Squelching the speech of those you disagree with, how it is done — a cultural artifact of the present age:
In this video, the valiant Ben Shapiro gives a scheduled talk, but is harassed by protestors and his talk sabotaged by those seeking to “no-platform” him.
It’s not about the ten bucks — or the thousand. An important principle is involved.
Professional lobbyists in Missouri are legally required to submit reports about the corporations, local governments, industries, associations, and special interests for whom they lobby, how much they are paid, and the goodies they bestow upon the politicians they seek to influence. The registration fee is $10.
Problem is, as I revealed at Townhall yesterday, Ron Calzone isn’t a lobbyist. So, naturally enough, he didn’t file.
Calzone is president of Missouri First, a group advocating constitutional governance and mobilizing fellow citizens for an enormous impact on Show-Me State government. He regularly treks to the capitol, while Missouri First helps folks who can’t get to Jefferson City submit testimony online … all to weigh in on issues like the Second Amendment, property rights, initiative petition rules, and cronyism.
It’s true that Calzone lobbies every time he speaks to a legislator. But hey: he’s not a lobbyist under the legal definition. Why? Because he earns not a penny. Missouri First doesn’t even have a bank account. And Calzone doesn’t represent various clients as a professional lobbyist would; he represents himself — and those citizens who agree with him.
Despite the letter of the law, last week the Missouri Ethics Commission fined Mr. Calzone $1,000 for not registering as a lobbyist. It also ordered him not to speak to any state legislator until he registers.
Ron Calzone — with the help of the Freedom Center of Missouri and the Center for Competitive Politics — is appealing the case.
And will win in court.
Yet, that an “ethics” agency is harassing a citizen volunteer speaking truth to power … speaks volumes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems … a tad … trivial.
First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.
He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.
And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861 – 1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.
Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”
I’m not convinced it did a thing.
And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.
Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Thank you, Seattle, for being one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America,” socialist-cum-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders shouted to the large crowd in the City of Goodwill.
Seconds later, two women with a local Black Lives Matter group jumped the stage, threatening to shut down the event. Quickly, they were rewarded for their extortion-by-tantrum. Sen. Sanders and company relinquished the microphone, podium and stage.
The kidnapped crowd booed the violation, only to be screamed at by Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, as “a bunch of screaming white racists,” who practice “white supremacist liberalism.”
“I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” Johnson added.
Angry audience members yelled, “How dare you?!” and “How dare she call me a racist.”
“You guys are full of bull-$@%# with your ‘black lives matter,’” she chided, acknowledging that the event had already recognized the anniversary of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.
What a fascinating marriage of outrage and entitlement!
And yet … real grievances abound.
“Welcome to Seattle,” Johnson told Bernie, “where our Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree for the past three years, and yet has been riddled by use of force, racial profiling, and scandals throughout the year.”
Sen. Sanders doesn’t even stand up for his own speech rights, much less ours. Apparently fearing the loudmouths, he proved unwilling to confront them or address their complaints.
Sanders and his “progressive” Democrat comrades (governing cities like Baltimore and Seattle) must take responsibility for the results of their policies, and admit that the black voices shouting against racism are shouting at them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
For two weeks, Reason magazine was stopped by court order from talking about two government actions.
It started with online comments.
Everyone who samples the Internet knows that although some un-moderated remarks are judicious and thoughtful, others are intemperate and un-thoughtful. Freedom of speech subsumes the latter just as much as the former — unless and until a published comment can be honestly construed as a genuine threat of violence, as opposed to mere venting.
Reason was first hit with a subpoena that “demanded the records of six people who left hyperbolic comments at the website about the federal judge who oversaw the controversial conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.”
The subpoena is itself debatable, the Supreme Court having recently noted that context is relevant to determining whether an online “threat” is a genuine one.
Not debatable? The gag order that soon followed, prohibiting discussion of both the subpoena and the gag order after Reason notified the affected commenters so that they would have a chance to defend their right to anonymity.
Reporting at the magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog, Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain why the prior restraint represented by the order is unconstitutional and a bad idea.
For Reason, the situation was unprecedented; but similarly wrongful gag orders have become commonplace.
If we lose freedom of speech in this country, it won’t be all at once but bit by ugly bit.
This episode? One of the ugly bits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Given the stated purposes of the university — discovering, learning, teaching, engaging in open intellectual discourse — you might suppose that the pitched battles on campus would be primarily intellectual in nature. Persons set forth a view, others criticize it or elaborate a positive alternative, etc.
Open intellectual change, however heated, is indeed often what transpires.
But on many campuses, we also witness efforts to muzzle opponents of ideas or policies. The censors contend that disagreement as such constitutes a kind of assault on them, one from which their delicate selves must be forcibly and un-delicately protected.
