Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables. Today is veteran’s day so please take a moment to reflect on the great sacrifice of those who served our country and most of all, those who died for it.

Hate Speech Laws Do Not Protect Democracy—They Threaten It

Via American Greatness

The First Amendment protects “hate speech.” So why do so many powerful figures want to criminalize this protected speech? Because this supposed menace threatens their political agenda.

Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by MSNBC analyst Richard Stengel arguing for a ban on hate speech. Stengel, a former Obama Administration staffer and Time magazine editor, said he began questioning the legality of hate speech when Arab diplomats expressed offense that Americans could burn Korans. To any normal American, the thought of an American diplomat taking ideas from Arab authoritarians sounds alarming, but Stengel lacks the self-awareness to realize that.

Stengel’s position leads him to adopt an excruciatingly dumb standard on free speech. “Yes, the First Amendment protects the ‘thought that we hate,’ but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another,” he writes. “In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.”

What’s the difference between the “thought we hate” and hate speech? Stengel doesn’t adequately explain, which further exposes his bad argument.

The Obama Administration veteran implies that speech should only be protected for the “good guys,” not the “bad guys” like Russian bots that, he seems to believe, can sway a presidential election with a handful of memes. He says the First Amendment is out of date because it doesn’t give liberal bureaucrats the power to determine what speech “threatens democracy” and undermines “tolerance.” He mentions that we do have laws against speech that explicitly incites violence and he feels we should broaden even that standard to include speech he deems less than “tolerant.”

Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn’t that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law? Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?

He concludes his op-ed with this Orwellian statement: “All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Why the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Craze Quickly Morphed into Black Shaming

Via Yahoo Lifestyle (GQ)

In celebrations about fast food, folks frequently focus on black people’s perceived relationship with fried chicken over analysis of systemic segregation—a recent New York Times article “Popeyes Sandwich Strikes a Chord for African-Americans” cited statistics on how much fried chicken black people buy and remarked that Popeye’s “celebrated sandwich tastes like something that could have come from a black home kitchen.” But this heavy emphasis on African Americans’ connection to fried chicken easily winds itself to offensive clichés. On Tuesday, Ja Rule berated black people for “acting like some niggas” over a “wack-ass chicken sandwich.” The rapper said that “ANYBODY that thinks we as a ppl are not EMBARRASSING ourselves over this wack ass chicken sandwich YOU ARE THE PROBLEM” and also ripped that Popeyes would soon be serving “a free piece of watermelon and a 32-ounce cup of Kool-aid” as a complimentary side.

The typecast of black people holding a preternatural affection for watermelon stretches back to the Civil War era, when freed slaves farmed the fruit to support their new found freedom. Yes, Ja Rule nakedly invoked tropes about black people’s eating habits. And whatever the intention of critics like Ja Rule, when amateur pundits connect deviant social behavior, black people, and fried chicken, they compound and amplify deep-seated racial stereotypes. Whether John McWhorter stigmatizing Zora Neale Hurston’s chicken dinners as part and parcel to a legacy of black people preferring not to eat healthy foods, or Barack Obama chastising black fathers for feeding their children a “cold Popeyes” breakfast, the habit of fetishizing and pathologizing what black people put in their mouth is American tradition—and it is most certainly at work in the racialized Popeyes media frenzy.

The discomfiting news narratives abounded even before coverage amounted to gawking at black people chewing chicken. When the sandwich initially dropped last summer, the imagery of long lines of black folks congregated in public spaces pushed celebrities like Janelle Monáe and Cynthia Erivo to tweet that voting booths should be retrofitted with Popeye’s chicken sandwiches to increase black electoral participation.

Read the entire article HERE.

Lawyer describes altercation before customer body-slammed at Tennessee Popeye’s

Via The Tennessean

A 55-year-old woman remains hospitalized at Vanderbilt University Medical Center with nine fractures in her elbow, six broken ribs and a broken left leg after an assault in the parking lot of Popeye’s Louisiana Chicken restaurant in Columbia, Tenn., that was captured in a now-viral video.

Popeye’s employee Deriance Ra’Shaiel Hughes, 29, was arrested Friday and charged with felony aggravated assault, according to Columbia Police. The incident occurred Tuesday, police said.

The video shows a woman walking out of the restaurant. A man wearing a red Popeye’s uniform shirt follows quickly behind her, with several other people behind him.

