Hate Crime Hoax Could Be Constitutionally Unprotected True Threat

By Eugene Volokh

 Photo from the indictment.

From today’s decision by Judge Regina M. Rodriguez (D. Colo.) in U.S. v. Bernard:

Colorado Springs, Colorado, held an election for mayor …. CANDIDATE 1 [Yemi Mobolade -EV] is black and CANDIDATE 2 [Wayne W. Williams -EV] is white…. Defendants supported CANDIDATE 1. The Indictment alleges that the Defendants devised a plan to help CANDIDATE 1 win the runoff election. In the early morning hours [three weeks before the election], the Defendants defaced a political sign with CANDIDATE 1’s name on it by using red spray paint to write the N-word on it. The Defendants then staged a burning cross in front of the sign and videotaped it.

Later that same day, the Defendants created a fake email account, posing as a concerned citizen, and sent the video, along with an email referring to hate crimes, to media outlets and CANDIDATE 1’s campaign. {The email described what was depicted in the video—”To my surprise and disgust it was a cross on fire in front of running candidate’s sign for Mayor. Looking past the flames I see it’s Yemi Mobalade’s sign with the word sprayed painted across in red ‘NIGGER’!” The email also included language regarding hate-crime tactics used to harass and intimidate candidates and voters in elections.} According to Defendant Bernard, Defendants’ actions were “specifically designed to generate voter outrage and support for a candidate” they actively backed….

Defendants were charged with conspiracy and with “using instrumentalities of interstate commerce to maliciously convey false information to intimidate someone by means of fire,” and the court rejected defendants’ motion to dismiss the charge:

For the government to succeed on [the intimidation] charge, it must prove that the communication in question was a true threat lying outside of First Amendment protection…. “The ‘true’ in [the term ‘true threat’] distinguishes what is at issue from jests, ‘[political] hyperbole,’ or other statements that when taken in context do not convey a real possibility that violence will follow (say, ‘I am going to kill you for showing up late’).” True threats instead “encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” [A true threat] “subject[s] individuals to ‘fear of violence’ and to the many kinds of ‘disruption that fear engenders.'” … [T]he mens rea required to prove a true threat is recklessness, meaning that “a speaker is aware that others could regard his statements as threatening violence and delivers them anyway.” …

Defendants argue that they did not intend to threaten CANDIDATE 1 but instead intended to support his campaign. Defendant Bernard argues that “the distribution of the video actively disavowed and condemned the cross burning: (1) Expressed outrage at the act; (2) Blamed political opponents; (3) Urged support for Candidate 1; and (4) sought to mobilize voters” and therefore the context of the communication was “political theater.” … [But t]he reference to hate crimes in the email indicates that the Defendants were aware that others who saw the video of the burning cross in front of the defaced political sign would, or should, view it as a threat or intimidation to CANDIDATE 1 and/or his supporters. It’s not clear that others who saw the video understood the context that was intended…. CANDIDATE 1 may testify at trial as to what the Defendants’ communication conveyed to him. A reasonable jury could find that Defendants meant their communication not as “political hyperbole” or “political theater” but rather as statements “convey[ing] a real possibility that violence will follow.”

In sum, the Court finds that this is not a case where the statements made by the Defendants were so clearly protected by the First Amendment that the Court can hold, as a matter of law, that they did not constitute a true threat. Instead, the Court finds that “whether a defendant’s statement is a true threat or mere political speech is a question for the jury.” Considering all of the relevant factors, the Court has little difficulty concluding that a reasonable juror could find that the Defendants’ comments were a true threat….

I never thought this would happen. It’s only 100 (mostly farmers) so far that have been approved, but it’s a start and a good example of “it’s the principle that counts.” Of course the usual refugee grifters (who are funded by the U.S. taxpayer), including HIAS, are pissed because they are White people and they are being fast-tracked compared to non-Whites.

