The answer is ... yes! From the WSJ a few days ago. I bolded and enlarged the obvious point below in the Journal excerpt.
It’s a curious thing that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) are enjoying generally friendly media coverage even as they set modern campaign records for avoiding media scrutiny. Odder still is that while avoiding discussion of the policies they will employ to govern us, they’ve clearly expressed contempt for the bedrock liberty that allows all of us to criticize government policies.
Recently this column noted Ms. Harris’s history of hostility to free expression. Now we know that if voters give her the promotion she seeks, we can’t expect her vice president to serve as a moderating influence.
Writing for Reason, Robby Soave notes that at this week’s vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz repeated his false claim that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment does not protect misinformation or “hate speech.” Mr. Soave writes of Mr. Walz:
Walz defended his position by glibly asserting that it is constitutionally impermissible to yell “fire in a crowded theater.” This is an oft-expressed sentiment—and one that’s completely and utterly false. It comes from the Supreme Court’s odious opinion in the 1919 case Schenk v. United States, in which the majority held that the government could stop people from distributing leaflets opposing World War I. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes likened such activism as akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater; in other words, he believed that raising doubts about the desirability of the U.S. participating in such a global catastrophe was dangerous, and could be prohibited.
Today we recognize that the right to criticize U.S. military policy and oppose foreign wars is an essential component of the First Amendment. And the Supreme Court agrees: Schenk was gradually overturned by subsequent decisions. The right to engage in speech that the government might deem reckless, dangerous, or hateful was explicitly affirmed in the 2017 case Matal v. Tam, in which Justice Samuel Alito observed “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” It could not be more simple: Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
This shouldn’t be surprising; after all, if hate speech constituted unprotected speech, it would create all sorts of problems. What counts as hateful speech is purely subjective. Religious people, for instance, might find blasphemy to be hateful—but it’s sufficiently obvious that the federal government cannot criminalize criticism of religion. Similarly, political figures might determine that their opponents running attack ads against them are examples of hateful messaging. If censorship was allowed on this basis, there would be no end in sight.
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