When Free Speech is Indecent Exposure

Get your dick out of all of our faces, Robert.    Could someone please call the police on him? [i] [ii] [iii] [iv] [v] [vi]

“Is Charles Carreon a pervert? Does he hang around middle-school playgrounds selling heroin to children? No one has ever made any such accusation against him. Nor, as far as I know, is there any reason to believe that Charles Carreon is a serial killer with a basement dungeon and the bones of prostitutes buried in his backyard. No, he’s just a douchebag. And a big-shot lawyer …

“Fuck him. He’s vermin. He’s not forgivable. Let any good he has ever done be wiped out. Let the name ‘Charles Carreon’ be synonymous with petulant, amoral censorious douchebaggery.” — Kenneth Popehat White 

The key to understanding this is Charles Carreon’s sense of entitlement. He is a big-shot lawyer and therefore entitled to a good reputation, so if people say mean things about him on the Internet, Charles Carreon believes he has been wrongly deprived of something that is rightfully his. He whined to NBC News after The Oatmeal mocked him: ‘I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails,’ he says. ‘I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat — I’ve never really seen it before,’ Carreon explains. ‘I don’t like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant.’

Is Charles Carreon’s mother a ‘sexual deviant’? I’d never heard that before, but now that you mention it — and hey, Charles, you invited me to your reign-of-terror pity party, remember? — your mother being a sexual deviant might explain a lot of things. Ken White offers apologies for his reign of terror, but who’s going to apologize for all those hookers who have disappeared from the streets of Tucson in recent years, huh? And what about the epidemic of heroin addiction among Arizona middle schoolers? No one has accused Charles Carreon of dealing heroin or carving up kidnapped prostitutes in his basement torture dungeon — he’s never even been suspected of such things — and if anybody has a hunch that the hard drive on Charles Carreon’s laptop is crammed full of illegal pornography, they’ve never mentioned this to me. As for the alleged sexual deviancy of Charles Carreon’s mother, I’ve double-checked that NBC article, and he didn’t deny it, did he? We know of no actual evidence for any such allegations, and he probably doesn’t have a torture dungeon in his basement, although you never know about such things. Most of Ariel Castro’s neighbors in Cleveland thought he was just a law-abiding citizen and at least Ariel Castro never threatened to sue a blogger for $20,000.” — Robert Stacy McCain [vii]

Rapeutation.com

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Notes:

i. Excerpt from “A Rape in Cyberspace,” by Julian Dibbell:

[T]he Bungle Affair raises questions that — here on the brink of a future in which human existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind — demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to shut our ears for the time being to techno-utopian ecstasies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll — and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.

***

The facts begin (as they often do) with a time and a place. The time was a Monday night in March, and the place, as I’ve said, was the living room — which, due largely to the centrality of its location and to a certain warmth of decor, is so invariably packed with chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party. So strong, indeed, is the sense of convivial common ground invested in the living room that a cruel mind could hardly imagine a better place in which to stage a violation of LambdaMOO’s communal spirit. And there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world — he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH! But whether cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene is not among the established facts of the case. It is a fact only that he did choose the living room.

The remaining facts tell us a bit more about the inner world of Mr. Bungle, though only perhaps that it wasn’t a very cozy place. They tell us that he commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the room’s occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this victim was exu, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses. That exu heaped vicious imprecations on him all the while and that he was soon ejected bodily from the room. That he hid himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo doll worked just as well at a distance as in proximity. That he turned his attentions now to Moondreamer, a rather pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other individuals present in the room, among them exu, Kropotkin (the well-known radical), and Snugberry (the squirrel). That his actions grew progressively violent. That he made exu eat his/her own pubic hair. That he caused Moondreamer to violate herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery. That his distant laughter echoed evilly in the living room with every successive outrage. That he could not be stopped until at last someone summoned Iggy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that didn’t kill but enveloped its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo doll’s powers. That Iggy fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the evil, distant laughter.

***

Where before I’d found it hard to take virtual rape seriously, I now was finding it difficult to remember how I could ever not have taken it seriously. I was proud to have arrived at this perspective — it felt like an exotic sort of achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing experience of the MOO a richer one.

But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I looked at the rest of the world. Sometimes, for instance, it grew difficult for me to understand why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes against person or property. Since rape can occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind — more intimately and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably located on the same conceptual continuum. I did not, however, conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion by the First Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real that underlies the very notion of freedom of speech.

Let me assure you, though, that I did not at the time adopt these thoughts as full-fledged arguments, nor am I now presenting them as such. I offer them, rather, as a picture of the sort of mind-set that my initial encounters with a virtual world inspired in me. I offer them also, therefore, as a kind of prophecy. For whatever else these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

And it was precisely this logic, I was beginning to understand, that provided whatever real magic LambdaMOO had to offer — not the fictive trappings of voodoo and shapeshifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and act that’s inevitable in any computer-mediated world, be it Lambda or the increasingly wired world at large. This was dangerous magic, to be sure, a potential threat — if misconstrued or misapplied — to our always precarious freedoms of expression, and as someone who lives by his words I dared not take the threat lightly. And yet, on the other hand, I could no longer convince myself that our wishful insulation of language from the realm of action had ever been anything but a valuable kludge, a philosophically imperfect stopgap against oppression that would just have to do till something truer and more elegant came along.

ii. Excerpt from “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, The Sociopaths of the Virtual World,” by Julian Dibbell:

It was mid-2004, and Goons were already an organized presence in online games, making a name for themselves as formidable players as well as flamboyantly creative griefers. The Goon Squad guilds in games like Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars: Galaxies had been active for several years. In World of Warcraft, the legendary Goons of the Mal’ganis server had figured out a way to slay the revered nonplayer character that rules their in-game faction — an achievement tantamount to killing your own team mascot.

But Second Life represented a new frontier in troublemaking potential. It was serious business run amok. Here was an entire population of players that insisted Second Life was not a game — and a developer that encouraged them to believe it, facilitating the exchange of in-game Linden dollars for real money and inviting corporations to market virtual versions of their actual products.

And better still, here was a game that had somehow become the Internet’s top destination for a specimen of online weirdo the Goons had long ago adopted as their favorite target: the Furries, with their dedication to role-playing the lives — and sex lives — of cuddly anthropomorphic woodland creatures.

Thus began the Second Life Goon tradition of jaw-droppingly offensive theme lands. This has included the re-creation of the burning Twin Towers (tiny falling bodies included) and a truly icky murdered-hooker crime scene (in which a hermaphrodite Furry prostitute lay naked, violated, and disemboweled on a four-poster bed, while an assortment of coded-in options gave the visitor chances for further violation). But the first and perhaps most expertly engineered of these provocations was Tacowood — a parody of the Furry region known as Luskwood. In Tacowood, rainbow-dappled woodlands have been overrun by the bulldozers and chain saws of a genocidal “defurrestation” campaign and populated with the corpses of formerly adorable cartoon animal folk now variously beheaded, mutilated, and nailed to crosses.

As the media hype around Second Life grew, the Goons began to aim at bigger targets. When a virtual campaign headquarters for presidential candidate John Edwards was erected, a parody site and scatological vandalism followed. When SL real estate magnate Anshe Chung announced she had accumulated more than $1 million in virtual assets and got her avatar’s picture splashed across the cover of BusinessWeek, the stage was set for a Second Life goondom’s spotlight moment: the interruption of a CNET interview with Chung by a procession of floating phalluses that danced out of thin air and across the stage.

