Category: First Amendment rights

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights folly ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Campus Freedom in Peril

Charles Murray, protest, violence, free speech, Bell Curve, students, intimidation
  1. What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange?
  2. What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly?

Sociologist Charles Murray asked those questions near the end of his reflections on Thursday’s Middlebury College event, in which his speaking engagement was interrupted by shouting mobs and he and his colleagues were physically attacked*.

Murray thinks the answer to the first question is “more than 50 percent.” He doubts that is the answer to the second.

He is pessimistic about free inquiry on campus.

And has reason to be.

College faculty members are closing ranks, as many at Middlebury did, calling Murray — famous for books such as Losing Ground and The Bell Curve — “a discredited ideologue paid by the American Enterprise Institute to promote public policies targeting people of color, women and the poor”** and “not an academic nor a ‘critically acclaimed’ public scholar, but a well-funded phony.”

Mark J. Perry has listed many more complaints, all offered as reasons not to listen or debate with the famous intellectual.

That was last Thursday. On Saturday, a pro-Trump, “Proud Boys” march in Berkeley culminated not only in violence, bloodied faces, destroyed property, but also in the burning of a purloined “Free Speech” placard.

The University of California at Berkeley seems uninterested in controlling the mobs. Berkeley City Police have poorly defended non-leftist protestors. It’s open season on freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble.

Unless something is done, officially, mobbing will be the new normal. And our basic rights? A memory.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* His colleague Professor Allison Stanger was seriously injured in the riotous shoving and grabbing. Murray tweeted yesterday, “Everybody in the mob could be criminally prosecuted, but those who injured Prof. Stranger must be.”

** It is worth noting that his recent Coming Apart was entirely devoted to the economic performance and culture of white Americans.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Wolves Crying Wolf

By any means necessary, BAMN, protest, free speech, fascist, first amendment, censorship, violence

People have a right to defend themselves. Right? Especially against rape and murder.

“This is not about free speech,” Yvette Felarca yelled to the crowd at the University of California-Berkeley, gathered weeks ago to “shut down” a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial Breitbart editor.

Felarca, a national organizer for By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)*, the militant group with the incendiary name, argued that Milo wasn’t “interested in any genuine debate.”

She continued, “But what they’re really trying to do is they’re trying to assert their power, threaten us, intimidate us, rape us, kill us! This is real. This is life and death.”

Given such sentiments, it is hardly surprising that the protest turned violent — leaving people beaten, bloody on the pavement, and racking up $100,000 in property damage.

Not to mention causing the cancellation of the talk sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans. Felarca called this a smashing success. Asked by reporters how she could justify violence to squelch speech, Felarca simply dubbed Milo “a fascist.”

Yesterday, in my Townhall column, “Hate Is Our Business,” I addressed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s just-released report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” The report continued the SPLC’s habit of calling entirely peaceful conservative and religious organizations “hate groups.”

The man who shot a security guard at the Family Research Council in 2012, but was thankfully blocked from further mayhem, used the SPLC’s “Hate Map” to target their office.

In its reports, the “progressive” SPLC completely ignores BAMN and violent left-wing groups. And by crying wolf in mislabeling non-violent organizations as “hate groups,” it provides the unhinged — BAMN, Antifa, and lone-wolf lunatics — very dangerous ammunition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Ms. Felarca also has a day job, as a public school teacher at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in the Berkeley Unified School District. That has generated some controversy.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

The Silence of Violence

Berkeley, Milo, violence, speech, politics, photos, comment, analysis

“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

  • people beaten up on the streets,
  • rocks and bricks and Molotov cocktails hurled at police,
  • a young woman with a “Make America Great Again” parody hat pepper-sprayed in the face,
  • fires set, windows smashed at the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, along with
  • an estimated $100,000 of property damage.

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.

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Accountability First Amendment rights government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Prestige, Trump & the Media

Donald Trump, media, journalism, twitter, tweet, direct, illustration

“Donald Trump’s election has really undermined America’s democratic prestige in China,” offered Claremont McKenna College Professor Minxin Pei on a recent hour of The Diane Rehm Show, public radio from our nation’s capital. When Pei added that it has “set back the prospect of democracy in China for years,” Mrs. Rehm let out an audible moan.

Then Diane asked her guests, “as members of the press” what they “make” of President-Elect Trump’s “rejection of his meeting with The New York Times.”

“It seems,” bemoaned James Fallows, the Atlantic’s national correspondent, “a continuation of his not having any normal press conferences, dealing entirely outside normal press channels and seeming not to recognize the legitimacy of this part of the democratic fabric.”

“I don’t know anything about the specific details about the New York Times meeting,” admitted the Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer. Still, that didn’t stop Dyer from announcing that, “But it’s part of a pattern . . . to a much more conflict-ual, antagonistic, almost bullying relationship with the media.”

Elizabeth Economy, with the Council on Foreign Relations, found it “disturbing” that Donald Trump thinks “he can be his own media, he can simply tweet out whatever he wants, he can make his homegrown videos and sort of impart his information directly to the American public, without the mediating influence of the media.”

Let’s welcome Elizabeth to America.

