On free speech: from Robert Reich, Yale Law School graduate
And he graduated from law school a long long time before wokery took over. And yet, he writes this:
Elon Musk and his enablers have turned this website into a torrent of ad hominem attacks, lies floated as jokes, and blatant misinformation.
This isn’t freedom of speech. It’s just dangerous.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 11, 2022
Earth to Reich: Twitter has always been a torrent of ad hominem attacks, lies floated as jokes, and blatant “misinformation.” You’re just upset because your side used to dominate those categories.
But the more interesting part of Reich’s statement are those last two sentences: “This isn’t freedom of speech. It’s just dangerous.”
Again we have the strange definition of “dangerous,” which seems to mean “anything I don’t like which could conceivably hurt the feelings of someone on the left, or anything with which I disagree and think is incorrect or misleading.” And even more importantly, we have the idea that speech that is dangerous in those ways – hurting someone’s feelings, or bad jokes, or “misinformation” – is not free speech.
But it most certainly is. In fact, any lawyer (and certainly anyone as old as Reich, who is 76) should know that free speech is often awful in any number of ways. It takes nothing to defend the allowance of speech with which you agree, and which you think is kind or great or otherwise good. The importance of the doctrine of free speech rests on defending the allowance of speech with which you disagree and which you dislike.
And hateful speech or misleading facts can indeed spawn violent actions. That is very unfortunately true. But it is the price we pay for liberty, just as letting a guilty person go free because his or her guilt cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt is the price we pay for the presumption of innocence in criminal cases. Reich knows these things – or once knew them – but, like most leftists, now pretends not to know them because of politics and power. He does not want the left to relinquish any portion of the enormous power it has gained in the last half-century, and in pursuit of that goal he’s quite willing to sacrifice the liberty of others.
And this post isn’t meant to be about Reich himself, who is relatively small potatoes these days. It is about a certain way of looking at things that is very common on the left, despite the fact that many of the people espousing the point of view actually know better or used to know better.
Reich is certainly “small potatoes” (not to mention being not of great height), but many of the most pernicious ideas in this country continue to emanate from our law schools, which consistently turn out endless numbers of destructive individuals (one should not forget that the parents of the poor unfortunate now languishing in a Bahamian jail taught, until recently, at Stanford Law, once home also to Pamela Karlan, outrageously involved in Trump’s impeachment and now at the Department of (In)Justice.
Neo remarks that Reich “is relatively small potatoes these days.” He certainly is small, standing only 4 feet 9 inches or 4 feet 10 inches, depending on which source you consult. For comparison, Maximilien Robespierre stood a full 5 feet 3 inches tall (prior to his date with Mme. la Guillotine).
FWIW, Reich once dated Hillary Rodham (later Clinton) when he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and she was at Wellesley. They ended up as classmates at YLS. Reich may indeed be small potatoes in and of himself, but his political connections make him a real troublemaker in regard to free speech issues.
this simpering munchkin has been in our face, for 30 years, as they said of cromwell go away, he’s not mostly harmless like miguelito lovelace, but somewhat dangerous,
PA Cat:
That was an unconscious pun of mine.
Reich has a syndrome that leads to very small statue but not technically dwarfism.
Indeed the ONLY reason to listen to anything Reich says is because he’s the town crier…in motley…
j e:
I agree that law schools have become pernicious these days, but Reich didn’t learn this stuff in law school back when he attended.
Those of us familiar with Reich as a participant in public discussion 40 years ago (or even 20 years ago) do not recognize the man anymore.
I think this may be attributable to cultural shifts in the political class and in academe. OTOH, recall that Reich is 76. Certain things are evident only in retrospect when you begin to remark the signs of someone’s incremental deterioration.
We have a relation who was diagnosed with cognitive decline in the spring of 2018. Out of town relatives noticed at the end of 2014 that his short term memory was decaying. He had a business that had to be shut down in the spring of 2018. Relatives tasked with sorting through his financial records discovered that as early as 2008 he was doing peculiar and damaging things which put him in legal jeopardy. Then we recalled his adventures in pet care which began around 2006 and which we’d initially put down to his eccentricity, later to his habit of doubling-down on foolishaz. He’s been disappearing into dementia for 15 years.
Recall the case of Jeffrey Hart, retired of the Dartmouth faculty and a pal of Wm. F. Buckley. Sometime around 2004 he began to make bizarre statements (about George W. Bush) and take an interest in conspirazoid literature. Around about 2011, he fell silent completely in public fora. His family admitted at the time he died in 2019 that he’d been demented for some time. (People who professed to be knowledgeable about Hart maintained he was an alcoholic from way back).
As best I remember Reich has always been like this. It was not so uncommon as many believe, though more a minority position back in the 70s than it is today.
Neo–
Yes, I know that Reich suffers from Fairbank’s disease, aka multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, a disorder that affects the growing ends of the long bones in the body. The actor Danny DeVito has the same disorder. At present there is no cure for it, only various approaches to managing it. Fairbank’s is doubtless difficult to cope with, and it’s likely that it affected Reich’s personality.
As best I remember Reich has always been like this.
Nope. He was talking out of his a** a great deal (see Thos. Sowell on the distinction between expertise, intelligence, and articulateness), but his was a congenial voice.
Once the left got into positions of power they ditched their “liberal” beliefs because they want to hang onto power.
A skewed view of things is a requirement for success in the opinion world. If you are “On the one hand … on the other hand …,” “Both sides do it,” “It all depends on whose ox is being gored” or “Let’s wait until all the facts are in,” you won’t post as much and won’t develop loyal followers. Being shallow and quick on the trigger pay off.
It also seems like the way to totalitarianism is through private enterprise, strangely enough. Private companies don’t have to respect the First Amendment, so governments and interest groups use the corporations to censor speech that they cannot censor themselves.