People laughed at those attacks, but for Prokofy Neva, another well-known Second Life real estate entrepreneur, no amount of humor or creativity can excuse what she sees as “terrorism.” Prokofy (Catherine Fitzpatrick in real life, a Manhattan resident, mother of two, and Russian translator and human-rights worker by trade) earns a modest but bankable income renting out her Second Life properties, and griefing attacks aimed at her, she says, have rattled some tenants enough to make them cancel their leases. Which is why her response to those who defend her griefers as anything but glorified criminals is blunt: “Fuck, this is a denial-of-service attack … it’s anti-civilization … it’s wrong … it costs me hundreds of US dollars.”

Of course, this attitude delights the terrorists in question, and they’ve made Prokofy a favorite target. The 51-year-old Fitzpatrick’s avatar is male, but Goons got ahold of a photo of her, and great sport has been made of it ever since. One build featured a giant Easter Island head of Fitzpatrick spitting out screenshots of her blog. Another time, Prokofy teleported into one of her rental areas and had the “very creepy” experience of seeing her own face looking straight down from a giant airborne image overhead.

Still, even the fiercest of Prokofy’s antagonists recognize her central point: Once real money is at stake, “serious business” starts to look a lot like, well, serious business, and messing with it starts to take on buzz-killing legal implications. Pressed as to the legality of their griefing, PNs are quick to cite the distinction made in Second Life’s own terms of service between real money and the “fictional currency” that circulates in-game. As ^ban^ puts it, “This is our razor-thin disclaimer which protects us in real-life” from what /b/tards refer to as “a ride in the FBI party van.”

iii. Excerpt from “Unwilling Avatars: Idealism and Discrimination in Cyberspace,” by Mary Ann Franks:

Few would deny that cyberspace has a dark side. … On one side are voices calling for increased regulation of the Internet: user codes of conduct, [FN2] the reform of Section 230 of the 1996 *225 Communications Decency Act (CDA § 230), [FN3] and stricter laws regarding online defamation, threats, and invasions of privacy. [FN4] On the other side are those who argue that the benefits offered by the free and unregulated exchange of ideas that characterizes the medium of cyberspace far outweigh the harms facilitated by the Internet. [FN5]

The latter view is based on what this Article calls cyberspace idealism — the view of cyberspace as a utopian realm of the mind where all can participate equally, free from social, historical, and physical restraints. Though the high-flown rhetoric of early cyberspace idealists [FN6] may now seem somewhat dated, the liberationist vision at its core maintains its hold on our (increasingly online) collective imagination. This vision is a quasi-Cartesian one: a vision of human identity as fundamentally divided between mind and matter, where matter is limiting and temporal and, as such, in many ways inferior to the mind. For those who hold this vision, cyberspace presents the opportunity to escape physical limitations, both geographic and bodily.

The concept of the avatar, broadly conceived, is central to cyberspace idealism. The term is generally used to refer to users’ virtual self-representation — from sophisticated graphics to simple pseudonyms — in computer games, virtual reality systems and chat rooms. As used in this Article, an avatar also stands *226 more generally for the unique mode of being that cyberspace allows. The very structure of cyberspace facilitates a wall between a person’s “real” identity and their virtual one. The term “avatar” is Sanskrit for “incarnation,” and the religious resonance is telling. Cyberspace provides, according to this view, a powerful counter to the real world. In real life, individuals are constrained by physical limitations, with all the prejudice and division this engenders. In cyberspace, the only limitation is an individual’s imagination and creativity.

Cyberspace idealism often produces conflicting accounts of the “realness” of cyberspace. On the one hand, cyberspace is often regarded as more real than real life — that is, the ability to control the terms of representation makes cyberspace existence more genuine. On the other hand, harms committed in cyberspace are often dismissed as “not really real,” as they are by their nature not physical, bodily harms. The way this tension plays out in terms of the law’s recommended role in cyberspace can yield schizophrenic results: freedom of speech, for example, in cyberspace is “really real” and must be vigorously protected; harassment in cyberspace is not “really real” and thus should not be taken very seriously.

This is not to say that cyberspace idealists do not find any cyberspace practices harmful. Many idealists do not object to tort and criminal remedies for defamation or stalking that occurs in cyberspace. The idealist position does, however, treat such harms as aberrations, as occasional malfunctions in an otherwise smoothly operating system. This Article argues that the idealist view sets up a false picture of cyberspace that preempts the proper evaluation of the harms of cyberspace harassment. Specifically, the idealist view fails to recognize — or at least to take seriously — how the same features of cyberspace that amplify the possibilities of individual liberty also amplify the potential for discrimination. Cyberspace idealism drastically downplays the Internet’s power to activate discriminatory stereotypes and social scripts.

This Article focuses on the particular discriminatory phenomenon of the unwilling avatar. In stark contrast to the way users exert control over their online identities, the creation of unwilling avatars involves invoking individuals’ real bodies for *227 the purposes of threatening, defaming, or sexualizing them without consent. Sometimes the creation of unwilling avatars takes a very literal form: for example, hacking into the account of a gamer and using her avatar as though it were your own, or creating a false profile of a real person on a social networking site. Other examples of unwilling avatars are more figurative. For example, women have been targeted for “revenge porn,” a practice where ex-boyfriends and husbands post to the web sexually explicit photographs and videos of them without their consent. Another example is the case of Kathy Sierra, who was attacked by anonymous bloggers and posters with manipulated photographs and threats of death and sexual violence. Female law school students also become unwilling avatars when they are targeted by graphic and violent sexual threads at message boards such as AutoAdmit.com. [FN7] In most cases of cyberspace harassment, the perpetrators use pseudonyms [FN8] while identifying their targets not only by name but often also with private information such as home addresses and social security numbers. This informational asymmetry further aggravates the inequality resulting from cyberspace harassment.

The unwilling avatars phenomenon affects the way that many different groups interact with cyberspace, among them racial and sexual minorities. This Article focuses specifically on the way this phenomenon affects women, not because the impact on other affected groups is less important or interesting, but because the gendered dimension of harassment and abusive behavior online is worthy of independent study. [FN9] Cyber harassment affects women disproportionately, both in terms of frequency and in terms of impact. Moreover, there is a particularly poignant irony in the nonconsensual sexualized embodiment of women in cyberspace. As will be discussed in *228 more detail below, cyberspace can present particularly compelling opportunities for women because they feel the constraints of physical vulnerability, especially sexual vulnerability, more acutely than men. In that case, the extent to which this physical vulnerability is re-imposed upon them–principally by men–in cyberspace is truly disheartening. If cyberspace harassment makes many women feel less safe online than they do in real life, and more exposed and vulnerable to sexual aggression both on and offline, this undermines the idealistic promise of cyberspace in a significant way. The volume and viciousness of cyber-attacks — especially sexualized attacks — on women by men suggests that cyberspace cannot be thought of as a place where, on balance, women and men can participate equally. Rather, it is a place where existing gender inequalities are amplified and entrenched.

