Memo to Sheila Jackson Lee: You Only Have Free Speech because of Dead White Guys!

She's a brilliant statesman.

By A.J. Rice

Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is on a new tear. She has filed a bill in the now Republican-controlled House that would go after what she defines as “hate speech.” That bill, if passed into law, would make this article a federal crime, and might make you a criminal if you shared it with anyone who then went on to commit a crime. 

Any infringements on free speech codified into law have long been a political minefield. One person’s “hate speech” is another person’s inconvenient truth. One person’s reasonable objections can become targeted as harmful threats. For instance, during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic, you could be deplatformed from social media and lose your job for saying things that politicians found inconvenient but were in no way hateful or even harmful.

Speech codes that were once confined to leftwing university campuses have come to own newsrooms and dictate how pre-Musk Twitter crushed dissent from the far left’s most intolerant and unreasonable orthodoxies – orthodoxies that change with the political winds by the hour.