The brazen appearance of white supremacist groups in Nashville left the city grappling with how to confront hateful speech without violating First Amendment protections.
They first arrived at the beginning of July: dozens of masked white supremacists, shuffling out of U-Hauls, to march through Nashville carrying upside-down American flags.
A week later, members of a separate neo-Nazi group, waving giant black flags with red swastikas, paraded along the city’s famed strip of honky-tonks and celebrity-owned bars. The neo-Nazis poured into the historic Metro courthouse to disrupt a City Council meeting, harassed descendants of Holocaust survivors and yelled racist slurs at young Black children performing on a downtown street.
The appearance of white nationalists on the streets of a major American city laid bare the growing brazenness of the two groups, the Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. Their provocations enraged and alarmed civic leaders and residents in Nashville, causing the city to grapple with how to confront the groups without violating free speech protections.
… what? Not arresting Nazis isn’t going to magically un-arrest left-wing protesters.
It’s also not going to arrest Nazis that have already done these things. So how about we don’t arrest anyone for protesting and just make it legal from now on?
I’m sure police chiefs will get right on that
I’m sure police chiefs will get right on arresting Nazis too. What’s your point? We shouldn’t advocate for not arresting people for protesting?
You’re fucking kidding me, right? You don’t pre-arrest people. You arrest people after they’ve done shit.
God, why didn’t we think of that brilliant solution before? How many left-wing lawyers and political organizations have simply overlooked that we can just make it legal to protest?
I see, this is one of these “never try” situations. We could never stop left-wing protesters from being arrested so we should never try to stop it and advocate for that to end and instead just call for other people to be arrested too.
Because we shouldn’t want people to have rights, we should want other people’s rights taken away.
No, it’s apparently one of those noble martyrdom things, where the correct response to getting brutalized by Nazis is to roll over and show how very moral you are by just passively taking it.
You do realize that this is already happening to left-wing protesters, right? The only thing you’re advocating for is that left-wing protesters get the full force of the state laid down on them while Nazis are allowed to roam free because “It wouldn’t be fair” to apply the same goddamn laws to them as long as those laws are on the books.
You’ve convinced me. Never try to get back rights that were taken away from you. Just get vengeance.
Vengeance is when you show why mutual disarmament is a good idea instead of showing that you won’t fight back, and the less you fight back, the less vengeful you are.
Got it. Fight back, but not for your rights which have been taken away from you.
You do realize a society can do more than one thing at a time, right?
Like, demanding police chiefs to arrest Nazis under the same circumstances that they arrest left-wing protesters is not going to magically diminish the work of left-wing lawyers and politicians to redefine the rules so that protesters, in general, are not being arrested. Even application is kind of the point of laws, and not simply allowing but actually advocating that an unequal application of the law be perpetuated (because it wouldn’t be fair if the Nazis got the same treatment as left-wing protesters) is, itself, incredibly damaging to the legitimacy of the government as a whole.
Fuck’s sake.