This Article is concerned with gender discrimination as an interference with liberty and equality. It advocates for an expansive notion of liberty, one that includes the freedom to think and act and develop one’s life as one wishes, without political or social restraints, except where that liberty would harm others. [FN10] Though John Stuart Mill is invoked frequently in debates concerning the relationship between law and liberty, his insight that social restraints on liberty are often more pernicious and difficult to challenge than political ones is often forgotten. This insight is key to any complete analysis of discrimination’s effects on liberty. Restraints on liberty can manifest in the form of formal legal restrictions, as they did in laws permitting slavery, but they can also manifest as social restrictions, as they do in cross-burnings and racist propaganda. An African-American man who could not enter a restaurant that had a “whites only” sign in the window experienced a once-legally permissible infringement on his liberty; an African-American man who avoids the same restaurant because of the racist jeers and taunts of other customers experiences a social infringement on his liberty. This is not to collapse the two experiences into one — for there are important differences between them — but merely to underscore the point that infringements on liberty can occur both through legal-political means and social means.

*229 A world in which members of certain groups avoid places, professions, opportunities, and experiences because they fear de facto, rather than de jure, discrimination — based not on their ideas but on their bodies (e.g. because they are women, or gay, or black) — is not a world that maximizes liberty. [FN11] The virtual world has not only reproduced the various forms of discrimination that exist in the physical world, but has allowed them to flourish in ways that would not be possible in the physical world. Again, one could use any number of examples, racism [FN12] and homophobia among them, to illustrate this principle, but this Article deals specifically with sexism in cyberspace. Women shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, refrain from engaging in online political commentary, and choose not to maintain potentially lucrative or personally rewarding online presences due to cyberspace harassment. [FN13] The harms they experience also spill over into their offline lives: women have dropped out of school, changed jobs, moved cities, gone into hiding, experienced mental breakdowns, and, in extreme cases, committed suicide due to cyberspace harassment. [FN14] The harassment that they experience is promulgated by users who overwhelmingly self-identify as male, though most remain anonymous beyond that, and is overwhelmingly characterized by obscene, sexually violent, sexist language and behavior.

When cyberspace idealists argue against increased legal regulation because of its implications for liberty, they ignore the fact that cyberspace harassment has already undermined and compromised liberty. Sometimes this ignorance is genuine; sometimes it is thoroughly disingenuous, in that many *230 cyberspace idealists are fully aware that the liberty they desperately wish to defend is liberty only for others like them. [FN15] In either case, it is necessary to explode the myth of cyberspace as a state of liberty that deserves wide deference and instead view it for what it is: a state of license in which certain groups with power oppress, threaten and harass groups with less power. As Locke described it in Two Treatises on Government, a state of license is one in which some groups have taken liberty at the expense of others. [FN16] Such a state is no longer “natural,” according to Locke, and as such requires intervention of the law. [FN17] Cyberspace has become a state of license in which women as a group are afforded less liberty than men as a group and thus must be regulated through laws that distribute liberty more equally. If cyberspace is not to be merely a state of license, we must turn our attention to finding the best possible legal responses to harassment.

***

II. UNWILLING AVATARS: THE FALL

Cyberspace idealism unsurprisingly appeals to individuals who feel their life experiences have been restricted by their physical identity: by their social status, their age, their gender, or their physical appearance. Going online allows these individuals to experience a certain kind of positive disembodiment. One’s “real” race, gender, age, and social status need never be disclosed in cyberspace, and so negative stereotypes that may *238 attach to any of those attributes can be avoided in a way not possible in real life. Particularly for historically marginalized groups, the power to re-create oneself and control the public representation of one’s identity through avatars can be liberating.

What happens, then, when individuals are not in control of their online embodiment? What if one is embodied against one’s will, in places that one never chose to enter, in ways one never consented to be shown, in graphic and vicious detail for all the world to see and which may be impossible to erase? We would surely describe that experience as a profound loss of liberty, the very antithesis of the freeing process of avatar creation. A world populated by an increasing number of unwilling avatars, reduced to their physical characteristics, caricaturized, ventriloquized and under attack, looks much more like hell than paradise.

A. Bringing in the Women

Christina McCormack [FN43] had been dating fellow University of Georgia student Richard Baker only a short while before things got serious. According to Baker, they moved in together, got a dog, and exchanged promise rings. [FN44] They broke up in January 2007. When a male friend stayed at McCormack’s place for a few days, Baker became enraged. He hacked into McCormack’s MySpace account and sent messages to McCormack’s friend in her name. These messages included claims that McCormack had certain medical conditions and that she was still in love with Baker. [FN45] Baker installed spyware on McCormack’s computer so that he could track her Internet use and gain access to her IDs and passwords. Finally, he uploaded naked pictures of McCormack (which he had obtained without consent) on his Facebook page. In May 2008, Baker was charged with 32 felonies. News reports as of this writing indicate *239 that he is currently free on bond, awaiting trial. [FN46]

Sayani Chakraborty had never been a member of Orkut, a social networking site similar to Facebook and MySpace, but she discovered that someone had created a profile of her on the site and used it to send offensive messages to her family and friends. [FN47] Someone created a similar profile for a schoolgirl in Delhi, complete with obscene photographs and the girl’s home address and telephone number. [FN48] The profile came to light after her family began receiving calls asking to speak with the girl and referencing the Orkut profile. Eventually, two men came to her home claiming that the girl had invited them over for sex. [FN49]

An Oklahoma State University sophomore named James Cory Lanier videotaped himself and his 19-year-old girlfriend having sex. [FN50] After the woman broke up with him, Lanier threatened her with physical violence and promised to “ruin her life.” [FN51] He threatened to upload the videos of the two having sex to the Internet unless she agreed to continue having sex with him. His ex-girlfriend reported him to the police, and Lanier was charged with felony blackmail. That charge was eventually dismissed, and Lanier pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. [FN52]

*240 The owners and operators [FN53] of the message board AutoAdmit.com, which they characterized as a forum where individuals could share information about law firms, clerkships, and succeeding in law school, claimed that it was by “respect[ing] the merits of the free, uninhibited exchange of ideas” that the site became the most successful and informative law school discussion board on the Internet. [FN54] In March 2005, Brian Leiter highlighted the pervasive racism and sexism on AutoAdmit [FN55] on his blog, Leiter Reports. The message board achieved increased notoriety in April 2007 after The Washington Post ran an article about sexist, obscene and racist posts on the site, focusing on the particularly vicious attacks on female law school students. [FN56] These posts included links to pictures of many of these students, with entire message threads devoted to “ranking” the women’s bodies, discussing their alleged sexual activities and expressing what users would like to do with them sexually in graphic and often violent detail. [FN57] The women in question were frequently targeted by name, while their attackers posted under pseudonyms. Several of the women targeted knew nothing about the site prior to the Post article, and only found out about it when the threads came up on Google searches or when friends alerted them. [FN58] Some of the women attacked on the site contacted the site’s administrators requesting that the abusive posts be removed, only to be told that no post would be *241 “censored.” [FN59] In some cases, the administrators posted the women’s complaints on the site, leading to further derogatory name calling and threats to punish them with rape, stalking, or other abuse. [FN60] In some of these cases, users posted the women’s home addresses and phone numbers. [FN61]

Kathy Sierra is a programming instructor and a game developer who runs a blog called Creating Passionate Users. This blog is centered on discussions about “designing software that makes people happy.” [FN62] At about the same time as the AutoAdmit controversy broke, Sierra began receiving death threats in the comments section of her blog. [FN63] Someone wrote about slitting her throat and ejaculating; another posted her photo alongside an image of a noose with a caption: “The only thing Kathy has to offer is that noose in her neck size.” [FN64] On an external site, a user posted a manipulated photo that appeared to show Sierra with underwear across her face, struggling to breathe. The picture was captioned: “I dream of Kathy Sierra … head first.” [FN65] Sierra canceled several speaking engagements and suspended her blog in the wake of the threatening posts. [FN66]

