Jackson's Utopia*

I have been studying civil-military affairs for 35 years, wrote my dissertation and my first book on it, and have been teaching military guys most of my career.

I will now step back so people on Twitter can explain this subject to me with with three minutes of thinking about it.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) April 18, 2021

Behold the democratization of public discourse as wrought by the series of toobs!

Disagree. Likely to cause imminent lawless action is not the criterion. The usual test - comparison to shouting fire in a crowded theater - has nothing to do with that; people dying in a panic are not committing a lawless action.

— Tom Anderson (@_Tom__Anderson_) April 18, 2021

That one needs a bit more context, but it's a subject I understand. So: context.

@Popehat I guess exclaiming "the penalty for acts against humanity is DEATH. Take em out!" to a roaring crowd - in the context of recent mass shootings and insurrection - is merely 1A protected speech? Genuinely curious on your position.

— noahlz (@noahlz) April 18, 2021

Popehat is a lawyer who actually understands First Amendment jurisprudence the way the courts do (the only venue that actually matters in legal discussions. Law has a convenient boundary like that which most subjects I'm conversant in have a harder time establishing, as in the above, with statements of "criterion" (not a legal term of art) which no competent lawyer would recognize as a valid legal analysis. Perhaps it's better to say the law is more cut-and-dried in who determines what it means, and who doesn't. But I digress....) 

The simple answer here is that shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater has never been an exception to speech protected by the First Amendment, even in the opinion which came up with the phrase everyone remembers; and the opinion expressed in that opinion was expressly overruled by the Court in a later case. So, in the vernacular as popularized by Charles Dickens, as a matter of law that statement is as dead as a doornail.

Except it's a zombie statement that cannot die, and is resurrected constantly by people who know nothing about the law.  What they don't get is how using it establishes their lack of knowledge. 

More and more I think of the internet not as a rising water that lifts all boats equally, but a draining lake leaking out through the broken dam, revealing all the trash and junk once hidden by the peaceful waters now gone.

That said, if you’re wondering if I’m talking about you, yes, I definitely am.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) April 18, 2021

*Andrew Jackson, the real nowhere man.