ADVENTURES IN PROGRESSIVE LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS: Michelle Goldberg: How the Online Left Fuels the Right.

What Goldberg essentially says is “instead of trying to silence conservatives, let’s be incredibly condescending to the point where we *might* be willing to debate some of those we consider to be sufficiently intelligent. And let’s throw in some largely irrelevant contempt for Israel too, because I need to virtue-signal my Progressive bona fides before I can mildly criticize Progressives.” Yep, columns like this will certainly stop the online left from fueling the right. Not. How about taking serious ideas seriously?

WHEN YOUR POLITICAL VIEWS BECOME POLITICALLY CORRECT ORTHODOXY, FREE SPEECH SEEMS LIKE A THREAT: Law Professor Ronald Collins: Abandoned? The Liberal Flight from the First Amendment. This process of abandonment has been going on for decades, especially when the First Amendment conflicts with antidiscrimination laws, as I documented in my 2003 book You Can’t Say That!

ANALYSIS–TRUE: Antonin Scalia Law School Is Under Attack for Being Successful and Different.

Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University has a very highly cited faculty, showing that it has a relatively large impact on the world of legal ideas. It is ranked as the 21st, just after the University of Texas. This ranking is an extraordinary achievement, given that it was a young school with a small endowment, not at all comparable to long established schools like Texas. As is clear from objective data, Antonin Scalia Law School’s faculty is also unusual in having a faculty that it is right of center in a profession where every school with a higher citation count is left of center, sometimes far to the left of center.  For instance, schools in the top twenty citations regularly have less than ten percent conservatives and frequently less than five percent.

The existence, much less grand success, of my law school is a minor miracle in today’s academic climate, especially since we’ve been grossly underfunded for almost our entire existence. This success, moreover, belies the notion that the dominance of Progressives in academia is primarily the result of lack of interest by non-Progressives, as opposed to viewpoint discrimination (which we often are able to take advantage of by hiring non-Progressives overlooked by other law schools). Unfortunately, there are certain organizations that are not satisfied with Progressives holding 90+% of faculty positions at law schools and elsewhere, they want to stamp out all right-of-center dissent.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE TRUMP, REMEMBER THE JEWS AND THE BICYCLISTS ARE TO BLAME: Women’s March leader blames Trump Muslim ban, Mexican border wall on Israeli PM.

“PEACE PARTNER”: Abbas says Jews’ behavior, not anti-Semitism, caused the Holocaust.

Yair Rosenberg comments,  “It’s almost like he thinks there is no international accountability for open anti-Semitism.” Shh, Yair, you are disturbing the Narrative.

Related: Abbas–“Israel has imported frightening amounts of drugs in order to destroy our younger generation.”

MY GRANDPARENTS CRIED WHEN FDR DIED–THAT WAS THE WRONG REACTION: The Tablet: “While [FDR] was uncertain about whether [Jewish refugees] would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.”

I’M EMBARRASSED FOR THE AUTHOR: USC lawprof Michael Simkovic: A well-organized campaign to bait, discredit, and take over universities is exploiting students and manipulating the public.

Here’s a taste:

Recently, the Federalist Society invited South Texas College of Law Houston’s Josh Blackman to lecture at CUNY law school.  Professor Blackman’s sparsely attended lecture drew protestors because of Blackman’s previous criticism of an amnesty program for undocumented immigrants and his use of language the protestors interpreted as racial dog whistling.

A university official asked the students to be respectful, defended Blackman’s right to speak, and admonished the students “please don’t take the bait.”  One student noticed Blackman recording himself and asked Blackman, “You chose CUNY didn’t you? Because you knew what would happen if you came here.”  (CUNY, like Vassar, has a reputation for left-wing student activism).  Blackman deflected the question.  One protestor used an expletive, which Blackman repeated.

According to both Blackman and CUNY, the protestors were non-violent.  Security was present to maintain order.  Blackman—tall and muscular—towered over the students and appeared calm throughout the exchange.

(1) Josh Blackman is an incredibly mild-mannered, polite, nice guy. The protesters didn’t identify any “dog whistle” language; they just called him a racist because that’s their default criticism of anyone they don’t like. Simkovic should be ashamed of himself for suggesting that the students may be correct in asserting Blackman has actually indulged in racism, which is a kiss of death in academia. A public apology should be forthcoming.

(2) Josh hasn’t criticized the amnesty program per se, which he supports, he’s criticized its implementation by executive order, which he believes is unconstitutional. The fact that neither the students nor Simkovic can appreciate the distinction doesn’t speak well of either.

