John Oliver's Explanation of the First Amendment is a Must Read for Every Dumbass Troll On the Internet

By Dustin Rowles | Videos | April 27, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | Videos | April 27, 2015 |

One of the very favorite canards of the Internet troll is to fall back on the protections of the First Amendment, as in, “Banning me from your website so that I can’t spew the raving lunacies of the Men’s Rights Movement is a violation of my Freedom of Speech!”

No it’s not, you dumbass. The First Amendment allows you to say any moronic thing you want, just as it allows us to tell you to fuck right off to the YouTube comments section where you belong.

The failure to understand simple First Amendment rights is one of my biggest pet peeves, and in a segment on Dr. Oz last night on This Week Tonight, John Oliver explained, once again, how the First Amendment works when Dr. Oz ignorantly claimed that his critics were trying to silence him in abrogation of his Freedom of Speech rights.

No.

“Let’s be clear. The First Amendment protects Americans from government censorship, and that’s it. It does not guarantee you the right to simultaneously hold a faculty position at a prestigious private university and make misleading claims on a TV show. It absolutely protects your right to say whatever you want on it, just as it protects my right to say whatever I think about you on mine, which is this:

You are the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television, and I’m including Katherine Heigl in that. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be worse than Katherine Heigl? You are also the admittedly handsome ringleader of a mid-afternoon televised snake-oil dispensary, and it says something that, even when you do a show with seven fake models of human feces, the biggest piece of shit on stage has his name in the title. Isn’t Freedom of Speech great?!”

Perfect. Also perfect? Oliver’s description of Pizza Hut pizza:

“Just because some bread, tomatoes, and cheese got black out drunk and fucked each other in an abandoned dumpster doesn’t mean that you get to call the resulting abomination ‘pizza.’”