The Supreme Court Is At The Heart Of America’s Racial Division

Bookworm Room

                                                    Society needs defamation law to function

"If you are trying to make sense of how our nation has become so toxic, a good starting point is the Supreme Court’s  1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. That case radically altered existing law so that, for the first time in our history, it was, as a practical matter, impossible for any “public figure” to bring a successful defamation suit. There can be no better example of the horrid effect of that decision than a recent race-based defamation against Governor Ron DeSantis.

"Recently, the DeSantis administration sent a letter to the College Board informing it that the State of Florida would not allow a proposed AP African-American Studies curriculum to be taught within the state. The rationale was that much of the course was nothing more than a highly politicized and radical ideology dressed up as a history course, something illegal in Florida. 

"Factually, nothing DeSantis did was “racist”—that is, he did not treat Blacks differently because of their skin color. Nor did anything DeSantis say or do support “White supremacy”—that is, he did not promote White Americans as being inherently superior to Black Americans. And yet, the race hustlers instantly went on the attack:

"Since the 1960s, progressives have been using the race card to demonize and defame their ideological opponents.

"In that vein, it would be hard to imagine a more classically defamatory article than that penned the other day by Renée Graham, an associate editor of the Boston Globe: “Ron DeSantis’s Fear of American History.” Graham outrageously slanders DeSantis by claiming that racism motivated him. She compares DeSantis’s refusal to allow the wildly ideological African American Studies AP Course to be taught in Florida to the actions of a slave owner who refused to allow his slaves to learn to read. It is, she says, an act of “white supremacy.”... 

Democrats are drooling over the possibility of criminalizing any speech with which they disagree — and they’ll do it, too, if voters don’t deal them a stunning political loss.

"Rep. Sheila Jackson (D-TX; Yale BA; University of Virginia Law School JD) has floated a bill controlling speech with which she disagrees. It’s called the “Leading Against White Supremacy Act” and is intended to make expressions of “white supremacy” a federal crime. Usefully (for her purposes), Jackson Lee does not define “white supremacy.” Instead, the act opens with at Tautology:

A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.

"You got that, right? You will be charged for having engaged in a white supremacy hate crime if you were thinking white supremacist thoughts when you engaged in that hate crime.". . .