Assassinate the President!
GG Allin, crooner
It was spring, 1980. We were organizing a Students for Peace benefit at the Spirit Club. The Spirit Club was a dive bar’s dive bar in San Diego. SfP started at UCSD soon after Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
We booked the club for an evening early in the week and agreed to pay the bar’s minimum for the night. As I recall, we had four bands play and barely broke even. A competent ska/2-tone quartet named Fire opened with danceable beats and solid political lyrics. We’d heard they were affiliated with the ultra-Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, more specifically its youth auxiliary, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade. The RCP had a long history of—and an interest in—youth organizing, and they used the RCYB to cultivate young recruits as well as a street presence. It was early in the evening, the attendance was sparse, so we had time to chat with the band.
Except for the drummer, they were all working musicians with experience and again, except for the drummer, they all seemed a little too old to be called “youth.” Originally called Prairie Fire, they had played aggressive punk rock up until becoming a ska band. It was clear that both the name change and change in musical style were not due solely to personal tastes or wanting to be more commercial. Their political milieu had dictated it. Someone in SfP who had heard them before asked about a song, “Overthrow The Government,” they did in their punk incarnation. The band demurred, said they no longer played the song, and inferred that it was not in their repertoire because it was not politically correct per the RCP. We kept pestering them, shouting requests for the song between numbers, demanding they play it. After some hesitation, they relented and played a hardcore “Overthrow The Government.”
The First Amendment to the Constitution prevents government from passing laws that prohibit free speech, but no such prohibition applies to a private club, service organization, capitalist business, Leninist vanguard party, what have you. Clearly, the “right” to free speech can be limited or curtailed by the vanguard party you belong to, but no more so than if you work for your typical capitalist corporation in these United States. I remember telling an old school San Diego Leftie that our mutual friend—a member of the Maoist Communist Party, M-L, formerly called the October League—had been reassigned to a party cadre on the east coast. His take was that our mutual friend displayed party discipline and a commitment to both party building and mass organizing in making the move. I considered that our mutual friend was involved in a job relocation, an employee transfer between branch offices of a corporation, and was making a lateral career move.
And corporations can legally deny you your “right” to free speech with impunity. They can fire your ass for what you say on or off the job, make you sign non-disclosure agreements, confidentiality contracts, and codes of conduct in order to keep your ass employed, and regulate the content, manner, and timing of your speech while your ass is on the job. According to court judgments regarding labor laws, employees can legally discuss wages, hours, and working conditions, but not much else. Private workplaces are miniature totalitarian states, and the situation is little better for public employees working for the government. When speaking as private citizens, government workers may be protected so long as they are speaking out about a public concern, and speaking out doesn’t interfere with doing their job. Otherwise, no “right” to free speech. But what if the public employee is also an elected public official, or is a public employee by virtue of being elected to public office?
I hope Trump is assassinated.
Maria Chappelle-Nadal, politician
Maria Chappelle-Nadal was heavily criticized for her remarks on her Facebook post. The Secret Service investigated the Missouri Democratic State Senator, and demands were raised that she resign. The Democratic senator apologized but remained adamant and refused to resign, so the Republican-controlled Missouri Senate censured her. The vote was just shy of the two-thirds needed to remove the senator from office. Compare this to what happened to Michigan truck driver James Anthony Jackson when he said of Trump: “I am going to blow white brains out the fuck out his motherfucking head.” He was investigated by the Secret Service, who then arrested and charged Jackson for threatening to assassinate the president of the United States, which is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Congress may be prohibited from making any law abridging freedom of speech, but the government can certainly define what “freedom of speech” legally means. Credible threats are not considered freedom of speech, with federal, state, and local governments universally defining the use of threats of violence as the assault part of “assault and battery” laws. Similarly disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and breach of public order are all considered crimes, not free speech. So government does have the legal right to prohibit the content of speech if it is deemed threatening and the manner of speech if it is deemed disruptive.
Even with genuine free speech, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that local, state, and federal governments can reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of individual expression. Time, place, and manner restrictions “accommodate public convenience and promote order by regulating traffic flow, preserving property interests, conserving the environment, and protecting the administration of justice,” [West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd ed.] and therefore are not considered an abridgment of freedom of speech.
#assassinatetrump
hashtag
In a time of social media and instant global digital communication however—when alt.right idiots threaten anti-fascists with “helicopter rides” and conspiracy wingnuts threaten victims of mass shootings with mayhem, rape, and murder for being “false flag” crisis actors—all of this seems moot. In fact, the “right” to free speech is not guaranteed by god, natural law, the constitution, legislation, custom, morality, or our sense of fairness. That right, any right, is guaranteed solely by our individual and collective power to deny or enforce it. Even then, the “right” to free speech doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it, or shield you from criticism or consequences, or prevent you from being boycotted, your events cancelled, or banned from some internet community (to quote a popular XKCD comic). This has little to do with Karl Popper’s so-called “tolerance paradox.” The “right” to free speech is a fight for power, pure and simple.
So, consider the hashtag #assassinatetrump. Social media forces its users to participate in a bit of compulsory free speech through the system of hashtags to flag posts and tweets as part of a single meta-conversation. By using #assassinatetrump, people for or against the assassination of Trump, or people just making a point or a joke, are engaged in a de facto free speech fight. No doubt the FBI has ‘bots applying internet algorithms to search out the content behind any and all #assassinatetrump hashtags to determine whether or not they pose a threat. And be prepared for when the Secret Service breaks down the door of someone using the hashtag to actually threaten to assassinate Trump, violating all sorts of other rights and freedoms in the process. But the hashtag #assassinatetrump is a statement all by itself, simultaneously an assertion of free speech and a battle over it.
Use #assassinatetrump at your own risk.
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