Thus, campus activists at Northwestern University have reported Professor Laura Kipnis for “sexual harassment” for arguing, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that “Sexual Paranoia [Is Striking] Academe,” as exemplified by prissy new rules about dating, jokes, the simplest of standard human interactions. According to her accusers, her article somehow creates a “hostile environment” for students eager to impose not only a Victorian screen on dating and talking, but also a screen, or lid, on any discussion of the Victorian screen. It’s just one example of a syndrome that could be multiplied ad infinitum.
What to do?
One thing, if you’re applying to college: omit as a prospect any school rife with the politics of repression. Boycott the anti-academic academy.
The second, larger solution: bypass the modern university altogether.
Modern technology can help with that. There are more and more ways to learn, and teach, with every day that passes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
State-powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.
Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.
O’Neill, editor of the London-based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.
Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-folk use to flag and meta-comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).
And how about the case of the svelte-model-adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-body-ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-body-ready” in the super-model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-blobby sentiment.
Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.
What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-skinned and/or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.
As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-be-offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Silence.
In Wisconsin, laws regulating political speech, along with the clamor for stepped-up “enforcement,” have facilitated an awesomely powerful prosecutor to launch dawn SWAT raids, dragging men, women and children out of their beds, stealing their computers and cell phones and ransacking their homes.
For what crime?
Supporting an act passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.
And for having the bravery, or naïveté, to think we live in a free republic where organizing with others to promote ideas about public policy is a noble pursuit.
Not a one-way ticket to Room 101.
Here at Common Sense we’ve been following these dystopian John Doe raids since 2013, when my friend and hero, Eric O’Keefe, refused to be bullied into silence: he violated a gag order to tell the Wall Street Journal and other media about secret investigations tying up 29 conservative groups.
O’Keefe’s courage inspired several suffering the dawn raids to finally speak out. An article by David French in the May issue of National Review tells their stories, which sparked attention last week from Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News’s The Kelly File.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm “correctly identified some of the most important communicators of political messages in Wisconsin,” O’Keefe told Meghan Kelly, “and they raided their family homes, with kids at home .… They came in the dark.”
“Put aside whether people should have filed different campaign finance reports, is this an appropriate tactic for any kind of campaign finance question?” he asked.
O’Keefe has fought back, suing Chisholm in federal court. Today, we may discover whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal in his case and determine whether a federal district court judge’s injunction against Chisholm’s witch-hunt will stand.
We all know what this is really about. Chisholm was retaliating against individuals and groups that supported Governor Scott Walker’s ultimately successful moves to curb Wisconsin’s public employee unions. It’s a grand example of our age’s real class warfare: between insiders with power and outsiders trying to curb that power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Diane Feinstein thinks so.
Sen. Feinstein (D‑California) wants to ban The Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet. The book, which came out in 1971 with lots of radical ideas, including notoriously unreliable instructions for making bombs, is now a website. Perhaps the quality of the “cookbook” has helped us survive against the anarchist threat these last five decades.
Today, the threat is not anarchist but Islamist terrorism. So of course Sen. Feinstein also wants the Al Qaida magazine Inspire “off the Internet.”
Government censorship, anyone? Free speech, Senator?
Now, I don’t approve of the bombing and murdering of innocents for any cause. So I am not at one with deadly anarchists or deadly jihadists. Count me as among their enemies.
But, at the risk of being called a “liberal,” I don’t think we should defend ourselves against anarchists or jihadists or other terrorists just any old way. For both moral and strategic reasons, we ought not be killing innocents by drone strike, along with those simply declared guilty, without any lawful process at all.
Likewise, we ought not abridge our own cherished principles and the rule of law.
Including the First Amendment.
After all, that’s what government is supposed to be protecting in the first place.
The fact that Feinstein seems so comfortable with simply “banning” books and magazines and websites suggests an illiberal, unAmerican attitude. An attitude that threatens to do more damage to the homeland than any “cookbook” or pro-terrorist magazine or website ever will.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Whenever I feel discouraged by the steady drumbeat of domestic assaults on liberty — from Obamacare to parents being accused of “child neglect” for letting their kids return from a playground by themselves — I try to remind myself:
World history provides plenty of support for this dictum, but so does a glance at the newspaper. Like the story of how a single satiric Instagram post “could end up sending a former Miss Turkey to jail.”
An Istanbul prosecutor has been threatening to imprison Merve Büyüksaraç for up to two years for the heinous deed of insulting an official. Last summer she excerpted a satirical piece called “The Master’s Poem” that originally appeared in the magazine Uykusuz. Uykusuz has a habit of mocking Turkish politicians, including President Erdoğan.
“I shared it because it was funny to me,” she says. “I did not intend to insult Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.” Regardless of her motive, her post should not have put her at legal risk.
Buyuksarac is popular on social media — 15,000 followers on Instagram, double that on Twitter — a presence that makes her a target. The Turkish government doesn’t care whether she is an ardent dissident. They obviously just want to intimidate others with a readership who are inclined to ruffle the feathers of the powerful even a little.
So yes, things could be worse. Lots worse. They could also be a lot better. That’s what we have to fight for.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.