Chelsea Gorman was a freshman at Vanderbilt University when she was raped on her way to campus one evening. Gorman left school for that semester, struggling with panic attacks and self-blame. When she returned to school in the fall of 2007 she had only told her family and a few friends about the rape. In *242 March 2008, a friend at another college called to tell her that someone had posted about her rape on a gossip site called JuicyCampus.com. On the Vanderbilt University page of the site, there was a post titled “Chelsea Gorman deserved it.” The post not only announced the rape, but went on to read: “what could she expect walking around there alone. Everyone thinks she’s so sweet but she got what she deserved. wish i had been the homeless guy that f ***** her.” [FN67] The post became the talk of Vanderbilt’s campus — both the virtual one on JuicyCampus and the real one Gorman had to face every day. [FN68]

Nicole Catsouras was eighteen years old when she died in a horrific car accident. On October 31, 2006, she and her father had an argument, and he confiscated the car keys as punishment. Later that day, Nicole snuck out, taking the car keys with her. Fifteen minutes later, she crashed into a freeway tollbooth at a speed of over 100 miles per hour. The collision mangled her body, nearly decapitating her. The police photographs of the accident were leaked and published online. The gruesome images began to appear in chat rooms and fetish websites where users would discuss, among other things, how Nicole “deserved” what happened. A MySpace user posted the pictures along with sexualized commentary about Nicole; another created a fake profile of Nicole that included a close-up of her remains. [FN69] Someone posted the Catsouras’ home address and encouraged others to harass the family. Nicole’s parents received numerous pseudonymous emails and text messages that included the photos, along with vicious captions. They attempted to convince web site owners to take down the pictures, but met with little success: “We’ve asked them to please take down the pictures, and they’ve said, ‘No, I don’t have to because I’ve got my First *243 Amendment rights’,” says Nicole’s mother, Lesli Catsouras. [FN70] Nicole’s family uploaded a memorial video of Nicole on YouTube, hoping that it would help show that they “are a family with real hearts, and it hurts what people are doing.” [FN71] A number of vicious and sexist pseudonymous comments were posted on YouTube in response, including the following: “she got what she deserved … you wanted equality, fine, fuck that stupid cunt … hahahaha, she got what she deserved ….” [FN72]

iv. Excerpt from “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” by Eugene Volokh:

 2.  Shift of Control to Speakers: The Decline of Private Speech Regulations

      While American government agencies generally don’t regulate speech, private parties do.  Publishers sometimes refuse to publish material they disagree with.  Private groups sometimes pressure publishers to drop certain material.  And even the viewpoint-neutral reluctance of publishers to accept work that appeals to too few consumers has the effect of shutting out political fringe groups on all sides of the spectrum.

      The shift of control from publishers to speakers will greatly weaken these private speech regulations.  When speech comes straight from the speaker to the listener, there’s no one in between to regulate the speech, and no one for various groups to pressure if they think the speech is reprehensible.  Threats of boycotts may work against diversified companies, which sell information to many markets; someone can tell, say, Time Warner Records “If you carry Ice-T’s {Cop Killer,} I won’t buy other Time Warner material.”  But telling Ice-T “If you keep singing {Cop Killer,} I won’t buy your other material” probably won’t work — Ice-T knows that people who say this probably wouldn’t buy his music anyway.

    There’s no consensus today about whether such private regulations are proper.  Some consider them almost as dangerous as government censorship; others argue that private pressure on speakers is legitimate and sometimes even laudable.[94]  But regardless of one’s normative judgment on this, the new information media will make it much harder for such private speech regulation, good or bad, to take place.

      Of course, there’ll still be some intermediaries.  Though the power of publishers will wane, the equivalents of the music stores and bookstores — the music databases, and the computer systems that people access to subscribe to opinion columns, to buy books, or to get video-on-demand — will remain.  They could refuse to carry certain kinds of speech, and various groups could pressure them into doing this.

      But such a refusal will probably have a limited effect on the speech that’s being rejected.  Each infobahn-connected home will be able to access every computer service in the nation.  If one service refuses to carry, say, gangsta rap music, others can instantly take advantage of the resulting market.

      And starting a new nationwide electronic service should be comparatively cheap, certainly cheaper than starting a nationwide chain of bookstores or music stores.  Today, it’s conceivable that all the major stores in an area might refuse to carry a certain product.  But even if all the mainstream computer services reject a particular genre, other services — say, an all-gangsta-rap service, or even a service specializing in materials that others don’t carry — could easily spring up.  The private speech regulations will remain only where there must be intermediaries who select what gets distributed, for instance in newspapers, whose editors will still control who writes for them.[95]

      Another form of speech regulation I alluded to above — regulation by poverty and unpopularity — will also become much less potent.  Many extremist groups have relatively little ability to speak out because they don’t have enough of a base to fund their speech.  At least some KKK chapters, for instance, are dormant largely because they’re broke.[96]  Cheap electronic distribution might mean that not only the ACLU or NRA newsletters, but also the KKK and Communist Party newsletters, can be sent to millions of subscribers.[97]  One would hope these fringe groups will find few people willing to listen, but their voices will be amplified along with the voices of worthier organizations.

      Finally, the new media might affect one more sort of speech regulation: self-regulation for accuracy.  It’s generally assumed that intermediaries — publishers, editors, and broadcasters — help make sure the things we read and hear are actually true.  They might, for instance, fact-check articles, or refuse to work with writers who are known to be unreliable.

      But when speakers can communicate to the public directly, it’s possible their speech will be less trustworthy:  They might not be willing to hire fact-checkers, or might not be influenced enough by professional journalistic norms, or might not care enough about their long-term reputation for accuracy.  Talk radio, for instance, has been criticized for being unreliable in large part because of how democratic and spontaneous it is.[98]

      It’s not clear, though, what the magnitude of this would be. The new technologies will give some untrustworthy speakers a forum that responsible editors would deny them, and some people will end up misinformed by these speakers.  But the majority of new speakers may be no worse than most media of today.  Many leading publishers actually don’t employ fact-checkers;[99] and while today’s media aren’t notorious for intentional falsehoods, misunderstandings and misreporting seem quite common — consider how often we all find errors in newspaper articles about subjects we know well.

      At worst, the new technologies may supplement some fairly unreliable publications with other, perhaps more unreliable, ones. At best, they might allow the publication of more trustworthy materials — for instance, science news publications put out by specialists, rather than generalist journalists — that couldn’t be printed before.

***

B.  A Rosy Future

      Let me begin my answer with the good news.

      Existing First Amendment doctrine is founded on some rather idealized premises.  “[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”[135]  “[T]he fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”[136]  People who are offended by speech may “effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes.”[137]

      These premises may often be true, but sometimes they simply aren’t.  Sometimes the supporters of a thought have millions of dollars, while opponents are too poor to effectively compete.  Some markets are monopolized by one speaker, for instance a single cable system.[138]  Good counsels from poor speakers may often not be an adequate remedy for evil ones from richer, louder speakers.[139] And Justice Stevens had a point:  “[S]ay[ing] that one may avoid further offense by turning off the radio . . . is like saying that the remedy for an assault is to run away after the first blow.”[140]  Unless offense is simply constitutionally irrelevant (in which case the possibility of averting one’s eyes or ears shouldn’t matter), once the words are heard the injury is complete.

