Pennsylvania Lt. Gov: Accusing Us of Election Fraud Is Not Free Speech
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov: Accusing Us of Election Fraud Is Not Free Speech
By Daniel Greenfield
It’s the Pennsylvania Democrats so of course the second banana looks and sounds like a cheap thug with all the constitutional acumen of one, and is a Bernie Sanders supporter who plans to run for the Senate. And if Warnock can do it, despite a history of racism, interfering in a child abuse investigation involving a camp he worked in, and the whole, “God Damn America” thing, what’s to stop Fetterman from riding an escalator of Silicon Valley cash to the top?
So this idea that saying that Pennsylvania was rigged or that we were trying to steal the election, unquote, that’s a lie. And you do not have the right, that is not protected speech,” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) claimed on CNN.
“The second those tweets went up, they should have been deleted. That’s not deplatforming someone. It’s deleting lies that are yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is none,” Fetterman continued. “And there is a difference. That is not protected speech. He can talk all day about what his favorite football team is or that he’s the greatest president in the history of the world but no one, Republican, Democrat, whatever, has the right to say those kind of incendiary lies that are hurled with only one goal in mind. And that is to damage and debase the democratic franchise. And that is exactly what happened.”
On Twitter, Fetterman claimed, “The hyper-spread of tweets of documented lies, with only a “this is disputed” tag is NOT protected speech. It’s specifically designed to incite.”
So Fetterman looks and sounds like a cheap thug, but he’s making the same basic argument as the smarter Democrat set.
1. That claiming election fraud is “yelling fire in a crowded theater”, a discredited legal doctrine dating from a WW1 draft protest case that is not actually the law, but widely quoted by people anyway.
2. That it’s incitement.
The two obviously overlap. The common denominator is that accusations of fraud cause violence and have to be shut down. Those arguments are obviously coming from the same political faction that had been claiming that the 2016 election was rigged to elect a Russian agent. Good thing that wasn’t incitement.
Fetterman’s argument is an attack on the First Amendment. And it’s part of a larger Democrat campaign to criminalize political dissent.
The same political faction that falsely claimed the elections they lost in 2000, 2004, and 2016 were rigged, is now trying to criminalize saying that the elections that go to the Democrats are rigged.
There’s a name for that. Tyranny. Or is that considered incitement too?