The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Friedrich von Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from The Athenæum” (80), from Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 1797–1800, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), translators.
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, testifying under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused United Nations bigwig Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) changed priorities with the new Trump administration. It terminated some previously awarded research programs to develop “diversity-related projects,” since they do not align with the goal of creating “opportunities for all Americans everwhere.”
While the reader may be wondering why the National Science Foundation concerns anything but the advancement of science, the more immediate questions are Is the NSF allowed to just stop funding some projects on the basis of altered executive branch priorities? and What is required of the NSF by statute?
Sixteen states sued, asking for a court injunction to stop the halt of spending on DEI by the NSF. On August 1, a federal judge declined the request. “In a 78-page opinion, U.S. District Judge John Cronan declined to issue the injunction,” explains an Epoch Times article, “noting that the case involves monetary claims and therefore falls within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims.
Cronan determined that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that NSF’s directive runs counter to its mandatory statutory obligations, according to the court ruling.
The judge also stated that NSF’s directive, by its terms, does not require the agency to stop supporting projects aimed at increasing participation of women, minorities, and people with disabilities in STEM fields, citing evidence presented by the plaintiffs.
For example, the University of Northern Colorado stated that NSF funding supported nine of its programs that specifically aim to promote minority participation in STEM fields. Of those, only one had its funding terminated following the change in the agency’s policies, according to the court order.
“To the contrary, the record makes clear that, under the Priority Directive, NSF continues to fund many projects that advance the congressional objectives reflected in the NSF Act,” Cronan stated.
Aldgra Fredly, “Judge Declines to Block National Science Foundation From Ending DEI-Related Grants,” The Epoch Times (August 2, 2025).
Paul Jacob has been following the DEI issue for years, most recently in January with “DEI, Dying?” He remembers when its “diversity/equity/inclusion” policies were called “reverse discrimination.”
Equality of rights is the first of rights.
Personal motto of Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner.
Fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress of the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing began on August 2, 1776, and continued for several months, not all the delegates being present at the initial signing. The signings occurred at the Pennsylvania State House — later called Independence Hall — in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Things are about to get worse. By talking about it online, Britons who think that the country has an immigration problem could draw the attention of a new police unit, National Internet Intelligence Investigations.
Saying “we’ve got to protest about this” will probably cause the sirens to go off.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, says the government is trying “to police what you post, what you share, what you think” because it “can’t police the streets. . . . Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it.”
However, this kind of thing happened under the Tories too.
People still speak their minds in the UK. They aren’t yet used to regarding their political opinions as prenatal forms of criminal activity.
One could use social media to plan or boast about what everybody agrees is a crime. A thug might post video showing how he beat somebody up. Bank robbers might share bank-robbery plans on Facebook. Criminals tend not to do these things. But if they did, for real (that is, they’re not play-acting), who could object if the police inspect the incriminating posts and take appropriate action?
But what’s happening in the UK is not that.
It’s an attempt to prevent social unrest by finding expressions of dissent and pretending to divine which speech-crime will lead to protest-crime.
It requires Big Brother Bobbies.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance” in Collected Essays (1959).
On August 1, 1834, Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took force, freeing slaves throughout much of the British empire.
William Wilberforce, one of the country’s main anti-slavery politicians, had lived long enough in July 1833 to hear that the bill would pass, dying on the 29th, with the bill receiving royal assent a month later.
August 1 births include Francis Scott Key (1779), composer of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”; American authors Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819); and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (1972), historian and popularizer of Austrian economics, podcaster of the Tom Woods Show.
The “Ottawa truck convoy” is what they are calling the big anti-totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare.
“Crown prosecutor Siobhain Wetscher asked Justice Heather Perkins-McVey to impose a prison sentence of seven years for Lich and eight years for Barber,” we learn, and if you raise your eyebrows over such stiff sentences — for “mischief” cases! — you’re not alone. Chris Barber’s lawyer called the prosecutor’s demanded punishment, “cruel and unusual.”
The exact charges against the two convoy leaders are “mischief and counselling others to disobey a court order” (Barber) and “mischief alone” (Lich). The prosecutor argued that these people did a lot of damage.
But it wasn’t property damage, or burning buildings, or even littering. The convoys stalled traffic around government buildings and made a lot of noise — and Barber is acknowledged by the prosecutor to have worked with police to move trucks out of residential areas.
Barber and Lich wanted a clean and pointed protest.
Barber’s lawyer noted that the organizers and hooligans of the “Black Bloc” protesters at Toronto’s 2010 G20 summit “caused extensive property damage, including upending police cars and smashing storefronts, but received comparatively light sentences of under two years.”
And remember, even the CBC article used the word “unprecedented.”
Traditionally, however, a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful.
Tyrannical governments.
So we now know how to categorize the Canadian government.
Very precedented.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted.
Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (1548), p. 39, as translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press: 1992).