Mike Davis

I hope this becomes a referendum on the First Amendment.

I hope so.

That's what the left wants to make it, because they think that the facts are on their side.

They're not.

This is a little bit of a hobby horse of mine.

I wrote a whole book called Speechless about the limits of the First Amendment in our free speech tradition.

A lot of people who are going out blocking traffic, obstructing law enforcement, driving SUVs into cops, they think that all of that activity is protected by some right to protest.

It is not.

That's nowhere in the First Amendment.

That's nowhere in our legal tradition.

We have the right to peaceably assemble.

We have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That's why we have to do so in an orderly way.

There are licenses that you have to, permits that you have to,

That's what it's for, and all of that is protected.

When it comes to journalism, when it comes to freedom of speech, we have broad freedom of speech in the country, but there's a lot of speech that's not protected.

Speech like obscenity, speech like direct threats, speech like fighting words, and so on.

You cannot...

use free speech as a justification to commit additional crimes.

You cannot claim that your status as a journalist, whatever that means in the era of the citizen journalist and of the new media, gives you some kind of blanket immunity to break the law.