A thought on Free Speech
Pruneyard decision
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-shopping-center-v-robins#:~:text=The%20Supreme%20Court%20ruling%20in%20PruneYard%20is%20also,and%20without%20any%20compensation%20under%20the%20%E2%80%9Ctakings%E2%80%9D%20clause.
In my mid-20’s I decided owning a printing press and playing Tom Paine wasn’t good enough. So I decided to take a minimum wage for tabling in the hot Sacramento summer on various issues. I went door to door as well. Free speech is in my blood. My father whom I barely knew was a union man and I went with him to meetings. College of course saw me acting up as a publisher and studying on the 12 year plan with no particular aim aside from being happy learning and saying my mind. The cafe world I enjoyed was a free speech bastion. Old times.
Substack has me banned for a comment. Not clear why. I have opinions. I doubt they are important enough to have someone report me for too much speech of the wrong sort. Evidently I am wrong. Well I studied Samizdat and I studied Satire in Authoritarian and Totalitarian systems. I am not in China or Russia or Europe. I am amazed that I can post.
I am sad I cannot respond.
My mail is Cstegiel@gmail.com.
I will post until Banned from Posting. Any minute this will happen. Or not. But it could. Just be advised hot summer tabling and going door to door shaped some thoughts on Speech.
Those, who empower others to stifle opinions they disagree with, are dispensing with power that one day, will be used against them, too...
By Professor Stephen D. Solomon, Editor, First Amendment Watch:
https://firstamendmentwatch.org/thomas-jeffersons-first-inaugural-address/
"On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson delivered his First Inaugural Address in the Senate Chamber before taking the oath of office administered by Chief Justice John Marshall. He became the nation’s third President amidst the fires still burning from the odious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Under the Sedition Act, the Federalist Administration of John Adams had jailed more than a dozen Democratic-Republican political opponents for their speech or writing. Jefferson, vice president under Adams, and James Madison had opposed the Acts in their Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, written in secret. In large part as a result of this political repression, Jefferson prevailed in the election of 1800 and the Federalist Party began its spiral into oblivion.
"Jefferson delivered a conciliatory address, and in the excerpt below he argues that difference of opinion “is not a difference of principle.” All Americans were united—“we are all republicans: we are all federalists.” And freedom of expression should protect all, even those who preferred dissolution of the country—“let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”
Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address
“All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. . . [E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”
Yet my favorite part is this:
""All too will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind, let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things."
What kind of a life is one, where people cannot even speak freely?
I wonder what "hot summer tabling" is.
Is it being a waiter, but that's good for eavesdropping but not for one's own free speech.