I was reluctant to get into this because it seemed difficult enough just to identify what the Court did.
The judicial error here is that the consideration given to the First Amendment, which reads "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;", is very understated. The Court should have applied this as "State legislatures shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech".
Instead, the Court made up its own version of the First Amendment to apply to the states having exceptions for speech which encourages destruction of the state. If our Founders had wished such exceptions, they could have included them.
It's interesting that the wording of the "assumption" is as weak as it was. The legal world properly understood that the Court would have no business deciding this case without "incorporation" of freedom of speech", but the wording almost left the Court open to later reversing themselves by suggesting that they overstepped by taking the Gitlow case and that, in fact, there is no liberty to protect from state deprivation of due process.
There is a principle in law, I believe, which requires courts to tread as lightly as possible on existing precedent and law in their decisions, consistent with making the proper determination. This must have been a case when they decided that it would be absolutely incorrect for them to just refuse the case.
Someone more knowledgeable than I will need to tell us what decisions have been made up to the present time regarding freedom of speech. I think it may now include lap-dancing. This is probably far preferable to the situation in China. There the authorities are attempting to hold back the tide of the internet with a tennis racket.
The combination of cryptography with steganography ( hiding messages in random-appearing areas of digital pictures) will give the Chinese authorities big headaches and break their budgets with the computers they will have to install to control a billion people.
Free Speech! What a concept.
Exactly.
The USSC has a completely compromised brand of 'logic' by claiming that a State "must now protect your right to freedom of speech", but that it can, -- "forbid both speech and publication if they have a tendency to result in action dangerous to public security, even though such utterances create no clear and present danger." Protecting speech by forbidding it is an absolutely ludicrous concept.
In other words, let's keep the first amendment at the federal level where it was.
Are you saying that Congress cannot pass a statute (law) to prevent this type of "speech"? Why do you think that? The USSC wrote in Gitlow, "By enacting the present statute the State has determined, through its legislative body, that utterances advocating the overthrow of organized government by force, violence and unlawful means, are so inimical to the general welfare and involve such danger of substantive evil that they may be penalized in the exercise of its police power. That determination must be given great weight. Every presumption is to be indulged in favor of the validity of the statute."
If the USSC ruled that a state could write such a statute, why do you think they wouldn't have allowed Congress to write one? In other words, Gitlow would have been denied his brand of free speech whether it was a state or a federal law.