The Democrats have now spent two generations explaining that the true threat to free speech resides on the religious right,

those fascistic John Lithgow from Footloose types, who just can't wait to smash their Bibles in the faces of those who only want to read their lesbian pornography magazines.

In reality, there is only one side of the American political debate fully committed to destroying the First Amendment, the left.

On Thursday, former head of the Democratic National Committee and former Vermont Governor Howard

Dean tweeted this, quote, hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Uh, new.

This is ignorance of the highest order.

Of course, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.

There are only a few categories of speech that aren't protected by the First Amendment,

so-called fighting words, specific and deliberate calls to violence, child pornography, defamation, but there is no category of hate speech here for a simple reason. What you deem hate speech may be political speech you just don't like. In Canada, for example, the law has forced commentators like Mark Stein into court for criticizing Islam. This is a violation of freedom, and the First Amendment doesn't contemplate it. Using hate speech as a rubric for political speech you don't like is tyranny of thought. Dean's tweet came in response to a tweet from Stephen Greenhouse of the New York Times regarding Berkeley canceling a speech from commentator Ann Coulter. It said free speech defenders don't forget. Ann Colter once said, my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building. This may be dumb speech. It may be a bad joke. It may be offensive and nasty and terrible. It is also protected, as anyone with a modicum of First Amendment understanding knows. But the Democrats have long wanted to gut the First Amendment. They want to prohibit political spending from their opponents.

They want to prohibit people from using biologically correct pronouns to describe transgender people.

They want to ban hate speech.

They hate the First Amendment because they see its protections as incompatible with the collective good,

the collective good protecting non-offensive speech only.

This is why we have a Constitution.

It's why we have a First Amendment. And it's why Democrats certainly can't be trusted with protecting either of them. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. Okay, so we have a lot to get to today. You should subscribe right now over at Daily Wire, because if you subscribe right now at Daily Wire, then you can be part of the mailbag. We will be doing live mailbag questions today on the special Friday edition of the Ben Shapiro show. I don't know if I get to call it a special Friday edition given the fact that I took two days off this week, but in any case we will and pretend that we're giving you some sort of favor. But I want to talk at length today about a video that's going around on Facebook that has made all sorts of waves. And this is this video of

Neil deGrasse Tyson. He calls it the most I want to talk at length today about a video that's going around on Facebook that has made all sorts of waves.

And this is this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

He calls it the most important video that he has ever done.

And this video is about four minutes and 30 seconds.

We're going to watch the whole thing, but we're going to break it up and we're going to talk about it.

The thing has 17 million views on Facebook as of now. It's probably approaching 18

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