(3) Josh is, I believe, the most prolific speaker for the Federalist Society in the country. He has spoken at dozens of schools. By Federalist Society rules, the students at each chapter have to invite him, he can’t invite himself. In short, the idea that he somehow chose CUNY to provoke a reaction is ridiculous, and the notion that presenting an anodyne talk on free speech, which Josh had presented at several other law schools without incident, should provoke any sensible, mature person is ridiculous.

(4) Josh is certainly reasonably tall, but when a security guard comes to you before a talk and asks if you have an “exit strategy” and gives you suggestions about various emergency routes out of the law school, even a six-footer might feel a bit threatened. I wonder how Prof. Simkovic would feel if a security guard came to him before one of his classes, and suggested he needed an “exit strategy” in case the protesters intent on disrupting his class and chanting expletives outside his classroom turn violent?

The whole piece is like this, full of illogic and innuendo, suggesting that the fault with the threats to free speech on campus lies with those who engage in and defend free speech, rather than those bent on suppressing it. Read it and weep.

UPDATE–ADL APOLOGIZES: ADL regrets calling group that targets anti-Israel students Islamophobic and racist. Background here.

ANOTHER “TRUMP-INSPIRED HATE CRIME” BITES THE DUST: Suspect admits to toppling more than 100 headstones in St. Louis Jewish cemetery.

In 2017, large swathes of the American Jewish community were in the throes of what I termed The Great Anti-Semitism Panic of 2017. The last few years have seen an increase in visible anti-Semitism among alt-right trolls, but the panic that ensued with the election of Donald Trump was bizarrely and extremely disproportionate to any actual threat to the safety or standing of American Jews. (For noting this, one Jewish newspaper editor, Rob Eshman, called me an “apologist for anti-Semitism.”)

One incident that received disproportionate attention was the vandalism of a St. Louis Jewish cemetery. Even though some of us cooler heads noted that similar incidents of vandalism occurred with some frequency during the Obama and Bush years, many so-called Jewish leaders were quick to cast blame on the atmosphere allegedly created by Trump. St. Louis police arrested the perp, a thirty-four year old African-American man, yesterday, and announced “[t]here is no evidence to indicate the incident was racially, ethnically or religiously motivated.”

Those who participated in creating and spreading the panic should be ashamed of themselves, and heads should roll at certain organizations. But they aren’t, and they won’t. Heck, I still haven’t gotten an apology from Eshman.

MAYBE THEY SHOULD JUST LEAVE “ANTI” OFF OF THEIR NAME: Defamation by the Anti-Defamation League:

The ADL’s national office tweeted, “thank you to @umich student leaders for exposing Canary Mission’s Islamophobic & racist rhetoric as ‘antithetical and destructive to supporting Israel and eliminating anti-Semitism on campus.'”

I googled ADL and Canary Mission, and could not find any ADL report analyzing or condemning Canary Mission. So I emailed ADL’s media folks yesterday morning, and asked if they could “please point me to the underlying evidence that ADL has relied on in support of it accusation of racism and Islamaphobia?” I sent a follow up email six hours later, and received this response: “Our research team is pulling together examples for you, so please stand by.”

It’s now the next morning, and still nothing. One would think that the ADL, an organization whose reputation depends on correctly identifying anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, wouldn’t accuse a fellow Jewish organization, or anyone for that matter, of racism without having the research on hand to support it. It shouldn’t take a post hoc research effort, much less one that hasn’t borne fruit more than twenty-four hours after an initial inquiry.

BETTER TO REMAIN SILENT AND BE THOUGHT A FOOL: CUNY Law Students Explain “What We Mean When We Say ‘Fuck the Law.'”

Spoiler: They mean “Fuck the Law.” A good dean would not only have cracked down on these students’ bad behavior in disrupting Josh Blackman’s talk, she would have strongly suggested that they keep quiet to avoid embarrassing themselves and their law school even more.

THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: The Shameful Character Assassination of Trayon White. This “shameful character assassination,” mind you, consists of calling out an anti-Semitic member of the D.C. City Council who happens to be African American. There’s certainly an argument for presuming ignorance rather than malice when someone says something as stupid as “the Rothchilds control the weather,” but not based on the race of the speaker.

