Republicans Still Don't Get It

One of the persistent mysteries of the past week is what leads Republican House members—some of whom had to crouch on the floor of the chamber as the Capitol was being attacked, while others were whisked into unidentified locations for their own safety—to refuse to accept who was to blame for the insurrection. With the exception of the 10 Republican House members who voted alongside the Democrats to impeach the president, and a smattering of Republicans who acknowledged that the events of last week could easily have ended their lives but wanted to convene a commission to investigate matters, a nontrivial number of Republicans took to the floor on Wednesday to insist the real injury of Jan. 6, 2021 was to their own free speech rights. This was perhaps best embodied in the galactically stupid visual of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting representative from Georgia—who falsely tweeted that Trump would stay in office after Inauguration Day—wearing a mask that read “CENSORED” as she spoke freely on the House floor, as captured on national television.

There was also Rep Jim Jordan’s inexplicable claim that one cannot “have a functioning First Amendment when cancel culture only allows one side to talk.” (Again, he was saying this freely on the floor of the House of Representatives.) Democrats are really out to “cancel the president and anyone who disagrees with them,” Jordan said, before warning that “cancel culture will come for us all.” There was also the fractionally less coherent Rep. Glen Grothman from Wisconsin claiming, of the rioters in D.C., that “they’re scared to death that nobody else will fight the cancel culture as we head toward an era when some things can’t be said.”

It is, quite frankly, beyond belief that the very same people who could have died in the United States Capitol just last week have somehow persuaded themselves that they’ve in fact experienced a more acute First Amendment injury than even insurrection itself—and that any effort to impose liability for the property destruction, terror, and death that resulted from the storming of the government is a monstrous encroachment on their right to talk. They make this point, to be clear, as they are talking and talking and talking about the pain of First Amendment encroachments, on the House floor. The real threat is to them, they say, as they point to the long and careening tour of Free Speech casualties of January 2021, from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, to an armed mob’s vaunted free assembly rights, to their own wholly imaginary right to talk endlessly—which they are, to be clear, doing, even as they whine about it. That it is all performed even when what they say is happening is plainly not happening is eminently incendiary and insane. And herein lies the problem. We have come to a moment in which one half of the country is fighting to be free of crippling, life-ending acts of stochastic terror, while another half of the same country is chillingly preoccupied with their right to just talk shit.

These harms are not the same.

More at:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/republicans-impeachment-speeches-first-amendment.html