By Rocky Normwell

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the transition from our beloved progressive president to being an alt-right extremist.

The pivot occurred during his third term in office when he delivered what came to be the fourth draft of his State of the Union Address. This horrendous pivot is the reason that the twenty-second amendment was passed. The twenty-second amendment states:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice

The fourth draft of FDR’s State of the Union Address, often called the Four Freedoms Speech, included the lines:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

This type of hate speech welcomes right-wing nut-jobs like Milo Yiannopoulos to say, The greatest threat to your future, the greatest risk to the American republic, is from the unprecedented assault on free speech committed by the media, Silicon Valley, politicians, Hollywood producers and the Academy.

Because speech is being weaponized, Free speech is Hate speech.

As Alex Wolf-Root said in a paragraph, free from cuss words, White supremacy and violent right-wing extremism is a far-too-real thing that infects all of society. We cannot continue to enable this violent ideology. We cannot fall into the trap of allowing any and all violent rhetoric due to some misguided allegiance to “real” or “free speech.” When speech is grounded in a denial of humanity or right to exist of others, it should not and cannot be tolerated.

We  are doing our best to eliminate the legacy of January 6 at Cornell.

According to the guide entitled, Sorting Through the Bigots’ Bag of Tricks put out by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, [t]hey use free speech as a cover for white supremacy. Because their bigotry is legally protected, they maintain it’s patriotic. They don’t care about the First Amendment – their goal is to promote a hateful political agenda.

According to FDR, the first freedom is the freedom of speech and expression, the second freedom is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, the third freedom is the freedom from want, and the fourth freedom is freedom from fear—which means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.

Since words are violence and words are armaments, the presence of the fourth freedom nullifies the first freedom, and since there is no God, we are left with the last two—and—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!