Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Biden Brazenness Against Religion

Joe Biden, Christians, Christianity, religion

April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot, but he wasn’t referring to the Biden Administration’s ramped-up war on Christianity.

Mid-month, the administration barred Catholic priests of the Holy Name College Friary from providing “pastoral care” to servemembers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The government contract had been granted, instead, to Mack Global LLC, which the archdiocese characterizes as “a secular defense contracting firm that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract.”

Not convinced that this Daily Signal story amounts to “a war on Christianity”?

Well, try The Epoch Times. In “Christians Say Government Targets Them Because They Oppose Left-Wing Agenda,” Kevin Stocklin lists a number of federal government policies that favor left-wing politics over the social and political activism of Catholics and other Christians. 

Abortion activists, pro- and anti-, do occasionally engage in what might plausibly be called “terrorist” activities, but the FBI appears avid in hounding pro-life protesters, yet uninterested in doing any actual work to curb the string of “violent attacks, including assaults and firebombings, against pro-life individuals and institutions.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s “subpoena to the FBI earlier this month demanding information on its alleged program to surveil Catholics for ‘signs of radicalization,’” spurred Stocklin’s reporting about the government’s increasing conflict with Christianity.

Why see traditional Christians as enemies of the State? Because they are.

Potentially, at least.

In part, simply because those who worship God see a worshipful attitude towards the State as something akin to idolatry. And apparently vice versa. But sociologists such as Robert Nisbet regard religion as a countervailing power against ever-growing government.

If you are looking for a jealous god, the modern total State fills the bill.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Censored Under Pressure

censorship, Twitter, Covid, free speech, freedom of the press

Journalist Alex Berenson is suing members of the Biden administration — and others, inluding Pfizer officers — for pressuring Twitter to ban him for what he wrote about the COVID-19 vaccines.

The best-known of his heretical tweets says, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

In the months since August 2021, when Twitter expelled him “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules,” such hardly intemperate observations have become less controversial. Vaccine proponents have retreated, typically claiming, at most, that the putative vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness and death.

Berenson first sued Twitter to challenge its ban. The suit succeeded; eleven months after Twitter banned him, it reinstated his account.

But Twitter had not been acting independently; it had succumbed to a lengthy campaign by the Biden administration to censor Berenson. Any such actions by government officials are, of course, unconstitutional.

The defendants in Berenson’s new lawsuit include President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, and former White House official Andrew Slavitt (“at the center of the conspiracy”). Two Pfizer officers are also named: board member Scott Gottlieb and CEO Albert Bourla.

Berenson’s detailed complaint alleges that “after months of public and secret pressure, Defendants succeeded” in getting Twitter to ban him.

The private pressure is attested by internal documents released by Twitter and government documents produced during the course of Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit against censorship by the Biden administration.

In defending his rights, Alex Berenson is helping us all retrieve freedoms we lost in the pandemic panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Trans-Violent

Riley Gaines, protestors, trans, censorship, free speech

“I applaud the students, staff and faculty who rallied quickly to host alternative inclusive events, protest peacefully and provide one another with support at a difficult moment,” declared San Francisco State University President Lynn Mahoney on Monday.

The “difficult moment” she refers to? A talk on campus by All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, sponsored by Turning Point USA. Gaines was speaking out against “transgender women” (biological men) competing in women’s sports.

President Mahoney did finally acknowledge that the event was followed by “a disturbance,” which “unfortunately” “delayed the speaker’s departure.”

In fact, Gaines wasn’t able to leave for hours, until nearly midnight . . . when, as CNN reported, “the San Francisco Police Department sent officers to disperse the crowd.” Gaines says she was “physically assaulted,” “struck twice,” with video confirming a very threatening situation.

“We are reviewing the incident,” Mahoney assured, “and, as always, will learn from the experience.”

No arrests have been made. They should be. That’s the teachable moment we need.  

SFSU’s president did acknowledge that what occurred last week was “deeply traumatic.” But she meant the event itself, which she claimed “advocated for the exclusion of trans people in athletics.” 

That isn’t true. Gaines and many (if not most) folks involved in the controversy simply want collegiate sports separated by biological sex and not by gender identity.

