[This is a post by occasional “Alas” comment-writer Lirael, reprinted with permission from their excellent blog NowFaceNorth. Thanks, Lirael! –Amp]
There’s a lot of interesting arguments going around in the wake of the cancelled Donald Trump rally in Chicago. One of them is that the protesters violated Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech, or his supporters’ First Amendment rights to free assembly. These arguments are wrong, and I want to take a look at why that goes beyond the refrain of “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” (which is technically true, but I think it’s a flippant and overused argument).
The really obvious problem is that the First Amendment regulates the behavior of the state. The only First Amendment issues you could raise in this situation involve the actions of law enforcement, regarding their attacks on and arrests of protesters and a reporter outside – I would really, really like some of these defenders of free speech to show more concern about that part of what went down in Chicago – or if you don’t think they were legally justified in clearing the arena. The actions of private citizens have nothing to do with the First Amendment.
What people are somtimes trying to get at when they make this argument is that a society that values freedom of speech enough to protect it from government coercion in the constitution, ought to value it enough to guard against or avoid other kinds of coecive behavior in relation to speech. This is what people mean, I think, when they talk about “a culture of free speech.” And while this argument has gotten a bad rap on much of the left these days because we’re so used to it being taken to ridiculous extremes (“How dare you ban me from your website for racist comments? What about the culture of free speech?”) or to claim that criticism of one’s argument is anti-free-speech, it’s an argument that’s worth reckoning with. To understand why, I strongly, strongly recommend reading Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch’s essay Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace, which takes libertarianism to task for its failure to “come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace.” I don’t think the left in general, or the social-justice-oriented left in particular, should be jumping to fall into the libertarian failure mode, into the idea that state coercion is the only kind of coercion worth caring about or opposing. We should give some thought to free speech as a norm, if you will, and not just free speech as a freedom. This is why I don’t much care for, say, campaigns to get rank-and-file workers fired for saying racist, sexist, or other oppressive crap in their private lives. It’s not a violation of their First Amendment rights, but it’s also not good.
That said, not all kinds of exercises of power around speech are equal (I give some more examples in the next paragraph). State coercion actually is different – you can be arrested, subject to invasive searches of your person, have property confiscated, have to appear in court repeatedly, be forced to pay a lot of money, be incarcerated. You can lose much of your liberty. And the First Amendment regulates that kind of coercion, and I’m pretty fervent about the First Amendment. Once you get beyond that near-absolute, you have to make judgments about what kind of coercion, if any, is happening, and what kinds of effects it’s likely to have. And since none of the parties involved is the state, you have to consider the competing rights of private citizens (e.g. giving a speech is a speech act, and so is petitioning to stop a speaker’s appearance or heckling them), and the competing principles that many of us look to in governing human interaction (the idea that people should be able to express their views is a valuable one – so are anti-racism, feminism, affirming that marginalized people are welcome in your communities, and a lot more, and sometimes those come into conflict with people being able to express whatever views, wherever they want). You have to actually make some kind of evaluation about how far is too far for what principle and how to resolve competing needs. The Constitution won’t help you. And free speech advocates aren’t all going to draw all the lines in the same places – for instance, when it comes to speech and higher education, you have advocates like Angus Johnston (who you should all be reading) and advocates like FIRE, and they draw the lines in sufficiently different places that they’ve had public debates about it. I sometimes change my mind about situations that are sufficiently close to my personal lines, and my personal lines sometimes move a little bit as I think situations over (the anti-Trump protest in Chicago did not cross my personal lines). I don’t think you’re a better civil libertarian for having your lines in a different place than someone else, because civil liberties are about the individual’s relationship to the government.
For an average person who has to make a living, the employer has very strong coercive power, possibly more than any other institution except the state, but this power is much less for, say, executives, who have more power in the workplace, usually more financial resources, and probably more ability to get a new job easily. Because Facebook and Twitter are such huge platforms, they have a lot of power to control what ideas get out there and how (by taking action, or for that matter, by not taking action, such that people get threatened and harassed until they abandon the platform in stress and fear). The book-publishing industry has a lot of power over authors, but will be using that power against a whole lot of speech by definition, because they don’t publish every single author who submits something. The blogger who bans you from their comment section has almost no coercive power. The student who asks for trigger warnings both has little coercive power and is not stifling you in any meaningful way (oh no, you’re being asked to say a couple of extra words – I don’t buy that you can even call that an infringement on either speech OR the related but different norm of academic freedom, unless you think that profs being required to issue course syllabi at many schools is also an infringement). There’s also the issue of what kind of platform someone has – Donald Trump gets news coverage if he sneezes, he has one of the largest platforms in the country, the idea that protesting a rally such that he decides to cancel it is stifling him is laughable.
