For 30 years, the far right has been falsely claiming that they are the true champions and defenders of the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech. For the last 15 of those years, they have succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that the right wing consists of Constitutional purists who diligently defend our First Amendment rights.

That’s a goddam filthy lie, but we knew that already, amirite?

The right wing’s currently trendy crusade is “fighting for free speech on social media.” Let’s just see what the right wing really thinks about First Amendment rights, in the words of the right wing of the Supreme Court.

Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck is a little-known 2019 case that examines whether the First Amendment protects freedom of speech on a cable-TV public access channel. While this case does not directly deal with social media, it brings into stark relief which wing of the Supreme Court has a more expansive view of free speech, and which wing is more contemptuous of it.

The precedent on which Halleck had hoped to prevail was Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, which held that government-hosted cable access channels are required to observe and respect the free speech rights of their content creators.

What made Halleck peculiar is that the cable access channel in question was not hosted directly by a government agency, but by a private entity who hosted the channel on behalf of a government entity for a quasi-public purpose. Manhattan Community Access was, in effect, a state actor and therefore ought to be bound to the same First Amendment obligations as a government entity proper.

This is where Halleck’s footsteps wander here and there into the conceptual realm of social media.

The Court ruled 5-4 that First Amendment protections did not apply to a public access channel that was hosted by a private entity on behalf of a governmental entity. Which five judges ruled against the First Amendment in this case?

The right wing of the court, of course. Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the Court, asserting that Manhattan Community Access was not a “state actor” when clearly, it was.

And which four justices had the more expansive view of the First Amendment’s reach?

Why, the four liberal justices at the time: Justice Sotomayor, Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Kagan.

The four liberals voted to uphold free speech, whereas the five right wing judges ruled against free speech.

The second obscure case really lays bare, pardon the pun, just how arbitrarily contemptuous the right wing really is toward free speech and free expression. (Where’s the pun? You’ll see.)

Erie v. Pap’s AM was a 2000 case that pitted the First Amendment rights of a strip club against an anti-nudity ordinance in the city of Erie, Pennsylvania. Unsurprisingly, the Court held that the alleged secondary effects that strip clubs have on a community were sufficient to override the rights of the strip club. But that’s not the shocking part of the ruling.

The late justice Antonin Scalia, long hailed as an ideal model judge for the right wing, wrote a completely separate concurrence that nakedly expressed his contempt for free expression and the arbitrary manner in which he would be willing to ignore the First Amendment.

He wrote, “The traditional power of government to foster good morals (bonos mores), and the acceptability of the traditional judgment (if Erie wishes to endorse it) that nude public dancing itself is immoral, have not been repealed by the First Amendment.”

He came right out and said it. Someone’s mere arbitrary decree that something is “immoral” should override the First Amendment in Scalia’s eyes.

This is what the right wing calls “free speech” – impunity for me, but if we think that your content is “immoral” in any way, then the First Amendment does not protect you.

This is MAGA.