Statesmen are gamesters, and the people are the cards they play with.
David Crockett, first sentence of The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Tenth edition, 1836).
Singing Revolution
On August 23, 1989, two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood on the Vilnius-Tallinn road, holding hands, as part of the “Singing Revolution” that helped set the Soviet Union to its fateful implosion.
Let’s assume that most Harvard University officials harbor no special animus against Jews.
Let’s also assume that the school’s willingness to ignore its own policies while Jewish students were the focus last year of what Judge Richard Stearn agrees was “‘severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive’… harassment” by Hamas supporters was motivated, rather, only by lack of courage.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let’s say that Harvard officials were motivated only by craven unwillingness to go against one of the latest left-wing ideological fads, that of letting anti-Israel agitators run wild.
But a policy that protects students from harassment and assault only when this is easy or fashionable to do — while insisting on “freedom of speech” for persons pushing past obnoxious speech into criminal assault and battery — is not much of a policy.
Stearns’s ruling is not a binding decision on the merits of the plaintiffs’ lawsuit. He simply allowed it to proceed.
His refusal to dismiss means that he finds the plaintiffs’ argument plausible — the argument that Harvard has violated its contractual obligations by observing what pro-Hamas students were doing to other students with supreme institutional indifference.
Indeed, he finds that the protests “were, at times, confrontational and physically violent, and plaintiffs legitimately fear their repetition. The harassment also impacted plaintiffs’ life experience at Harvard; they dreaded walking through the campus, missed classes, and stopped participating in extracurricular events.”
Peaceful protest ends when riot, assault, and intimidation begin. Institutions of both law and higher learning should always make that dividing line as clear as possible.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Stephan Kinsella
All these guys they call judges? The federal judges? The Supreme Court judges? They’re not really judges. They’re just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That’s it. Their job is not to do justice. Which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve dispute between two parties based upon principles of justices and fairness. These federal judges can’t do that, because their job is to interpret constitution and federal law, which is just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats, and members of the state. So, I don’t think they’re actual judges. They’re not actually doing law. What they’re interpreting is not law.
Stephan Kinsella, KOL361 | Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington (October 13, 2021).
Devil’s Island
On August 22, 1952, France closed its penal colony on Devil’s Island.
At first a leper colony, it had been transformed by the end of the 19th century into a prison tasked primarily with housing enemies of the French state.
“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”
Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.
National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-lance professionals and the like.
The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”
So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?
Would-be Cackler-in-Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-and-out communist:
- “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
- “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
- “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”
True-believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-Marxist totalitarians?
It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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