On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.
In 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.
These policies include onerous burdens on building construction; lax attitudes toward homeless folks’ tent cities and public excretory practices; and a green light for sundry criminal activities, including broad-daylight theft.
The green light flashed statewide in 2014, when Californians passed Proposition 47, giving looters much less to worry about if caught stealing less than $950.
Remove a disincentive and you wind up with a huge incentive: thugs were emboldened; folks on the margin between criminality and civilized peace went the wrong direction.
In San Francisco, they were further emboldened when voters installed Democrat Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2019. At least the election was close.
A recent recall election wasn’t so close, with some 61% voting to oust him.
In the cause of abetting criminals, DA Boudin did everything but serve as getaway-car driver.
Right away, he fired several prosecutors, and The Epoch Times reports that soon “more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff had either been fired or had quit their jobs over Boudin’s progressive agenda.”
The agenda included ending cash bail, slashing incarceration rates, routinely releasing repeat offenders.
Although it has lost a lot, San Francisco still has piers and fog and that famously twisty road, Lombard Street. Residents have a ways to go to emerge from their ideological fog and perhaps must travel an even twistier road to reclaim their city.
By getting rid of Boudin — and three pretty rotten school board members in another recent recall election — San Franciscans have taken the first steps back to something like sanity. Which always makes next steps easier.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back.
Born on this day: historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).
Hentoff wrote a good book on the history of free speech in America, The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).
Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.
Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson remains alive.
Now the ACLU is a changeling monster, with many at the organization arguing to ignore threats to what they regard as the wrong kind of speech. The erstwhile bastion of civil rights has even come out against restoring due process for the accused on our nation’s campuses.
Among longtime ACLU supporters discouraged by the retreat is David Goldberger. This lawyer believes that it has become “more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle. Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
Or: progressives are no longer even a little bit “liberal.”
Fortunately, taking up the discarded banner is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, until recently called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The new name signifies an expanded mission.
FIRE will — we are assured — still combat threats to freedom of speech at colleges and universities, where it has been doing excellent work for years.
“To say the least, we have not solved the campus free-speech problem,” says FIRE president Greg Lukianoff. “But we started to realize if we wanted to save free speech on campus we have to start earlier and we have to do things not on campus.”
Freedom of speech is for everybody. In its heyday, the ACLU defended people of all walks of life, and offended tyrants everywhere. Now that progressives generally and Democrats specifically have gone pro-censorship, FIRE is taking up the cause of civil libertarianism.
Someone needed to.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).
Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide on this day in June, 68 AD, ending Rome’s Julio-Claudian Dynasty, later written about with verve by Suetonius and Robert Graves. Assisting in his suicide was his secretary, Epaphroditus, whom Domitian had executed over 20 years later — for failure to prevent the suicide of the emperor.
Also on June 9, James Oglethorpe received a charter from the British crown to start the Georgia colony (1732); William Jennings Bryan resigned his position as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, disgusted over the handling of the sinking of the Lusitania (1915); philosopher John Hospers (pictured) — who would go on to run as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972 — was born in 1918.
The court rejected a major claim in a lawsuit filed by Nashville County and Shelby County to challenge the constitutionality of the program, which awards scholarships up to $7,300 to qualifying students so they can escape failing public schools.
The lawsuit contends that the program flouts a rule prohibiting the state legislature from passing local laws that are “applicable to a particular county . . . either in its governmental or its proprietary capacity.”
Judging that school districts aren’t counties and that the ESA program does not impair the ability of counties to govern themselves, Tennessee’s highest court threw out a determination to the contrary by lower courts and sent the case back down for review of other claims in the lawsuit.
The Institute for Justice and the Beacon Center of Tennessee, which have been working together on the case, are optimistic about the final outcome.
According to IJ attorney Arif Panju, the ruling means that “thousands of Tennessee parents and children trapped in failing school districts can look forward to seeking a better education this fall at a school of their choice.”
In its description of the program, the Tennessee government mentions the lawsuit and expresses the hope that the state will “succeed on appeal” and begin enrolling students in 2022.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Thomas Sowell, “The survival of the left,” Forbes (Sept. 8, 1997), collected in The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011), p. 144.
On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.