@Hunt “It may be that SpongeBob and Seymour Butts were the primary signatories.”
I highly doubt it.
And if they did actually produce real signatures to counter that notion, there would be hell to pay that they were holding up these “kids” for public ridicule.
I don’t know if 50 students actually sincerely signed this “petition,” but based on the current climate and many of the statements made recently by students, either in print, online, or on social media, I would not be surprised in the least if there aren’t some students who honestly would like to put an end to “offensive speech” by repealing the First Amendment. How insidious this notion actually is amongst current students is another thing altogether, but I find the possibility that these kinds of students exist to be quite believable.
Has any student or student group, on any campus called for the repeal of the First Amendment? Has any student written an editorial in any student newspaper calling for this? They’ve certainly called for all sorts of absurd stuff, but I’ve never seen this anywhere. If it exists, I’d like to know about it. So count me as skeptical that a conservative with an axe to grind has uncovered a hitherto unknown antipathy for the First Amendment at Yale.
Like Hunt says, I would guess that somewhere around zero of those Yale students actually wants to have the First Amendment repealed. If you hang around enough Ivy grads (I was visiting with a few last night), you will see that overwhelmingly their minds process very quickly. It’s a generation raised with The Simpsons and South Park well exposed to satirical humor.
My HS Junior just wrote a piece about repealing the 14th Amendment so that people could enter into long-term employment contracts with survivor benefits. I hope Fox News (or HuffPo) does not find a copy and start saying it was a serious proposition, that some privileged white kid wants to re-legalize slavery, followed by a string of internet outrage.
Like the Yale students, he also would have signed that petition quickly, maybe even with “Jonathan Swift” because he can appreciate social satire. I like to think we live in a society where our best and brightest are quick-witted and, so far, the evidence (Post #122) seems to be supporting that.
53 Democrat Senators sought legislation to modify the First Amendment when it came to election campaigns. What Yale students are doing doesn’t surprise me in the least – all foreshadowed in the Citizens United hoopla that liberals (who control the billion-dollar press and massive Union political war chests) feel is “unfair” speech because it actually allows a level playing field with private donations.
Magnetron is living my life. For about a decade my sons and their friends were convinced they were comedians, and now in their late 20s, early 30s, two or three of the friends are doing stand-up. For a while, all of them were writing, but I am not sure where all that stands at this point in time. When I had a houseful of these kids, I would walk through a room, listen in horror, and beg them to stop. They would attempt to deconstruct it all for me and I would assure them that most people were not going to get it… at all.
If this had happened to them, they would have played along, then come home and stayed in character and that would have been the theme of the entire school break. Now they have pretty much outgrown it. Thank goodness. My kids were some of the very first on facebook. I remember them assuring me it wasn’t something anyone but their classmates would ever be able to access. The internet wasn’t quite so crazy. I thank my lucky stars, and am almost through holding my breath.
^^I find it interesting that the Yale prof and students mentioned in the second article took the signatures as serious errors of judgment, and not as kids humoring a satirist. Just sayin’.
@alh my sister is the same way. She thinks she is an actress and a comedian (ok, admittedly she’s pretty good at both) and would play along with this in a heartbeat. It would be a game to her. I’ve seen her do it with the screaming preachers on the corner and the people with ridiculous petitions (like this).
Do I necessarily think that’s what’s going on here? Nah. Do I think that 50 Yale students actually wanted to repeal the first amendment? No.
Sure, all those Yale students were budding comedians who were just playing along. How the might have fallen, and how parents refuse to admit it.
I wrote in my first post I guess we all see what we want to see. We react based on our own experiences. I would never have described Yale students as “mighty” but maybe that was one of the points of the video. Since I’m pretty dense, and live in a bubble, I hadn’t considered that aspect and it’s helpful, TheGFG. Thank you.
eta: just to be clear I have no kids at Yale or any other college. My kids are long done with college.
