On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.
In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.
The guilty parties have been caught red-handed.
Now that the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court, reports on oral arguments suggest that not every justice is as acquainted with the point of the Bill of Rights as we’d like.
Its function is to stop government from doing various rights-violating things at will. But Justice Ketanji says: “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in most important
Justice Kagan, chiming in: “I’m really worried
Tyrants worry about having too little flexibility to stomp our speech “in most important time periods,” prevention of which stomping is the very purpose of the First Amendment.
We, for our part, worry about having our
Some of the justices also seem not to grasp that when government officials contact you and ask you to do this and that, no overt threats are necessary for officials to rely on the threat of governmental power.
The bossing is not always subtle, though. Perusing the evidence, Justice Alito says he couldn’t imagine officials “taking that approach to the print media.” The federal speech police treat “Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates.”
Are they?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varèse, as quoted by Martha Graham, Dance Observer, Volumes 24-27 (1957), p. 5.
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Victoria Taft points us to “a federal judge who believes in justice” . . . or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Recently, California District Court Judge Cormac Carney chastised a purportedly anti-crime department of the Department of Justice for prosecuting two men who “became members of a group characterized as ‘white supremacist’” for alleged violence while carefully ignoring the often worse conduct of Antifa and BAMN members.
Carney dismissed the federal charges against the two men.
He argued that “prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech. . . .
“At the same Trump rallies that form the basis for Defendants’ prosecution, members of Antifa and related far-left groups engaged in organized violence to stifle protected speech.”
There’s something wrong when people who had been holding a peaceful event full of speeches and flag-waving are prosecuted — not just prosecuted, but selectively prosecuted — for defending themselves when violent leftists show up and act violently.
If a speaker commits an actual crime, sure, he should be punished, in a proportionate way and without regard to the ideology of the speaker. Equal justice under the law, that’s all.
How about it, Justice Department? Care to earn your name?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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More individualistic countries are also richer, more innovative, and more economically productive.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020).
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be
“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”
This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.
And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.
The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media
It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.
There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices.
This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.
And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
If a man appears as a witness, but withdraws his oath, he must make payment, to the extent of the value in litigation of the case.
The Code of Ur-Nammu, 21st century B.C.