There are also ways in which the situation of Trump’s rallies is unusual. There’s the thing where Trump has encouraged his supporters to physically attack protesters. Like, earlier that day he had said to his rally in St Louis that that one guy getting sucker-punched is the kind of thing they need to see more of, not to mention his previous comments offering to pay the legal fees of people who hit protesters. He’s creating violent spaces at his rallies, not in the “frame everything as violence” sense that you see in certain kinds of activist discourse, but in the literal, physical, interpersonal violence sense. Even if you think that people should not try to shut down other people’s rallies as a matter of principle, “space where you’re encouraged to beat people up who disagree with you” is not usually what a rally is, and it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable that people would want to shut down such a space in their community, especially when it involves racists having such a space at a majority-people-of-color university.
A last bit of the argument that I want to address is the “Well now right-wingers will disrupt Sanders and Clinton events and then you’ll be sorry” argument. My answer is, maybe they will. Protest/counterprotest situations aren’t exactly uncommon. Primarily as a street medic, I’ve been in protest/counterprotest settings that were nonviolent and quiet, nonviolent and loud, and (on at least part of one side) not nonviolent. The first big protests I ever went to were protest/counterprotest situations around same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, when I was 18. Big loud crowds on both sides, people crossing the street to mess with each other, people milling around mixing, most peaceably if noisily, a few less so. I befriended a gay 13 year-old goth who rather hilariously photobombed some homophobes getting interviewed by TV news, and then got kicked in the leg while crossing the street. Also before I started street medicking, I was at a Planned Parenthood rally where the counterprotesters were mostly peaceful but a few of them were trying to tear down people’s signs, shove them around, and rush the stage. I’ve medicked some nontrivial number of Israel/Palestine protests/counterprotests that have covered the whole range of conditions that I listed above. I’ve seen a couple of white supremacists counter the Ferguson protesters I was medicking for, I’ve medicked LGBTQ and anti-fascist counterprotests of a Tea Party rally featuring vicious homophobe Scott Lively, I’ve medicked a pro-Syrian-refugees-coalition vs militia protest/counterprotest (that ended up being very mellow as the militia people decided to go march elsewhere). It’s just not that novel, oppostion happens when you do politics. Violence and threats, obviously, are different matter, but if right-wingers start loudly-but-nonviolently protesting Clinton or Sanders rallies, I’m sure that everyone can manage and it is not like anyone won’t be able to access Clinton’s or Sanders’ opinion on the issues of the day if they want it.
This is an unusually thoughtful article on free speech. Thank you.
Obviously, I agree with Veronica. :-)
I was wondering if this was meant to say “won’t” be using that power?
I think that sentence reads correctly (though I could be wrong) – the publishing industry *is* using its power to “silence” a whole lot of speech, for values of “silence” which amount to “not give a platform to at this time.”
This is a very good article!
My concern isn’t “they will do it to Clinton”. My concern is that it is counterproductive because it lets Trump paint leftists as the aggressors, and himself as the victim (a frame we are already seeing). That isn’t a free speech issue, that is a “you are narccistically demonstrating your own righteousness in ways that are likely to actively hurt your cause” issue.
Sarah is right. That particular example was spurred by the recent controversy around children’s books and that book about slaves making a cake for George Washington, and my seeing several authors of color on Twitter point out that publishers who largely ignore authors of color and the perspectives that some of them have in their books, are suppressing far more speech than anyone asking for that particular book to be taken off the shelves. And it got me thinking how the publishing industry is in fact all about choosing what speech gets access to certain platforms and what kinds of power that gives it (this may be an obvious point to authors, but other than scientific papers and my blog I am not an author, and hadn’t really thought about the issue at that level before).
@Sebastian H: I didn’t address that issue at all in the piece (not saying that you thought I did), but I am less concerned about it than you are, because I think Trump was headed for the nomination in any case (plus Cruz is roughly as bad), and the protests may mobilize people, including people from demographic groups that historically don’t have high turnout, against him for the general. In Chicago, they may also have helped mobilize primary voters against awful DA Anita Alvarez, as the activists (content note: link has graphic descriptions of police violence) specifically sought to tie Alvarez’ enabling of police brutality together with Trump’s racism. Alvarez subsequently lost her reelection primary, which was an enormous victory for Chicago antiracist and anti-police-brutality activists.
