Matt Walsh

If you go out in public and yell and scream psychotically and someone says that they disapprove of your conduct, it wouldn't make any sense to reply.

But I wasn't engaging in conduct.

I was only engaging in speech.

Speech is conduct.

And, you know, under Ketanji Brown Jackson's understanding, all speech could be banned as a kind of conduct.

But if you have an IQ above room temperature, then you understand how absurd this is.

There needs to be some limiting principle.

And as luck would have it, over the past 50 years, courts have established exactly what these limiting principles are.

And those limiting principles in general go like this.

Whenever the government wants to ban speech,

It cannot discriminate against a particular viewpoint while allowing others.

Additionally, the government can't ban speech at all unless it's closely related to some kind of unlawful conduct beyond the speech itself.

So, for example, if the government passes a law that says no one can participate in a loud protest in the suburbs after midnight,

That's obviously completely fine.

The government is not discriminating against any particular viewpoint.

Instead, they're shutting down all expressions of viewpoints in that form at that time in that context.

They're doing it for a very important reason.

A protest after 3 a.m.

in the suburbs is very closely related to the separate crime of disorderly conduct, protesting without a permit, and so on.

So in that case, someone could be prosecuted for creating a disturbance.