On October 29, 539 B.C., Cyrus the Great entered the city of Babylon as conqueror. His general policy of religious toleration would be extended to the exiled Hebrews, who were, not long after, allowed to return to their homeland.
On the same date in 1923 A.D., the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution marked the start of the Turkish Republic.
The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)
The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”
Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”
Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of … citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”
What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process.
AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-state puppet.”
The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Weep not that the world changes — did it keep
William Cullen Bryant, “Mutation: A Sonnet” (1824).
A stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.
On October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, despite the fact that the monument was not a federally funded project and that Cleveland was adamant in sticking to the private funding of the project.
In “What Do You Think of Thomas Jefferson? (Trump Asked),” the Fine People on Both Sides calumny against Donald Trump was covered here. Now, let us fact-check two other infamous Trump sayings.
Repeatedly we hear former president and current presidential candidate Donald John Trump accused of declaring he would be “a dictator on Day One,” and that, therefore, we cannot trust him to respect the Constitution.
Sure. He said it. No doubt. But the original statement was a bit of jesting with Sean Hannity:
Hannity had asked if he would ever use power as retribution against anyone, and Trump responded orthogonally, saying “except for Day One,” then clarifying: he’d close the border and “drill, drill, drill.”
He was answering a different question. This is quite clear. You have to be somewhat illiterate not to understand what Trump was doing here. So can we assume that they really object to is his border policy and petroleum production stance?
Trump is charged with threatening a bloodbath if he is not elected. And he did say the word. But the context was also closer to anodyne. He predicted a bloodbath if tariffs in automobiles from Mexico were not raised “100 percent,” which he promised to do:
Now, the ultra-protectionist policy Trump lays out here may be close to insane. But it’s not threatening-riots- or threatening-insurrection-insane. That is just a fantasy. Of his opponents.
It is worth remembering, also, that there is a difference between a prophecy (or prediction) and a threat (or dire promise).
We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer — and they’ve had almost 30 years of it — shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater.
Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” a televised speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign (October 27, 1964).