Regardless of the glasses we’re wearing, 50 signatures are 50 signatures. Our Constitution is precious. It is not a joking matter, so even if all 50 students signed the petition to be “funny,” that should be a matter that produces grave concern in all of us. Yes, I think the general public is all too eager to see Ivy Leaguers cut down to size, and that was likely one reason Horowitz did the experiment at Yale. However, to be fair, Yale brought this additional spotlight on themselves because of recent circus surrounding the Halloween costume protests.
As for the concept of the mighty falling, well, hubris does tend to get punished. There is pride on both sides of the aisle, but the version that afflicts the SJWs is that they are oh so much more compassionate and enlightened than the rest of us. They are certain they care much more about the marginalized members of society than others do. Therefore, the only reason they’d go along with a repeal of the very amendment that protects minority expression is because they consider themselves a perfectly trustworthy intellectual and moral elite. As such, they have full confidence in their own intelligence and ability to create through their restriction of speech, a more positive social discourse than what evolves naturally as a product of freedom. So great is their pride, that they placed their “wisdom” of the moment above the long, arduous deliberations of the framers of the Constitution–a true intellectual elite who fortuitously assembled at the same time and place in history. IMO, that is the hubris of Yale students that just got exposed.
Who in the world thinks it is unknown?
At Princeton, the protesters wanted mandatory training on the “true” meaning of free speech. The student government defunded the student newspaper at Wesleyan after the paper ran an editorial from a student veteran who argued that the Black Lives Matter movement was not all that and a bag of donuts. We all saw the Yale video, and the Mizzou video. You can not ignore the annual outpouring or rage and excrement hurled at conservative speakers who give talks on campuses, not to mention the legions who are dis-invited every year.
What do you think all that is?
Here is an article quoting another guy who thinks there is an anti free speech flavor on at least some campuses.
Yale, Princeton, and Wesleyan are private institutions.
I do agree that some students are taking positions that I think are contrary to the freedom of speech that I think should exist at even private colleges. To go from that to believing that there are 10, much less 50, students at Yale who are stupid enough to actually support repealing the First Amendment is contrary to my personal experience of Yale students.
Come on. I know that Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan are private institutions, and we both know that students at all three schools are at least passingly familiar with state action. And I think we both agree that the number of students who believe in restricting free speech is relatively small. I don’t know the Yale campus terribly well, but it would not shock me if the location of the video was near an area where a lot of SJW types were expected to be.
But there are what, 12,000 students at Yale? You don’t think you can find 50 who favor restrictions on speech? I bet I could have found a dozen just in the Sillman quad watching the master get screamed at by the kid. I bet you could have too.
I believe that you could find more than 50 who would favor restrictions on speech on campus (unfortunately). I don’t believe, however, that you could find 50 who would actually support repeal of the First Amendment.
Ah. There’s the rub.
So would you find this situation as fantastical as you seem to if the person seeking signatures was asking people to sign something that would replace the first amendment with a similar provision that allowed for the restricting of some types of speech? That at least is how I assume it plays out.
Well, since I often find myself as a (nearly) lone voice defending free speech rights when somebody is saying something really awful, I think that many people would favor limitations on the First Amendment. That’s not the same as repealing it, which is supposedly what Horowitz was proposing.
If, for example, he had a petition suggesting that the First Amendment be amended to allow punishment of “hate speech,” I think a lot of people would sign it. Indeed, a lot of people seem to think that hate speech isn’t protected speech now.
I agree with that. And while I am all for giving Yale students the benefit of the doubt about how the government operates, making a distinction between “repeal and replace” and “amend” may be a lawyer’s quibble lost on the uninitiated.
Speaking of lawyer’s quibbles, I think that the 1st amendment would actually have to be repealed and replaced rather than amended (much like the repeal of prohibition). Can’t exactly say this has ever come up in my practice though 
Effectively the 1st amendment for free speech has to be repealed to outlaw something like hate speech which a majority of millennials according to polling support, so it’s not farfetched to find 50 very radical leftists on the Yale Campus who’d sympathize with or openly support the idea.