“Right, right. People should not be allowed to criticize the government or protest the war,”
Just to interject an observation here, all the minutiae and arcanae and expostulating on what freedom of speech is or is not, tends to obscure the plainly-observable circumstance that consistently, those who seek to curb the free speech of others, are merely doing so because it might not be what their side wants said.
I grew up during the Vietnam war. The loudest denouncers of freedom of speech then, were waving the American flag and calling their drives to silence anti-war dissent “patriotism.” This was just another, earlier manifestation of political correctness, one which held that to openly oppose the war in southeast Asia or anything else about current foreign policy, was politically incorrect. Playing right into the hands of (wait for it) “the Russians” (!)
I really have to just discard and as much as ignore the legalistic and hifalutin contents of various arguments about what is or is not “shouting fire.” In doing so, it isn’t hard to see that shouting “fire!” is generally undertaken by those who don’t mind the theater burning down, or opposed by those who do, because of who is in it or what is playing on the stage.