      The Court has heard these arguments.  It has accepted that they may sometimes be valid.  And yet it has generally — most notably in {Turner Broadcasting v. FCC} and {Miami Herald v. Tornillo} — refused to change the doctrine to accommodate them.[141]  It may have been right to refuse; it might, for instance, be too dangerous to let the government intervene when it thinks it’s found “market failure,”[142] or an inability to counterspeak, or a situation where the sting of offensive words is so great that averting one’s eyes is no remedy.  And even when the Court’s assumptions are counterfactual, they might still be required because they represent “the theory of our Constitution”[143] — a basic principle which government must assume to be true even when it might not be.  But it remains true that the Court has based its jurisprudence on an idealized view of the world, a view that doesn’t quite correspond to the world in which we live.

      What I’ve tried to suggest above is that this idealized world — where money is no barrier to speaking; where it’s easy to avert eyes from offensive speech; where there’s more than one newspaper in each town, and something other than a vast wasteland on TV — is much closer to the electronic media world of the future than it is to the print and broadcast media world of the present.  If my predictions are right, the new technologies will make it much easier for all ideas, whether backed by the rich or the poor, to participate in the marketplace.  Even if many individuals still can’t afford to counterspeak effectively, there’ll be many more organizations able to speak out on all sides of an issue.  And when one’s radio is no longer a dumb receiver but rather a computer capable of screening out whatever the listener wants removed, a householder really will be able to “avert his eyes” — and his children’s eyes — from radio profanity (or TV nudity or what have you), rather than having to wait for the first blow.[144]

      Copyright specialists are fond of suggesting that we operate in an electronic age under a copyright law created for a print age. It seems to me that during the print age, the Supreme Court created a First Amendment for the electronic age.  The fictions the Court found necessary to embrace are turning, at least in part, into fact.

C.  A Possible Dark Side

      But some of the other assumptions that the new technologies will upset may lead to more trouble.  {Missouri Knights of the KKK v. Kansas City}[145] might be something of a cautionary tale.  In exchange for giving a franchise to a cable company, Kansas City demanded that the company provide a public-access channel. Everything went well until the Ku Klux Klan decided to put on its own show, which offended the city government so much that authorized the cable system to shut the entire channel down.

      The city’s action was ultimately overturned on First Amendment grounds, but the story shows what can happen when the assumptions underlying certain rules are changed.  The city’s willingness to provide a forum for the little guy, it turned out, was based (perhaps unconsciously) on the supposition that the little guys would either provide a public service or at worst be harmless eccentrics.  When the assumption proved false, the consensus behind the rule evaporated.

      As the new media arrive, they may likewise cause some popular sentiment for changes in the doctrine.  Today, for instance, the First Amendment rules that give broad protection to extremist speakers — Klansmen, Communists, and the like — are relatively low-cost, because these groups are politically rather insignificant.  Even without government regulation, they are in large measure silenced by lack of funds and by the disapproval of the media establishment.[146]  What will happen when the KKK becomes able to conveniently send its views to hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country, or create its own TV show that can be ordered from any infobahn-connected household?[147]

      Likewise, the broad protection for false speech[148] evolved in a time when the main suppliers of news and opinion were large, ostensibly nonpartisan, media organizations.  Obviously these broadcasters and publishers weren’t entirely reliable — they still lose some libel lawsuits even after {New York Times v. Sullivan} — but they were the sort of media that people can feel relatively comfortable with.

      But with the emergence of talk radio as a powerful force, some have begun to grouse.  Consider, for instance, a recent speech to the National Association of Broadcasters by FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, whose Commission decides whether to renew the broadcasters’ licenses.  Chairman Hundt, focusing specifically on talk radio, “urged station owners and management to . . . emphasiz[e] accuracy and truth over a quest for ratings and advertising dollars.”[149] “`As a society,'” the chairman said, “`we need solutions to public disinformation and misinformation, but solutions that don’t involve governmental intrusion and yet don’t leave us callously indifferent to truth or falsity.'”[150]  While this isn’t yet a call for greater regulation — the chairman specifically “stressed that the FCC should not be the judge of content or quality in radio’s public discourses”[151] — it shows the sort of concern that may be a harbinger of future regulatory proposals.

v. Excerpt from “Cyber Civil Rights,” by Danielle Keats Citron: 

The Internet raises important civil rights issues through both its aggregative and disaggregative qualities. Online, bigots can aggregate their efforts even when they have insufficient numbers in any one location to form a conventional hate group. They can disaggregate their offline identities from their online presence, escaping social opprobrium and legal liability for destructive acts.

Both of these qualities are crucial to the growth of anonymous online mobs that attack women, people of color, religious minorities, gays, and lesbians. On social networking sites, blogs, and other Web 2.0 platforms, destructive groups publish lies and doctored photographs of vulnerable individuals. [4] They threaten rape and other forms of physical violence. [5] They post sensitive personal information for identity thieves to use. [6] They send damaging statements about victims to employers and manipulate search engines to highlight those statements for business associates and clients to see. [7] They flood websites with violent sexual pictures and shut down blogs with denial-of-service attacks. [8] These assaults terrorize victims, destroy reputations, corrode privacy, and impair victims’ ability to participate in online and offline society as equals.

Some victims respond by shutting down their blogs and going offline. [9] Others write under pseudonyms to conceal their gender, [10] a reminder of nineteenth-century women writers George Sand and George Eliot. [11] Victims who stop blogging or writing under their own names lose the chance to build robust online reputations that could generate online and offline career opportunities.

Kathy Sierra’s story exemplifies the point. Ms. Sierra, a software developer, maintained a blog called “Creating Passionate Users.” [12] In early 2007, a group of anonymous individuals attacked Ms. Sierra on her blog and two other websites, MeanKids.org and unclebobism.com. [13] Posters threatened rape and strangulation. [14] Others revealed her home address and Social Security number. [15] Individuals posted doctored photos of Ms. Sierra. One picture featured Ms. Sierra with a noose beside her neck. [16] The poster wrote: “The only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.” [17] Another photograph depicted her screaming while being suffocated by lingerie. [18] Blogger Hugh MacLeod describes the posters as perpetrating a virtual group rape with the site operators “circling [the rapists], chanting ‘Go, go, go.’” [19] The attacks ravaged Ms. Sierra’s sense of personal security. She suspended her blog, even though the blog enhanced her reputation in the technological community. [20] She canceled public appearances and feared leaving her backyard. [21] Ms. Sierra explained: “I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.” [22]

Although in theory anonymous online mobs could attack anyone, in practice they overwhelmingly target members of traditionally subordinated groups, particularly women. [23] According to a 2006 study, individuals writing under female names received twenty-five times more sexually threatening and malicious comments than posters writing under male names. [24] The organization Working to Halt Online Abuse reports that, in 2006, seventy percent of the 372 individuals it helped combat cyber harassment were female.25 In half of those cases, the victims had no connection to their attackers.26 These mobs also focus on people of color, religious minorities, gays, and lesbians.27

These attacks are far from the only new challenge to civil rights in the Information Age,28 but they are a serious one. Without an effective response to both aggressive, bigoted attacks and to more passive forms of exclusion, online equality is more of a slogan than a reality.

