That Pesky First Amendment.
The author of this piece, Katie Mettler, starts with this:
There is a tool at the federal government’s disposal that was created in 1970 to take down mob bosses, mafia families and organized criminal enterprises — groups of people with a common ideology who made the United States less safe.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) allowed the FBI and the Justice Department to hold accountable not just the low-level henchmen doing the dirty work, but the leaders and organizers behind desks who were making plans and issuing directives.
Why free speech makes it difficult to prosecute white supremacy in America
OK, you want to apply RICO to whom? Who you decided in your expertise are White Supremacists? There is no hard definition of that and it is pretty much along the lines of “Everyone I Don’t Like Is Literally Hitler.”
“Today’s white supremacists adhere to both a tactic and folklore of leaderless resistance which glorifies lone actors or small cells that have tenuous ties to actual groups,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino. “RICO is not going to be a panacea for a terrorist threat that is increasingly dispersed.”
Federal authorities have used RICO many times to prosecute white prison gangs, but what got the members of organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood locked up under the statute was not the racism they believed but the acts they committed: crimes including drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping and money laundering.
And the same has been done to the Mafia, Irish Mobs, the Russian Bratva and MS-13.
But if they wanted to use RICO to hold accountable the collective ideology that radicalized the shooter, they would need to prove that there was an organized enterprise involved with that ideology, that there was a traceable criminal conspiracy to commit violence and that there was a leader or leaders who instructed others to cause harm.
Without that, the collective ideology is not a conspiracy but hate speech. And in the United States, hate speech is not criminal. It’s a right protected by the First Amendment.
Amazing how right protect all and not the selected ones, huh?
Even more challenging for those wishing to take on white extremism is the notion that much of what drives the ideology today occurs in leaderless, sometimes anonymous, corners of the Internet, where there is no clear hierarchy or organizational structure.
Like all the Islamic extremist, ISIS and other Muslim-based terrorist groups? The one that have mosques all over the US preaching hate for the West and death to Jews, but they cannot be touched?
And cue in token counterpoint:
Weaponizing RICO against groups for their ideology is concerning to Levin, who said he worries that it could be used “as a hammer on First Amendment dissenters as opposed to real criminal syndicates.”
“Our laudable desire to combat violent white supremacists might come back to harm us later if the law is used to punish peaceful dissent in grass-roots movements that may have some attenuated violent sliver,” Levin said.
And we have the Smart Person giving his studied conclusion in favor of destroying the Bill Of Rights:
But according to retired law professor G. Robert Blakey, who wrote the RICO statute and is considered the nation’s foremost authority on it, federal authorities should be using RICO to more rigorously investigate white extremist groups without violating free speech protections.
It wouldn’t be easy, he said, but there’s “no excuse” not to try.
It does not make sense to do a RICO investigation and arrest people if Freedom of Speech is involved and no court would be dumb enough to side with the Government, so why? The answer:
Those arrested on RICO charges were automatically denied bond, and sentences were harsher and longer.
And that is the point. They want the Federal Government to use RICO to bankrupt a shitload of folks and ruin their lives by spending time in jail while the government takes its sweet time delaying the court date filing motions. Anybody else hit with the tag of White Supremacist, will be warned to shut up or end up in a cell next to the first batch. Happen to believe that marriage and family should be based in one man and one woman? You must go to the RICO Gulag. Are you an NRA member and participate in matches? To the gulag next in the cell to the gallows to you and your White Supremacist friends! You put on a mariachi hat last Cinco de Mayo? Cultural appropriation! You are under arrest and your frat brothers too for allowing it.
You support the Bill of Right like millions of other people in the US? Shit, we are out of space in jails and prison. We may need to rent abandoned stadiums to warehouse all these White Supremacist, all these political “Untermensch “, these filthy Deplorables. Maybe a relocation camp or two. Is Manzanar in decent shape?
Winters: Will you ask him what kind of camp this is? What, why are they here?Liebgott: He says it’s a work camp for. . . .l’m not sure what the word means.-Unwanted, disliked, maybe?
Winters: Criminals?
Liebgott:l don’t think criminals, sir. No.
Doctors, musicians, tailors,
clerks, farmers, intellectuals.
l mean, normal people.
They’re Jews. Jews. Jews. Poles and Gypsies.
Band of Brothers – Why We Fight
And that is why we have a Second Amendment, Ladies and Gentlemen.
