The “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment needs to be laid to rest once and for all.
The jury in the Shiloh Hendrix case was instructed that it could convict her if her words were “inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction or incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
But violence is never a reasonable reaction to offensive words, and you should not be held responsible for someone else’s inability to control their anger.
One of my most enduring ideas for a message to convey that I've never figured out how to put out there is basically this one: the saturation of our professional and political life with actors reading lines from scripts.
You've probably heard the theater expression "breaking the fourth wall." What it means is that the actors directly acknowledge either the audience or that they're in a dramatic production. The stage has three sides ("walls"), and the "fourth wall" refers to the invisible and psychological wall on the front of the stage that separates the drama from the watching audience. The idea is that the drama is happening in a contained little world that doesn't acknowledge the fact of its own dramatization or the audience watching it, except when it does.
In some performances -- and maybe you've experienced some like this -- there's an even more profound way of breaking the fourth wall, which is to make the drama immersive within the audience. Actors are placed like plants among the audience and at various times shout out, heckle, or even join the performance, thus revealing themselves to be actors. Sometimes this is made explicit. Sometimes it isn't.
In this situation, the "fourth wall" isn't broken but dissolved. The audience becomes part of the drama, and the drama is happening from what appears to be, but isn't, the audience. I'm not talking about audience participation here. I'm talking about performers embedded in the audience without the audience realizing it, playing a scripted role while looking like part of the crowd.
Taking this another step is, in fact, indicative of the world we live in now. This part is the message I have thought about almost every day for years and never figured out how I wanted to say it. That step is that there's no theater at all, but the immersive act with a dissolved fourth wall goes on all around us.
Imagine a situation where a nontrivial proportion of people in public life around us are actually actors playing scripted roles. Maybe they're politicians. Maybe they're pundits and influencers. Maybe they're journalists. Maybe they're actors playing actors. They're all actors, though, pretending to be politicians, professionals, pundits, influencers, journalists, and who-knows-what else.
It's not just that the fourth wall has been dissolved but that the entire theater has been dissolved. "All the world's a stage," wrote the Bard, but now taken literally. Some percentage of our entire political, professional, and information universe becomes a scripted act, and the real professional bodies in which they are embedded are the audience unaware, as are we, except we're subject to the performance in the literal political sense.
I think this is the world we live in now.
I think many of our politicians and professionals, and most of our influencers and pundits, are not those things at all. They're actors playing those roles, but not on a stage or on a show, but in real life.
As in the "dissolved fourth wall" immersive situation, we, the audience, not watching but living this performance, might sometimes be dimly aware that some parts of what's happening around us are planted parts of the show, but we're not always sure, or maybe we're never sure.
The difference is, there's no theater. The show doesn't end but just rolls into another act after another act after another act. You cannot get up and leave the performance, should you get bored, tired, or disgusted with it, because the performance is actually real life itself. There's nowhere to go, not because you're trapped, but because there's literally nowhere to go, at all.
This is the world I think we live in today and have lived in for some time now.
Once you become even dimly aware of it, it makes you want to scream. It makes you want to escape. It makes you want to shake your neighbors and tell them, but you know you'll sound like you've gone mad. And you will sound that way.
For those just below that level of dim awareness, no such good fortune is available. They slowly do go mad. They wonder if they're going crazy, and they are. They're inside the spell of the drama around them but think it's real.
Below that level of awareness, this is just business as usual, and everyone seems to be losing their minds over histrionic nothing.
And the situation presents an evil dilemma to those aware: play the game and become part of the scripted drama yourself, because it's the game and it can be played, or slowly boil in your own frustration at being unable to articulate with proof what you realize is going on all around you.
Most of these latter kinds do the most sensible thing they can. They scream for a while, realize the futility, and withdraw, which is the closest thing anyone can do to leaving the theater. They willfully submerge themselves to the level of the unwitting rubes, except they aren't unwitting; they've ceased caring. It is what it is.
I don't know what to call this state of affairs except to say it's "there is no fourth wall" like The Matrix or "where we're going, we don't need theater walls" like Back to the Future. I also don't know what to do about it.
I do think it's our reality, though.
I don't think we're ruled primarily by fools. I think we're ruled primarily by actors, all our world's a stage, and the production, frankly, SUCKS.
Glenn Beck:
It’s not enough to look at Iran and ask, “Why can’t we just make a deal and move on?”
That worked with North Korea. They wanted stability, prosperity, and feared death—just like us. Mutually Assured Destruction held.
It does not work against a religion that commands its followers to cleanse the world through maximum chaos… that treats martyrdom as a promotion… and that openly calls America the “Great Satan.”
The Iranian Marxists learned this the hard way in 1979. They thought they could negotiate and share power with the Twelvers to overthrow the Shah. The second the revolution succeeded and Khomeini took control, they were the first ones thrown off the roofs.
Until the public understands this history and worldview, we’ll keep asking why diplomacy fails.
Iran isn’t playing by Western rules of survival.
It’s playing to destroy the Great Satan.
Haitians TPS has expired. America is not a global refugee camp. America is not a get-rich-quick scheme for the third world.
America is our home.
And when house guests become squatters, you don’t delay enforcement. You call the Sheriff and you send them home.