Nonetheless, the development of a viable cyber civil rights agenda faces formidable obstacles. First, because it must fill the gap left when the Internet’s disaggregation allows individuals to escape social stigma for abusive acts, the cyber civil rights agenda must be fundamentally pro-regulatory. A regulatory approach clashes with libertarian ideology that pervades online communities.

Second, civil rights advocacy must address inequalities of power. This may seem incongruous to those who believe – with considerable justification in many spheres – the Internet has eliminated inequalities by allowing individuals’ voices to travel as far as those of major institutions. This assumption may slow recognition of the power of misogynistic, racist, or other bigoted mobs to strike under cloak of anonymity, without fear of consequences.

Third, a cyber civil rights agenda must convince a legal community still firmly rooted in the analog world that online harassment and discrimination profoundly harm victims and deserve redress. In particular, proponents of cyber civil rights must convince courts and policymakers that the archaic version of the acts-words dichotomy fails to capture harms perpetrated online. The Internet’s aggregative character turns expressions into actions and allows geographically-disparate people to combine their actions into a powerful force. Those who fail to appreciate the Internet’s aggregative powers may be inclined to dismiss many of the harms, perhaps citing “the venerable maxim de minimis non curat lex (‘the law cares not for trifles’).”29 For example, an online mob’s capacity to manipulate search engines in order to dominate what prospective employers learn about its victim, by aggregating hundreds or thousands of individual defamatory postings, may not be grasped by judges accustomed to a world in which defamers’ messages either reached a mass audience or were sent specifically to recipients known to the defamer. Much as the northern media initially dismissed the Ku Klux Klan’s violence in the early 1870s as “horseplay” borne of “personal quarrels,”30 so have many viewed the destruction wrought by online groups as harmless pranks.

Fourth, cyber civil rights advocates must overcome the free speech argument asserted by online abusers. Perpetrators of cyber civil rights abuses commonly hide behind powerful free speech norms that both online and offline communities revere. Just as the subjugation of African Americans was justified under the rubrics of states’ rights and freedom of contract, destructive online mobs invoke free speech values even as they work to suppress the speech of women and people of color.31

 vi. I strongly suggest you to take your own advice here, Robert, and definitely DON’T start digging.  You have been a bad, bad boy:

“Look: If you are ever in a situation where your stupidity makes you a target, the correct thing to do is . . . nothing. Don’t react. Don’t try to defend yourself. Don’t lash out at your tormenters. Just ignore it until it is over. Learn your lesson, avoid repetition of the error, and be glad it wasn’t worse. People who merely describe your stupidity — however mocking and sarcastic their descriptions — have done you no wrong.” — Robert Stacy McCain

vii. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has claimed that McCain was once a member of League of the South, which the SPLC classifies as a white supremacist hate group.” — Wikipedia

Dr. Michael Hill, September, 2004 Virginia League of the South State Meeting
The Patrick Henry Chapter
Virginia League of the South
[Transcribed by Tara Carreon, ABOL Librarian]

[Dr. Michael Hill] When God foiled the building of the Tower of Babel on the Plains of Shinar, he did so in order that the people might be scattered into separate nations, and no longer be one people with one language. That’s Genesis 11, verses 1-9.

In the previous chapter of Genesis, we are told that the sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth. and their descendants would occupy specified parts of the earth. For example, we read in Genesis 10:5 regarding the sons of Japheth, “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided into their lands, every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.” It’s clear then that God intended man to live separately, with their own languages, kith and kin, and nations. Therefore nations, that is peoples, have a biblical mandate to exist, and thereby to protect their interest from those who would destroy them, either by war, genocide, or more subtle means.

Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism, which is the new Tower of Babel, white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people, because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood.

While all other nations, or peoples, groups based on race, ethnicity, and blood and soil, are encouraged today to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those who are different from ourselves, and who bear some alleged grievance toward us, whether it be slavery, racism, hatred, you name it.

And sadly, as has been alluded to earlier, it is often Christian ministers who lead the charge toward multiculturalism, pluralism and universalism in the name of God himself. But these are false teachers. You can see them as that way.

By the Grace of God — I’ll repeat that phrase — by the Grace of God, the philosophies and institutions of Christian liberty, are the creation of Western European thoughts. In an age of rabid political correctness, this salient truth is buried beneath the monumental lie that all men, and hence all cultures and civilizations, are created equal.

You know, but the truth is a stubborn and resilient thing. And the truth is that at least for the past 400 years, Western Christian — that is, European — American civilization alone — ALONE! — has enjoyed the fruits of order, liberty and abundant material prosperity. Elsewhere in the world, despotism, sloth and poverty have been the order of the day.

However, let us not boast for the simple reason that God has ordained things thusly out of his eternal wisdom. The Western world’s blessings of the gospel, liberty and prosperity are just that: a blessing.

In Acts 16, verses 6-9, Paul and Silas were headed to Asia to spread the gospel, but the holy spirit forbade them to go into that region. Instead, the spirit led them by means of Paul’s dream westward, into Macedonia. Thus, the gospel was forbidden in Asia in that day. Conversely, it was God’s will that they be spread into Europe. Of this we cannot boast. Rather, we can only thank God that in his providence he saw fit to bless our ancestors with his Word, and all that flows from obedience to it.

Our white, European, American ancestors had no trouble enunciating the obvious truth that Western Christian civilization was superior to all others. When I taught at the University of Alabama, and taught Western Civilization for almost 20 years, I wish I had a quarter for every time I got called to the Dean’s office or the Department of Chair’s office because of some irate, left-wing student who says, “Dr. Hill is saying that Western white civilization is superior to everything else, and we just don’t like that.” Well, the Dean and the Department Chair just finally got tired of it, and just left me alone.

But this is the truth. And I thought that that’s what universities sought to give to their students, is truth.

Well, our ancestors in the South had no trouble understanding this truth. Moreover, they had no hesitation about defending it. Defending it as their God-given patrimony against those who would denigrate it or destroy it.

And just a century and a half ago, right before the war, our civilization was still distinguished by a robustness and self-confidence, born out of the realization of the natural superiority of the West and its ways. None but the most cracked-brain utopians believed in social, political, economic, and cultural equality. Nor did they believe in the equality of the races, in intellect and accomplishment.

Unfortunately, our present century, and the previous century, has witnessed this old order turned upside-down on its head. Today, the descendants of those European-Southern white folks who are our ancestors, today we their descendants behave as a shamed and defeated people.

Not only do we refuse to proclaim the God-ordained superiority of our own civilization, and its venerable institutions, we also refuse to defend the very ethnic and racial peculiarities that gave form and definition to our civilization. “White” has become a dirty word, and we have no one but ourselves to blame for letting it happen. Few whites today can even use the term without wincing and casting furtive glances to and fro. I mean, we’re afraid to call ourselves what God created us. And to deny one’s identity in such a manner is to dishonor the God who made us what we are, and who separated us apart from the other races and peoples for his own eternal purposes. While Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other groups revel in their natural peculiarities, whites will not even dare admit that race is one of the primary factors that determines who we are, and what we create on this earth. This is a simple and fundamental fact of God’s creation. We are who we are simply because he’s commanded it.

Because Christian liberty has been the product of Western civilization, should the white European stock of America disappear, then both liberty and civilization as we have come to know them, will cease to exist for us.

