Category: First Amendment rights

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Letting DEI Die

MIT, DEI, college, racism, collectivism, sexism

The good news? 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants to make DEI statements.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says the school can “build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Correct on both counts, but a bit blah as indictments go. And inadequate. Forget “inclusive.” This is merely a pledge to refrain from being arbitrarily exclusionary.

But the new policy is better than the status quo.

DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) may sound innocuous, at worst pointless. But DEI guidelines have functioned as a particularly odious form of ideological litmus test. The goal has been to force instructors to toe certain leftist (or collectivist) ideological lines as if the ideas imposed were as self-evidently true as declarations that the cloudless sky is cerrulian blue.

For example, if you dare disagree that race-conscious “antiracist” policies making skin color — and maybe also “gender” — more important than quality of work or some reliable leading indicators of productivity, your views may put you on the wrong side of the DEI divide.

So MIT’s dropping of mandatory DEI-fealty statements is a big step in the right direction. By as prestigious an institution of higher learning as any in the world.

The bad news? 

MIT has apparently not fired the “diversity deans” that it hired in 2021 — and hired not on the basis of excellence of qualifications: serious plagiarism complaints have been filed against two of these personnel!

If MIT retains six “diversity deans” in place, able to run around causing trouble for those faculty who reject DEI edicts, it hasn’t purged itself of the poison quite yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bills of Suppression

censorship, misinformation, disinformation, surveillance

In 2021, Democrats took aim at persons who donate to Democrats’ opponents with legislation called the For the People Act, which Republicans successfully blocked.

Back then, Bradley Smith, chairman of Institute for Free Speech, observed that the legislation aimed to violate the rights of groups “who do nothing more than speak about policy issues before Congress.” It would also have limited political speech on the web.

Now the bill is being resurrected as two separate pieces of legislation, each with language purporting to counter the purported threat of artificial intelligence. They are the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act and the AI Transparency in Elections Act.

Some Republicans seem to be buying into the resuscitated anti-speech agenda, even though the legislation incorporates many proposals — even much of the same language — from the earlier bill. Again, says Smith, the goal is to expose conservative donors to “to harassment and boycotts.” Also to outlaw content called “materially deceptive content” as judged by a “reasonable person.” 

Of course, “reasonable persons” can and do disagree about the meaning of various speech and whether it’s “deceptive.” It’s reasonable to assume that the legislation, if enacted, will be used against speech that enforcers happen to disagree with.

As for actually deceptive speech: all manner of jabberwocky is protected by the First Amendment unless uttered to rob or defraud someone. If I tell you the moon is green cheese and you believe it, that may be sad. But I haven’t picked your pocket . . . or made you eat lunar cheese.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Library Against Liberty

library, Moms for Liberty, gender

In order to conduct a forum “on Fair and Safe Sport for Girls,” Moms for Liberty reserved and paid for a room at a library.

Then, the librarians ambushed them.

Yolo County Public Library Regional Manager Scott Love “invited disruptive protesters” to the August 2023 forum and then shut it down as soon as it started. He disagreed with Moms for Liberty that men who demand the right to participate in women’s sports are men. So the matter couldn’t even be discussed. Not in the library’s reserved and paid-for meeting room.

With the help of the Institute for Free Speech and Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty sued, arguing that Yolo County Library had acted unconstitutionally.

According to the complaint, “Defendants are not required to agree with Plaintiffs’ views about protecting women’s sports. The First Amendment, however, requires that Defendants allow Plaintiffs to speak freely about the integrity of female athletics in library meeting rooms. It demands public library officials not enable — let alone participate in  — the disruption and cancellation of Plaintiffs’ events on account of their viewpoints.

“The Court should hold Defendants accountable for the damage they caused in censoring Plaintiffs’ event and ensure that such censorship never happens again.”

The library has now settled, revising its policies to (we hope) protect the freedom of speech of patrons who use its meeting rooms. It must also pay plaintiffs $70,000 in damages and legal costs.

Sadly, those funds come from taxpayers. Seems Mr. Love should pay a price.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom regulation

Criminal Discrimination?

The Joker, Uncle Sam, racism, business, regulations, quota

It’s okay.

You don’t have to associate with criminals. You don’t have to employ them and worry how they’ll act on the job. It’s not your duty to give criminals or persons with a criminal record access to your life or property and hope for the best.

If only we could leave it at that. 

That’s not our world though. In our world, our government, working hard to rip America apart in every way possible, is suing the Sheetz chain of convenience stores because it doesn’t hire applicants with a criminal record.

The “problem” is that too many such failed applicants are nonwhite.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accuses Sheetz of “disproportionately screening out Black, Native American/Alaska Native and multiracial applicants.” The agency babbles that “employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue.”