“We are all recognizing we’re on new terrain now and need to find some way to keep telling the truth, or our best approximation of it, in very different circumstances,” concluded Fallows ominously.

Trump, as you’ll recall, did wind up attending that meeting at The Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Donald Trump, media, journalism, twitter, tweet, direct, illustration

 

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Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people moral hazard nannyism Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

Four Measures for Rogue Government

speech, anti-speech, NAACP, Supreme Court, First Amendment, Free Speech,

Rule of thumb: don’t enact today laws that, had they been obeyed by folks in the original 13 states of our union, would have prevented independence.

Voters in Missouri, South Dakota, and Washington have the “opportunity” to enact such laws this November.

In “Beware of Anti-Speech Ballot Measures,” Tracy Sharp and Darcy Olsen, presidents of the State Policy Center and the Goldwater Institute, respectively, offer a warning. Focusing on Measure 22, the South Dakota Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act, they show how dangerous notions like forcing “nonprofit organizations to report the names and addresses of their donors to the state government” can be.

Such disclosure would subject non-profits “to possible investigation by an unelected ethics board that is given the power to subpoena private documents and overrule decisions made by the state attorney general. . . .” Rogue, star-chamber government.

Fever dream?

No. Sharp and Olsen highlight a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that protected the NAACP from the state’s demand for the group’s funding sources. Both women also offer personal tales of how nasty the opposition (in government and out) can become when big issues are on the line.

I can personally attest.

These measures fly in the face of what really matters — encouraging robust public debate. Democracy doesn’t work when people dread participation. As our authors challenge, “[d]o we want America to be a country where government keeps public lists of law-abiding citizens because they dare to support causes they believe in?”

Especially when, without the secret (unreported!) activities of the Committees of Correspondence, the USA would not have become united states in the first place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Original (cc) photo by Michael Tracey on Flickr

 

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

A Suit of a Different Color

Melania, Donald, Trump, daily mail, scandal, sex worker, illustration

Donald Trump has threatened to use lawsuits against people he says are lying about him. Even if elected President.

Well, enter the third Mrs. Donald Trump, Melania. She is suing Britain’s Daily Mail* for suggesting that she may have worked as a “part time escort in New York,” explains the BBC, “and met husband Donald Trump, who is now running for the White House, earlier than previously reported.”

We know from published nude photographs that she was in the U.S. before the time specified by her presidential-hopeful husband. And for some, those nude photographs lend credence to a rumor about escort service work. (She’s made money for being photographed in sexual congress before.)

The Daily Mail has withdrawn its article, insisting that it had not “suggested the sex work claims were true but said that, even if false, they could affect the US presidential campaign.” Sounds like a defense to me.

Earlier this week I confessed to my lack of accounting expertise. Now I should do the same regarding law. Yet, the claim by the Trumps’ lawyer, Charles Harder, seems hard to take seriously — that is, that the defendants’ statements were “so egregious, malicious and harmful to Mrs. Trump that her damages are estimated at $150 million dollars.”

Really? That much?

Besides, it’s her husband’s career on the line. And a sex morals rumor about Mrs. Trump wilts next to the long list of rumors and established fact in the scandal department of actual candidate (and former First Lady) Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Seems with either major party candidate, we’re guaranteed a soap opera . . . and full employment for lawyers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* She is also suing an American blogger.

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Melania, Donald, Trump, daily mail, scandal, sex worker, illustration

 

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall nannyism national politics & policies political challengers responsibility too much government

A Private Party

Donald Trump, delegates, unbound, convention, crime, vote

Virginia delegate Beau Correll won’t cast his first ballot vote at the Republican National Convention for Donald Trump, and won’t go to jail, either.

As discussed last Thursday, at issue is a state statute requiring* delegates to vote for the plurality winner of the party’s primary. On the Republican side, that’s Mr. Trump. Yesterday, Federal Judge Robert Payne ruled the law unconstitutional, no law at all, because it violates Correll’s First Amendment rights to speak and associate politically.

“In sum, where the State attempts to interfere with a political party’s internal governance and operation,” the federal judge wrote, “the party is entirely free to ‘cancel out [the State’s] effort’ (Def. Resp. 28) even though the state has expended financial and administrative resources in a primary.”

Love ’em or hate ’em, political parties are private associations, properly protected by the First Amendment.

But is it fair to hold primary elections, at taxpayers’ expense, and then ignore the votes of so many people?

Easy answer: NO.

Sure, Judge Payne correctly struck this statute, but it doesn’t follow that states must foot the bill for party primaries and national conventions or provide legal preference. Up to now, incumbent politicians have quietly legislated a relationship of too-friendly collusion between government and the major parties.

It’s time for citizens to look at initiatives to mandate separation of political party and state.

More immediately, the implications for the coming GOP convention in Cleveland are obvious and far-reaching. “The Court’s decision,” as Correll’s attorney David Rivkin summarized, “follows more than 40 years of precedent in firmly rejecting Donald Trump’s legal opinion that delegates are obligated by law to vote for him.”

The delegates are free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Penalty for non-compliance? One year in prison.

