History shows how the human mind, which, at the dawn of civilisation, was a lyre of three chords, became in the progress of civilisation a lyre of seven chords. . . .
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (1879), p. 157.
The purpose of the demonstration was to shut down a speech.
The speech would not have been shut down without the presence of violent protestors.
The peaceful protestors are claiming a victory that wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of violent protestors.
“The Free Speech Movement is dead.”
So said the Berkeley College Republicans after violence Wednesday night forced cancelation of a sold-out speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Greek-born British author, now a senior editor at Breitbart News. The reference, of course, is to the University of California’s history as a haven for free expression dating back to the 1960s.
Protests of the event gave way to
Yet only one arrest was made Wednesday night, and two on Thursday, when a man in a suit wearing a Trump hat apparently triggered two guys to jump out of their car and assault him.*
CNN dubbed the “inflammatory” Yiannopoulos a “professional provocateur.” He has also been labeled a racist, which he denies, and a homophobe, even though he’s gay. Pushing the envelope against political correctness, for his part, Milo calls “college campuses . . . cancerous and toxic to free expression.”
Regardless of label, Yiannopoulos’s right to speak and the right of others to listen are constitutionally protected. And violence to block a peacefully expressed point of view is never justified.
Asked about the tactics used, one unnamed young protestor** explained, “Although, you know, it could get violent or whatever, with the fire, that’s what caused Milo to leave. We succeeded.”
The young woman added, “And next is Trump.”
Either we defend civilization against speech-squelching violence, or inherit an ugly silence.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*More arrests may be forthcoming. The Washington Post reported that, “University police rescued many people in the crowd who were being attacked, trapped or injured . . . and are collecting video to try to identify suspects.”
** The woman was part of the ominously-named group By Any Means Necessary.
On February 3, 1783, Spain recognized United States independence.
Walter Bagehot (pronounced “badge-it”; pictured), famed editor of The Economist and author of Lombard Street, was born on this date in 1826.
The American people are paying for employees they can’t even control. Federal bureaucrats enjoy ludicrous protections that far exceed what average Americans can expect in their own jobs and thus isolate the bureaucracy from the will of the American people. To correct this, Congress should pass a law to make all federal employees serve at will — just like Americans in the private sector. If a bureaucrat underperforms, undermines policy, or is no longer needed, he should be dismissed.
Grant Starrett, “Make All Federal Employees Fireable, National Review (February 2, 2017).
The media hysterically pushes the line that the new Trump administration is so much “in chaos” it even frightens seasoned (salt-and-pepper?) heads in the Republican Party. But perhaps folks at the Environmental Protection Agency have more reason to panic.
“It looks like the EPA will be the agency hardest hit by the Trump sledgehammer,” writes Julie Kelly over at National Review.
Ms. Kelly offers striking reasons to hit the agency hard, quoting from Steve Malloy, the author of Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA. “I can think of no agency that has done more pointless harm to the U.S. economy than the EPA — all based on junk science, if not out-and-out science fraud.” Malloy looks forward to the new president’s promised rethink and restructuring of the agency.
Just how bad is it?
Environmentalists often cry foul over any corporate funding of ecological research. But if one worries about money influencing results, the case against grants funded by regulatory agencies for regulatory purposes is even stronger.
Especially when the agency is run by ideologues.
Trump’s transition team seeks to make all the EPA’s relevant data public, for peer and public review, and would really like to curtail the agency’s research funding entirely.
Pipe dream? Better than the recent nightmare: “For eight years,” writes Kelly, “President Obama used the agency as his de facto enforcer of environmental policies he couldn’t pass in Congress even when it was controlled by his own party.”
The EPA needs to be checked. And balanced. And more.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On February 2, 1887, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, celebrated the first Groundhog Day. On the same day in 1976, the Groundhog Day gale hit the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada.
In 2009, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe officially devalued the Zimbabwean dollar for the third and final time, making Z$1 trillion now only Z$1 of the new currency, equivalent to Z$10 septillion before the first devaluation. Politicians in Zimbabwe looked up, saw their shadow, and realized that they had only a couple months more of their inflation binge. Indeed, the legalization of trading currencies, the previous month, had sealed the fate of Zimbabwe’s independent dollar. The Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned officially on the 9th of April, 2009.
We should be more worried about the government taking away our free speech rather than us taking it away from ourselves.
Dave Rubin, Rubin Report transcript.
Legend has it that a juror once ran up to attorney Neil Gorsuch, after Gorsuch won a case proving a gravel pit owner had been cheated, declaring, “You’re Perry Mason.”
These days, Gorsuch sits on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the late Justice Scalia’s seat on the nation’s highest court.
And now Gorsuch is receiving testimonials worthy of the indefatigable TV lawyer.
Brad Smith, the chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, expressed his pleasure “that President Trump has nominated someone who will defend a robust First Amendment.”
Ballot access expert Richard Winger noted that Gorsuch has a “good record in cases involving independent candidates and minor parties.”
“I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration,” wrote Neal Katyal in the New York Times. “Until Tuesday,” continued the Georgetown law professor, “when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.”
Katyal, who had served as an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, added that Gorsuch’s record of holding government officials accountable “should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.”*
Even I have pertinent testimony: back in 1992, Gorsuch argued (in a co-authored Cato Institute paper) that term limits were “constitutionally permissible” as “institutional constraints on the power of government” that “the Framers,” if alive today, would likely see as “necessary preconditions for liberty.”
No, Gorsuch is not actually Perry Mason — I never knew where Perry stood on term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* On Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Damon Root strongly agreed.
