this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Arrest them for what exactly? Is disrupting a city council meeting anything but a civil infraction?

Criminal trespass, easy. Fuck, that's levied all the time as a club against left-wing protesters. Yet when actual neonazis show up, they get nothing? Fuck that.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Criminal trespass...

Most city council meetings are legally open to the public. It is in fact their main purpose.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Most city council meetings are legally open to the public. It is in fact their main purpose.

I'm used to normal city council meetings being private, and public ones being the exception.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

They’re open to the public unless certain members are asked to leave.

A public building can still kick someone out, and if they don’t leave, then that’s trespassing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I think the answer to that is not 'also arrest the Nazis,' it's 'don't arrest the left-wing protesters either.'

Balancing the scales doesn't solve the problem.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (37 children)

Balancing the scales doesn’t solve the problem.

And neither does playing by the gentleman's rules of boxing when your opponent is using brass knuckles. Fucking "They go low, we go high"? Did we not learn our lesson? If a weapon is used, the correct answer is to make the opposition see why that weapon was banned in the first place - it's the same reason why many signatories of the Geneva Protocol allow for retaliation if chemical weapons are used against them.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Balancing the scales doesn’t solve the problem.

Good point: the correct answer is, don't treat them equally, because they don't act equally. What we should be doing is exactly the opposite of what we are doing: fucking-up the NAZIs while leaving the left-wing protestors alone.

This is not hypocrisy, by the way. This is a simple application of consequences: those who do not respect the social contract do not deserve to be protected by it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

It may not be hypocrisy, but it is suggesting that the law continue to be applied unequally (just the opposite way around), which is definitely not a progressive position.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Arrest any and all groups that storm in and disrupt government functions, simple as that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Which means that people in the government can argue that virtually anything the government does is a "government function." Mayor's press conference? Government function. Better arrest those protesters. Governor's mansion? It has public tours. That's a government function. Better arrest those protestors.

Look what happened without that law when a president wanted a photo op with a Bible in front of a church. And you want to make that even easier?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You can protest outside the building perfectly fine, storming into the chambers and stopping the agenda is blatant disruption and I won’t argue it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But how do you make it clear that is the government function that can't be disrupted but the press conference afterward can because it does not count as a government function?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Don’t enter government grounds for your protests.. do it outside the building.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Outside the building is often government grounds too. Those buildings can be in plazas which are entirely government-owned.

So, again, you're saying you can't protest the press conference (except from a great distance).