Of course, the “disparate impact” exists not because of these classifications but because the denied applicants have criminal records. Sheetz didn’t decline these applicants because of their skin colors.

Nevertheless, Sheetz is supposed to have somehow “shown” that refusing to hire applicants with criminal records reduces Sheetz’s own risks and the risks for customers.

Elon Musk, commenting on this story, has it right: “You know The Joker is running things when the law-abiding are being prosecuted by the government for not hiring criminals!”

These days Uncle Sam and The Joker do look alarmingly similar.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

College Censors Squelched

college, censorship, academia, woke, wokeism

If you attend Oklahoma State University, you are, I hope, now free to speak.

OSU will shut down a “bias response team” instituted to harass speech on campus. We can thank a group called Speech First, which sued the school.

“We are excited to announce that OSU will be eliminating their insidious bias reporting system that told students to anonymously report on one another for ‘bias’ and that they will have to rewrite their harassment policy to include important speech protections so that students can no longer be punished for merely expressing their views,” says Cherise Trump, executive director of the organization.

“We have also secured a change to their computer policy so that it no longer targets the protected political speech of students.”

The settlement also requires the school to pay Speech First $18,000 for legal expenses.

OSU had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Speech First protected the names of its plaintiffs, OSU students.

Speech First’s reason for using pseudonyms is pretty commonsensical: to protect plaintiffs from retaliation. That a university with a policy of punishing students for renegade speech might also punish them for participating in a lawsuit to end this policy doesn’t seem like a farfetched concern.

The resolution of the case hardly means that the fight for freedom of speech on campus is over. But it may help other universities realize that, as Cherise Trump puts it, “there is a high cost to violating students’ constitutional rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Celebrity’s Defiance

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, censorship, Scotland, freedom

Can J. K. Rowling destroy Scotland’s new anti-free-speech law with a strategic wave of a single wand?

The author of the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series has gotten into trouble. She defied the State by saying that men are men and women are women even when a member of one of these sexes declares otherwise.

To some, the author’s statements are “hate” speech. Speech now prosecutable in Scotland, where Rowling lives.

On April 1, 2024, legislation went into effect there making it a criminal offense to “stir up hate” against members of a protected group, including transgender individuals. This is a “crime” that can be punished by up to seven years in prison. 

The law’s terms are encompassing and vague.

So far, Rowling has escaped arrest, though offering herself as the subject of a test case. After the law went into effect, she penned a series of posts declaring that various men who say they’re not men are in fact men: blatant “misgendering.”

“If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested,” she wrote.

When the Scottish police declined, she added: “I trust that all women — irrespective of profile or financial means — will be treated equally under the law.

This trust is, I fear, misplaced. As long as the law exists, Rowling’s very visible defiance cannot protect everybody else who might be targeted under it. 

Scotland needs more Harry Potters, er, heroes … to stand up to this terrible law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies political challengers

The RFK Challenge

Joe Biden, censorship, surveillance

Yes, but . . .

When contemplating a candidate for office we may like, we do a lot of “Yes, but” thinking. It’s impossible not to.

Yesterday I considered the candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., in the context of the Republican/Democrat Duopoly™. Many of my readers may like his stances on COVID or war, but worry about other positions, like the Second Amendment and “climate change.”

Yes, but . . . there is another Yes, But context: the candidate forces mainstream voters and media manipulators to Yes, But their cherished positions.

Yes, Trump was “a threat to democracy” for trying to “overturn an election.” RFK, Jr. grants that Democrat talking point. 

But when pressed by Erin Burnett of CNN, his response was a challenge: “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history — the first president in history — that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

Now your and my response might be, No, but . . .

As in, he was certainly not the first president in American history to directly censor political speech.

But the presidents who did that are all heroes to the CNN crowd, so they’ll have to say, “Yes, but . . .”

But what? What’s the response? 

The CNN article, linked above, was lame: “‘With a straight face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,’ DNC senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. ‘There is no comparison to summoning a mob to the Capitol and promising to be a dictator on day one. . . .’”

What CNN and the DNC and the whole establishment ignore is the vast suppression of thousands, millions of voices online, organized by the government and ex-government and close-to-government operatives.

Yes, but . . . they like censoring their competition!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Richly Revealing

Donald Trump, gag order, censorship, courts, indictment

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly . . . ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is . . . well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false. 

They object . . . because . . . what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Most Important Time Periods

First Amendment, US Constitution, free speech, censorship

The attorneys general of a few states, a few activist groups, and a few congressmen have acted to bring to light a mass of eyewitness and documentary evidence that the federal government has been working hard, behind the scenes, to censor our speech.

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 time periods.”

Justice Kagan, chiming in: “I’m really worried about that.”

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 speech stomped.

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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TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“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 video-sharing platform.

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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