(CNN) With coup label, Capitol rioters join communist party in plotting against USA, university project says. Quoting,
The Coup D’etat Project, an initiative of the University of Illinois’ Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, has determined the insurrection that unfolded at the Capitol on January 6 fits its definition of an attempted dissident coup.
The only other American entry in its global database is placed in 1948, in which members of Communist Party USA conspired to violently overthrow the government. They talked about it in their living rooms, and wrote plans.
This is a ludicrous comparison. The 1948 “coup attempt” survives in the public record only from the trials of 11 members of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders, between 1949 and 1958. According to specific criteria of the Coup D’etat Project, this results in a single line in their .xls spreadsheet.
You may despise communism, as I do. But Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black explains the difference in his dissent opinion for a 1951 Smith trial, Dennis v. United States:
These petitioners were not charged with an attempt to overthrow the Government. They were not charged with overt acts of any kind designed to overthrow the Government. They were not even charged with saying anything or writing anything designed to overthrow the Government. The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date: The indictment is that they conspired to organize the Communist Party and to use speech or newspapers and other publications in the future to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government. No matter how it is worded, this is a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press…
In the immediate postwar period, in the U.S. government as in Britain, there was a significant presence of Soviet moles. This sensitized Hoover’s FBI to the negligible threat of visible, self-identified communists who did share a vision of revolution. To put into perspective the efficiency with which the FBI nullified the CPUSA, from 1957-1977, the party paymaster, Morris Childs, was an agent for the FBI.
What benefit derives from comparison with the sacking of the Capitol, while advocating murder with weapons in hand, egged on by a sitting POTUS? If you’re running an academic project, which is not without value, it gets you news coverage for the wrong reason.
The most powerful fact was ignored: The Capitol Insurrection was powered by hate speech which incited violence. In the Free World, the U.S. is the only country that constitutionally protects hate speech.
Is hate speech now an unaffordable luxury, or can doctoring social media diminish the now rampant forces of hate?