Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Unmasking the Mask Debate

Covid, mask, UV light, disinfectant

Sometimes things are complicated.

Many factors matter when deciding whether it makes sense to wear a mask to fend off infection. Let alone whether it’s okay to compel others to do so.

Now add another question: whether it is ever okay to deliberately suppress discussion of these subjects.

I’ve talked about all this before. But on those occasions I could not yet point you to a lengthy Heartland Institute post by James Agresti on “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Masks, and the Deadly Falsehoods Surrounding Them.”

Once disparaged as ineffectual except maybe for hospital workers, the power of masking up was later drastically oversold by policy makers.

Agresti aggregates evidence indicating that COVID-​19 is spread mainly by fine aerosols that can stay aloft a long time and easily penetrate most masks. But the evidence for mostly aerosol rather than big-​droplet transmission was ignored or downplayed by the WHO and CDC for over a year.

Agresti also argues that trials of the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection are “inconclusive” with respect to N95 masks in clinical settings. And that these studies show no statistically significant benefits for any masks in “community settings.”

To combat aerosolized COVID-​19, he recommends more extensive indoor use of UV disinfection systems.

Lots to talk about. Experts familiar with the research that Agresti canvasses often disagree. How about it, big-​tech social-​media firms. May we discuss?

Or must we stick to received dogma regardless of observations and logic?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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mask1 /​ mask2

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Combatting Campus Cancel Culture

education, wisdom, cancel culture

We keep hearing how students and professors are being targeted for saying stuff they’re not supposed to say — from the perspective of the hard-​left students, professors, and off-​campus third parties who launch most of the attacks, that is.

Which seem to be happening more and more often.

The numbers confirm it. New research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) indicates that attacks on professors for impolitic speech have increased since 2015. Most of the attacks — 74 percent — have resulted in sanctions against the accused.

According to FIRE, “calls for sanction” of a professor rose from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020.

Three fourths of the tallied incidents, 314 out of 426, have led to punishments like suspension or termination.

The attacks tend to occur on university campuses with “severely speech-​restrictive” policies. Like many Ivy League schools.

One of the researchers, Komi German, says that university administrators and presidents must “explicitly state that the protection of free speech and academic inquiry supersedes protection from words that are perceived as offensive.”

Good idea. Let them do that.

Why aren’t the censorious administrators doing it already, though? 

Probably because they lack allegiance to the value of freedom of speech on campus.

Until these academics all have Damascus-​level conversions, parents and students must do what they can themselves to discourage these censorious policies. This means, abstaining from attending and paying tuition at schools that penalize professors and others for wrongspeech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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cancel/​wisdom

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First Amendment rights social media

The Colluder-​in-​Chief

Joe Biden, censorship, social media

When government pressures private companies to censor people, the government is itself acting to censor people.

That the Biden administration is acting to censor unapproved discussion of COVID-​19 isn’t a guess. It has publicly urged social-​media companies to prohibit “misinformation.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, for example, has said that Biden’s administration is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing. . . . You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

The Liberty Justice Center is now suing the administration and firms like Facebook and Twitter for violating the First Amendment rights of people like Justin Hart, a plaintiff in the case.

Hart is a data analyst who questions the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. For his fielding and repeating those questions, he was booted from social media accounts.

Explaining its litigation, the Liberty Justice Center observes that “dominant social media platforms and the White House are openly collaborating to eliminate social media posts about COVID-​19 that the administration finds objectionable, and to cancel or suspend the Facebook and Twitter accounts of people who raise issues about COVID they don’t want the public to see.”

I tend to agree with Hart’s conclusion, but that is not the point.

More fundamentally, I am inclined to discover what we might learn from unfettered discussion of the facts. Which is one of the many reasons we need that First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Our Non-​Know-​It-​All Censors

Dave Ruben, Mr. Obvious

The censors don’t know everything.

That a censor declares Conclusion X to be the case, i.e. the truth, allegedly a good reason to prevent anyone from claiming the contrary on a forum, doesn’t actually mean that Conclusion X is true.