That first night, though, the bulk of what I was seeing from pundits was free speech arguments – plus free speech is an issue that I ponder a lot, and that has had great relevance to my life lately – and so I focused on that aspect of the protests and the commentary about the protests.
Thanks for the explanation, Lirael!
I have to admit, although I can follow the logic, I have trouble thinking of failing to publish or promote speech as being the same as suppressing speech. Especially since, defined that way, most people’s speech will always be suppressed, mo matter what policies the publishing industry follows; there isn’t a viable model of traditional publishing in which everyone who wants to gets published.
I’m not saying my instinct is right about that, necessarily. I’ll have to think on it some more.
I feel like failing to publish can definitely be suppression.
f’rex: Facebook is a major communication platform, maybe the major communication platform. When Facebook tweaks its algorithm to say, decrement posts or fail to publish posts about a competing service, that’s definitely suppression of that speech (I wouldn’t argue it’s tantamount to state censorship, because other avenues are available for publication, but it definitely reduces the impact).
yrs–
–Ben
It’s about the magnitude of the imbalance. Furthermore, it is about the volume of what is said about us rather than by us.
Which is to say, there is plenty said about trans people (for example), but the vast majority has been cis people talking to other cis people and using us as a vehicle for their own sexual preoccupations. In many ways, this became big culture in the 60’s with that execrable Gore Vidal thing. It hasn’t got much better.
This is not an accident. This reflects the choices made by publishers and the public.
That said, one must acknowledge that this would always be an uphill fight, but cis writers, editors, publishers, and so on, played a role in shaping how the conversation would progress. Just because there was a market for X, this does not mean you cannot provide X-prime with a smattering of Z, when X-prime is less hurtful and Z is more truthful. It’s complicated.
Furthermore, even when a trans personality was involved, what editors were willing to publish was bound by their own views. This is to say, there is a reason that the most notable trans women these days is fucking Caitlyn Jenner, rather than literally anyone else with an ounce of worthwhile insight.
So yeah, no one owes anyone a book deal. But who gets access reflects existing power structures. When those power structures are hurtful, then people will get hurt. When those power structures are entrenched, then they are certainly a valid location of struggle.
This is not an argument against free speech. Instead, it is an argument against naive “free speech cheerleaders.”
Social power structures are not self-justifying. Just saying, “Well, it was free speech and thus it’s okay” is bogus. A lot of speech is wrong and hurtful. Bad people get the mic and good people get destroyed.
What I mean is, what is said is part of the system of who gets heard. It’s all wrapped up together. Free speech idealists are ignoring a huge swath of material reality.
I’ve been thinking that maybe disruptively protesting Trump is similar to drawing Mohammed; the fact that the response to it is violence transforms into a noble act what might otherwise be, on balance, a bad thing. (I’m not entirely sure how I feel about whether disruptively protesting Trump is a bad thing without the pattern of violence; whether drawing Mohammed was a bad thing would depend on the particular circumstances, to me, but drawing him just to get a reaction out of Muslims would be a bad thing if it weren’t for the pattern of violence.)
veronica d’s comments reflect pretty well why I brought up the publishing example. Nobody owes anybody a book deal. But on the systemic level, publishers – and their movie and TV equivalents – end up getting to pick speech winners and losers as part of their job, and that’s a pretty powerful function. I don’t think that’s something with a legislative fix, just to be clear, but I think it’s something worth chewing on, and as veronica d said, it can be an area for struggle. It seems closely related to, or part of, larger issues of media representation. Again, the media/publishing business is pretty far out of my bailiwick, and I give credit to authors, media professionals, and librarians of color – SF/F author Daniel Jose Older, fiction and nonfiction writer Mikki Kendall, my friend and SF/F poet/publisher Saira Ali, and childrens’/YA lit educator Debbie Reese all come to mind – for getting me to chew on this.
This is a very thoughtful article. It probably is going to inspire me to again pick up my copy of On Liberty. John Stuart Mill is often trotted out against purely juridical forms of censorship, but that was actually his easy case (it was a less easy case for the U.S. for the century or so following its publication, which perhaps explains the confusion). Mill was actually far more concerned about the norms of free speech and free expression in the social sphere beyond the brute case of g governmental censorship, and was well aware of the tension between critical counterspeech versus wielding social power to block of dissident views. His thoughts on this were quite rich and are well worth returning to (particularly if you think, as many do, of Mill’s defense of free speech as occupying a simple classical libertarian niche).
