Should he chitchat by brook shaugnessy5/17/2023 ![]() What’s surprising to me is that anyone even takes arguments of this sort seriously to begin with. ![]() They care about winning their stuff and beating the other’s side stuff. Despite their pretensions to the contrary, conservatives, and most people in general for that matter, do not care about content-neutral procedural fairness. They support what Phil Robertson had to say, but oppose what the Dixie Chicks had to say. It is not mysterious why conservatives think the Phil Robertson disciplining is rights-infringing but think the Dixie Chicks disciplining was not. Herman Cain described the suspension as “crap” that is “out of control.” And on and on it goes. Sarah Palin also expressed dismay at the threat this poses to free speech, and called opponents of Phil Robertson intolerant haters. Bobby Jindal said the TV network’s disciplining ran counter to the free speech protections of the first amendment to the constitution. Strangely enough, conservatives found the economic disciplining of Phil Robertson to be a kind of unjust censorship that is antithetical to the spirit of free speech. So we have here a perfect analogue to the Dixie Chicks spectacle: a popular entertainer said something offensive and outrageous to many, and an economic actor punished him for doing so. ![]() The cable network that runs his hit television show responded to these comments by putting him on hiatus. Among other things, Robertson explained that blacks in the Jim Crow south were contented with American apartheid and that homosexuality is both sinful and utterly disgusting. Take the firestorm surrounding the comments "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson made to GQ this week. Their support for economically coercing the speech of popular entertainers is curiously contingent upon the content of the speech in question. This is all well and good except conservatives don’t actually believe this. That’s just the dialectic of freedom working itself out. ” For Bush and other conservative cheerleaders of the war, you can speak your mind all you want, but you should be subject to private economic disciplining if you say something unpopular. They can say what they want to say … they shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. President Bush himself said of the debacle: “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. Unsurprisingly, conservatives welcomed this effort to economically discipline political speech. Former fans gathered to burn previously-purchased CDs and even, in one media spectacle, crush them with a giant farm tractor. pulled them from circulation, with radio network giant Cumulus banning the Dixie Chicks from its more than 250 local stations. Their record sales plummeted, they fell down the Billboard charts and a full scale boycott swept through their largely right-wing country music fan base. ![]() When media reports about the concert got back to the United States, all hell broke loose. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Despite these currents, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks spoke out during a London show on the eve of the war, saying “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. ![]() In that month, presidential approval also shot over 70 percent, the highest it would be for the remainder of George W. Despite massive protests throughout the world, over 70 percent of Americans supported the invasion. In March of 2003, the drumbeat for war in Iraq had reached a fevered pitch. ![]()
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