Is speech that promotes murder protected?

[LookingForward]

Is speech that promotes murder or harm to others protected?

 

[UnReconstructed]

no speech is protected unless you are armed

 

[iddo]

google cop killer lyrics

 

[Freedom 4 all]

google cop killer lyrics

I love how Ice-T does that song and yet also plays a violent douchebag cop on Law and Order.

 

[anaconda]

It certainly should be. It's the murder part that should be illegal.

 

[Bruno]

Is speech that promotes murder or harm to others protected?

curious as to why you are curious

 

[LookingForward]

Torn.

On the one hand, something just doesn’t seem right about defending speech that promotes murder or harm to others but on the other, free speech is essential to liberty.

 

[WaltM]

no speech is protected unless you are armed

ha!

 

[iddo]

On the one hand, something just doesn’t seem right about defending speech that promotes murder or harm to others but on the other, free speech is essential to liberty.

Here is how Noam Chomsky summarized it (link):
"It's extremely important to preserve freedom of speech, and not to grant the state the right to determine what is or isn't said. A sometimes conflicting right is privacy and protection against verbal or other forms of violence. Once the state is granted the right to prevent speech (writing, songs, etc.) that it claims might precipitate harm, we're on a very dangerous slope. That's why the Supreme Court, in 1969, finally reached the standard of protection of speech that was proposed during the Enlightenment (and I believe may be unique to the US): speech is protected until the point where it is part of imminent criminal acts. So if you and I go into a store to rob it, you have a gun, and I say "shoot," that's not protected speech. How far should it go? Very delicate questions, and my personal feeling is that one should err on the side of restricting state power, as a general rule."

 

[Rael]

Yes, it is protected as long as there is no immenient danger of you commiting a violent act.

"The denouement came in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). The case arose when a small group of Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio invited a television news station to film their rally. The handful of KKK members in attendance brandished rifles and firearms, made racist and anti-Semitic statements, and declared that they were going to march on Congress. The leader of the group was arrested and convicted under Ohio’s version of the California law that had been used in the 1927 Whitney case. The Court overruled Whitney, declaring that subsequent decisions, including inexplicably Dennis, “have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or regulate advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faclibrary/overview.aspx?id=11452

 

[LookingForward]

Thank you, Rael and iddo! Your answers were very helpful.

 

[iddo]

free speech is pretty much the only issue on which the supreme court endorsed a pure libertarian stance