Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (October 23, 1909).
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G.K. Chesterton
On December 13, 1623, Plymouth colonist established the system of trial by twelve jurors.
Maybe we can put a stop to the assault on the privacy of donors to political causes.
By “we” I mean The Buckeye Institute and the Institute for Free Speech, who have teamed up to challenge “a decades-old law that forces the IRS to demand that nonprofit charities hand over the private information of their largest donors every year.”
The IRS itself admits that collecting this personal data “poses a risk of inadvertent disclosure.”
Also a risk of fully advertent disclosure.
The IRS has often been used to harass the political enemies of federal officials in a position to tell the agency what to do.
Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt reports the Institute’s own experience as Exhibit A. In 2013, soon after it had urged Ohio to reject Obamacare-inspired efforts to expand Medicaid, the Institute was subjected to an IRS harassment-audit.
The specter of this investigation was a scary one for the Institute’s major donors, who reasonably assumed that the audit was retaliatory. They worried that if their own names came up during the audit, they too would be subject to IRS attention. Many donors drastically scaled back their giving so they’d be less of a target; others stopped donating altogether.
Prospects for the Institutes’ litigation are good. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in a 2021 ruling that the government must at least consider “the potential for First Amendment harms before requiring that organizations reveal sensitive information about their members and supporters.”
Anonymity in political activism has a long American history — from the start, actually.
It’s what democracy looks like.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Mark Twain
Our papers have one peculiarity — it is American — it exists nowhere else — their irreverence. May they never lose and never modify it. They are irreverent to pretty much everything, but where they laugh one good king to death, they laugh a thousand cruel and infamous shams and superstitions into the grave, and the account is squared. Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935), p. 195.
On December 12, 1939, Finnish forces defeated those of the Soviet Union in the first major victory of what became known as the Winter War, in the Battle of Tolvajärvi.
December 12th birthdays include:
- Erasmus Darwin (1731) – English physician, slave trade abolitionist, inventor and poet
- John Jay (1745) — First Chief Justice of the United States
- William Lloyd Garrison (1805) — American abolitionist, editor of The Liberator
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Watch: We Didn’t Win!
Paul Jacob starts with TIME and ends with FIRE:
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Thomas Babington Macaulay
Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own, — a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” Edinburgh Review (May 1828).
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Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918. Solzhenitsyn became a novelist, philosopher, historian, and dissident who helped bring down the totalitarian Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s novels include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1966). His behemoth history of Soviet prison camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was a major event in the cultural eclipse of far left ideology in the West, when it was published in 1973.
Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008.
In the last two years, variants of an aphorism about Soviet life has been making the rounds on the Internet, misattributed to him.
Paul Jacob talks up The Person of the Year:
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Harry S. Truman
Once a government commits to the principle of silencing opposition, it has only one way to go, and that’s down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes source of terror to all its citizens.