Legislative supervision is important. Plus, the role of civil rights organizations: “Idaho Freedom Foundation has published screenshots of since-deleted tweets from a BSU assistant professor of English who stated that a ‘student in a university foundations class taped a zoom discussion on white privilege, in which apparently a white student was made to feel uncomfortable, and sent the video to ID state legislature, who are ‘enraged.’ BSU suspended all UF 200 classes mid semester as a result. Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Anna Miller told The College Fix in a telephone interview Friday that her group has submitted public records act requests for copies of student complaints over UF 200 — as well as for a copy of the alleged video.”
Progress, Chesterton pointed out, isn’t anything. You can’t be for progress unless you’ve defined the thing towards which you are progressing. Otherwise progress is simply a comparative for which we have not established the superlative. The Progressives, according to Chesterton, were only interested in “going on towards going on.” Their notion of progress was based on a rejection of the past, a hatred of history, and a breaking of the commandment that tells us to honor our father and mother. Tradition means giving a vote to our ancestors. It is, Chesterton said, “the democracy of the dead.” Letting our ancestors have a vote is only common sense, whereas voting on behalf of our ancestors is election fraud.
For those who would measure progress by technological innovation, Chesterton responded that, in spite of our faster cars and communication, “the mere strain of modern life is unbearable.” The world has become abnormal. We no longer desire normal things: normal marriage, normal ownership, normal worship, or even life itself.
Chesterton is considered a conservative these days, but in his own day he called himself a liberal. He felt that a liberal was someone who believed in freedom. But, just as Ronald Reagan said that he didn’t leave the Democrat Party, it left him; Chesterton said, “I am the last liberal.” He was alienated from Britain’s Liberal Party when he discovered its stealth and corruption, but also when he realized that the Liberals were not interested in liberty or justice; they were only interested in getting reelected.
Chesterton also lived during the period that one of the greatest stolen bases by the American left occurred: embarrassed by the disastrous presidency of Woodrow Wilson, they swapped out the word “liberal” for “Progressive.”
MORE LIBEL NEWS: Big win for Project Veritas against the New York Times. “Project Veritas’ lawsuit came to be due to The New York Times’ labeling Project Veritas’ investigation into illegal ballot harvesting taking place in Minnesota during the 2020 election cycle as ‘deceptive.'”
But in the meantime, how exactly is When Harry Became Sally an instance of ‘hate speech’? Brief answer: it’s not. More extended answer: ‘hate speech’ is a bogus category wheeled out to forbid or criminalize speech that you don’t like.
But in their response to the letter from Messrs Rubio et al., Amazon went a step beyond the language set forth in their content guidelines. Henceforth, the spokesman for Amazon said, the online emporium will not ‘sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness’.
Note the deployment of the verb ‘frame’. I wonder how many meetings it took for Amazon to come up with that weasel word? Simply as a matter of rhetoric, I admire its encompassing vagueness. But what does it really mean? Ryan Anderson replied that ‘Nowhere have I ever said or framed LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.’ This is true. But in the context of Amazon’s interdiction, it signifies nothing. Amazon’s suppression of this one book is just an express stop, a skirmish in a much larger battle.
In their letter to Amazon, Sens. Rubio et al. touch on that larger battle when they ask whether the delisting of When Harry Became Sally was ‘part of a broader campaign against conservative material and voices on Amazon’s platforms?’
Bingo. ‘Amazon said ‘No’, of course — ‘We offer customers across the political spectrum a wide variety of content that includes disparate opinions,’ their letter insisted. But this is supremely disingenuous. Sure, you can buy Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan and many other Tabasco works on Amazon. And as for works that ‘frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness’, you’ll find various works by Sigmund Freud, publications of the American Psychiatric Association, and works by other authors and entities that do just that.