In the vulgate, Robert Reich is a clown. This is not my judgement, but the judgment expressed in everything I’ve read by writers I respect over the past decade.
Reich has become a hideous buffoon who now really belongs to a species other than Homo Sapiens. He is right out of Daniel Boorstin’s now 60 year-old book, The Image. He is a self-created noisemaker, and thus, today, in some looney tunes circles, is a celebrity.
The stakes are very high now.
The Sturdy Walls of Democratic Party Meta-Coverup have been pierced.
And so, one can FULLY understand why the elites are restless… (and “to understand is to…laugh(?)”…)”
“The mainstream media can’t risk covering #TwitterFiles. If they admit rampant collusion between govt agencies and Twitter, they’ll have to inquire about Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google. The whole censorship regime would unravel. Better to pretend nothing’s happening!”—
https://instapundit.com/559555/
…or pretend that Free Speech is SO IMPORTANT that it MUST BE CENSORED by responsible organizations and people (IOW Democrats and their accessories in VIRTUE and UNITY!)….
That is, “The Reich Stuff”!
Related:
This should be fun!
“Security for me, censorship for thee: AOC, Musk tangle over doxing and liberal double standards”—
https://justthenews.com/accountability/media/satrules-me-and-not-thee
Wow! AOC really does have her [hypocritical] finger on “the [Democratic] pulse”…
In a nutshell… (and there’s a whole lotta nuts out there…shelled and shameless…):
Daniel Greenfield chimes in…
“EU Declares Posting to Twitter a ‘Human Right’;
“… at least for the media hacks Elon Musk suspended.”—
https://www.frontpagemag.com/eu-declares-posting-to-twitter-a-human-right/
Burisma?
What’s Burisma??
Never heard of it….
Probably just another goofy GOP stunt—those Deplorable, Insurrectionist, White Supremacist, racists….
“White House silent on prospective release of ‘Burisma’ emails;
“The administration has 60 days to decide whether to withhold the documents under the Presidential Records Act.”—
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/white-house-silent-prospective-release-burisma-emails
(So will they block it citing “NATIONAL SECURITY”??)
File under: L’etat, c’est BWAAAH”…
I have, now & then, confused Robert Reich and Alan Dershowitz. A bit absurd, right?
The realization that this wasn’t Dershowitz is a relief! Anyone know if he’s been offering his views on Twitter’s censorship, Musk’s actions, etc.? I hope he isn’t disappointing.
I can’t look it up right now.
Free speech, eh?
Jeff Carlson is on a roll…
https://twitter.com/themarketswork
I have, now & then, confused Robert Reich and Alan Dershowitz. A bit absurd, right?
They were both on the Harvard Law faculty, both are Jews, and both have facial hair. Dershowitz is more flamboyant.
Dershowitz is eight years older than Reich, is a specialist in constitutional law and criminal defense, and has always had a wider and more vernacular audience (newspaper columns, trade books); he generally stays in his lane as a purveyor of opinion. He’s also kept his hand in as a working lawyer, doing both trial and appellate practice. Dershowitz I’m wagering has a great deal of entree, but he’s never been an insider to the same degree as Reich is. Dershowitz is also a vociferous Zionist; he did not intermarry.
Reich’s general audience writing has been for tonier publications with smaller circulation (he was a regular at The New Republic back in the day); a great deal was outside his wheelhouse and ill-advised for that reason. Reich was a Rhodes Scholar and fairly well connected, being a veteran of both the Carter and Clinton administrations. AFAICR, Israel and the Jewish experience are not subjects Reich ever addresses; he had two children with his estranged wife; she’s gentile. He was once general-counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, but I don’t believe he’s been a working lawyer since. (He left that job in 1981).
It’s not surprising that one of these men has thoughts which are less regime-compliant than the other. What is surprising is that Reich has stopped making sense, and Dershowitz hasn’t.
Art Deco sez “Reich has stopped making sense”. Really? Cast your mind back about 40 years; did he make “sense” then?
Cast your mind back about 40 years; did he make “sense” then?
Yes he did. Retrospectively, I think his pieces we’re ill considered and, if you run through them, invalid. An invalid argument is not a nonsensical argument.
Art Deco; Marv:
To me the biggest difference between Reich and Dershowitz is that the former is a Party man through and through, following the latest Democrat talking points. The latter thinks for himself and goes his own way. Conformist vs nonconformist, and willingness to jettison principles vs. sticking to principles wherever it leads him.
IMHO Dershowitz is also much much smarter.
Yes, you could say that. Reich 40 years ago was a policy journalist. He favored the Democratic Party, but he was not a purveyor of talking points. Even 20 years ago, he had some critical distance from Bill Clinton, even though he’d worked for him and was at the edges of the Clintons’ circle of friends.
I don’t know which one was smarter. They had quite different interests. Dershowitz is a law professor, working lawyer, and public advocate. Reich has a long history as a law professor playing a business school professor.
WRONG. You have fully vested, 1000 percent constitutional protection to absolutely and flagrantly lie through your teeth, if that’s what you want to do.
It’s just as constitutionally protected as any other speech.
I was very surprised when Reich, whom I always considered to be something of an esteemed individual, started opining on issues related to freedom of speech. That shows how naive I am. The elitist mentality exemplified by Reich is probably par for the course within the leadership of the Democratic party. The party I grew up with is truly gone forever. Time to wake up.
This is what happens when you do not fight back. The long march through the institution began in the 50’s with its culmination in what we have today. Reich is a small part of that, yet, a dedicated part. Colleges and governments long ago were converted to reeducation camps and purveyors of ideological propaganda. I sure don’t know how to stop this.
Don’t crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.
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