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The Political Orphanage

Popehat: Speech That Gets You Tossed in Prison - Featuring: Ken White

The Political Orphanage

Andrew Heaton

Politics, Comedy, News

4.91000 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2019

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ken White is a First Amendment litigator, lawblogger at Popehat.com, and the hilarious Twitter personality Popehat. He joins Heaton to talk about Free Speech: what's legally protected and what will prompt the cops to come knocking? How do public decency laws work? 

Interview at 5:30

Season 2, Ep 21

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the political orphanage. Are you one of those weird people who still has friends you disagree with?

0:15.0

Maybe you're some kind of political mutant who doesn't neatly fit into a box.

0:19.0

Or, you're an actual orphan, and you enjoy reading the week. If so, welcome home.

0:26.0

I'm Andrew Heaton and I have the strongest hands in this whole county.

0:31.0

On today's show, Mr. Ken White, one of the top First Amendment

0:34.5

attorneys in the country and known to the masses as Pope Hat on Twitter,

0:39.2

joins me for an awesome discussion about free speech and the First Amendment.

0:43.4

So if you've been thinking about putting controversial messages on billboards or

0:47.9

broadcasting soft-core pornography on a public access channel, we're going into a crowded movie theater and shouting,

0:55.0

Lion! There's a m'in'

0:58.0

lion in here! There's not a fire. There's no fire.

1:01.0

But there is a lion.

1:03.0

Then this is the episode where you find out if you go to prison or not.

1:07.0

This is an awesome discussion about free speech law.

1:11.0

For example, if you walk down a street naked, are you exercising freedom

1:16.4

of expression? Can a town order you by law to put on clothes or is it constitutionally protected particularly if you're very

1:25.0

handsome and in great shape like me. It turns out there are specific bright lines

1:29.7

which govern when a community can employ public decency laws.

1:33.0

And by the end of this episode, you're going to know them.

1:35.0

More importantly, what's the division between protected speech, if it's racist or nasty,

1:41.0

and incendiary speech urging people to be violent. We're going to have a

1:45.1

primer on the First Amendment and its application and it's fascinating and you

...

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