NEW YORK TIMES CALLS THE TRUTH “FAR-RIGHT CONSPIRACY PROGRAMMING.” Leil Leibovitz in The Tablet:

On Saturday, Nellie Bowles, a technology reporter for The New York Times, wrote a piece about Campbell Brown, the former news anchor recently hired by Facebook to help the social media giant improve its relationship with the news media. One obvious problem is Facebook’s contribution to the dissemination of fake news, which Brown is now fighting. How? Let the Paper of Record tell you all about it.

“Ms. Brown,” wrote Bowles, “wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families.’”

As those of us who are in the reality based community know, the Palestinian Authority’s financial support of terrorists and their families is very, very far from a conspiracy, far-right or otherwise. Reading Bowles’s report, for example, Lahav Harkov, the Knesset reporter for The Jerusalem Post, took to Twitter to share some of her meticulous reporting on the Palestinian pay-for-slay program with Bowles: Read the real news, and you’ll learn that, in 2017, the PA doled out more than $347 million to families of terrorists who had murdered Jews, increasing the amount to $403 million this year.

REVISITING 2016 MEDIA BIAS: With the elite media increasingly suggesting that they were too harsh on Clinton and not hostile enough to Trump in 2016, it’s perhaps time to revisit just how biased elite media outlets were in 2016. Consider, for example, this NPR interview with the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet. Baquet explains why the newspaper decided to use the word “lie” when referring to what seems like ordinary campaign obfuscation: “I think the moment for me was the birther story, where he has repeated for years his belief that President Obama was not born in the United States.” This, for some reason, justifies using the word “lie” more generally with regard to Trump and his campaign, but not with regard to any false statements by Clinton: “I don’t think Hillary Clinton, to be honest, has crossed the line the way Donald Trump did with the birther issue.” Thus, in NewYorkTimesworld Clinton merely obfuscates and exaggerates, while Trump lies. You can’t make this stuff up.

My guess is that Clinton lost far more votes because they resented the elites were shoving Clinton down their throats than because of the “Russian interference” the elites now want to blame for Clinton’s defeat. The response, apparently, is for the elite media to double-down on its strategy of overtly favoring whomever runs against Trump, which, I suspect, is how we get more Trump in 2020.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME?: CUNY Law Fed Soc co-president: Disruption of Blackman can be a “learning moment”

NOT THE ONION: Democratic Party files suit alleging Russia, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks conspired to disrupt the 2016 election. Someone must think this is good for fundraising.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE BIG MONEY IN POLITICS THEN YOU SHOULD OPPOSE BIG GOVERNMENT IN OUR LIVES: Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a Trump appointee:

To be sure, many Americans of good faith bemoan the amount of money spent on campaign contributions and political speech. But if you don’t like big money in politics, then you should oppose big government in our lives. Because the former is a necessary consequence of the latter. When government grows larger, when regulators pick more and more economic winners and losers, participation in the political process ceases to be merely a citizen’s prerogative—it becomes a human necessity. This is the inevitable result of a government that would be unrecognizable to our Founders. See, e.g., NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012).

So if there is too much money in politics, it’s because there’s too much government. The size and scope of government makes such spending essential. See, e.g., EMILY’s List v. FEC, 581 F.3d 1, 33 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (Brown, J., concurring) (“The more power is at stake, the more money will be used to shield, deflect, or co-opt it. So long as the government can take and redistribute a man’s livelihood, there will always be money in politics.”).

But whatever size government we choose, the Constitution requires that it comply with our cherished First Amendment right to speak and to participate in our own governance. If we’re going to ask taxpayers to devote a substantial percentage of their hard-earned income to fund the innumerable activities of federal, state, and local government, we should at the very least allow citizens to spend a fraction of that amount to speak out about how the government should spend their money.

H/T Josh Blackman via Twitter

DON’T FLY SUN COUNTRY: Sun Country Airlines Strands Hundreds of Passengers in Mexico.

Gary Leff: “The airline acknowledged that no one was staffing the airline’s counters and that phone lines were just disconnecting callers because of volume. And they say they hope providing a refund for the cancelled flight ‘will more than compensate for the cost of making alternative arrangements home.’… However they should have chartered a plane. Or they should have covered the cost of each passenger’s tickets home on another carrier. Without interline agreements that means they’d be paying retail. The airline took money and agreed to provide transportation, not strand passengers.”

CUNY LAW SCHOOL NEEDS TO FIRE ITS DEAN: Inside Higher Ed reports that there will be no sanctions, nor even an investigation, of the students who disrupted Josh Blackman’s talk:

Via email on Sunday, Mary Lu Bilek, dean of the law school, said that the protest was reasonable because the disruptions ended relatively early in the time frame of the appearance.

