Seattle-Area City Will Pay Over $1.5 Million to Former Police Chief Disciplined for Displaying Nazi Insignia
Shane Trejo
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Former Kent Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell will soon be $1.5 million dollars richer after reaching an agreement with the Seattle-area suburb after he was disciplined over displaying Nazi imagery on his office door on the job.
Kammerzell reportedly put Nazi rank insignia on his door and joked about the Holocaust while on the job. This resulted in the city of Kent initially punishing him with two weeks of unpaid leave, but outrage built and Mayor Dana Ralph then placed Kammerzell on paid administrative leave while pushing for his resignation.
Because Mayor Ralph punished Kammerzell a second time, he and his attorneys disputed the legality of the mayor’s decision, and the matter seemed to be headed for court. However, interim city Chief Administrative Officer and city attorney Arthur “Pat” Fitzpatrick said that the matter has been resolved after the city agreed to pay $1,520,000 to Kammerzell, who has officially agreed to resign.
While Kammerzell’s display may have been uncalled for, this settlement is good news for free speech. Controversial speech has been under attack by the organized Left that wants to replace the 1st Amendment with hate-speech laws that can be used to target their opposition and stifle dissent.
Big League Politics has reported on the coordinated assault on free speech coming from the Left at every level:
“In another showing of proof that the fake news is in fact the enemy of the people, the New York Times Magazine has published an article arguing that the biggest threat to free speech…is free speech itself.
Feminist author Emily Bazelon believes that government and corporate censorship must be used to save free speech, and she made her case very poorly in an op/ed riddled with Orwellian doublespeak.
“It’s an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech,” Bazelon wrote, effectively arguing for an end to the Bill of Rights.
“They think our formulations are simplistic — and especially inadequate for our era. Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes. But in the United States and other democracies, there is a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news and science. It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract,” she wrote, using left-wing blather to justify shredding the U.S. Constitution.
Bazelon is arguing that since freedom of speech allows people like Trump and his supporters to speak freely, it must be sharply curtailed. This way, her liberal agenda can be protected from any dissent or challenge that is allowed under the evil 1st Amendment (which, after all, was written by slave owners!).
“This concern spans the ideological spectrum. Along with disinformation campaigns, there is the separate problem of “troll armies” — a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots — that “aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again,” Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor at Harvard, writes in an essay in “The Perilous Public Square,” a book edited by David E. Pozen that was published this year,” she wrote.”
This settlement is a victory for free speech. Controversial speech must be defended; it is part of America’s valiant history of liberty to do so.
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