A N.C. gun store put up this billboard:
Rep. Rashida Tlaib responded:
How the hell is this not inciting violence? https://t.co/rgdDloiePq
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) July 31, 2019
No, calling politicians idiots isn’t “inciting violence” or “encouraging gun violence.” It is urging people to dislike the politicians—a basic right of every American. That’s so when people criticize President Trump or the Republican Congressional leadership or the left wing of the Democratic party or anyone else. It’s so regardless of what groups those politicians belong to.
It’s true that some tiny percentage of listeners may react to such criticism by deciding to violently attack its targets, whether the targets are on the Left or on the Right. But one basic premise of free speech isn’t that we don’t treat speech as “inciting violence” (a label for constitutionally unprotected speech, see Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)), and suppress its communication to the 99.9999% of people who don’t act violently because of it, just because of a risk that 0.0001% would act violently.
And that’s so even for much harsher speech, such as calling people traitors or fascists or other such labels that some might see as morally justifying attacks. It is even more clearly true of simply calling them idiots. That’s true, I think, not just a matter of law but also of political ethics: There’s no basis for morally condemning such speech as supposedly “inciting violence.” (One might mildly condemn it as being nonsubstantive, but that condemnation would of course apply to a vast range of common criticism, and of common praise, of political figures from both sides.) It most certainly does not “NEED[] TO COME DOWN.”
Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley have set themselves up as leaders of the left wing of the Democratic Party. They have achieved national prominence, not just individually but as a group. In my view, their policies and views merit criticism; but even if you agree with them, surely others have a right to disagree. People have a right to criticize them as a group and not just individually. People have a right to continue to criticize them even when the politicians had gotten threats from third parties (as Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley reportedly have, and as I’m sure many other politicians have as well).
People have a right to criticize them disrespectfully and not just respectfully. They have a right to criticize them with slogans and not just substantively, again just as they do with President Trump or Republican Congressional leaders or anyone else. And of course they have a right to call them “idiots.”
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