Consider recent predictions by Dave Rubin and Mr. Obvious that the Biden administration would impose a federal vaccine mandate. Big tech responded by censoring both men.

In July, Twitter shut down Rubin’s Twitter account until he removed a tweet about the desire of some for “a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago.”

Then Google removed a video from the Mr. Obvious YouTube channel predicting a federal vaccine mandate that would be announced only a week later.

“Maybe they thought that I was simply jumping the gun saying that Biden was going to do these federal mandates,” Mr. Obvious now comments. “Mr. Obvious was in fact right.”

These predictions did not promote criminality or terrorism. 

They were based on savvy political assessments.

Those assessments are now vindicated. 

Such vindication in a particular case is not required to establish the value of open discourse. But that the censors were so manifestly wrong here does dramatize a big whopping problem with censorship.

What now? 

Surely, the policymakers at Twitter, Google, Facebook, et al., can see once again that their censorship is misguided; hanging their heads in shame, they will henceforth ensure that discussion on their forums is open and untrammeled.

Don’t prove me wrong, guys.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights general freedom

Three Decades of Justice

IJ, Institute for Justice, law

Since September 1991, the libertarian law firm founded by Chip Mellor and Clint Bolick has been fighting for the rights of its clients against governmental assault.

For no charge, Institute for Justice helps people stripped of options fight for:

● The right to keep one’s land (and what’s on it).

In 2001, the city of Mesa, Arizona launched eminent-​domain proceedings against Bailey’s Brake Service, owned by Randy Bailey. The plan was to destroy the shop and give the land to a hardware store, not a constitutionally permitted “public use.” Bailey and IJ eventually prevailed in court.

● The right to make a living despite arbitrary professional licensing.

The Louisiana State Board of Cosmetology demands that aspiring hair braiders submit to hundreds of hours of training and pay for an expensive license to ply their trade. IJ is challenging the requirement on behalf of clients Ashley N’Dakpri, Lynn Schofield, and Michelle Robertson.

● The right to keep one’s cash despite arbitrary civil forfeiture — i.e., the power of police and prosecutors to grab your money or other belongings without charging you with a crime.

One recent victim is Marine Corps veteran Stephen Laura, whose $86,900 was looted by the Nevada Highway Patrol. The Institute has agreed to help him get it back.

And so on.

It doesn’t look like governments will stop interfering with our ability to live and work any time soon. 

“Eternal Vigilance”? Thy name is IJ.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights general freedom

Lockdowns Down Under

John Howard, Australia

“Australia is suffering a surge of authoritarianism, in part because of its lack of constitutional protections for liberty,” writes J.D. Tuccille at Reason.

Sydney, Australia, is going through another major round of lockdowns. When you see the popular reaction — the mass protests demonstrate how unpopular the lockdowns are — you might be inclined to think there’s hope.

But Mr. Tuccille finds the hope in Americans’ great historic fortune: we have a Bill of Rights.

Australian politicians, on the other hand, express thankfulness that Australia doesn’t have any deep constitutional limits to their powers.

While it is the current Aussie prime minister who plays tyrant today, Aussie tyranny was cogently expressed by a previous holder of the position, John Howard, whom Tuccille quotes — chillingly: 

  1. “The essence of my objection to a Bill of Rights is that, contrary to its very description, it reduces the rights of citizens to determine matters over which they should continue to exercise control.” 
  2. “I also reject a Bill of Rights framework because it elevates rights to the detriment of responsibilities.”

That first point is not made much less bizarre by the prime minister’s elaboration, expressed in a sentence Tuccille did not include, that a Bill of Rights must fail because it delivers “authority to unelected judges, accountable to no one except in the barest theoretical sense.” Yet, lacking a listing of rights, there are few things a beleaguered citizen can do but bend to the cop’s bludgeon and prime minister’s edict. (Hooray for judges?)

That second point is an old canard. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand; every right has a flip-​side duty.

In the context of a pandemic: people with rights oblige others to negotiate masks and vaccines and the like.

Where? On private property: outside of government. On public property: in legislatures. 

Alas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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