ATF: CONSIDER ‘SWATTING’ YOUR EX FOR VALENTINE’S DAY. Wow, this can’t go wrong. Someone over there needs to look up “perverse incentives” in the dictionary.

“FREE SPEECH MAKES FREE PEOPLE.” PRIMETIME OLYMPICS TV AD WITH CELTICS STAR ENES KANTOR FREEDOM. FIRE shares the story of the Turkish (now American) NBA star, barred from his native land for speaking out.

Watch it before it somehow gets canceled!

THIS YEAR’S TEN WORST COLLEGES FOR FREE SPEECH IS OUT TODAY! And you won’t BELIEVE who’s… Oh heck, yeah you will. Georgetown is on there. In fact, FIRE had to delay the release a bit just to update its entry.

This 11th annual edition of FIRE’s annual list also includes a college that punished students for handing out stickers critical of China’s government, and another that sent a law professor to mandatory reeducation for including censored references to slurs in an exam — the materials for which used the same slur redacted in the same way. I am not making this up.

BIDEN ADMIN WANTS TO REGULATE BITCOIN, CRYPTOCURRENCIES BASED ON “NATIONAL SECURITY.” National security in this context means “hand it over to the Fed/big banks” so the right people can make money, and also make it government spyware.

GEORGETOWN PREDICTABLY DISAPPOINTS ON ILYA SHAPIRO. Sigh.

UPDATE: To be clear, the fight continues. A number of college professors, led by Eugene Volokh, have signed on to a letter in support of Shapiro’s rights — including a lot of names Instapundit readers will recognize.

A CHANCE TO HELP CANCEL CANCEL CULTURE: The New Tolerance Campaign is inviting people to contact Georgetown Law dean William Treanor and urge him to stand up to a textbook cancellation campaign by keeping Ilya Shapiro, who sent what he admits was an “inartful” tweet criticizing Biden’s promise to limit his Supreme Court search to black women and exclude males and people of other races from consideration, regardless of qualification. You can learn more in FIRE’s letter to Dean Treanor, too.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: “So, basically, people are talking about firing Ilya Shapiro for expressing a sentiment held by most Americans, most non-white Americans, and most Democrats, because it’s too right-wing I guess.”

VANDERBILT BANS ITS STUDENTS FROM ATTENDING HOME BASKETBALL GAMES BUT NOT VISITING STUDENTS. The ban may end today. Ten years ago, we discovered Vanderbilt admins were nuts when they kicked more than a dozen Christian groups off campus for requiring the “wrong” beliefs about homosexuality. Looks like not much has changed.

SUPREME COURT WILL HEAR PAIR OF COLLEGE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CASES. I wouldn’t get too excited. Equal justice under law is pretty far in the rear-view mirror at this point.

WASHINGTON & LEE CHANGES COURSE, ALLOWS STUDENT CAMPAIGNING AFTER SHUTTING DOWN COLLEGE GOP BEFORE VA. ELECTION. Students couldn’t campaign for Youngkin before the election based on W&L’s bogus 501(c)(3) reasoning. Last week W&L finally changed the policy – the day before Youngkin took office, which seems like all kinds of coincidence.

Reminder: W&L President Bill Dudley is the one who amusingly said last year that universities had been unfairly dragged into the culture war.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL DEMANDING RETRIAL AFTER JUROR ‘MISTAKENLY’ DOES NOT TELL COURT HE WAS A SEXUAL ASSAULT VICTIM. And boy are these federal prosecutors extra-mega-ethical about the the whole thing, asking the court to investigate a jury biased in their favor. I bet they do that all the time!

I really preferred it when our ruling class tried to be less ostentatious about all the cover-ups and double standards.

KAVANAUGH AND ROBERTS JOIN COURT’S LIBERALS IN UPHOLDING VACCINE MANDATE FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS. What must it be like to be on the side that never receives unpleasant surprise “defections” in highly politicized Supreme Court cases? I’ll never know myself, but it must feel freaking great.

WILL YOUR COLLEGE DEGREE BE A GOOD INVESTMENT? Merits of the education itself aside, the gatekeeping function colleges provide used to make this an easy “yes,” at least in most people’s eyes. That seems to be fading now, as costs mount while the utility of many degrees continues to decrease, for all kinds of reasons — not just the usual suspects.

HUFFPO’S WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT ON JAN. 6 VERSUS 9/11. I’m a free speech lawyer. I am an awfully hard person to seriously offend. But by golly, this guy managed it, by spitting on the graves of thousands of innocent people for a Twitter hot take.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The thing you have to understand though, is that he’s sincere. The worst thing a Democrat can imagine is a threat to Democrats’ political power. Islamists aren’t seen as such a threat. Meanwhile their biggest fear is that the Normal-American community will rise up and take back control of the country and its institutions. All the media censorship, charges of “white supremacy,” etc. is just designed to prevent that.

HO HO HO, FREE SUBSIDIZED CELL SERVICE FOR HOUSEHOLDS MAKING…$198,000? As long as your income took a hit from COVID. I am not 100% sure this is the best use of tax dollars, but I guess it beats giving the Taliban $80B of weapons.

HAPPY 230TH BIRTHDAY TO THE BILL OF RIGHTS. Yeah, I know, hollow laughter. I share it myself sometimes (I’m riding the hilariously bad and authoritarian Amtrak right now). But consider how bad things would be without it. There probably won’t be a United States of America in the year 2791 — but our descendants will certainly still remember the Bill of Rights.

VIRGINIA TECH STUDENT PUNISHED FOR BOOING AT SOCCER GAME. Great news! Virginia Tech has time to go after the “Shirtless Boys” superfans for yelling “what?!” at a ref, because all the other problems on campus have been solved.

