> The First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech.
Civics 101. My right to through my fist stops at your face. Simple. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, etc. etc.
Political speech, ie, expressing ones viewpoint, is and has always been protected by the First Amendment -- even if it's false or racist speech.
> I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths...
What would you replace it with? Seriously. Are you going to punish people for lying? Lock them up for something just slightly racist? Who do we trust to make these judgements? Republican appointed judges? What?
> Are you going to punish people for lying?
We punish people for lies that cause harm all the time. Though a bad example to use (because it is dicta unsupported by the law at the time in a particularly repugnant case suppressing core political speech that was later overturned, so that the quote at issue was never part of the substantive case law itself, wasn't particularly supported by the substantive case law, and was issued in a case now widely recognized as having been wrongly decided), the quote you wave your hand in the vague direction of about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater is also an odd one to raise if you are going to turn around and sneer at that idea.
It's certainly true the left can have illiberal tendencies, and there's some indication that's on the rise, and that's worrisome. But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter, it's always worth asking how many people have been "cancelled" and to what degree. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have never been denied an audience and will almost certainly continue to have huge ones. J.K. Rowling, for all of the articles about her "cancellation" over the past couple of months, turns out to still be a multibillionaire author who still has a book contract. Yes, every day brings us complaints from prominent conservatives about how Twitter is stifling their voice -- complaints generally tweeted to their millions of Twitter followers who like and retweet them in support.
In any case, while I'd be loathe to carve out explicit exceptions to the First Amendment, I'd also be loathe to invoke it too cavalierly. Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"? No, but in practice that's very rarely what we're arguing about when we argue about cancel culture: you mentioned it was a social media phenomenon in another comment here. Would you demand that social media networks not be allowed to make decisions about what content they're willing to carry? How about employers? Firing someone for that "something just slightly racist" is harsh, but do we want to say that HR departments are no longer allowed to make those calls? If so, who is?
I mean, if you don't have protected free speech, you have regulated speech. If you can't say "I believe in X because .... " where X might be racism, then it's no longer freedom, and therefore subject to potential criminal legislation. See John Adams and the sedition act.
> But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter...
Bari Weiss made it clear it was the anger from the Tom Cotton essay where she felt her career at the times became untenable.
When did we decide that an essay by Tom Cotton was too dangerous to be published? That his speech was so dangerous that the core ideas could not just have been countered with... wait for it... more speech.
And no one said that freedom of speech never meant freedom of jobs. Nor did freedom of speech ever mean that people would buy your product after your ugly ideas came to light.
So what is cancel culture? It's this. Specifically this article:
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2019/9/25/20883697/cancel-cu...