Free Speech Activists

"Randazza’s advice for journalism majors is simple: Get a good foundation in First Amendment law. He adds that students in the UMass Journalism Program should consider themselves very fortunate."

"To the best of the Plaintiff's knowledge, no pony has ever attacked an American politician—and presumably the Secret Service would be able to intervene, should Mr. Supreme try and find some way to break that drought in pony-on-politician violence.""

"I represent Anglin in this suit. I realize that Anglin’s story is full of controversy, hate, and nationalistic views, which he reportedly spread among his followers. However, the court may be on the verge of creating a dangerous precedent when deciding this lawsuit."

"Brunetti does not necessarily create an automatic sea-change in the federal trademark registration regime. We will need to see what the USPTO does in the short term in response to the decision. If it allows previously “immoral or scandalous” marks to proceed to registration, then we should expect to see a flood of trademark applications for years' worth of a backlog of improperly-denied registrations. If the USPTO keeps sitting on its hands, however, that rush will likely be delayed until the Supreme Court (if it takes the case) decides the issue."

"Speech is presumptively protected. And, while there were decisions at one time that prohibited speech that had the tendency to produce negative results, those were thoroughly wiped away in 1969 in the landmark case, Brandenburg v. Ohio."

"Most might think that in America, you can freely publish what you wish, then (and now) an over-zealous prosecutor can put you on trial simply because the government does not like your art. And, there is no way to know if your content is “obscene” and thus punishable by prison, until after a jury rules that it is so."

"Marc Randazza argues that restricting Anglin's trolling would set a dangerous precedent. Anglin “has every right to ask people to share their views, no matter how abhorrent those views are,” Randazza told. “This is the shitty price we have to pay for freedom.”"

"You can not take something that an artist created during the creative process, and then discarded, and say it is an authentic work of that artist."

"But, the notion of an American citizen going to jail for a nonviolent political protest is utterly antithetical to what this country is all about. It is a disgrace. Officer Coronado is a disgrace for arresting her. The prosecutor is a disgrace for charging her. The jurors are disgraces for convicting her."

"The government should not be in the business of deciding what is moral, immoral or offensive. The section of the trademark act in question in this case is a leftover from Victorian times, and is used now primarily, I would argue, (and have argued) to promote social agendas with coercive censorship. I do not trust any government to tell me what I can and cannot handle. The marketplace of ideas will do that for us."

"Marc Randazza, the managing partner of the Randazza Legal Group - the Las Vegas based law firm that focuses on the First Amendment, intellectual property, and copyright infringement cases, is representing the defendant. Randazza filed an opposition motion, saying that the plaintiff’s claims are frivolous."

"Let us remember that those who kill innocent victims do not do so simply because they wish them dead -- terrorism is about killing a few to strike fear into many. Terrorism is a form of activism coupled with narcissism."

"Science tells us that the earth is getting warmer and we are probably doing it. Science tells us that this is bad. Therefore, we want science."

"There is no greater way than to preach your love for the First Amendment then to take on a case from someone whose speech you abhor."

"The First Amendment does not insulate you from criticism. In fact, that's the First Amendment in action. That is how the marketplace of ideas works. We float our ideas in the marketplace, and we see which idea sells."

"Some credible scholars say that making mass murderers famous motivates other mass murderers. (One might even argue that this article is part of the problem). Elliot Rodger sent his lengthy diatribe to the media before he went on his killing spree -- correctly predicting that his actions would propel his ideas (such as they were) into the marketplace of ideas on a digital billboard larger than he could ever have enjoyed had he not amplified them with his psychotic rampage. Accordingly, should we not silence him? Wipe his words from the Internet forever? Let him be forgotten?"

"Responsible journalism is hard. It isn't public relations. A responsible journalist digs for the truth, she doesn't just take her subject's agenda and run with it. That isn't journalism, that's "gossip," and like all gossip, it doesn't do anything positive for anyone."

"Girls need modems!"

"I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought."

"Give us bandwidth or kill us!"

"I hate this waaaah-I'm-a-poor-sensitive-weak-woman-protect-me shit. This kind of stuff generates more contempt for women. So fuck niceness!"

"Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics."

"Peterson tosses 2,000 years of Christian biblical theology and redefines what it means to be a Christian as mere truth-seeking — no repentance, no regeneration, no profession of faith, and it seems not even a conscious decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ. This Christ-less Christianity is so cut-rate as to make what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” look downright expensive. …There is more of the postmodern about Peterson’s philosophy than one might imagine."

"Peterson is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn't offer get-rich-quick schemes, or pick-up techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, but that it is ultimately worthwhile."

"For all the bizarre but now-familiar attempts to smear him as ‘far-right,’ Jordan Peterson is just a centrist liberal, with all the uninterestingness that that entails. But he’s a centrist liberal who has been demoralized by the officialization of polite falsehood enough to loudly speak what should be insipid truths. Platitudes like ‘Enlightenment values are worth preserving’ and ‘science is true even if when produces discomforting results’ now qualify as bomb-throwing."

"The startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made [Jordan Peterson] the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation."

"Peterson can take the most difficult ideas and make them entertaining. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star."

": Danny: Aren't I? And you're really quite nothing."

"{{Cite tweet |user=jordanbpeterson |number=1633882580746653696 |date=9 March 2023 |title=There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see"

"The more you hear Peterson babble about anything that isn’t himself, the more it becomes apparent that he’s simply not very intelligent or very well-read."

"Countless men are grateful to Jordan Peterson for having the courage to speak his mind on a contentious social matter. This temporal issue brought him many enemies, but his timeless messages earned followers that vastly outnumber them. The sheer numbers testify that he is the right man at the right time, someone capable of showing young men that cleaning up their room has cosmic significance, and that imposing a little order upon chaos is good for the soul, which in turn is good for the world."

": Danny: You don't have to tell me. I was under the impression- I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?"

": Jordan: No, you were invited... to..."

": Jordan: I could be either of them. But I don't have to tell you."

": Danny: I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You're probably in the wrong YouTube video."

": Jordan: Don't be a smartass. [crosstalk] (I won't talk to you if you're a smartass.)"

": Danny: (Well, either you're a Christian or you're not.) Either you're a Christian or you're not. Which one is it?"

": Danny: You don't know where you are right now."

": Jordan: You say that. I haven't claimed that."

": Danny: Well what is this? Is this "Christians vs. Atheist"?"

": Danny Xia (from PhilTalk with Danny): Because you're a Christian."

": Jordan: I don't know."

"[First opening statement:] To read something you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and the level of paragraph, “Is this true? Are there counter-arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?” And I have to tell you, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence as The Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read. And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality. And I also understand that The Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument, but that notwithstanding I have some things to say about the authors psychologically. The first thing is that is doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with this particular fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And it doesn’t matter if they're your ideas or someone else’s ideas; they’re probably wrong. And even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all that they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what struck me about The Communist Manifesto was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking and this was the thinking of people who were not trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought; it appears to them like an object might appear in a room; the thought appears and they just accept it as true. They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking. And that's the real essence of critical thinking. And so that's what you try to teach people in university, to read a text and think about it critically—not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so what I tried to do when I was reading The Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff, and I'm going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order."

": Jordan Peterson: Why are you asking me that?"

": Jordan: You're really quite something, you are."

"You use the observation of your own capability to bear responsibility, to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite. You say, "Weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail!" And that's good enough."

"I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. You know, we have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group—there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent."

"You want to have a meaningful life? Everything you do matters. That's the definition of a meaningful life. But everything you do matters. So you're going to have to carry that with you."

"Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself."

"The motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life, and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment-filled rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end."