by Stephen Green, PJ Media:
“Congress shall make no law,” the First Amendment begins and, in an ideal world, the Founders would have put the period after “law,” as you’re sure to agree after reading the latest assault on one of our two most important constitutional guarantees.
What we need right now is the late, great George Carlin to remind everyone that “Political correctness is America’s newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
“It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people’s language with strict codes and rigid rules,” Carlin continued. “I’m not sure that’s the way to fight discrimination.”
But it’s the perfect way to wage political warfare on your domestic enemies, according to the American Left in general, and Columbia Law professor Tim Wu in particular.
“The First Amendment is spinning out of control,” Wu whined in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday, and since my managing editor won’t let me reply to Wu with any of Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television — even though all seven would be appropriate and, I promise you, artfully arranged — I’ll have to resort to reasoned analysis.
(I knew I should have ordered that second martini at lunch.)
Excuse the lengthy excerpt but this is important stuff.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the two NetChoice cases greatly adds to the problem. The cases concern two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that limit the ability of social media platforms to remove or moderate content. (Both laws were enacted in response to the perceived censorship of political conservatives.) While the Supreme Court remanded both cases to lower courts for further factual development, the court nonetheless went out of its way to state that the millions of algorithmic decisions made every day by social media platforms are protected by the First Amendment. It did so by blithely assuming that those algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.
Even if one has concerns about the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws (as I do), the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call. The judiciary needs to realize that the First Amendment is spinning out of control.
