The neo-Nazi Chris Cantwell has been arrested again for making threats over state lines, which is rather interesting from a free speech point of view. They’re just words, right? First amendment! Free speech! Mere words can’t hurt people.
Then we see the words.
Cantwell allegedly pressured someone to give up what’s described in the indictment as “personal identifying information” about a man known by the “on-line pseudonym ‘VM.’”
“So if you don’t want me to come and f*ck your wife in front of your kids, then you should make yourself scarce,” Cantwell allegedly wrote in a June 16 message. “Give me Vic, it’s your only out.”
Last July, Cantwell allegedly used Telegram to threaten a lawyer suing him over his actions in Charlottesville, calling the woman anti-Semitic slurs and claiming that he and his followers “would have a lot of fucking fun with her.”
Well. That’s certainly repulsive, and marks Cantwell as a terrible and unpleasant person. We don’t arrest people for their personality.
However, it’s also an attempt to compel someone to do something against their will, or Cantwell will commit vile criminal acts. If I got a threat like that, I’d be asking the police to provide protection; I’d also have to spend money and time upgrading my home security.
It seems that words have power after all, and that “free speech” isn’t carte blanche to say whatever you want after all. Now if only the absolutists could figure that out.
Whose absolutists? As has been observed before, the alleged absolutists on the right know perfectly well that they’re lying about their belief in any principle – and everyone else knows that too, Do you mean the ones on the left who fall over themselves to assure everyone that they’ll never actually do anything about the likes of Cantwell because, gosh darn it, that would be censorship?
Talking about the FREEZE PEACH! crowd, who are frequently (but not exclusively) naive libertarians with absolutist tendencies on issues of free expression.
Chris Cantwell is pants-shittingly, swivel-eyedly afraid at all times. Everything he says and does grows out of that — he’s stupid and confused and knows no way to deal with his diffuse feelings of fear and inadequacy except to lash out in an attempt to feel strong and competent and safe even for a moment. Yet even when he was marching through town shouting “Jews will not replace us” with a hundred fellow goons right behind him, he looked like he was barely holding back from crying in fear.
In other words, he’s the living embodiment of reactionary “thought” as the defensive reflex of ignorant cowards, one so completely transparent that you could stand him in front of a class and point out each of his neuroses and attached rationalizations with a ruler. I kind of enjoy seeing him in the media just for that.
So, if I use a pseudonym, my family is targeted?
In person, people generally like us, yes, we have some objectionable views, but who doesn’t in a grand crowd?
Still, we have protection against this monster, the greater monster of one who has knowledge, specifications and designs of thermonuclear weapons.
Screw us, loss of specific contact methods eventually are sent.
Paranoid? Yes, for a reason, during one era, security was loosened and showed up on searches.
Happens to us, it happens to you.
There were a few things bad, a number after it was finally found to be bad, after, things get confusing.
Oddly, precisely zero thermonuclear war occurred.
Alas, we have amateur night at the White House…
For the record, our preference is for bursts, to cause thermal flux missing a planet.