The Bourgeois Right to Bear Arms/ To Fascistic Racist

[Michael Hoover]

> freedom of speech is not an absolute right. In the very first Supreme 
Court case on the freedom of speech, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' most 
famous words in his decision are an effort to carve out and exception to 
First Amendment protection: "Crying fire falsely in a crowded theatre." He 
gives this example to show that freedom of speech is not absolute. Then in 
the case itself he finds another exception to freedom of speech for "clear 
and present danger". The result is he  upholds  the conviction of  a 
socialist opponent to WW I (Schenck, I think), who opposed it because it 
was a capitalist war against the interest of the workers who were doing the 
dying in it. 
> Charles Brown

*Schenk v US* (1919)...Charles Schenk, a member of the Socialist Party, 
had distributed flyers calling for abolishing the draft and arguing that 
the working class was dying in WW1 for Wall Street...

all analogies being suspect, Justice Holmes' non-parallel fallacy is a 
whopper...first, airing opposition political views is hardly similar to 
yelling fire in a crowded theatre, but even if it were, Schenk wasn't 
doing so falsely, after all, there was a war (fire) going on...if you 
can't speak out against war when it is happening, then what good is 
freedom of speech in this matter?...

Holmes made a similar argument in *Debs v US* (1919)...having protected 
the interests of the ruling class from such "clear and present danger"
during wartime, he could return to being a Court liberal, which is how he
is generally remembered...Michael Hoover