I live about 20 miles away from where the Chicago event occurred. As you might expect, there was wall-to-wall coverage of it in the local media, much of which I consumed. I also am friends with an administrator at UIC who was at school when this all went down.
I’d divide up the situation there into two parts – inside and outside the hall. Outside the hall I see no issue with any protest as long as it was free of criminal activity. Inside, however, is another matter. The announced objective both before and after the event on the part of many activists there was not to protest Trump but to prevent him from speaking. There was no shortage of people there who on-line and on-camera proclaimed that aim and how proud they were of having achieved it. And there were plenty of people I know on Facebook who congratulated them for having achieved that aim.
I think that’s wrong. Dead wrong. For one thing, it’s a violation of Trump’s First Amendment rights. The bottom line is that if someone rents out a hall for the purpose of giving a speech, you have no right under the First Amendment or any other part of American law to exercise a heckler’s veto and block that speech from happening. When one rents out a venue (or uses a venue that they own, or is given the use of a venue for free by the owner), the right of free speech belongs to that person and that person only, or to the people they give permission to speak to. I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember the kerfluffle over Ronald Reagan saying during one of his rallies “I paid for this microphone!”, but he was right. The fact that you are giving a speech does not automatically make it or you subject to open debate. If you are speaking in a public park or some other venue where you have no priority, then fine – people are perfectly free to shout you down. But that’s not what was at issue here.
So as you might imagine, I went ahead and posted this in Facebook in the comment sections of the posts that people I know – people I’ve sung with, for God’s sake – who were so proud of what had happened. Protest that he’s speaking there? Fine. Have at it. Block him from speaking? No, that’s anti-free speech, anti-democratic and anti-American.
The reactions split into two main fractions. By far the smaller one was from people engaging me on the free speech issue, claiming that I was wrong on the facts and the law. Well, I’m not, and posting a summary of what the Supreme Court’s position(s) have been on the matter fairly settled that. But the larger one consisted of people either shocked or openly pillorying me for supporting Donald Trump. The concept that defending the right of someone to speak does not necessarily mean that you support the speech’s content itself seems to be foreign. And there seems to be an embrace of the philosophy that the ends justifies the means, and that while blocking the speech of someone you claim is racist is justifiable and even admirable, blocking the speech of someone you claim is on the side of the angels is horrid and evil. Which I was shocked to hear.
“Alvarez subsequently lost her reelection primary, which was an enormous victory for Chicago antiracist and anti-police-brutality activists.”
I remember telling a very liberal friend of mine prior to the last election that while he and I would not agree on who to vote for President, etc., he should NOT vote for Alvarez because despite her ethnicity she was just another machine candidate and she would simply use her position to further the machine’s aim. I wish I had not been proven so prescient.
“… it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable that people would want to shut down such a space in their community, especially when it involves racists having such a space at a majority-people-of-color university.”
That venue does not belong to the students and faculty of UIC. UIC is a public university and it was paid for and is maintained by the taxpayers. It belongs to the public, a great many of whom wanted to hear what Donald Trump had to say. The fact that they attend that school does not give them special rights to determine who does and does not get to speak there.
Ron, could you please link to some documentation of protestors saying that their goal was to prevent the speech from happening at all – and saying so before Trump cancelled his speech?
I’m not assuming you’re wrong. But your account definitely contradicts the account of this reporter, who was “embedded” with one of the inside protest groups, and attended their planning meetings. Unless the reporter is flat-out lying, their plans were definitely assuming that the speech would go on.
Inside the various halls, I think several layers of protest which are going on, none of which cross a line for me.
1.) People shouting down Trump. These people should be escorted out non-vilolently. To the best of my knowledge, all protesters using this tactic expect to be removed from the venue, and I am not aware of any who have resisted being removed, even passively. Some have been violently attacked by crowds. As long as protesters leave when they are told to, I don’t think what they are doing is problematic. Moreover, I think these protests have done good things on the left, with Black Lives Matter protesters getting both Clinton and Sanders to pay more attention to their issues.
2.) People protesting silently with signs/t-shirts. Of course it is legal to remove such people. However, I would not want any candidate I support to remove such respectful protesters. I’d also want to hear what my candidate had to say about their concerns. My understanding is that several such protesters have been roughed up at Trump rallys.
