* The First Amendment protections for a free press apply only to “journalists”, not to everyone.

* The government gets to decide who is a journalist and who isn’t.

Taken together, these two things would wipe out freedom of speech, since the government can take away your freedom of speech just by asserting you’re not a journalist.

There’s another idea they’re sneaking in there: the idea that being a “political actor” disqualifies you from First Amendment protection. In other words, they’re saying that the First Amendment doesn’t protect political speech (a complete inversion, since protecting political speech was the primary purpose of that amendment’s free speech protections).

Villify:

1.
to speak ill of; defame; slander.
2.
Obsolete . to make vile.

Speaking the truth about his membership in a horribly violent evil group of men – which requires from all its membership that they regularly batter others at a minimum – is not vilification.

“Let’s just round up the Pagans and gas them down!”

While unconstitutional, it would certainly be a boon to civil society.

Calling Hale – a full patch Pagan – “an ex-marine” is bullshit Radley. Then current membership in an ultra violent gang is probably more relevant to the shooting than his former military service isn’t it?

Being a Pagan is a 24/7 commitment to crime and violence.

And there you have it! See how easy it is for humans to vilify other humans? Let’s just round up the Pagans and gas them down!

The guy was unarmed, sitting on a porch. The police had no warrant for his arrest. Further, the guy HAD NO ARREST RECORD.

The police, on the other hand, were all fired up. state police Lt. Patrick Ogden told Browne prior to the killing that guns and drugs were recovered two days earlier during a search warrant at the home where Hale was killed, that Hale was a member of the motorcycle club and that “Mr. Hale had been known to carry firearms.” Hale had a permit from Virginia to carry concealed weapons.

So even if he WAS armed, (Which he was not) it would have been perfectly legal for him to be.

See how this works? The Police convince themselves that this guy is the sum of all evil, then ride out LYNCH MOB style and confront him. Tasers fly, guns are drawn, shots are fired. That’s good work, boys!

But it’s all legal because they’re the boys in blue! The protectors of little children and Unicorns.

From Radley’s description I thought he was sitting in a rocking chair with a harmonica and a chaw of tabaccy.

Being a Pagan is a 24/7 commitment to crime and violence.

Joe Biden wasn’t the brightest bulb even before his brain aneurism…..

The “offense” that got him in trouble: he wrote a song called “Kill Me a Cop.”

http://www.wtsp.com/news/mostpop/story.aspx?storyid=110679&provider=top

That can happen? Why don’t I ever see that on the COPS TV show? I was told no one ever gets away from the superhero police.

With what you’ve already documented about the growing militarization of the police, and wrong-door and often just plain wrongful SWAT raids, the book would practically write itself.

Suggested working title: “Survived the Sunni Triangle 2X but K.I.A. by Wilmington PD”.

P.S. Wilmington PD Lt. Brown was subsequently promoted to Captain.

Words cannot express the outrage……

Maybe you can even work in a thread about how pro-LEO Delaware’s own VP Joe Biden has been his entire career.

That’s an excellent analogy, comparing the “legislating by equivocation” of the First Amendment to what people say about the Second Amendment. To wit, the word “militia” meant something very different from what many would have you believe today: it meant every able-bodied man able to carry arms in defense of his country. It was something more akin to today’s volunteer fire departments than to the National Guard.

Like Pablo said, I’m vehemently against police misconduct, but they do carry guns for a reason, and that reason is that sometimes people do escalate force against them, and it’s not just bank robbers. Even Radley has made the distinction with SWAT teams: There’s a time and place when using a gun defensively is a justifiable action. The problem is that the times are becoming all the time and places are becoming everywhere for some officers, and even worse, there are times where the officers are initiating force, like the Baltimore City cop who shot the other guy at the bar for slapping a woman’s butt, or the guy in that story a while back about the cop who flew off the handle and just executed the guy who was trying to get past him out of his house (sorry, I don’t remember more details about it).

But maybe the point that needs to come through to PD’s is that if they call everything justified, even when it’s plainly not, then people aren’t going to believe them when it actually IS justified.

In our democracy, the pressure to change their minds is only going to be delivered when we pressure our fellow citizens to change their minds. And as long we have the cop-fellators to excuse infringements of liberty, theft of property, and out-and-out murder, there are minimal ways to win this fight.