The "normal administration" to which I'm referring would be almost any administration in US history other than the current one. Freedom of speech is — at least putatively — a bedrock principle of the US.
In fact, the same Secretary of State who deported this man from the US for his speech (amongst dozens of other such deportations[1]) has announced a policy meant to prevent other countries from doing the exact same thing.[2] "Free speech for me, but not for thee."
Fascists consider applying double standards that enable them to enjoy what they deny others, virtuous. Not a logical fallacy. The purpose is to dominate.
The denied person seems to be a foreign national and by all looks of it, an activist, taking part in university protests. It doesn't seem all that surprising that he got denied entry.
Man, if we can't agree that "freedom of speech" includes protection from legal consequences for something you say then there's really nowhere to go from here.
Well, he appears to have been a protester at Columbia University in 2024, and he is also not a citizen.
If you yourself are a citizen, I'm sure you can express your views and not be sent anywhere. You can also vote to get people in power who are more to your liking, or even attempt be one of those people yourself.
If you actually care about these concepts then reading about them will be faster than relying on Cunningham’s Law to iteratively eliminate all conceivable wrong answers.
So I guess the neat way for US to deny entry to people is somehow have the denying done by non-law-enforcement and also perhaps somehow outside of its soil (if that matters)?
Yes, but isn't the current situation based on a technicality then? Assuming that reaching that when anyone reaches US law enforcement gets everything in the constitution applied to them and then must be let into the country because they only want freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. I guess the workaround for this would be to have outposts in other countries where non-US law enforcement personnel is denying entry - this would be ok, as the constitution doesn't yet apply.
Or, I wonder if the the people for whom denying entry was wrong don't base their decision on a technicality, but would actually prefer foreign political activists to enter the country. I wonder if this is tied to the foreigner's specific agenda, or would they also like the opposing side to be let in. To me, this sounds either a way to get supporters for their own opinion, or, on the latter case, recipe to increase chaos.
What could the technicality possibly be? They explicitly said they deported him due to his speech! This is like the most egregious possible violation of the First Amendment. The police literally — in the fashion of a cartoon villain revealing their dastardly plot — copped to breaking the law.
What the police did here doesn't hold up to even the most stringent possible definition of "freedom of speech", and it's also obviously unconstitutional. And there are still people trying to defend it. I'm honestly a little flabbergasted.
As I read it, he was trying to enter the US from elsewhere and was denied entry at the border. Perhaps his student visa had been cancelled due to clearly getting involved with unrelated stuff.
I say "I wonder", "perhaps" etc to simply be polite, tease out the content of your argument, and also due to the person we are talking about not providing the legal reason given to him of why he was denied entry.
He literally didn't, he just quoted what the police said. But I assume his visa was cancelled and thus he was denied entry. Is this legal, or would you say that anyone already in US soil should be let in, regardless of visa status, if they want to assemble (the constitutional right)?
Reductio ad absurdum: corporal punishment for people who say things the government dislikes doesn't violate their freedom of speech. Sure, they might get beaten for it, but they can still express their opinion and they can still protest!
Yes, my opinion is that there should be no legal consequences for speech. And again, that is the US Secretary of State's opinion too — just only for US nationals traveling to foreign countries, not vice versa.
> In your opinion, should anyone be able to travel to the US to protest? Would you set an upper limit to this process, or should any amount be allowed?
The government shall not take action in response to his constitutionally protected rights because the laws to authorize that action shall not exist.
They are not limiting foreigners (well, they are, but that's a separate issue). They are deporting people specifically in order to censor speech the government dislikes, irrespective of how many people are visiting the country.
I understand what corporal punishment is. My point is that the reductio ad absurdum of your definition of "free speech" does not preclude it.
Remember, the far left uses terms like "assault" to describe speech they don't like. Maybe this is conservatives' chance to play "manipulate the meaning of words" and spin it as "denied entry in order to prevent assault" ?
Either way, they made certain forms of speech de facto illegal and we're not going to go all "free speech" a few years after people on the right were fired or kicked out of school for expressing wrongthink.
The far left is welcome to use those stupid terms. That is also their First Amendment protected speech.
Has anyone been charged with assault by the state for their speech? No.
Private schools and private employers are private entities (it’s in the name) ergo they do not have to respect the First Amendment. In fact they have First Amendment rights to kick out whoever they want, free of government compelling them otherwise.
Has any country ever functioned like that? The idea seems absurd. Of course you should be held legally accountable for what you say. You can see trivial examples in American culture with defamation law, laws against calling for violence, laws about when and where you're allowed to protest. Agree with it or not, we don't have a right to say what we want with no consequence. The devil as always is in the details. But people need to actually agree what sort of values we should have represented as a people to write those laws, and america has never figured out how to do that without either violence or a massive river of cash to distract us from each other.
For an instance of how bad free speech can get, look no further than the role RTLM played in the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994.
> You can see trivial examples in American culture with defamation law, laws against calling for violence, laws about when and where you're allowed to protest.
Defamation is extremely hard to stick in the US.
You also are allowed in general to call for violence in the US. Incitement is very specific and not merely "calling for violence."
> we don't have a right to say what we want with no consequence.
Yes, in the US you absolutely are allowed to say what you want with no state-sanctioned consequence. There are extremely, extremely narrow exceptions. Way, way narrower than most people on either side of the political aisle intuit.
For an instance of how great free speech can get, look no further than the role the 1st Amendment has played in creating a highly adaptive society that, despite the internal chaos, conquers most of its challenges.