3.) People presumed to be protesting because of who they are. The only instance I know of this was a Muslim couple. The woman was wearing a hijab and a t-shirt that said “SALAM I come in peace”. They wound up being escorted out. If people are being ejected from political rallies due to race and/or religion – or any other “because of who they are” – that is a serious problem, even if it is legal (I’d guess that varies based on anti-discrimination ordinances in different places).
Veronica —
I think my tripping over the word “suppressed” was semantic, not substantive. I agree with 100% of your comment.
Ditto for your response to Veronica, Lirael.
@Ampersand — people on the left, in general, suck at the “choose the correct word” game. Myself, I just run a constant leftist-hyperbole-to-rational-concept translator. It helps.
Today I’m going to navigate the crushing weight of hegemonic patriarchy — or as it is otherwise know, “Most folks are a little bit sexist in ways they don’t quite realize, and this tends to favor men.”
Amp:
From here:
Obviously, just because one group had plans to non-disruptively protest doesn’t mean other groups didn’t have different plans.
kate:
I disagree. First, as I said above, in a rented space, it is a clear violation of the speaker’s rights. Second, the people who came there did so to hear the speaker, not the protesters. A right to free speech does not mean a right to make other people listen.
People with t-shirts – no problem. People with signs – if they are standing in front of other people and blocking their view of the stage, toss them out. OTOH, removing people based on the way their are dressed is kind of ridiculous.
Ron, you claimed “The announced objective both before and after the event on the part of many activists there was not to protest Trump but to prevent him from speaking.”
I took that to mean that they were going to prevent him from speaking at all – not to just momentarily interrupt Trump and then be escorted out as Trump’s speech went on. But it’s clear from the passage you quoted that they didn’t intend to shut down the speech altogether:
One doesn’t have a right to “make other people listen”, but one is under no obligation to go into situations assuming that no one wants to hear what one has to say. I consider the way candidates respond to protesters to be very important information. Some politicians actually are happy to respond to some protesters. For example, I’ve seen Obama give some really good responses to Dreamers who were protesting at some of his speeches. Protesters were then either appeased by what he said, or escorted out and he went on with his speech. I don’t see any problem with that. The way Trump responds to protesters, with violent, dehumanizing rhetoric and, sometimes, violence on the part of his security staff, alarms me. The way Clinton and Sanders listened to Black Lives Matter protesters and responded to their concerns is part of the reason why I support them. If Trump supporters were to start trying to disrupt Democratic events, I would want to see Clinton and Sanders stand up to them, in a way that they did not with Black Lives Matter protesters, but respectfully, not in a bullying way, like Trump.
This is how I want my president, and my represntatives to respond to protesters when I think thier concerns are valid.
Yes, Obama really shines at moments like that. (Although OTOH, what if the protestor had continued shouting and refused to ever quiet down? Eventually, I assume, Obama would have acceded to having the protestor thrown out.)
But, I couldn’t make out what it was the protestor wanted Obama to do. I mean, he was asking for an executive order, but an executive order to do what?
From what I could make out, they were asking him to make an executive order to stop deporting illegal immigrants. I think Obama’s response was that federal law, as passed by congress, makes it mandatory that they be deported, and hence he doesn’t have the legal authority to order otherwise.
No, but one is [under an] obligation to respect the fact that people are there to listen to the advertised speaker. One is free to speak in ways that don’t disrupt the ability of the advertised speaker to communicate with the audience. Free speech doesn’t extend to taking actions to directly interfere with other’s ability to communicate.
Planning a protest to start at the exact time the designated speaker starts their speech is entirely about shutting down someone’s speech and not about making one’s own. There would be plenty of opportunity outside the time & place the main speaker was talking to express the same speech.
Part of entering that private space is accepting the implied responsibility to not take actions to disrupt the use of that space by the person who has rights to it. Where that use includes political speech, I would see maliciously disrupting that use as an incursion on that persons free speech.
Why? Where does this obligation come from?
In some venues a certain amount of heckling and protesting is considered the norm. (That was certainly the expectation when there were controversial speakers at both of the colleges I attended). If the venue owners consider that the norm, and the speaker knows this is the case before she speaks, then where is this obligation coming from?
Popehat make a good comment on this once, about “the doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker”:
As I understand it, for the most part what you’re calling a “free speech” right is actually a property right. A venue owner has the right to prevent people from making speeches (or protesting) inside of their venue. This can in some cases extend to public property, if (for example) the city government has rented me use of their park pavilion for an event. (You nod to this in your third paragraph – when you refer to “private space” – but before that, you seemed to be talking about free speech in general, not just in private spaces).
