by Donald Jeffries, ”I Protest”:
From Yelling Fire to Fighting Words
I’m a civil libertarian. We’re practically extinct now. There were never very many of us, but there used to be a lot more. Most people simply don’t support your right to say something they disagree with. And therein lies the rub, as the Bard once said. Political correctness, “hate speech,” call it what you want. It destroys liberty.
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I have recounted many times the origin of the expression “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used that phrase to explain why Woodrow Wilson had the right to throw WWI protesters into prison. They weren’t yelling fire, in a theater or otherwise. But the American public of that day and age accepted it. Didn’t offer up a whimper of dissent. In 1942, the Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, decided that “insulting or ‘fighting words’, those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.” Now, Americans in 1942 were in full WW2 war fever mode. They were too busy buying bonds and planting Victory Gardens to worry about any “Fighting Words” exception to the First Amendment. We had Nazis to defeat- screw free speech!
Think of all that could potentially be construed as “fighting words.” If someone says something bad about your wife, do you have the right to respond with physical violence? This was the Supreme Court kind of validating the Creed of the Hood, forty years before Hollywood started celebrating the “hood.” I don’t have to tell you what can happen if someone “disrespects” your mama. Ghetto culture especially benefits from this flawed decision, which put yet another asterisk on the Bill of Rights. I grew up well after 1942, but we were still taught that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” And now, emboldened by a Supreme Court decision none of them are even aware of, our ghetto culture uses the “fighting words” exemption to enable angry Blacks to batter hapless Whites, and then attribute it to being assaulted by certain words. Fighting words. Well, if you hear fighting words, what else can you do but fight? Usually starting with a sucker punch.
I abandoned my liberal roots because the Left had already become unduly concerned with policing language, in the late 1970s. When the term “politically correct” was invented, and not met with incredulity, the die was cast. After all, if something is politically correct, that means that society has determined that there are opinions, words, that are politically incorrect. Not permissible in a country supposedly protected by a First Amendment. We should be free to be politically wrong, politically stupid, politically deranged. We should be able to say basically anything we want. Sure, saying something mean and confrontational to a person may result in you being punched. And if you’re injured seriously enough, you may sue that person for losing his cool and injuring you. But no one should ever be able to justify a physical attack based upon anything that someone else said. The Left today thinks otherwise. They declare that words are violence. They support punching “nazis” in the face.
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