“For the first eight minutes of the 70-minute event, the protesting students voiced their disagreements. The speaker engaged with them. The protesting students then filed out of the room, and the event proceeded to its conclusion without incident,” Bilek said.

“This non-violent, limited protest was a reasonable exercise of protected free speech, and it did not violate any university policy,” she added. “CUNY Law students are encouraged to develop their own perspectives on the law in order to be prepared to confront our most difficult legal and social issues as lawyers promoting the values of fairness, justice, and equality.”

Some free-speech provocateurs should consider disrupting the first eight minutes of each of CUNY law school’s classes this week, including by forcing the professor to run a gauntlet of protesters threatening to block entry into their classrooms. After all, we now know that the law school’s official position is that eight minutes of disruption is “a reasonable exercise of free speech.” Meanwhile, Dean Bilek should be fired, and the Department of Education should investigate whether CUNY, a public institution, is violating the First Amendment rights of its guest speakers and students by giving disrupting students carte blanche, at least for eight minutes. The joke is that Dean Bilek is an ABA site visit team member, helping determine whether other law schools should get or keep the necessary accreditation, something she clearly is not competent to do.

Note that I’m not advocating any particular punishment of the students. But surely it can’t be consistent with free speech and university policy to disrupt a speaker. Indeed, that was the law school’s position before the talk. As IHE reports: “The law school sent a campuswide email stating that Blackman had a right to speak, and that protests were welcome, but not if they disrupted his appearance. At the beginning of his lecture, a law school official came to the event, repeated that message and then left.”

UPDATE: Let’s take a look at page 85 of the law school’s student handbook: “II. Rules of the university (1-11) and law school (12). 1. A member of the academic community shall not intentionally obstruct and/or forcibly prevent others from the exercise of their rights. Nor shall she/he interfere with the institution’s educational process or facilities, or the rights
of those who wish to avail themselves of any of the institution’s instructional, personal, administrative, recreational, and community services.” Also this: “5. Each member of the academic community or an invited guest has the right to advocate his position without having to fear abuse—physical, verbal, or otherwise from others supporting conflicting points of view.” The disruption didn’t violate any university policy, Dean Bilek? Have your read the student handbook?

SENTENCE FIRST, TRIAL AFTERWARDS: Linda Greenhouse on the recently-deceased Judge Stephen Reinhardt: “Doctrinal purity mattered less to him than extracting even the most gossamer claim to a favorable result.” Greenhouse comes not to bury Reinhardt, but to praise him, but I don’t find the notion that judges should reason backward from the result they want generally praiseworthy. I don’t think Greenhouse would, either, if it had been a conservative doing so.

IRAN IS ON THE BRINK OF HYPERINFLATION: The Iranian rial is in free fall. Still seem like a good idea for President Obama to provide the regime with hard currency that will help it weather a crisis? Did it ever?

NLPD: NON-LIBERTARIAN POLICE DEPARTMENT: Enjoy that New Yorker parody of hypothetical libertarian policing from a few years ago, that’s once again making the rounds of social media? Consider the absurdities of actual non-libertarian policing, which aren’t very funny.

THE MOST USEFUL LAW SCHOOL RANKINGS FOR PROSPECTIVE LAW STUDENTS: The 2018 Revealed-Preferences Ranking of Law Schools

As I noted way back in 2004: A huge amount of information is encapsulated in the actual revealed preferences of students who decide to attend or not to attend a law school, because most of these students will have done some research before choosing a school. Such information includes desirability of geographic location (clearly a big factor if one compares, e.g., U.S. News rankings to LSAT rankings), local reputation, job placement, quality of life, tuition costs, bar passage, faculty quality and commitment to teaching, student satisfaction, national reputation, and, of course, U.S. News ranking.

A notable winner in this rankings system is Brigham Young University, which takes the 18th spot, as opposed to being tied for 41st in U.S. News. A notable loser is Washington & Lee, which falls from 26th in U.S. News to 55th in revealed preference.

ONE OF MANY REASONS ERIC HOLDER SHOULD NOT BE PRESIDENT: Flashback: Eric Holder defends using Justice Department airplane for 27 personal trips

WHAT TRUMP LEARNED FROM OBAMA: President Obama embraced base-first politics. President Trump is taking a page from his predecessor’s playbook. One strange phenomenon of the Obama years is my progressive friends insisting, to this day, that Obama, who oozed (admitted generally polite) supercilious contempt for anyone to his right, bent over backwards to accommodate Republicans. If you know people like that, send them this article