On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.
Her resignation letter focused on the recent congressional hearings in which she found herself in the uncomfortable position of selectively defending free speech against a Republican politician slinging charges of “genocide” and “racism.”
It was all very . . . the opposite . . .
And that is the most important context. Her letter’s evasion of discreditable cases of academic plagiarism — at Harvard, no less! — while not honorable, was at least politically apt. One administrator’s fraudulent academic history is no match for the issue of freedom of speech.
Which, as a legal matter, is as Ms. Gay said it was, a matter of context. You have the right to advocate genocide or say racist things on your property or on hired property. You do not have the right to shout such things just anywhere.
But college campuses aren’t just anywhere. They are allegedly places for intellectual debate. The practice of academic freedom means that the property and customs of universities and institutions of higher learning allow differing opinions to be aired.
In classrooms; in papers; in auditoriums.
Still, these student academic free-speech norms don’t extend anywhere and everywhere, in all campus contexts. No student may hide behind “free speech” or “academic freedom” to corner and scream hatred of Israel at every Jew on the quad. That’s where Ms. Gay’s answers in congressional hearings were so unsatisfactory. Especially since Harvard and other major higher education institutions have been disallowing some speech from academic contexts and celebrating other quite threatening speech in the university’s public places.
Gay’s resignation reminds us of Al Capone’s imprisonment for tax evasion: a work-around at best. The underlying issues remain unresolved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).
On the third of January in 1777, American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis’s forces in the Battle of Princeton.
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig (pictured above) became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.
Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.
This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public.
Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”
“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”
This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-democratic mindset.
And very real. It could end our small-r republican experiment.
Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.
Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?
Let’s not ignore the age-old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.
Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter VII, “Free Society.”
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
On the second day of 1819, the Panic of 1819, the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States, began. The classic historical treatment of this crisis remains Murray Rothbard’s dissertation.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”
from “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.