I understand quibbling about specifics, but I'm still unconvinced "free speech" is a meaningful term or that it's necessary for industrialization with private investment. It's a bone given to morons to get them to not demand real rights. I would also not ever willingly live in a society with truly free speech.
> Yes, in the US you absolutely are allowed to say what you want with no state-sanctioned consequence.
When has this ever really benefited us? We complain endlessly but fix nothing. What value have unanswered complaints?
Sorry, can you illustrate which point you were confused by or which aspects of my sentiments you felt weren't fleshed out? On rereading I think i'm perfectly clear. Do you feel like one of your points didn't get the attention it deserves? I'm happy to comply—if I didn't respond to a point, it's because I don't want to indicate disrespect, and as a result I have nothing left to say. But I would be overjoyed to tell you my actual thoughts if you can bear the social conflict.
If you don't want to or do not feel equipped to reply to my thoughts you can do just that—not reply.
Ah apologies, you edited to expand on an extremely cryptic comment.
> but I'm still unconvinced "free speech" is a meaningful term
It is demonstrably a meaningful term given that it has prevented the imprisonment of countless people who have been unfriendly towards the state or other powers that be at various times in our history. You can look for "landmark 1st Amendment cases" for an extremely partial list. In reality the bulk of the power is in the deterrent effect against the state pursuing action against private entities for expressing themselves, and the obverse effect that private parties aren't afraid of the state when expressing themselves.
> or that it's necessary for industrialization with private investment.
Not sure what you're getting at here, but it doesn't matter whether it's "necessary" for anything. It's in the Constitution. If you want to debate changing the Constitution you can go ahead and do that, but I won't spend my time engaging with it.
> When has this ever really benefited us?
Every day! It is literally benefiting you right now. You're aware that these very comments, in a regime with weaker protections, would put you at risk? And that even if the odds are remote, you would experience a chilling effect on sharing your thoughts with me here?
This all sounded pretty abstract to me too until I spent some time in a truly authoritarian country. I went on a date and casually asked the lady "so what's it like living under [ head of state ]?" What was a warm and friendly evening immediately turned as she glanced over her shoulder and completely clammed up, hurrying us onto a different topic. That reaction sent chills down my spine, and if you're an American and have zero concept of what any of this stuff means in the real world, it would've sent chills down yours too.
> It is demonstrably a meaningful term given that it has prevented the imprisonment of countless people who have been unfriendly towards the state or other powers that be at various times in our history.
You can just say "first amendment protections" rather than the disingenuous "free speech"
> Not sure what you're getting at here, but it doesn't matter whether it's "necessary" for anything. It's in the Constitution. If you want to debate changing the Constitution you can go ahead and do that, but I won't spend my time engaging with it.
You were the person that identified free speech as a reason for western dominance. I'm saying it doesn't appear to be related at all.
> is literally benefiting you right now. You're aware that these very comments, in a regime with weaker protections, would put you at risk
I don't give a damn. No amount of free speech will help the homeless, so fuck it. Let's get real rights in this country. All americans do is complain and complain and complain, so I see it as a marker of american complacency that they don't actually want anything to improve.
It's the same thing a lot of the people on the right were complaining about ten years ago. Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
Watching this happen twice has really killed the idea that polls are a useful way to determine mandates for government policy in my mind. Most of the population probably just shouldn't be involved.
What legal censorship were conservatives facing ten years ago? There is no real precedent for this that I can think of since maybe the Red Scare in the 50s.
Well there's all the fake censorship where private parties exercised their First Amendment rights to control which content they carried. According to modern "conservatives", private actors should be compelled by the state to carry certain kinds of speech (their kind, obviously).
They will claim the government pressured private platforms despite 1) the platforms never claiming coercion, 2) the moderation actions aligning with the platforms' own content policies, 3) the platforms routinely denying government requests for content moderation, 4) there being no evidence of an implicit or explicit government threat towards the platforms.
> private actors should be compelled by the state to carry certain kinds of speech
Restrictions on speech far predate either social media or section 230. If you want to call this censorship—sure, by all means. I don't personally think it is very objectionable appropriately characterized in a situation with consequences.
> Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
And, by design, it won't affect most people. Except the people who have the chutzpah to speak out against israel, of course—good luck finding that on cable tv or the opinion column. That shit is only on social media.
The protesting and activism are the same. I think foreign students/citizens should refrain from doing either of these, as they are in the country for a specific reason (to study), and not to turn its government. You'll probably get away with it when you do it at a small scale, but as things get out of hand, you are unlikely to go unnoticed - as person in the topic apparently did.
There are no such considerations in the US Constitution.
As an American, I have a right to hear the speech of foreign students and citizens. The government does not have the power to prevent me from hearing what they have to say. Small or large scale does not matter.
Stanley v Georgia: "It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth is fundamental to our free society."
Yes, but this person arrived from another country. Would you say freedom of speech and freedom of assembly means that people from around the world have the right to assemble in the United States?
> Yes, but this person arrived from another country.
Yes.
> Would you say freedom of speech and freedom of assembly means that people from around the world have the right to assemble in the United States?
I wouldn't say that because it isn't a well formed question. It conflates multiple, distinct activities. It unhelpfully presents them as if they were a single, constitutionally addressable action, which they are not.
But he was denied entry at the border, so it appears that, according to you, anyone from elsewhere in the world should be able to assemble in the US and express his free speech.