As we have lost the will to defend our inheritance, there has been a corresponding increase in the willingness of others to destroy our civilizations. I don’t have to tell you that when our enemies see and sense that we are weak, they will strike. Other people see today that Western white Christians, and their civilizations, will not defend themselves; therefore, they seek to replace it with their own vision of what they consider to be the good society. That vision — or for us, nightmare — will have no truck with the rule of law, equity or fairness. It will be predicated on what I like to call the intimidation factor, the employment of brute force of the strong against the weak. In short, it will be payback time for the alleged mistreatment that minorities -cum-majorities have suffered at the hands of what they so often now call the White Devils.

Why do we Southerners, in particular those of us who can trace our lineage back to the founding stock, lack the backbone to stand for the civilization that was given to us by our forbears? That’s the question that we have to answer. Why will we not defend our patrimony? What is it that has paralyzed us to the point that we are about to commit suicide if we do not stand?

A major reason is a thing called “collective guilt.” When the white man first came into contact with the darker races through the institution of slavery in the 17th century, slavery, and not man-stealing, was successfully defended from a Biblical standpoint through the war for Southern Independence and beyond. But after the South’s defeat and subsequent reconstruction, the institution’s legitimacy was systematically undermined in the name of equality, and misappropriated Christian ethics. By World War I, Communists in Europe and America seized on the issues of equality, racism, and white guilt, and began to use them as battering rams to knock down the gates of the old social, political, and economic order in the West.

Moreover, the bogus work of leftist intellectuals such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, told white Europeans and Americans that all cultures were basically equal, which has come to be known today as “cultural relativism.” Slavery and racism, and as was pointed out earlier, the latter term — I think Stan pointed it out — was coined by the Communists.  Because of these things, they become instruments wielded by the left to destroy the very civilization which allows them freedom and leisure to formulate and articulate their ideas in the first place.

This nihilistic predilection shared by all leftists, appears paradoxical at first glance. However, upon closer inspection, it reveals a deep-seated hatred of God-given order and rationality, hallmarks of the White western Christian world. The leftists’ embrace of the antithesis of ordered Christian liberty manifested itself early on in a fascination with the primitiveness of non-white, non-Christian peoples and cultures. It was the enlightenment philosophers after all, in France, who first became enamoured with the idea of the noble savage: those who had not been corrupted by the vile civilization of the west. The leftists’ success in introducing the concept of racism into the American social and political lexicon, has today led to increasingly shrill demands from Black leaders for reparations. This is clearly a policy of economic blackmail, and intended to transfer yet more wealth from whites to blacks. It is also, more importantly, another means of eliciting from whites an admission of guilt in order that their civilization might further be discredited.

But instead of whites owing blacks reparations for slavery, and its alleged attendant ills, blacks in reality owe White America, especially the South, a debt that will not be acknowledged and certainly not repaid. As Donny Kennedy said to me as we were discussing his new book on American slavery — I think it’s called “American Slavery” — he said basically, the Blacks owe us for the boatride over here. And I tend to agree.

Now, let’s see what they left here.

Sold into slavery by their own people, or by the Muslims who so many Blacks seem to hold in such high regard today, which I could never quite understand why, Africans were transported out of a heathen and idolatrous continent, and set down in the most Christian section of America. There they were instructed in the Christian religion of their masters, given cradle-to-grave security, and generally treated quite humanely. In short, they were given a chance to live in an advanced civilization. 

And because of this, they have prospered mightily. All you have to do is contrast the lot of today’s black Americans with that of his brethren back in Africa to see the truth of this assertion. Yet, you’ll never get them to admit that that is where this has all led to. Why? Because it’s too good of a weapon to use against us.

The South’s military defeat in 1865 and the sudden, subsequent emancipation of 3-1/2 million slaves, was a disaster for whites and blacks alike. Former slaves who found themselves on top in many areas of the reconstruction of the South, generally proved unfit to hold positions of authority.  Spurred on by the radical Republican leaders, these black legislators, and newly-enlisted soldiers, earned the enmity of disenfranchised whites who saw the destruction of their society at hand.  Therefore, once the Union military occupation forces were withdrawn from the south in 1876, white southerners immediately began to reassert their authority over a war-ravaged society. During the period of reconstruction, 12 years, 1865-77, whites in the south had seen enough of negro rule to understand that their civilization would perish should blacks be given the vote and thus be permitted to control the political system.

Whereas whites and blacks in the antebellum south lived and worked in close proximity, once the situation changed at the end of the war, especially with the passage of the reconstruction amendments, some new arrangement became necessary if our white ancestors were to conserve the society that they had built. Few southerners of the late 19th century believed that whites and blacks could live together in a state of equality without serious consequences for both races. If you don’t believe that, just go back and read what they had to say, all the way back to Jefferson. Therefore, postbellum Southern blacks were disenfranchised, and Jim Crow laws resulted in a segregated south.  And I must admit that as much as I would like to claim authorship of this next clever term I’m about to use, I can’t do that. I’m going to have to give credit where credit is due to John Vincent. Today, Jim Crow has been replaced by what might become “Jim Snow” policies that discriminate against whites.  Thank you, John.

Through these measures, white southerners were able to exert some control over a still primitive and uneducated black population during the period of reconstruction. Nonetheless, the black community of the late 19th century, began to experience problems largely absent prior to 1865. I talked to Clyde Wilson who studied this, and he says it’s almost impossible, it is impossible to find the levels of illegitimacy, poverty, family disintegration, crime among southern blacks before 1865. He said that about the 1890s, these problems — black on black crime, illegitimacy, abject poverty, family disintegration, among others — became an epidemic within the black community. And this was only one generation removed from emancipation.

Despite trillions of dollars spent on welfare and other programs in the past century, these problems, and many others, still plague the black community to the present day. Clearly there’s an ever-present problem here, that emancipation and money did not solve and cannot be explained away by a white [inaudible].

Today it’s fashionable for black leaders, hispanic leaders, and their white liberal allies, to blame slavery, racism, you name it, for the continuing ills that beset the black and other minority communities. These ills were not eradicated by the civil rights revolution, and now black and other minority failure must have a fresh excuse, and that excuse is institutional racism. To the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world, the only remedy is the destruction of our civilization, white western European civilization, in which blacks and other minorities cannot compete. And this society, in their view, must be replaced with a society based on the principles and mores of dark-skinned people, usually some form of Marxism. This is why whites, beginning with southerners, the easiest targets, and their way of life, must be demonized and eradicated. Blacks and other minorities claim they simply cannot get a fair shake in a white man’s world, therefore the white man must give up his world.

The cold facts of history give the lie to the claims of the afro-centrist, who says that we stole their civilization. You know, it started with the Greeks and it never stopped. We stole their civilization and made it our own. Well let me tell you this, having studied the European colonial history of the 19th century, I can say this: that the little light that did shine on what has been called “the dark continent,” came only as a result of 19th century European colonialism.  Once these colonial regimes were dismantled after World War II, Africa began a steady descent into decadence and barbarism. And all you need to do is look at the poster child, Robert Mugabe — he’s it.

You know, I will not call Rhodesia Zimbabwe. I just simply refuse to do it. To me it will always be Rhodesia.  And Nelson Mandela’s South Africa.

What you see here are the deleterious effects of white disestablishment and black rule. And anyone with half a brain and one eye can see that. That is simply the truth that can’t be covered up.  These were two prospering countries in Africa, and now they are no different from any other place in Africa.

