New Popehat Signal courtesy of Nigel Lew. Thanks, Nigel!
When I was about 11 a few other socially inept morally spavined twerps and I recorded fake radio shows on my primitive cassette tape machine. It was mostly fart jokes, inarticulate inside-baseball ridicule of people we didn't like, and snort-laughing.
I was born too soon. Apparently these days you can make thousands of dollars a month for that sort of thing.
Let me preface this with my biases: I hate everyone in this case. I hate their ethos. I hate their culture. I hate how they pollute American discourse. Based on a representative sample I hate their fans. They are the groin flop-sweat of wretched post-modernity, the web's genetic-cul-de-sac Morlocks gaping dumbly at the slimy shrill-voiced megaphones of the parties to this case.
Nevertheless, the case involves significant First Amendment issues, which may be resolved in a way that impairs everybody's rights unless the defendants have competent counsel, which these days is ruinously expensive. This is how rights are trammelled: when we don't defend them because the defendants at hand are loathsome. Therefore, I respectfully request assistance.
The case at hand involved "internet personality" George Ouzounian, known as "Maddox." Maddox has filed suit in New York state court, alleging a dog's breakfast of causes of action against defendants including other web personalities, their employers, web platform Patreon, one of Patreon's executives, and others. The heart of the case is a tiresome dispute amongst online "comics" who have various podcasts and publications. You can find (no doubt biased) backstories of the conflict places like here and here; they are every bit as incomprehensible and tedious as you would expect of obsessive chronicles of the drooling slap-fights of online trolls. The core of the complaint is the allegation that the defendants engaged in — or tolerated, or endorsed — a campaign of harassment against Maddox, a rival.
I don't claim that every act alleged in the complaint is protected by the First Amendment — I haven't done that thorough of an analysis. However, the complaint has many of the hallmarks of vexatious and frivolous litigation calculated to chill protected speech. It seeks to hold content providers liable for the loathsome online behavior of their fans. Even if some of the defendants' speech crosses the line into defamation (and I don't know whether it does), the complaint treats online satire, ridicule, and criticism as an undifferentiated mass, and unquestionably sweeps up a substantial amount of clearly protected speech. The complaint treats boycotts and calls for boycotts as actionable. It purports to hold Patreon and one of Patreon's executives liable for failure to kick the defendants off of the platform. It names one of the defendants' employers as a party, asserting that the employer is liable for the employee's obviously non-work-related dipshittery. It demands prior restraint on speech and court-mandated apologies, both of which are patently unconstitutional. These are all elements of bad-faith censorious litigation. If they are tolerated — even against utter turds like some of the defendants — they metastasize, become precedent, and can be used more freely against you and me and people everywhere.
As I often say in these Popehat Signal posts, even an utterly frivolous suit, shot through with clear indicia of bogosity, is cheap at easy to file but ruinously expensive to the vast majority of Americans to defend. That's how censorious thugs and litigation terrorists suppress speech — by leveraging a system that gives everyone, rich or poor, the right to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an adequate constitutional defense. The more they succeed, the more thugs will file suit.
One of the individual defendants, though employed, has a modest salary and is burdened by medical debt and has grave difficulty affording counsel. If you are a lawyer admitted in New York, please consider helping him, because we defend the First Amendment and everybody's rights when we defend the speech of vile people and push back against litigation abuse.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/22/popehat-signal-ugh-really-ok-everyone-has-a-right-to-free-speech/
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