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Donald Trump, delegates, unbound, convention, crime, vote

 

Original photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr

 

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

The Controversialist

DePaul University, Black Lives Matter , Social Justice Warriors, Dangerous Faggot Tour, Milo Yiannopoulis , provocative,

“Feminism is cancer.”

Milo Yiannopoulis is provocative. Apparently of violence as well as of thought.

Until very recently, best known for his Twitter presence (@nero) and his work at Breitbart, Mr. Yiannopoulis, a gay British man in his mid-30s, has undertaken what he calls his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” — speaking to anti-left audiences in hired halls at the heart of the modern university.

He outrageously decries the regnant “Social Justice Warriors” of anti-capitalism and intersectional feminism, and defends free speech and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

But obviously he is egging on the student mobs. One stunt was to take a poll asking whether the subject would rather his or her daughter get cancer or become a feminist.

Cancer, Milo chortles, was the overwhelming result.

Most people hate modern feminism, he says. It’s only on campuses that the youngsters are unhinged enough to believe that

  • rich, pampered college students are “oppressed” just because they are women or gay or trans; that
  • white men are “systemically” their “oppressors” and thus “privileged”; and that
  • there exists an overarching Patriarchy in capitalist America, but not in the Mideast.

So he is shouted at and “protested” everywhere he goes. This week, Black Lives Matter protesters basically took over an event at DePaul University, with a young woman invading Milo’s personal space, apparently (you decide) hitting him in the face during a Q and A.

The university, which had charged organizers a huge fee for “extra security,” did nothing. Milo’s suing to get back that payment — for services plainly not rendered.

Some patriarchy. Some privilege.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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DePaul University, Black Lives Matter , Social Justice Warriors, Dangerous Faggot Tour, Milo Yiannopoulis , provocative,

 

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First Amendment rights general freedom individual achievement obituary

A Life Too Short

ElizaBeth Garrett

One lesson from the classic film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is that “Every man’s life touches so many others.”

Every woman’s life does, too.

On Monday, I was stunned and saddened to read in my morning paper that Cornell University President Elizabeth “Beth” Garrett had died, barely a month after being diagnosed with colon cancer, at only 52 years of age.

“Being the first woman president of Cornell, just as I was the first woman provost at U.S.C., puts me in the position of being a role model — not just for young women, but also for men,” she told an interviewer.

While at the University of Southern California, Beth “was the driving force behind the Initiative and Referendum Institute becoming part of USC,” according to my friend, Dane Waters, founder of the Institute.

I met her in the late 1990s. While we certainly were not in full agreement politically, my respect for her intellectual honesty grew and grew. She produced top notch research on the initiative process

And she cared. Years ago, when the Oklahoma Attorney General unsuccessfully sought to persecute myself and two others, Beth Garrett, an Okie native, reached out to lend her moral support.

Reason magazine mourned her passing by calling her “a staunch defender of free speech on campus.”

“There isn’t any idea that ought not to be tested and questioned,” Garrett once told students. “Because that’s how we get closer to the truth. . . . So if you disagree with someone, the answer isn’t to shut them down.”

Beth Garrett lived a wonderful life, leading by example. We’ll miss her.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ElizaBeth Garrett

 

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies Snowden

Structurally Opinionated B. S.

Edward Snowden, iPhone, First Amendment, privacy, Apple, illustration

Edward Snowden, the infamous American whistleblower now exiled in Russia, says the FBI’s claim that it cannot decode the infamous San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone is, and I quote, “Bernie Sanders.”

Oops.

He used another word-set, also sporting the initials B. S.

I got confused because, though the press has been fretting endlessly about the B.S. coming from Donald Trump, the real corkers of late have come from Bernie Sanders, who seems to think that white people cannot be poor or oppressed* and that the successes of free markets elsewhere serve perfectly as excuses for Big Government interference here in America.**

Mr. Snowden, who knows a lot more about encryption and decryption than I do, has given more weight to my suspicion that the whole FBI case against Apple — demanding that Apple create software to decrypt the company’s customers’ iPhones, and supply (on an allegedly case-by-case basis) the decrypted private information to the government — is a sham.

Snowden insists that there are multiple ways to do the job.

“Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup,” a report on Snowden’s judgment elaborated, “if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.”

Once again, a government failure leads to another push by government to correct for its failure, burdening citizens.

In this case: folks at Apple.

Interestingly, Apple’s legal defense appears to rest heavily on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees, arguing that the demanded software is value-laden speech, is literally made up of such.

The exact term is “structurally opinionated,” which I nominate for the jargon phrase of the year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sanders has recently said, in one of those interminable debates that I can no longer watch in full, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As if “white privilege” amounts to immunity from poverty or oppression.

** Sanders, whose Tweets are as insane as his spoken pronouncements, recently lamented how Romanians in Bucharest have faster Internet speeds than Americans — without realizing they’d achieved these levels of access by wide-open, unrelenting, and wild competition. That is, Laissez Faire capitalism.

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Edward Snowden, iPhone, First Amendment, privacy, Apple, illustration

 

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Please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar  (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money. Your help in spreading the message of common sense and liberty is very much appreciated!