Let’s realize that these Antifa-esque “trans activists,” the ones who threaten to beat up women, do not speak for all transgendered people — certainly not those I know and love. Their goal is clearly not harmony but the very opposite. 

The solution is simple: Love for trans folks, common sense public policies, and jail for the thug attackers of free speech.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Package Deal

Tik Tok, app, China, censorship

Suppose suggested legislation outlaws both murder and walking. How could you oppose it? Are you, a dedicated perambulator-peripatetic, also a murder-supporter?

Obviously, this would be an attempt to foist a package deal consisting of unrelated or mutually contradictory elements.

Consider a more true-to-life example.

In the Wall Street Journal, Philip Hamburger argues that a congressional bill targeting TikTok would do much more than counter Chinazi spying on Americans (“The TikTok Bill Is a Sneak Attack on Free Speech”).

If curbing or even outlawing TikTok were the sole focus, one could argue the merits of the legislation given what is known about the company’s collecting of data and its relationship with the Chinese government. There’s no free-speech protection of foreign espionage.

However, as Hamburger points out, the bill gives the federal government “sweeping power over communications” and could be used to stifle speech protected by the Constitution.

The proposed statute would allow the Department of Commerce to undertake open-ended mitigation of “undue or unacceptable” risk regarded as arising from use of communications technology in which any entity subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary “has any interest.”

This is very vague and very all-encompassing. The legislation thus confers power over domestic communication companies “that could be used to extort their cooperation in censorship.”

Attempts to resist such “mitigation” or censorship would risk administrative fines of $250,000, criminal penalties of $1 million, two decades in prison. For supporting freedom of speech?

Please walk away from this, Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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No Mystery, Just Confusion

woke, pc, woke culture

This week, two examples of “woke” political correctness shot across my visual field.

First, there was another classic 20th century writer bowdlerized by publishers and copyright holders so as not to offend the easily offended: Dame Agatha Christie.

As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, the great mystery writer has had her texts altered before, in the form of the title to her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, which was originally published as Ten Little Indians. No, that’s not right. It was something far more offensive in America — but in U.S., one edition did use the less-offensive Ten Little Indians.

But now interior content of a much more innocuous sort has been changed. “A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew — because, well, he is a Jew — is now just a person,” Soave explains. “And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.”

Nicety-mongering went much further in the second case, however, after the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The young woman who murdered three students and three adults at the school, and was then herself shot dead, sported, online, the pronouns “he/him.” In between blaming Republicans and the talking heads of The Daily Wire for this trans-gendered person’s suicide-by-cop murder spree, some journalists couldn’t help but scold others for mis-gendering . . . him?

At least one report referred to the perpetrator (whose name I see no reason to publicize) as a “trans-woman,” though, in current lingo, she (“he”) was a “trans-man.”

It does get confusing — but as sad as it can get, there’s no mystery here. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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License for Leftists

censorship, education, schools, Marxism

Libertarians should avoid taking sides in left-right antagonisms when promoting a principled third position would make more sense.

Regrettably, in “Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” libertarian magazine Reason fails to offer that alternative.

“In an essay published this week in City Journal,” author Emma Camp begins, “conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities — or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities — should shut down ‘activist’ academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.”

Tellingly, she never defines “routine” censorship.

Let me help: routine censorship is the governmental policy of preventing or punishing private speech on private property. 

State colleges and universities are public institutions, politically established and subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, “private colleges” are also routinely tax-funded at the demand end, and are further supported with research contracts.

Getting rid of Marxist professors preaching political revolution is no more anti-free speech than preventing the CDC and Anthony Fauci from conducting gain-of-function virus research within some college laboratory.

Ms. Camp quotes the Supreme Court about the importance of “safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Freedom sounds great, but as usual, the Supremes forget that taxpayers have an interest, and that constraints on public schools was once routine.

So how not to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”? 

Offer a third position: de-subsidize and dis-establish government “education” by empowering higher education’s customers. Let Marxist professors find payers in the private sector.

Instead, Emma Camp effectively tells conservatives they have no choice but to fund every leftist program that politics and the bureaucracy allow. She could have recognized that “Academic freedom” in the context of tax-subsidized schooling is merely ideological license.

Which is itself a sad alternative to real liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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