Let’s decouple the free speech rights from the property rights. Imagine a street preacher has set up a soapbox on a public sidewalk so she can yell things at passerby. She hasn’t reserved this sidewalk or anything; she just set up a soapbox on a corner (someplace where she isn’t blocking foot traffic) and is yelling. I think we both agree that she has a free speech right to do that.
But suppose a second person comes along and begins arguing back at her. She tries ignoring this person, but the person won’t shut up, so now the two people are just speaking over each other, making it impossible to really hear what either is saying. I think it’s fairly accepted that both of these people have a free speech right to speak on this public corner. But your argument would imply that the preacher on the soapbox has a right not only to speak, but to have no one talk back to her. In your formulation, free speech means that the second person has an obligation to shut up.
I disagree.
So a protester speaks at the start of someone’s speech, and gets kicked out. This happens reliably; protesters know perfectly well that if they don’t shut up they’re going to get kicked out. So how do you conclude that their act is about shutting down the speech? It seems to me that in 999 cases out of 1000, the protestors are expecting, not to shut down the speech, but to delay it a minute or two.
My argument is entirely about leveraging off of private property/space, although re-reading my comment I didn’t make that clear.
It doesn’t matter that it’s only brief, it’s still being done. If you sneak into someone’s home but then leave as soon as they notice you, you’ve still invaded their right to privacy even though you planned to leave immediately afterwards. If you touch someone inappropriately but then stop when they call you on it, you’ve still violated their right not to be assaulted. “It was only for a little while” seems like as immature defence for violating someone’s rights as saying “It’s just a prank, bro!”
Ampersand, do your feelings about the situation change if a venue is reserved for 60 minutes, and a group has inserted 60 hecklers, coordinated to act in a sequence, and prepared to take about a minute each? Do your feelings change if you also have a PR oriented group that will be very careful about not getting thrown out, but will support the hecklers to the limit allowed by the organizers rules? Would your feelings change if someone was selling such hecklers as a service, together with a cost analysis with the sense of “How much would it cost you to negate, with X% probability, Y% of the benefits your opponents could derive from his $Z investment into the event”?
Thanks for clarifying that you only mean private property/space.
Wait, before I respond: when you said….
… did you mean the word “speech” to mean “free speech rights,” or did you mean “speech” to mean “a formal address or discourse delivered to an audience”? I was assuming you meant the latter, but now I’m thinking you meant the former. But my response would be different, depending on which you meant.
Yes; if they do that, then their intent is to stop the speech (meaning “a formal address or discourse delivered to an audience”) from occurring, which to me seems very different and much more objectionable.
I couldn’t say without knowing more about what specific actions are entailed by “will support the hecklers.”
Probably. But this seems like (afaik) an unrealistic example, and I honestly haven’t given it any thought. My knee-jerk response would be that this sort of service would convert a form of speech which is valuable to a great extent because it’s a form of speech available to people without money, into a form of speech for people with money, which I’d consider a change for the worse.
To clarify:
Wait a sec, Desipis. Didn’t you just agree with me that the right really at issue here is property rights, not free speech rights? No one has a free speech right not to be interrupted.
If so, then shouldn’t it be more like this:
But this seems like (afaik) an unrealistic example, and I honestly haven’t given it any thought.
Well, I wish I had your faith in humanity. Services like this were available to employers in the United States at the height of your socialist upheavals in the 30s, were available in Bulgaria in the 90s, and are available now, as a simple search showed, for deployment in most South American countries. Some are even run by governments – both Putin and the CIA deny it, but it is easy to get the name of the ‘companies’ that either one is supposed to employ. There are books written by people who have run them in the last few years, and there are people who are in jail for doing it.
Not being in that business, I do not know how to get someone for deployment in the States. But when it comes to astro-turfing on the Internet, or for positive crowds, I know exactly how to get them (still not in the business, but I have helped people launch a product with the help of established forum identities) I would be absolutely shocked to learn that no one has thought of providing the service in meat space. I would be less surprised to learn that no one has successfully done it in the US lately, but I would still be surprised. Of course, something like this should remain somewhat obscure to work well.
Ampersand,
Well, I mean, it’s both. When the police drag you off to jail for criticising the government, they haven’t just violated your rights to freedom of movement, they’ve also violated your rights to free speech (even though they haven’t gagged you and you can still yell what you want at the top of your voice). That reasoning applies even if they let you straight back out of jail. To me the important element is the fact that the violation of another right is motivated by the content of one’s speech.