Freedom Of Speech And The Case Of The Homicidal Hoagie – CleanTechnica

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If you were to collect all the court cases that deal with the right of free speech as contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, they would fill dozens of volumes — maybe even hundreds. The fact that it is set forth in the First Amendment suggests the people who wrote it thought it was pretty damned important. Some of those cases have found that conduct can be protected speech, such as gesticulating with various hand gestures to other drivers to show you have a low opinion of their driving skills.

Last week, the alleged president had a brain fart that induced him to send federal troops to Washington, DC, ostensibly to curb an alleged crime wave in the US Capitol. That action rubbed one man, Charles Dunn, the wrong way. On August 10, 2025, Dunn decided to exercise his right of free speech by hurling epithets at several of the federal agents. According to The Guardian, authorities claim that Dunn pointed his finger in an officer’s face and yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,” before “winding his arm back and forcefully throwing sub-style sandwich” at an officer. A video of the incident is below.

[A hoagie, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is a sandwich such as you might get from Subway or Jersey Mike’s. It is often called a sub because it resembles a submarine in appearance, unless you find yourself in certain parts of southern New England, where it is known as a grinder — for reasons now lost in the mists of history.]

Actions As Speech

US Attorney General Pam Bondi is having none of such boorish behavior. She quickly saw to it that Dunn was charged with a felony — hurling a hoagie that bounced off the bullet proof vest worn by one of the officers. Bondi snarled, “If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you. I just learned that this defendant worked at the Department of Justice — NO LONGER. Not only is he FIRED, he has been charged with a felony. This is an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ. You will NOT work in this administration while disrespecting our government and law enforcement.”

Good gracious, Pammy, take a breath, will ya? Should Dunn have thrown a sandwich at the officer? Of course not. That was stupid. But to conflate his action with the “Deep State” is just ridiculous and an example of the hysteria that is the hallmark of this failed administration. Because of his lapse of judgement, this misguided individual is now unemployed with no way to pay his rent or mortgage. Any assets he may have will soon go to pay an attorney, and if Bondi has her way, he will spend years in solitary confinement at a Supermax prison, surrounded by the hardest of hard cases.

To say Dunn regrets ever buying that hoagie is probably a gross understatement. But what of the officers’ reaction? Was it proportional to the offense? Law enforcement officers have a hard job. They have to deal with criminals, sure, but they also have to deal with people under extreme physical and emotional stress. I am not a psychologist, nor have I ever played one on TV, but it seems pretty clear from the video that Dunn was having a very bad day. Yet the response of the federal agents seems to be out of all proportion to the offense of hurling a homicidal hoagie in their direction.

MAGA Mind Virus

For those who may not know, Bondi is a poster child for the kind of MAGA mind virus that has swept the nation, a point of view that allows people like the so-called Vice President to allege with a straight face that Haitians are eating the pets of people in Springfield, Ohio. It allows a sitting president to claim without proof that Washington, DC, and Los Angeles are crime ridden cities when in fact the evidence clearly shows that crime in both places is at or near a 30-year low.

Bondi first ran for attorney general in the state of Florida in 2010, where her nomination was boosted by an endorsement by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Faux News personality Sean Hannity. According to Wikipedia, she was the lead attorney in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the Affordable Care Act. She also has a history of opposing same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights. In other words, she is MAGA through and through, which raises an interesting point.

MAGA is all about outrage. The putative president spends every waking hour talking about how persecuted he is. Faux News is based on feeding the sense of outrage over the fact that white males in America have to share the country with others. Rupert Murdoch has shown there are fortunes to be made by peddling hatred by some human beings against other human beings, which leads to this question: Why is there no corresponding media presence for progressives?

Emotion Sells

The answer can be found in understanding the first principle of sales, which is that people buy on emotion and justify their decisions later with facts. Rush Limbaugh, Faux News, Truth Social, The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, and their ilk all are selling emotion. Facts and rational thought are nowhere to be found. But the lifeblood of all such enterprises is advertising dollars. Advertisers only count “eyeballs” — how many people are seeing the ads they pay for. In the battle between emotion and facts, emotion is the clear winner.

Progressives focus on facts — how many cubic yards of glaciers are melting every day, how many square miles of forest have burned since yesterday, what the level of carbon dioxide is at the Mauna Loa Observatory, how many people are covered by Medicaid at any given time. Advertisers won’t pay to promote such cerebral pronouncements that rely on reason.

Free speech means progressives can talk about their product all they want, but no one will pay the slightest attention if their message is stripped of all emotion. In the battle for the hearts and minds of America, progressives are losing primarily because the people who choose to speak for them are old. Now don’t get me wrong. I am old — old enough to know that if I were the spokesperson for progressive causes on digital platforms, most viewers would dismiss what I have to say out of hand.

Who wants to listen to what Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton, or Oprah have to say? Those people are old. Compared to the bright faces on Faux News, they are ancient. No wonder people fall asleep when they speak. Marshall McLuhan told us “the medium is the message,” and today the medium is visual. It is visceral.  And until progressives figure out how to leverage platforms that are visual and visceral, they will continue to lose.

Fairly Unbalanced

Walter Cronkite was a giant in the news business 50 years ago. His opinions shaped the national conversation. When he came out against the Vietnam War, Nixon’s advisers knew the game was over. “If we have lost Cronkite, we have lost the nation,” they told the president. Today, Cronkite couldn’t get a job as a newsman at a small town newspaper.

Reason and rationality are so yesterday. The turning point for Al Gore was not whether he wore a warm and fuzzy sweater, it was the gangs of disruptive people the Republicans flew to Florida from all around the country to wave their preprinted “Sore Loserman” signs and scream about stealing votes. Hillary didn’t lose because of her emails; she lost because the producers of the debates allowed the Republican challenger to wander into her space and glower at her, an image that showed Clinton as powerless and unable to control the situation.

Democrats spend more time destroying their own than trying to win elections. They demonize AOC and her peers as “the squad” and are outraged that a Muslim is their leading candidate for mayor of New York City. Until they find a message that resonates with people — and learn to sell their product — they will continue to lose election after election. Free speech may be free, but to get your message across, you need to attract “eyeballs.” The reactionaries have learned how to do that very well. Progressives think they are still back in the Tammany Hall era, when voters did what the party told them to.

America needs progressive voices, not party bosses. Losing is becoming a habit. It’s time for them to learn how to sell themselves to voters or risk becoming completely irrelevant. Irrelevancy is the one thing the quest for a sustainable Earth cannot withstand.