Again, it is a cold and hard fact that if white Christian Americans should lose control over the North American continent to non-white, non-Christian minorities, then this will cease to be the civilized place we’ve known for the past several hundred years. And I do not want my children and grandchildren to live in such a place. I mean, we’re talking about a matter of our own survival here, folks. That is what it is.  And the time for mincing words and dancing around the subject is over. Because this is about our survival as a people.

As minorities have gained political control over towns and cities, the decline in the quality of life for whites has become precipitous. Whites have very quietly deserted the places their forefathers built, rather than stay and be subjected to the crime and disorder that frequently comes with minority rule. Especially intolerable is the never-reported epidemic of black on white violent crime. Whites then don’t leave because they are “racists,” whatever that means. But they leave because they fear for their lives and property in an unfamiliar and inhospitable environment. They become outsiders.

You know, I have two grown daughters, and I have one daughter who is 12, and I learn a good deal about current popular culture through them as sort of conduits. But I also learn a lot by simply observing things on the streets. And when I see a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy walking around with his britches hanging down, and his underwear showing, and a backwards baseball cap on, listening to rap music, you know what the first thing I say is? We have failed. We have failed. There’s a cultural vacuum that that kid’s trying to fill. And we have failed to give him the true fundamentals of his own culture to fill it.

And the idea that, you know, you have this TV-Hollywood nexus today. It’s the epitome of cool among young people, I don’t care whether they’re white or black or hispanic or whatever. To act in the manner that they see put forth on the television, and that’s why as Franklin Sanders has said before, one of the three things that we all ought to do is kick out our television sets, because that has been the purveyor of this kind of sewage through our living rooms. And we’re surprised that our children act like this when they watch four or five or six hours of TV in a day after being at government schools for the other 8 hours? And we’re surprised that they act like this?

You know, why listen to Mozart when you can listen to rap? I mean, I know why, but you know a lot of young folks think rap is cool, and Mozart is just a old dead white European male. In fact, what we’re seeing today is the descent of our culture to the lowest common denominator.

And stemming naturally from this very sad state of affairs is not a sense of cultural equality, but of cultural superiority. And if you want to see a representation of that, just look at how white men, particularly fathers, are portrayed on television programs and movies. The squarest, most unhip, uncool characters that you can imagine. And everybody else is portrayed as cool and hip and witted. So this is not about cultural equality, it’s about cultural superiority. And it’s not our culture that’s elevated to the superior place.

Now, its I think a short series of steps from white guilt over slavery and racism, to equality, to multiculturalism, and diversity, to hate crimes, and hate speech, and then to the ultimate compromise of racial extinction through either genocide or miscegenation. At that point, our civilization won’t be needed. For whatever reason, it will be gone. And our question again today that I’m putting to you is, “Are you willing to do and say and write what is necessary and true regarding the questions of our survival as a people?”

What will happen when America is no longer a predominately white Christian nation? Already we’ve seen that the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, what I like to call “the second reconstruction,” was more about special privileges for blacks and other minorities than about equality. Moreover, guilt-ridden whites have acquiesced to a campaign of silence about the epidemic of black on white violent crime. That’s the biggest dirty little secret, that’s the 2-ton elephant at the tea party that everybody plays like it’s not there.

There are, however, some blacks who see the truth, and are willing to speak it. One is syndicated columnist and George Mason University economist Walter Williams [libertarian], who recently said that the antebellum south was absolutely right to defend its largely anglo-celtic civilization from the machinations  of Yankee abolitionist meddlers.

Then there is Elizabeth Wright. Do any of you know who Elizabeth Wright is? Elizabeth Wright and her views undoubtedly shape the liberal egalitarians to their very core. Elizabeth Wright is a black woman, and she wrote this: “I’m not fooled by the diversity folk into believing that the institutions of this society will be preserved and honored by those who happen to share my gene pool. The multicultural ideologues make it clear that they view these institutions with contempt. They are working for nothing less than total control of the [inaudible].”

Well, Wright has indeed pegged the multicultural egalitarians correctly. Raw power is their one and only end, and they’ll use any means necessary to obtain it. And when they do, we, as white European-Southerners, will be their first target. They’ve made that clear. Then we’ll understand what “equality” really means. When they get in control, we’ll understand. Wright believes, and I quote:  “when these people — meaning blacks and other minorities — come to power, their major aim will be to institute their enlightenment policies in all quarters of society. I have heard them refer to liberties such as freedom of speech as no more than ‘jive ass claptrap’.” She continues: “I predict that, once in power, they will actually create laws to impose interracial unions, in order to finally bring about the ‘raceless’ dream society.  He who insists on union with his own kind will be dubbed an intractable racist, and sent off for further re-education.”

Now, it goes without saying — but I’m going to say it anyway — that few whites today would have the intestinal fortitude to say what Elizabeth Wright has said. And this is the problem. Even in the benighted and racist South, most whites will no longer speak and act in their own interests. However, the situation here, as bad as it is, particularly in the big cities, the yuppie suburbs, and the big wimpy churches, it’s worse elsewhere. If a spirited defense of white, Western, Christian civilization is to be mounted on these shores, then it will be in the South among the remnant of proud Anglo-Celts who remember the glories of their past. As likely as not, the South will find it necessary to break away from a decrepit Union that has already succumbed to the poison of multiculturalism, and then form a new confederacy dominated by the mores and institutions of our own people and our civilization.

Once again, Elizabeth Wright — and don’t you feel ashamed that a black woman has to do our talking for us? — here she says, she seems to understand the predicament better than we do. She sees, “no deep-seated, heartfelt opposition to this trend — and it’s multiculturalism —  except among white Southerons. Other types of conservatives talk tough,” she says, “until an epithet is hurled their way. Then they fold.” Undoubtedly she’s talking here about the Republican Party.

Wright concludes her remarkable essay with a call to arms for white Southerners. And remember, it’s the Wright woman. Man, we can’t do our talking for ourselves! Quote: “Who is most likely to fight the hardest to maintain and conserve this extraordinary experiment in freedom? Who else but the actual descendants of those Founders, that’s who. That means you, white Southerons. Once you lay down the sword, that will be the end of resistance. I view the battle,” she writes, “as one that can be only accomplished by white southerners. I would think that most whites would want to be among the last who would destroy that which came out of the genius of their own ancestors.” And she concludes, “So, if a white South would guarantee the preservation of those institutions, then let’s have a White South.”

Now, this is a refreshing column. But look, we can say, “Man, aint it great that the Elizabeth Wright woman is on our side?” Yeah, I’d rather have her as a friend as an enemy. But it is not her job to do this.  Is it?  It is our job to defend our heritage, our culture, as a thing bequeathed us by our ancestors. If we can’t do it for ourselves, then it won’t last.

Yeah, this is a refreshing column, but it is white southerners themselves who must muster the courage to act, and act very soon. Demographers predict that whites will be a minority in this country by 350?, and this is already true today — a little bit ahead of schedule — in California and Texas, and, I believe, Arizona and New Mexico. If we are not willing to fight to preserve the glorious heritage bequeathed us by men of honor, genius, and principle, then we truly deserve the disinheritance that’s going to befall us for sure in the next half century. We are sowing the wind because of our inaction regarding immigration, in particular, and the spread of multiculturalism. We will likely reap the whirlwind.

I thank you for your attention. I thank Randy for inviting me to speak. And may God save the South!