Make No Law, Episode One: Fighting Words

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Jesse, it may seem radical, but the "salute the flag or get out" -- and, just a little further along, "salute the flag or maybe we'll kill you, is very real and very American and very familiar. /1

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Know it's standard conservative bullshit and a big chunk of his base likely agrees, but it's important to step back into reality for a moment and reflect on how radical and insane a position it is to say that people who protest the flag "Maybe ... shouldn't be in the country."

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/2 In the first episode of Make No Law, I talked about how refusal to salute the flag sparked a huge, nationwide, brutal, and now mostly forgotten wave of bigotry and violence against Jehovas Witnesses in the 1930s and 1940s.

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/3 To a sense of how bad it was -- something, again, I think we've mostly collectively forgotten -- check out this 1941 ACLU pamphlet collecting the stories of Americans who were persecuted -- by both citizens and government -- for being Witnesses

https://www.popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ACLU-pamphlet.pdf …

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/4 This notion -- that if you don't joint our nationalist rituals, you'd better shut up, you'd better get out, and maybe -- just maybe -- we're going to kill you, is as American as baseball and apple pie.

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Make No Law Episode One: Fighting Words
JANUARY 31, 2018 BY KEN WHITE

In Episode One, with the launch of the Make No Law podcast, I look at "fighting words" the exception to the First Amendment established in the 1942 case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. What got Walter Chaplinsky so riled up, and why were the cops so eager to prosecute him for an inconsequential outburst? Listen to find out.