Out for a bike ride, Juli Briskman gave the president of the United States the bird. A picture of the vulgar Virginia woman subsequently went viral, and the 50-year-old mother of two lost her job.
Good.
At least according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, the First Amendment protects giving government officials the middle finger (presumably that includes the president). That doesn’t make it any less stupid, and it doesn’t make private punishments any less appropriate. One would think Briskman would know better. Then again, nobody really seems to anymore.
Both the Left and the Right have made libertarian exuberance into such a virtue that they’ve sanctioned libertine excess. Wondering whether they could do it, everyone forgot to ask whether they should.
What Briskman expressed on two wheels and while wearing gym clothes, conservatives have been displaying on Twitter and the college campus for years. Provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos insulted and irritated their way to fame, collecting YouTube videos of triggered students like scalps. Winning an argument didn’t matter as much as lobbing jarring insults to get a rise out of the other side and to virtue signal to the like-minded.
But that’s not an argument. It’s a performance. And although still constitutionally defended free expression, flipping off the leader of the free world and triggering a social justice warrior are both actions that can carry practical consequences.
Somewhere along the line, some on the far-right adopted the positive rights ideology of the Left. Americans have a right to free speech, their argument seems to go, so everyone must accept what they say. Anything other than affirmation is unacceptable.
That was the reaction of Briskman when she found out her employer, government contractor Akima LLC, decided to censure her by firing her. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’” And the newly unemployed martyr is bitter. All she did was plaster the image of herself across the internet. She’s mad that another employee who called an interlocutor on Facebook “a fucking libtard asshole” was able to keep his job.
“How is that any less ‘obscene’ than me flipping off the president?” she asked Huff Po. “How is that fair?” But just like facts don’t care about your feelings, private entities don’t care about your First Amendment rights. The Left and the Right should learn that lesson.