But Amazon’s decision to squash this one book was never about any matter of principle. It is about the deployment of power in the battle now raging to determine the shape of American culture. Amazon has sided firmly with the bullies. We firmly expect to witness fresh interdictions, delistings and suppressions from the internet giant. They can do it, so they will do it. In a joint statement we published at the Encounter website, Ryan Anderson and I noted that
The Reagan appointee said increasing the power of the media is “so dangerous,” “because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions.”
“Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” Silberman claimed.
He also griped that the news section of The Wall Street Journal and most television outlets also skew to the left.
Silberman said a “one-party control of the press” poses a threat to a “viable democracy.”
He cited Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal opinion and editorial pages as one of the “few notable exceptions to Democratic Party ideological control.”
I personally think that the Supreme Court got it wrong in the Selective Service Cases and that the draft is unconstitutional. But if we’re going to have one, it should apply across the board.
And my Constitutional Law casebook has this note regarding abortion (basically cribbed from Blackmun’s separate opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey): “Laws against abortion compel women to carry a fetus to term, thus conscripting their bodies to the service of another. Men are not forced by law to give up their bodies to the service of another.” Well, except, you know, for actual conscription. . . .
These days Democratic politicians lean on anyone with power over platforms to shut down the propaganda of the right. Former Democratic officials pen op-eds calling on us to get over free speech. Journalists fantasize about how easily and painlessly Silicon Valley might monitor and root out objectionable speech. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, journalist after journalist can be seen rationalizing that, because social media platforms are private companies, the first amendment doesn’t apply to them … and, I suppose, neither should the American tradition of free-ranging, anything-goes political speech. . . .
This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.
Democrats are now the Party of HR.
Plus:
What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.
Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.
But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true.
The whole performance was positively shaming. Both sides had agreed on opening statement of two minutes. Blinken and Sullivan followed the rules. Yang went on for nearly 20 minutes, explaining how the US, with capitulation to Black Lives Matter, antifa and other radicals, was in no position to lecture China. He has a point. A canny friend of mine says that he would rather be governed by the Chinese than the Yale faculty. I am not ready to go that far, but I see his point.
The Anchorage outrage was not an isolated incident. On the contrary, though it is early days yet in the Biden-Harris (or Harris-Biden) administration, a pattern of contempt for America and its leaders seems to be taking hold. In the course of a ‘what-flavor-is-your-milkshake’ valen- er, interview with George ‘I <3 Hillary’ Stephanopoulos, Biden was asked if he thought Russian president Vladimir Putin was a ‘killer’. He answered yes, in response to which Putin said he wished Biden the best of health and suggested they livestream a debate. Can you imagine what that would be like?
Joe Biden can barely make it up the stairs to Air Force One without tripping (not once but thrice). It was ‘the wind’ said a White House spox. Remember when President Trump reached for the handrail after speaking at West Point? You would have thought he was about to expire from the hysterical media coverage.
The Swamp has continued its bizarre deflection of the greatest threat to the United States — an increasingly bellicose China — in order to cultivate their favorite meme: the dastardliness of Putin’s Russia. Really, you cannot encounter a news story from the Fake News Conglomerate without the canned strains of ‘Russian interference in the election’. And now HuffPo and kindred outlets are excitedly peddling the non-news that Russia was somehow behind the Hunter Biden laptop story. Sure, they circulated the story, which as far as I know was broken by the New York Post, but the entity behind thestory, the person at the origin, was Hunter ‘Ole Cokehead’ Biden himself.
Joe Biden has been in office for just two months. Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.
I wonder how or if Saturday Night Live will cover Biden’s fall. Probably not like this, from the good old days, when SNL’s utter contempt for Gerald Ford would cause one writer to mutter, “The president’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm:”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Via a friend, SNL will ignore this, but the memesmiths aren’t:
And how far are they willing to go to protect Biden from critics? This far.
We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.
And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.
Mass killers, if they are motivated by bigotry or hate, tend to let the world know. This mass murderer in Atlanta actually denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evidence for it — and that has been true from the very start.
