Like most Americans, I’ve been thinking a lot about free speech and its limits lately. I wrote about hate speech a couple of columns ago, and from the comments, it sounds like most of us are on the same page about that: “hate speech” is a slippery and politicized idea that usually boils down to “speech that I hate.” As such, hate speech laws should have no place in American politics.
All of the lying that the elite left has done about Charlie Kirk – before and after his murder – has made that point obvious. Most of us already thought that the next edition of the DSM would have to make room for Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think that KDS (Kirk Derangement Syndrome) might be an even more virulent mental disorder. Because if THAT guy could be accused of hate speech, who among us could go unscathed by that same accusation?
Would ANY nationally prominent leftists be left standing, were that standard enforced? Everybody who has called half the country Nazis or fascists would be out instantly. And that’s what, 95% of them, right off the top?
That’s not to say there’s no place in a healthy society for “consequence culture.” Normal people wouldn’t want their kids being “educated” by evil trolls who celebrated Charlie’s killing. Nor would they want to be treated by doctors or nurses who did that, or patronize any businesses whose owners or employees did that.
The exception to free speech protection is speech that “incites violence or poses an immediate threat to public safety.” I’m going to read some SCOTUS precedents to get a better idea of what that looks like, but I’ve come across two much-discussed examples that I think might in the running, and I’d like to see what CO nation thinks of these.
The first comes from a popular leftist streamer named Hasan Piker, Cenk Uyger’s nephew, and a hugely popular streamer on Twitch, and also an angry, hateful leftist, IMHO. Two particular quotes of his have been making the rounds in the wake of Charlie’s murder.
I’ve seen the first one but haven’t been able to find any context for it, so take that into account as you read it. (I’ve substituted a different “f” word for his favorite one.)
“I’m sick and tired of it. Left-wingers, liberals, you need to be friending showing your opponents’ guts. You need to be gutting them. You need to be shanking these motherfrienders and letting their friending intestines just writhe on stage…. Slice ‘em up! Slice ‘em and dice em’!”
Piker says that the second one came from 2019, during a conversation about landlords in Berkeley who had decided not to rent their properties out. (I saw a discussion elsewhere about landlords not being willing to rent their places to homeless people on city grants, but I don’t know if that’s the context here.)
“Kill those motherfrienders! Murder those motherfrienders in the streets. Let the streets soak in their friending red capitalist bloods (sic) dude.”
In both of these videos, Piker appeared to be totally serious. He was shouting and shaking his fists. When he talked about gutting people, he made a stabbing motion with one hand. There was no comical voice, or winking or sarcastic tone. He came across as an enraged radical, totally sincere in his beliefs.
After Charlie was murdered and an Aussie news presenter asked him about the “kill the landlords” quote, he showed himself to be a total wuss, probably because he got some legal advice. He waved away any assertion that his authentic-appearing rants were actually authentic.
He said, “My insincere statements don’t reflect on any of my beliefs whatsoever,” and repeatedly called his statements “obviously insincere” and “obviously hyperbolic.”
The second example comes from another popular leftist political streamer, a very unhappy dude named Stephen Bonnell II. He has given himself the stupidly self-aggrandizing name “Destiny.” Which I won’t use, because it’s ridiculous.
Simpson’s First Law of Names: if you give yourself an inflated name, you’re a gigantic douche. Examples include “Charlamagne tha God,” whose real name is Lenard Larry McKelvey. And I sort of get it, because who wants to be called Lenard Larry, especially when your dopey parents managed to spell “Leonard” wrong?
But his nom de stupid is even worse! It’s composed of three words, the first two of which are misspelled, and the third is blasphemous. (So good job, Lenny!) The offense is compounded by naming himself after a truly great Medieval character, Charlemagne. (His name is cool in at least three languages, since Charlemagne is French for Charles the Great, and his Latin name was Carolus Magnus.)
First Corollary to Simpson’s First Law of Names: If you EARN a great name, you’re immune from charges of douchiness. See the original Charlemagne. Also, Alexander the Great and William the Conquerer, who were great and a conqueror, respectively.
Sidebar: I remember that years ago, Dennis Miller (one of my comedy heroes) had a bit about the first time that Gordon Sumner showed up to the pub with his friends and said that from now on, he was going to be called “Sting.” Miller mocks the idea, but apparently Sting was one of the rare people cool enough to pull that off. Lenny McKelvey and Lil’ Stevie Bonnell are definitely not.
(Even I am not. I called myself “Martacus” as a joke, to poke fun at Cory Booker for calling himself Spartacus, and that has caught on around here a bit. But only as a funny, self-referential goof that no one would take seriously.)
Anyway, Steve Bonnell is a big influencer on the left, and also something of a broken person. But I repeat myself. He’s allegedly had a disordered private life that has included allegations of bisexuality, revenge porn and two quickly failed marriages, the second of which he proudly touted as an “open” marriage to a Swedish gal… which ended when she publicly cuckolded him and left him for another guy. Unexpectedly!
(I know: I’m a stick-in-the-mud, 19th-century Roving Correspondent who has not kept up with the times. But isn’t the whole point of an “open marriage” – which is to say “not a marriage” in normal-speak – that you both try to bang anything that stands still long enough? And yet it ended badly? Imagine that.)
But I digress.
After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Bonnell went on Piers Morgan’s program, and said many stupid and hateful things that do not constitute incitement of violence. He denied that Charlie’s killer was a leftist motivated by leftism to kill him. (D’oh!) Piers asked him that if that is eventually proven, “Would you condemn that?”
Bonnell showed who he really is: “I won’t condemn anything until the President of the United States [says that all of us need to calm down].” Moments later, he said, “Leftists and Democrats have been condemning and turning down the temperature for a decade. Donald Trump can’t go on tv and say all of us need to calm down.”
So obviously, Bonnell is a delusional idiot. But here is where he may have crossed a line. On his own podcast five days after Charlie was murdered, Destiny said, “You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events, so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature.”
He also said, “If you [conservatives] wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn’t have been president for his second term.”
Clearly, both of these morons illustrate the vast moral gulf between us and them. Hatred and anger spills out of them, as they sneer and swear and insult anyone who disagrees. I only spent an hour looking through some of their videos to write this column, and I feel like I need a shower.
Compare them to Charlie Kirk, whose default setting was humor and compassion and the desire for dialogue. By now we’ve all heard the half-dozen comments of Charlie’s – cherry picked from thousands of hours of his speeches and debates – and the best they could come up with was that small number of out-of-context but logically defensible statements, and the time when he called a career violent criminal a “scumbag.” (Fact check: true.)
Charlie at his “worst” was a million miles away from the bitter malevolence of Piker’s and Bonnell’s calls for pain, violence and death to be visited on their political opponents.
My gut instinct has been to reject calls for the government to pursue and charge people for political speech, no matter how wrong-headed or offensive their speech is. But as the left has gotten more and more violent these last 5 years, I’m taking a second look at that question.
Both Piker and Bonnell have millions of low-IQ, socially failing leftist followers, many of them with more than a dusting of mental illness. When Piker tells them directly to kill landlords and to disembowel their political opponents, does that constitute incitement? When Bonnell implicitly tells them that they need to make conservatives afraid for their lives, and blames Charlie’s murder on the people who elected Trump, does that constitute incitement?
What do you think, CO nation?
Martin Simpson 