John Morley, Voltaire (London: Macmillan and Company, 1885; 1897), p. 80.
Political liberty . . . has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties.
On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.
The word “storm” in its various forms is almost invariably paired with “Bastille” in discussions of the event. It is one of the great clichés of history.
On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act was signed into law, prohibiting the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.
The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson as its leader and figurehead.
With the help of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, he is suing the school for racial discrimination, specifically for being “singled out for ridicule and humiliation because of the color of his skin.”
According to the lawsuit, various of the defendants told De Piero that “outcomes alone — regardless of the legitimacy of methods of evaluation, mastery of subject matter, or intentions — demonstrate whether a faculty member’s actions are racist or not. . . . The logic of Defendants’ demands required that De Piero also penalize students academically on the basis of race.”
The filing details a litany of such conduct.
De Piero told Fox News: “I think there is almost a religious, cult-like environment where you had this original sin. In this case, I’m white. I need to repent for that sin. . . . I think they were waging a psychological war campaign and they’re trying to break people. And they almost broke me. But they didn’t.”
The U.S. Supreme Court took fifty years to rule against discriminatory, race-based university admissions. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another fifty years to rule against the travesties of racist grading, racist “diversity training,” and allied diversity-equity-inclusion racist policies doublespeakingly designed to mandate racism in the name of antiracism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.
James Abram Garfield, speech at Ravenna, Ohio (July 4, 1865).
On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”
This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal as well as political event; with the court-forced disclosure of the tapes, it proved to be one of the most striking examples of “government transparency” in modern times.
“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.”
Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”
However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”
Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”
Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”
Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.
“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)
But . . . why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?
Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”
Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.
“Ten Bears” in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as performed by Will Sampson and written by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, based on the novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forest Carter.
On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
We are not talking about borderline cases of one or two Chinese soldiers a year. The U.S. Border Patrol now acknowledges 347 encounters with Chinese nationals in 2021; 1,987 in 2022; and a whopping 12,533 encounters so far this year!
In a piece for Gatestone Institute, Gordon Chang reports that although some Chinese migrants entering through the southern border are simply “seeking a better life for themselves and their children,” many “are coming to commit acts of sabotage.” These are PLA soldiers.
They can first go to a country like Ecuador, which permits entry without a visa. They can then make their way through jungle before catching a bus to the border. They are often then simply released into the U.S.
Representative Mark Greenn (R-Tenn.) says that he was told by a Border Patrol sector chief that some of the people coming across have “known ties to the PLA.”
Chang quotes war correspondent Michael Yon: “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English. They were all headed to the American border.”
This is consistent with the pattern of Chinese aggression.
So maybe we — and maybe the government whose job is to protect us — should pay attention to this.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 21.