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Notes -
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
Alternative take: the left really does defend free speech when government is the one being mean.
On the other hand, I remember the Obama-era IRS persecuting the Tea Party. Can't seem to remember anyone on the left complaining.
How so, exactly?
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement that coalesced mostly in response to the economic crisis in 2008 and the US gov't response of bailouts to various entities. It grew over the course of 2009 and 2010 on a general platform of no new taxes and debt/deficit/spending reduction (originally an American Revolution reference, TEA became "Taxed Enough Already"). Probably best known for its opposition to Obamacare, and a significant contributor to the Republican wave election of 2010. At the time, it was practically unique in being a right-aligned popular protest movement (and, famously, known for leaving its protest sites cleaner than when the protesters arrived). While members of the movement had individual political views that were broadly conservative-ish, the movement as a whole was strictly focused on taxation and fiscal responsibility issues--it did not have a social policy platform.
In any case, if you're going to go from public rallies in parks to any sort of real political impact, you need organization and fundraising with an eye to electing friendly candidates for office. That means setting up 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s with the IRS. With Lois Lerner on point, the IRS went to work trying to choke off the movement financially, by a combination of sitting on applications without movement for months at a time, making periodic records demands that escalated to ludicrous levels of invasiveness, leaking donor information to hostile third-parties, etc.
The Tea Party didn't last much longer, though a couple of the orgs created acquired grifters and continued on, zombie-fashion, for another year or two after 2010. A lot of the original support for Trump's candidacy in 2015-2016 came from veterans of the Tea Party who were less inclined to politeness the second time around.
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