Prince Harry has been taking flak for calling the First Amendment “bonkers”.
Some Americans may be puzzled that a child of privilege who spent five years being educated at possibly the world’s greatest school, Eton, should have such difficulty understanding a concept as basic as freedom of speech.
But there’s a key point that his critics appear to be missing and it’s this: Prince Harry is quite exceptionally thick.
This thread on the subject by Ben Pile is harsh but true and well worth a read:
A Levels — for the benefit of U.S. readers — are exams you traditionally take in England in your last year of school, aged 18, after two years of study. At expensive private schools such as Eton, even the most stupid pupils would normally take three A levels, in vaguely academic subjects, and if they did a reasonable amount of work would probably scrape three Cs. (The top grade in those days was an A).
All Harry managed to scrape, however, was a D grade in that classic thicko’s subject, Geography, and a B in the completely non-academic subject of Art.
Prince Harry’s epic stupidity is probably inherited from his presumed father, the Prince of Wales.
Prince Charles, too, only got two A levels — a B in History and a C in French — yet somehow strings were pulled to land him a place at Cambridge University (normally it would have required something like three A grades at A Level, plus a decent performance in the entrance exam), where he scraped a lowly 2:2 in History.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being epically, fabulously, unbelievably stupid. Many upper-class men successfully make their brainlessness part of their comical charm.
Where stupidity becomes unattractive and culpable, though, is when it’s deployed to comment on issues far, far above its pay grade, and when it’s afforded undeserved prestige.
No one as thick as Harry, it’s surely a given, ought ever be allowed on to a public platform to pronounce on issues as vital as the protection of free speech.
Yet this is exactly what happened when Harry was given space to expound his half-baked views on a podcast.
Sure, Harry had the good grace to admit that he hadn’t a clue what he was talking about:
I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him declaring that he thought the First Amendment was “bonkers”.
His explanation as to why he thought so was a bit incoherent, but it seemed to involve his belief that it could be used for something bad called “ideology” and could be used as an excuse to “spread hate”.
He added: “Laws were created to protect people.”
What I’m guessing Harry was struggling to do was to try to wheel out the woke cliche that while free speech is fine, “hate speech” isn’t fine and should not enjoy constitutional protection.
This threadbare argument can be demolished in a second by anyone with more than two A Levels. Essentially if “free speech” laws don’t protect “hate speech” then they are not really free speech protection laws at all.
Like Prince Harry, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on U.S. history. But I do dimly recall that round about the second half of the 18th century America’s colonists successfully freed themselves from rule by one of Prince Harry’s ancestors. The U.S. Constitution — and that pesky First Amendment — was one of the consequences.
Obviously Harry wouldn’t know this: because of his A Levels he only knows where America is on a map, and maybe how to draw a picture of a hamburger. So presumably his resentment of the First Amendment isn’t based on anything rational or thought-through; merely it’s some kind of weird, atavistic sensation he feels in his bones and which tingles through his royal blood.
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