OREGON HEALTH AUTHORITY IN TALKS TO MAKE MASK MANDATES PERMANENT. Gee whiz, who saw this coming?

They told us “two weeks to slow the spread.” My suggestion: when the 2 year anniversary comes up – that’s 52 times the amount of time they asked – we all agree to just stop wearing them all at once. If they have the power to insist, like on air travel, we all just agree to put up a huge fuss every single time before we put it on. I think that would probably finish off these pointless mandates.

AWAKENING A SLEEPING GIANT – ALUMNI. From today’s Wall Street Journal, probably paywalled (but very important), a story about alumni organizing to take their campuses back from the censors.

Two years ago Cornell University asked a California real-estate developer and longtime donor for a seven-figure contribution.

Carl Neuss didn’t write the check immediately, saying he was worried about what he saw as liberal indoctrination on campus and declining tolerance toward competing viewpoints.

To allay Mr. Neuss’s concerns, the development office introduced him to some politically moderate professors, he said. The attempt backfired. The professors, he said, told him they felt humiliated by the diversity training they were required to attend and perpetually afraid they would say something factual—but impolitic.

Cornell has 1,695 faculty members and this was its best foot forward on free speech to an important donor. That speaks volumes. Later in the story:

In 2018, alumni at Washington and Lee University in Virginia launched an organization called the Generals Redoubt after they felt the school began disassociating itself from President George Washington—who endowed the school, and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, a former school president. Both men owned slaves. …

Washington and Lee President Will Dudley said the debate has placed universities unfairly in the crossfire.

“We’re living in an environment where people on both sides, right and left, are engaged in a culture war and they want to use universities,” he said. “I don’t find that beneficial to our mission and I’m not interested in being a participant in it.”

Universities have been waging a one-way culture war on free speech, due process, and other fundamental rights (along with many other things) for decades. They don’t get to pretend they’re not part of it when the other side finally starts firing back.

And if you’re an alumnus who wants to join the movement, please, take a moment to join FIRE’s (nascent) Alumni Network or reach out to the good folks at the Alumni Free Speech Alliance so we can put you in touch with like-minded folks from your own alma mater. 20 groups are out there already, and there is interest from many more.

CIVILITY CODES SURE ARE CONVENIENT FOR THOSE WITH POWER: Duke’s student government has approved its president’s veto of its decision to recognize the Students Supporting Israel student group, less than a week after voting to grant the group recognition, for the below Instagram post. In her veto, the student government president claimed that the group “singled out an individual student on their organization’s social media account in a way that was unacceptable for any student group and appeared antithetical to the group’s stated mission to be welcoming and inclusive to all Duke students, and educational in mission and purpose.” Behold the horror:

If I thought this were some kind of bold stance against cancel culture and social media mobbing, I’d be more sympathetic, even though it would still be wrong — this isn’t calling for cancellation, and Duke promises free speech and association. But color me extremely skeptical that this (wrong) policy will be enforced evenhandedly.

GOP VOTERS CARE ABOUT CULTURE WAR BEING WAGED AGAINST THEM, WOULD ACTUALLY LIKE SOMEONE TO FIGHT IT. That could easily be the headline to this NYT piece, if someone other than the NYT had written it. The left knows this; it is practically 100% in on the culture war on every front, and it has brought them great success even while impoverishing average Americans. It is not just the economy, stupid, and everyone knows this except the GOP establishment, which only pretends not to.

SEGREGATION RETURNS AS GEORGE WALLACE HARVARD BRINGS OLD-FASHIONED DISCRIMINATION TO THE DEEP SOUTH BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS? Better check your skin color before you try to hit tomorrow’s performance of Macbeth at Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre.

COASTAL CAROLINA SUSPENDS PROF FOR NOT BEING OUTRAGED ENOUGH ABOUT SOMETHING MISTAKENLY DEEMED RACIST. Colleges really think that taxpayers and tuition payers will tolerate this kind of stupidity forever. They won’t.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! This time it’s brought to you by, and I am not making this up, Elizabethtown College’s Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking.

DO WE NEED A FREE MARKET IN LEGAL SERVICES? We need to do something to make it cheaper — too many average people refuse to get a lawyer, even when they really could use one, because of the expense.

MORE “NORMS RESTORED” BY TRUMP-LESS GOP: “In an unbelievable move, both House and Senate Republicans, many of whom view themselves as “defense hawks,” voted to add far-left language to the bill that would draft our young daughters in a time of national emergency. In the House, 135 Republicans voted last night to do just that.”

So a huge part of the “conservative” party votes to let the government drag my two daughters (and yours) at gunpoint off to some foreign war run by loser generals obsessed with “white rage” instead of victory, who can’t even lose a war correctly, and who promise to warn actual communists before our attacks so that they’ll have maximum opportunity to kill my daughters (and yours)? How about you let the other party own that one? This is clown world.

UPDATE: Given the large number of comments here (which I did not expect), let me make this abundantly clear: it is in no sense conservative to have a society where we force unwilling teenage females into the meat grinder of warfare, regardless of what “feminists” or “equal protection” may demand. Like nearly every other American man, I registered for the draft when I turned 18; I would have served if called up. I am grateful that that didn’t happen, but I accept the necessity, in some circumstances, of male conscription (though I am dubious that it’s really necessary for any non-existential conflict). Conscripting 18-25 year old females is asking for societal suicide, for reasons so obvious they do not need to be explained. You can count me and my family right out of any such suicide pact, and I urge everyone else to do the same.