The purpose of the demonstration was to shut down a speech.
The speech would not have been shut down without the presence of violent protestors.
The peaceful protestors are claiming a victory that wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of violent protestors.
“The Free Speech Movement is dead.”
So said the Berkeley College Republicans after violence Wednesday night forced cancelation of a sold-out speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Greek-born British author, now a senior editor at Breitbart News. The reference, of course, is to the University of California’s history as a haven for free expression dating back to the 1960s.
Protests of the event gave way to
Yet only one arrest was made Wednesday night, and two on Thursday, when a man in a suit wearing a Trump hat apparently triggered two guys to jump out of their car and assault him.*
CNN dubbed the “inflammatory” Yiannopoulos a “professional provocateur.” He has also been labeled a racist, which he denies, and a homophobe, even though he’s gay. Pushing the envelope against political correctness, for his part, Milo calls “college campuses . . . cancerous and toxic to free expression.”
Regardless of label, Yiannopoulos’s right to speak and the right of others to listen are constitutionally protected. And violence to block a peacefully expressed point of view is never justified.
Asked about the tactics used, one unnamed young protestor** explained, “Although, you know, it could get violent or whatever, with the fire, that’s what caused Milo to leave. We succeeded.”
The young woman added, “And next is Trump.”
Either we defend civilization against speech-squelching violence, or inherit an ugly silence.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*More arrests may be forthcoming. The Washington Post reported that, “University police rescued many people in the crowd who were being attacked, trapped or injured . . . and are collecting video to try to identify suspects.”
** The woman was part of the ominously-named group By Any Means Necessary.
The media hysterically pushes the line that the new Trump administration is so much “in chaos” it even frightens seasoned (salt-and-pepper?) heads in the Republican Party. But perhaps folks at the Environmental Protection Agency have more reason to panic.
“It looks like the EPA will be the agency hardest hit by the Trump sledgehammer,” writes Julie Kelly over at National Review.
Ms. Kelly offers striking reasons to hit the agency hard, quoting from Steve Malloy, the author of Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA. “I can think of no agency that has done more pointless harm to the U.S. economy than the EPA — all based on junk science, if not out-and-out science fraud.” Malloy looks forward to the new president’s promised rethink and restructuring of the agency.
Just how bad is it?
Environmentalists often cry foul over any corporate funding of ecological research. But if one worries about money influencing results, the case against grants funded by regulatory agencies for regulatory purposes is even stronger.
Especially when the agency is run by ideologues.
Trump’s transition team seeks to make all the EPA’s relevant data public, for peer and public review, and would really like to curtail the agency’s research funding entirely.
Pipe dream? Better than the recent nightmare: “For eight years,” writes Kelly, “President Obama used the agency as his de facto enforcer of environmental policies he couldn’t pass in Congress even when it was controlled by his own party.”
The EPA needs to be checked. And balanced. And more.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Legend has it that a juror once ran up to attorney Neil Gorsuch, after Gorsuch won a case proving a gravel pit owner had been cheated, declaring, “You’re Perry Mason.”
These days, Gorsuch sits on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the late Justice Scalia’s seat on the nation’s highest court.
And now Gorsuch is receiving testimonials worthy of the indefatigable TV lawyer.
Brad Smith, the chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, expressed his pleasure “that President Trump has nominated someone who will defend a robust First Amendment.”
Ballot access expert Richard Winger noted that Gorsuch has a “good record in cases involving independent candidates and minor parties.”
“I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration,” wrote Neal Katyal in the New York Times. “Until Tuesday,” continued the Georgetown law professor, “when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.”
Katyal, who had served as an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, added that Gorsuch’s record of holding government officials accountable “should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.”*
Even I have pertinent testimony: back in 1992, Gorsuch argued (in a co-authored Cato Institute paper) that term limits were “constitutionally permissible” as “institutional constraints on the power of government” that “the Framers,” if alive today, would likely see as “necessary preconditions for liberty.”
No, Gorsuch is not actually Perry Mason — I never knew where Perry stood on term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* On Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Damon Root strongly agreed.
At Townhall on Sunday, I applauded the Women’s March on Washington for being peaceful, despite Madonna’s F-bomb laden speech, culminating with her daydream of “blowing up the White House.”
We’ll never know how many more folks marched in that much-heralded event than attended last weekend’s pro-life march, because the mainstream media did not pay enough attention to the later, inconvenient-to-their-narrative event, and crowd-counters didn’t count.
The two marches did “intersect” (figuratively) when a pro-life group was kicked out as a “partner” to the women’s march.
“If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a woman’s right to choose [abortion],” declared Linda Sarsour, one of four chairwomen for the women’s march, who was described by the New York Times as “a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American Muslim racial justice and civil-rights activist.”
In its favor, the pro-life march, anti-celebrating the 44th year since the Roe v. Wade decision, had far more tasteful placards — despite the fact that pro-life protesters are often remembered for grisly signs picturing aborted fetuses. I particularly liked a sign held by a young women, reading:
“We are having a clump of cells.” — [said] No One Ever
Speaking of young people, Slate magazine reported that “the demographic outlook for the pro-life movement looks anything but bleak,” citing a 2015 poll wherein “52 percent of millennials said the label ‘pro-life’ describes them somewhat or very well.”
Remember, the pro-life movement has been marching all these years not to secure government benefits for themselves, but to protect others.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The United States is no longer a “full-fledged democracy.”
According to a New York Post story, our union is, instead, a “flawed democracy.”
Hmmm. Where to begin?
Despite the article’s featured photo of President Trump, the downgrading of America’s democratic status occurred prior to the billionaire’s swearing-in.
