Judge says Education Dept partisan out-of-office emails violated First Amendment

“the First Amendment is a cheap thing if all it provides is the assurance that one may say what a current majority is willing to hear.” Charles Rembar

I think we can all agree on this. It would just be nice if there was consistent enthusiasm for the first amendment when it comes to actual taboo ideas. Are you quoting this when you hear about right wing extremists being canceled or jailed in Europe? In the 1970s, Jewish lawyers at the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie. Not out of support, but to uphold the principle of free speech for all. What happened to intellectual honesty?

I mean it depends on what we are talking about. The case you mention was about the right to peacefully assemble, and that the swastika does not count as "fighting words" and thus not grounds to say the assembly isn't allowed. In the case of Europe, they don't have the same constitution as the USA so I'm not sure how to compare that, and if those extremists are merely being silenced over swastikas or calls for the deaths of people since you didn't specify.

Plus the comparison to Europe and that specific case is especially untenable because if the specific case in Europe was in Germany, then they have a special relationship with the swastika.

People in Europe are also human beings and so they also have a natural right to free speech. They just happen to live in oppressive governments willing to use violence against them for expressing their natural right to speak their opinion.

People in Europe live in actual democracies (for the majority). The laws restricting speech were born through democratic processes.

Who do you think you are to pretend to know better than these citizens? You seem to want to impose some unbridled "free" speech that seem to have pretty disastrous effects in the only country where it supposedly exists... is this your idea if "freedom"?

We have tested the limits of tolerence at the cost of literal tens of millions of deaths during the last World War in Europe, I don't think we need any lesson on how we should run our societies regarding free speech because we have done a lot of painful learning.

Looking at the direction/unstability of the American system currently it's not impossible that its people will do the same kind of learning soon unfortunately, might be better to focus on this rather that trying export ideas that we democratically rejected, with purpose.

People in USA live in a constitutional republic based on self-evident natural rights given by god. We just have (somewhat) democratically elected representatives.

In an "actual democracy" with no constitutional rights, the majority can (legally) genocide the minority - and that's happened more than a few times in "actual democracies" in Europe in the very recent past.

You should probably think deeper about what you're advocating for.

We genocided the native Americans. Our president wants to genocide brown people. The government is almost wholly owned by wealthy individuals and corporations. A majority of our government is actively working against the good of humanity, much less the interests of the nation.

America now has a literal secret police abducting real people on the actual streets in broad daylight.

Upon losing the previous election our president staged a coup and faced no consequences and won a reelection.

We are no longer a great, free nation, and you really need to understand that fact. America has been lagging behind the rest of the free world for half a century or more. Pretty much everyone has it better than we do.