Is Political Assassination Free Speech?

We do not know why the shooter in Arizona targeted

Rep. Giffords. Sarah Palin did not arm him or pull the
trigger. We do not know if the shooter admired,
loathed or ignored Sarah Palin. We will eventually
know, and that will be a different accounting. But only
Sarah Palin put 20 Democratic members of Congress in
her crosshairs, and only Sarah Palin bragged that 18 are
now gone, leaving Rep. Giffords and Rep. Nick Rahall of
West Virginia.

Someone has to say it. There has been an astonishing

acceleration of violent right wing rhetoric. At the same
time, the mainstream media has come to accept armed
revolution (second amendment remedies) and violence as legitimate political discourse instead of calling
it out as behavior that crosses a very dangerous line. In the past week alone, incendiary devices were
received at the offices of the Democratic Secretary of Homeland Security and the Democratic Governor
of Maryland.

This is what Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and others like them have wrought with their violent and vitriolic
rhetoric that literally places gun sights on people who don’t agree with their extreme views. Apologists
on the right are already saying that while tragic, this event was simply the result of an isolated act by a
deranged individual. There have always been deranged individuals. But they have not always had easy
access to guns nor have they always lived in a 24-hour-a-day media machine that promotes a toxic soup
of violent attacks on political opponents.

It is not really necessary to tie the shooter into the broader body politic to prove what we as Americans
should already know instinctively: That when eliminationists are targeting members of Congress with
rocks and stray bullets and tar and feathers and a minister is praying for the death of the American
president and when a state decides as an entity to profile and harass human beings because they have
brown skin or because their religion is different, that things have already gone way, way off the tracks.

We enjoy the right of free speech in this country, but even it has its limits. Oliver Wendell Holmes’
opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United Statesin 1919, upheld the Espionage
Act of 1917 and concluded that a defendant did not have a First Amendment right to free speech against
the draft during World War I.

Holmes, writing for a unanimous majority, ruled that it was illegal to distribute flyers opposing the draft
during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented
a “clear and present danger” to the government’s recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater
and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such
circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about
the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Following this definition, aren’t Palin’s crosshairs and words (“Don’t Retreat, Reload”) of a nature and
used in such circumstance as to incite violence? Isn’t the Arizona shooting a perfect example of “clear
and present danger”? Seems like we are getting no better than the Taliban.