the First Amendment is fruitcake logic–the very kind of blather we’ve come to expect to come from academia and the legacy media.
However, I’m just a guy who lives off a gravel road in Flyover Country, so what do I know?
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| Professor Catharine MacKinnon, Fruitcake Extraordinaire |
