Former Governor of Vermont and candidate for president continually insists hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. His tweet is here. Dean is wrong because there is no court ruling or law that bans hate speech in the United States.

My opinion is, if you don’t like what someone has to say, just don’t listen to them or — even easier — don’t show up to the event where someone you disagree with is speaking. Nobody is forcing you to listen. We would be better off as a country if we listened to each other and were able to have a conversation with someone with opposing views. We would probably find out that we all agree more than we disagree, and even if that is not the case, we would learn something new.

Dean should not be spreading these misinterpretations of the First Amendment, and I am glad most people are not coming to his defense. The Washington Post has a great article explaining why Dean is not correct in this case, written by a professor who teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, and church-state relations law at UCLA School of Law. The author, Eugene Volokh, writes about many court cases that have decided on issues regarding the First Amendment. He summarizes them by saying, “Universities may not exclude Ann Coulter based on her viewpoints on immigration or anything else. And even if they can impose viewpoint-neutral restrictions on what a speaker may say, they can’t exclude Coulter up front just because they think she’ll violate those restrictions.”

This is exactly right. In the United States, currently we cannot ban speech that we don’t like or are offended by. If Howard Dean would like to change the current state of the Constitution, he could work on drafting the 28th Amendment.

By Dean making such a big deal about this, it makes Coulter an even more well known person, because now she is the number one thing talked about in news in the short term. She did multiple interviews including with Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Coulter also went on The View, where every host, including ultra left leaning Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, came to her defense and said that Berkeley should have allowed her to speak.