Technically, of course, the United States is not now nor has ever been a full-fledged (much less a flawed) democracy. We live in a republic . . . if we can keep it.
As is often the case, folks use the term “democracy” not to indicate it as a form of government — a pure democracy — but as a shorthand for a country with democratic elections, where “basic political freedoms and civil liberties are respected,” and with “an independent judiciary.”
An organization associated with The Economist, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), has for a decade been rating the world’s countries based on numerous political factors. For the first time, this year, the United States has dropped out of the top tier and into the second, joining the likes of Botswana, Ghana and India.
“The U.S. is the second-highest ranking flawed democracy,” the Post noted, “coming in right behind Japan and tying with Italy.” Norway garnered first place among the 19 “full-fledged democracies,” including most Western European countries.
Why was the U.S. downgraded? The EIU report explained the lower score “was caused by the same factors that led Mr. Trump to the White House: a continued erosion of trust in government and elected officials.”
So, if the American people simply placed their heads in the sand, blindly trusting politicians, we’d be “full-fledged,” eh?
Full-fledged fools fiddling away our freedom, that is.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A friend, who loves to talk football, sometimes boasts that his team “crushed” the other team, gaining more yards and rolling up more first downs, before dejectedly acknowledging that his team didn’t score as many points as its opponent. They lost.
When a Democrat gloats that Donald Trump lost the popular vote, I am reminded of my friend’s funny football foible.
It helps to gain yards in football, sure, just as it helps to gain votes in a presidential contest. But you win a game by putting the most points on the scoreboard, just as you’re elected president by winning a majority in the Electoral College.
Going forward, we can discuss whether a state’s votes should be awarded proportionally or winner-take-all and whether national popular vote should instead be the metric for victory. But the 2016 rules were the rules.
“I would’ve won the popular vote if I was campaigning for the popular vote,” President Trump told ABC News anchor David Muir this week. “I would’ve gone to California, where I didn’t go at all.”
Still, Mr. Trump should appreciate that not only didn’t he garner a majority, he lost by 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton, who was well short of a majority, herself.
Trump continues to claim “a massive landslide” in the Electoral College. He may have “shocked the world,” but in 58 presidential elections thus far, 45 winners gained a greater percentage in the Electoral College.
Again this week, Pres. Trump repeated his belief that “millions of illegal votes” prevented him from winning the popular vote. Specific evidence? None. But he wants an investigation.
This could be a long four years.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Obamacare may be on the way out.
According to The Atlantic, “the powers of the incoming Health and Human Services secretary are broad enough to cripple the [Affordable Care Act] so it has to be replaced.” Which is significant since the new President has just “signed an executive order empowering his administration’s agencies to do all they can — within the bounds of the Affordable Care Act — to undercut that law.”
The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II suggests this is . . . “ironic.” The executive leeway Trump is taking is not without precedent. “The irony of that component,” he writes, “is that it rests on precedent set by the Obama administration, which used executive and regulatory power liberally to make the law work in the face of Republican opposition.”
Irony? How about chickens returning to the home roost?
Obamacare itself undermined Obamacare. The plan, from the beginning, was so gimcrack with hidden redistribution that, to both opponents and proponents, it was designed to fail . . . to usher in the Glorious Era of socialized medicine.
Since Obamacare increased “insurance” costs for hundreds of thousands of previous insurance policy holders, and increased medical costs generally, too, it actually discouraged participation from the healthiest, many of whom would rather pay the exorbitant fines, er, “taxes.” Throwing the insurance industry into a death spiral.
So, putting the system out of our misery sooner seems sensible.
But Congress and Trump cannot stop there. Either they repeal more federal regulation and subsidy*, or keep parts of Obamacare, despite a lack of financial stability. A new bill in the Senate promises to do the latter.
We haven’t seen much hint of the former.
But can hope. Audaciously.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* To let markets work. Note that The Atlantic tends to miss the point of Obamacare critics. In describing more market-based options, the magazine characterizes the Medical Health Savings Account approach as “For people sick of high deductibles, Republicans offer high-deductible plans as replacements for Obamacare.” The idea is to incentivize people to pay for their own care, which would bring costs down generally.
Maine’s citizen initiative process is unfair, claims State Rep. Paula Sutton.
“[R]ural Mainers are left out of the equation,” Sutton tells readers of Knox County’s Village Soup, “and Portland dictates public policy for the rest of the state.”
Hmmm? Every Mainer eligible to vote currently has the equal right to decide ballot measures.
Her grievance appears to be that there are more urban voters than rural.
Last November, voters passed four of five issues, all opposed by Rep. Sutton. Still, losing at the ballot box is hardly prima facie evidence of “unfairness.”
“Unless we do something to fix the citizens’ referendum process here in Maine,” she nonetheless contends, “the state will continue to be an easy target.”
For what, exactly? Voting on issues people favor?
Mainers are “ripe to be taken advantage of by wealthy out-of-state special interests,” she complains, explaining that billionaire Michael Bloomberg “spent millions of dollars in his failed attempt to squash Mainers’ Second Amendment rights with Question 3.”
Yes, you read that right. Question 3 failed. Voters weren’t exploited.
Sutton has introduced legislation “to ensure rural Mainers are no longer being run over by wealthy liberal special interest groups.” Her bill requires petitions to qualify in each of the state’s two congressional districts instead of qualifying statewide. That makes it more difficult, but hardly changes the need to circulate petitions in urban areas.
Not forests and empty fields.
Rep. Sutton seems to understand her proposal won’t effectively thwart citizen initiatives, pledging to support further restrictions. That’s easier for politicians than permitting democracy and persuading people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