Before the woman steps off the sidewalk, the man later identified by police as Hughes grabs her waist from behind, lifts her up and body slams her onto the asphalt. On the audio, the man can then be heard screaming repeatedly as he stands over her while the woman moans.

My client was called ‘an ugly broke-down cracker,’ ” he said. A video of the incident circulating on social media does not capture this exchange. “If she said something she should not have said in retaliation and the heat of the moment we do not condone that and she regrets that, but it does not give someone the right to break somebody’s body almost in half.”

McElhaney said that after the woman was assaulted, as employees and others milled about in the parking lot, “nobody helped her. Nobody. Finally someone called an ambulance.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Bad News from HuffPost: Thanksgiving Is Bad for the Planet, or Something

Via Townhall.com

The things you enjoy are problematic and need fixing — that’s the message from our self-appointed, left-wing minders, whose scolding lectures never end. In a column this week at HuffPost, a writer describes the “damage” inflicted by Americans’ Thanksgiving travel and eating habits. The suggested solution? Eliminate the turkey, and perhaps skip meeting up with loved ones who don’t live locally. Finger, wagged:

After a windup about climate change and the Paris accord, the piece identifies the “culprits:”

How much damage are we doing with our epic Thanksgiving meal every year? We spoke with three researchers to find out more about Thanksgiving’s carbon footprint. It turns out that your food isn’t the biggest holiday culprit of carbon dioxide emissions — traveling for the meal is. No one should be discouraged from enjoying the holiday or celebrating with family and friends, but…

But…here are the bad things about your Thanksgiving fun, which are harming our planet:

Meat and meat byproducts (cheese, butter and heavy cream, for example) have a larger environmental footprint than plant-based ingredients. According to research done by Carnegie Mellon University, the carbon footprint of a 16-pound turkey creates a total of 34.2 pounds of CO2 — the same amount produced by turkey gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits and apple pie combined…The biggest carbon impact is caused by people, not food, traveling extensive distances. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon determined that four people flying a 600-mile trip produces 10 times the emissions of the Thanksgiving meal. Driving is less detrimental, but American cars emit close to a pound of CO2 per mile driven. Orchi Banerjee, a recent graduate of the department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon, said, “It may help the environment if [your guests] stayed home and cooked their own meal.”

Your enlightened and responsible Thanksgiving should probably exclude meat, butter, and travel. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Read the entire article HERE.

Giant Greta Thunberg mural to watch over San Francisco’s downtown

Via The Guardian

San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its eco-consciousness, will soon have a giant likeness of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg gazing upon its downtown, reminding residents to respect the planet.

The Argentinian muralist Andres Iglesias, who signs his art with the pseudonym Cobre, is expected to complete the project in the central Union Square neighborhood by next week, SFGate reported. Cobre also painted a revered mural of the comedian Robin Williams that has since been demolished.

“Climate change is real,” Cobre told SFGate. “This girl Greta is awesome and she knows what she’s doing. I hope with this mural people will realize we have to take care of the world.”

The environmental not-for-profit group One Atmosphere reportedly reached out to Cobre after the mural of Williams was slated to come down and just as Cobre was searching for a building for his next project. The organization is said to be supplying all the paint for the project.

Read the entire article HERE.

ABC News Claims Story On Epstein Was Accidentally Thrown Out Then Shredded Into Tiny Pieces And Incinerated

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

NEW YORK, NY—An ABC News spokesperson claims the story on Epstein they sat on for three years was accidentally tossed out with some old paperwork, then shredded into tiny pieces, and then finally incinerated into a pile of ash.

“There was some kind of mix-up with the papers,” said one man standing out by ABC News’s official incinerator. “A janitor must have tossed it out while he was cleaning. Then, I guess it got fed through a paper shredder somehow, fed through a second paper shredder by mistake, and finally incinerated at 4,000 degrees.”

“These kinds of things just happen sometimes, you know,” he added, shrugging.

Station representatives also believe the pile of ashes was then pulled out of the trash, stuffed into a briefcase, set inside a block of solid concrete, and dropped off the end of the docks near a seedy warehouse.

ABC News assured everyone the janitor has been fired, his mop has been confiscated, and he’s been tossed outside like a bag of moldy tangerines.

Check out all of the Bee’s hilarious takes on politics and culture HERE.

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