In Finis Germania, the Holocaust towers — a cyclone drawing the ancestral soul of a people into its endless orbit. No other grief permitted equal voice. History bends beneath this singular force until Germany wears only the mask of eternal villainy. The masque of fairness shatters, revealing a face sculpted by accusation, by inherited sin. Sieferle traces this metamorphosis, a ritual where the testimony becomes the void, and where the black hole of one narrative silences all others.

May 8 has become the axis of this ritual. Each year, officials gather. Each year, the same phrases spoken. The same flowers placed. The same guilt renewed. The same blade gleams. The ceremony requires repetition. Without it, the structure could collapse. Without it, memory might awaken. Without it, new generations might remember the old songs. The machinery continues because it must. Because memory sleeps, yet memory also waits.

Germany: Defeat as Annihilation

May 8, Denazification, and the Ritual of Perpetual German Guilt

May 8 returns, as seasons return, yet shaped by steel and fire rather than wind or harvest. Once, across forests and rivers, the German realm breathed in rhythm with the land itself. Knights gathered beneath banners adorned with ancient sigils. Peasants planted beneath the gaze of cathedrals whose spires kissed the clouds. Poets summoned spirits older than crowns or borders. These voices forged a people. Their hands shaped stone, their minds shaped destiny. That song now meets silence. May 8 does not bring spring. It brings ritual, a rehearsal crafted by the directors of forgetting. Flowers cover graves whose names dissolve from memory. Politicians speak, repeating phrases polished by long habit. Yet beneath each phrase lies the blade.

The blade once struck soldiers. Now it strikes meaning. What fell in 1945 exceeded armies and borders. The collapse swept through language, through birthright, through the marrow of being itself. Rolf Peter Sieferle walked this desolation, lantern in hand. Finis Germania rose from this wandering. A book shaped as lament, shaped as resistance. Not for conquest. For remembrance. Remembrance carried through shattered streets where once children played beneath eagles carved in stone. The imprint of Königsberg’s libraries reduced to ash. Of Breslau’s families driven across frozen plains. Of Stettin’s traders watching their guild halls dissolve into foreign hands. Marches stretched for miles. Elderly men gripping rusted medals. Mothers clutching infants wrapped in threadbare coats. Children whose lullabies became the rumble of distant artillery. The blade spared few. Those who marched did so beneath foreign orders, through snow and hunger. Roads became graves. Names became numbers. Suffering became silence.

The victors named this progress. They named it justice. Yet each proclamation dripped heavy with anticipatory annihilation. Justice measured by tribunals where victors judged the vanquished. Justice blind to the corpses of those expelled from Silesia, from Pomerania, from East Prussia. Cattle cars once carried victims to camps. Now they carried Germans to exile. No plaques marked their journey. No memorials shaped from sorrow. The past was rewritten. History bent to serve a single purpose: perpetual guilt. Sieferle traced the machinery behind this bending. A machinery as precise as clockwork. A machinery named denazification. An operation that reached beyond punishing ideology. It reached towards annihilating legacy itself.

Symbols forbidden. Books burned or rewritten. Monuments removed or renamed. Veterans silenced. Scholars dismissed. Teachers replaced by those who followed the victors’ script. Children gathered in classrooms where maps excluded heritage. Lessons taught repentance alone. Heroes dismantled. Legends dissolved. The harvest, once sacred, reduced to supply chains. The oath, once sworn to kin and ancestor, reduced to bureaucratic approval. The Volk redefined as confessors without absolution. An inheritance of guilt wrapped in paper, bound by foreign decree. The cycle became eternal. Each generation required to repeat the confession. Each generation shaped to accept this burden.

Cities rose from debris yet rejected their own reflection. Dresden rebuilt with scars displayed as virtue. Königsberg renamed by conquerors, its essence sealed beneath Soviet monuments. Danzig’s gates opened beneath foreign flags. Victors built memorials for their sorrows. Other sorrows ignored. A hierarchy of grief enforced through law, through media, through silence. To mourn forbidden losses became dangerous. To recall forbidden stories became subversion. Sieferle named this transformation. A people severed from its past floats without direction. Without roots, survival becomes drift. Without heritage, survival becomes mimicry.

Continues at: https://substack.com/@eurosiberia