This post was in response to this Medium article.
I need to explain the two types of rights and the confusion behind the rights in the First Amendment before I explain whose rights were violated at both of these locations.
A right falls into one of two categories: negative or positive. If a person wishes to coherently discuss rights, then they must understand the difference between the two categories. I’ll quote Chase Rachels from his book Spontaneous Order:
Many people believe everyone has a right to education; others contend that we have rights against such impositions. For the purpose of disentangling this philosophical mess, a review of positive and negative rights is in order. Positive rights essentially entail that one is entitled to a certain product, service, or environmental arrangement, i.e., that some other person must perform some activity in order to fulfill such rights. Conversely, negative rights refer to rights which an individual holds that entitle him to be free from certain actions. Put differently, negative rights entail that individuals may not justifiably engage in certain activities against others. In other words, positive rights require others tocommit certain acts whereas negative rights require them to refrain from particular behavior. Examples of positive rights may include a right to healthcare, education, or foo; a prime example of a negative right is the right to free speech.
I am not interested in justifying one category of right and showing the other as illegitimate in this piece (Hans Hoppe does precisely this with hisArgumentation Ethics); instead, my interest is to show that there was aggression, i.e. rights violation, committed at both locations if we define the rights in the First Amendment as most people define them.
As Rachels pointed out, the right to free speech is a negative right; it is unjustifiable to stop people from speaking, recording, photographing, etc. unless they initiate uninvited physical interference against another person’s property. Most Americans conceive the First Amendment rights as negative rights. Nobody, to my knowledge, thinks that they have the right to conscript another’s body or camera and use it to exercise their First Amendment rights; most think that they have the right to stop others from taking their cameras or assaulting them to stop them from talking or gathering peacefully.
Here are the First Amendment rights as they are generally conceived:
The right to practice a religion without physical interference, or the threat thereof.
The right to say what you wish to say, without endangering others, without physical interference, or the threat thereof.
The right to watch, read, listen, record, write, and make media without physical interference, or the threat thereof.
The right to non-violently gather in public places without physical interference, or the threat thereof.
I will leave out further detailed discussion that would complicate this reply, e.g. the First Amendment does not give any rights whatsoever and only restricts the Federal Government.
Let me start to discuss your post with all of what I have written in mind.
To be quite clear, the demonstrators and faculty member(s) blocking his view were being extremely rude and were asserting rights they didn’t have (they had no power to block him from a public space on a public campus)…The problem is that no one’s First Amendment rights were violated.
The crowd pushed him away from the protest. He was there peacefully until they ejected him. That is a violation of what most people consider the right of assembly, i.e., his First Amendment right of peaceful assembly was violated. Furthermore, somebody reached for his camera at one point in the confrontation, thus violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and to press.
Additionally, after his removal from the demonstration area a professor of Mizzou, Melissa Click, confronted the person filming. She said, and I quote, “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.” She clearly threatened the person recording. She said she needed “help,” implying she was going to physically remove the guy behind the camera. The second media guy had his First Amendment right of peaceful assembly violated too.
The First Amendment doesn’t mean you need to smile and play along if a reporter shoves a camera in your face.
That is correct, but as I showed they did not just simply block their faces or yell over him. They used coercion to remove him.
Concerning the protests at Rahm’s house, if nobody used violence or threat of violence against the media and just blocked their view, then no First Amendment rights were violated. However, Rahm had his rights violated that night of the protest.
None of the protestors were invitees, yet they gathered there. That is by definition trespass, and trespass is a rights violation.
If the rally was held on private property and the property owner allowed for the press to be restricted from going to certain places, then there was no rights violations. If the property owner had no knowledge of them being restricted and was fine with them being with the rally members yet the SS held them there, then yes there was rights violations. If the media was held there even if they wished to leave, then it was a rights violation.
The reason the media chooses to focus on college kids is because that is the only place we are seeing such outrage about opposing views and political intolerance in the country. There is a generation, my generation, that is extremely intolerant to the point of violence in some cases, as I just wrote about. So, no, it isn’t because they are young people and the media are old, senile people. It is because these 20 something year olds are acting like kindergarteners to opposing views. They are not only yelling and shouting, they are also getting in people’s faces and using physical force against peaceful people with dissenting views.
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