Democrats need to get Asians good and scared about “anti-Asian hate crimes” so that they’ll forget how made they are about anti-Asian discrimination that’s winked at, or even encouraged, by the Biden Administration. That’s what this narrative is all about.
But:
Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.
It’s useful if people are gullible enought to believe it.
But after 12 months in which he was pilloried as a reckless executive driven more by ideology than science, dogged by images of crowded beaches and bars and derided as “DuhSantis,” “DeathSantis” and “DeSatan,” Florida has fared no worse, and in some ways better, than many other states — including its big-state peers.
The most controversial policies DeSantis enacted — locking down later and opening up earlier, keeping nursing homes closed to visitation while insisting schools needed to be open to students, resisting intense pressure to issue a mask mandate — have ended up being, on balance, short of or even the opposite of ruinous.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went rogue on the Bluebook when he embraced an appellate lawyer’s suggestion for dealing with “citation baggage” that comes with some quoted material.
Jack Metzler, an appellate lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, outlined the problem in an article at SSRN in March 2017. When court decisions and briefs quote from an earlier source, and the earlier source sometimes quotes an even earlier source, the Bluebook rules make for a lot of “citation baggage” that distracts from the point.
“Following the Bluebook in those situations can result in a confusing mess of nested quotation marks, brackets and parenthetical information that distracts from the writer’s point in using the quotation—to convey what the court being quoted actually said,” Metzler explained in an email to the ABA Journal. “I proposed that writers could use a single parenthetical—(cleaned up)—to signal that extraneous material was removed from the quotation without changing any of the underlying text.”
Thomas adopted Metzler’s solution in his Feb. 25 decision in Brownback v. King, adding the words “cleaned up” in parentheses after a sentence quoting from an earlier decision, Law360 reported. The article described the development as a “mini-revolution in legal citation.”
The development resonated with appellate lawyers.
The Bluebook is excessively cumbersome, and is mostly a way for a few top law reviews to make money.
Just this week we had the black editor of a progressive magazine forced to resign because of tweets about Asians she wrote a decade ago in high school. Will the people who were outraged about a 17-year-old’s (admittedly dumb) tweets demand Alison Collins resign? These tweets are a lot more recent and a lot more offensive. More importantly, there’s no reason to think Collins has changed her views since then. As noted above she was saying much the same thing last year.
Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits of racism?
My neighbor has had enough of Zoom schooling and halting district reopening plans. She is removing her child from public school to homeschool this spring and will enroll her in a private school in the fall. This mom is not alone.
It’s estimated that less than half of all U.S. students are attending full-time, traditional, in-person schooling. While there are some signs that more schools may open in the coming weeks as coronavirus cases decline and vaccinations rise–and as some state officials mandate the move–teachers unions continue to push back against reopening plans in many areas. As parents observe the back-and-forth between politicians, union leaders and school boards, and grapple with the uncertainty of what their children’s learning will look like next fall, more of them are opting out of their local public schools for private options.
In my work with families who choose alternatives to conventional schooling, I find more interest in innovative learning models and more enthusiasm for private education. Many of the parents I talk to never would have considered leaving their district school until this year, while others have been on the fence for a long time. Poor quality remote schooling and unpredictable or unsatisfying reopening plans finally gave them a needed nudge.
From Hollywood to Higher Education to K-12 and beyond, core lefty institutions are dying or committing suicide because of the pandemic. The right should take advantage.
Among other things, education money should go to parents, not to schools. Public schools should have to compete with private schools and homeschoolers for students and funds.
LOOK, I KNOW IT’S MESSY. I KNOW IT LOOKS HOPELESS. THIS A STAGE IN: Renovations.
Why, two houses ago, in the middle of the night, when the paper I’d just put up fell, I wanted to burn the house down for the satisfaction of it. But my husband wouldn’t let me. Turns out he was right. Don’t burn the house down.
We have a bad case of termites and some truly bizarre renovations done over the last hundred years. I think the crawl space is full of sewage. It’s going to be a heck of a job. But it needs to be done.
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