BEZOS OUT AT AMAZON. To be “executive chair.” Wow. Hopefully this is to concentrate on spaceflight!

DISPATCH FROM 2030: Now here’s the kind of future I was hoping for!

JOURNALISTS MOBILIZE AGAINST FREE SPEECH. Of all the bad political trends right now, this might be the most destructive, since our government only works when the media is a watchdog. Otherwise it’s all too easy for the natural excesses of elites to get out of control.

THE CAMPAIGN TO STAMP OUT ACADEMIC HERESY. These anti-intellectual campaigns are killing research. (So much for “science!”) Of course, as Glenn’s post below about Tom Cotton and Newsweek demonstrates, history’s on the block too.

POLITICS MAKES YOU SAY DUMB THINGS: The Fast Company article on Parler that Stephen posted earlier has some good info but is hilariously biased against Parler and concludes thusly:

On some level, then, this is the internet working as intended: Hate speech will still exist, but after Parler failed to moderate the worst of it, it’s being pushed to the margins.

There is no level on which censoring speech those in power deem “hateful” is the Internet working as it was intended. It stuns me that someone could write this. Then again, maybe it’s just another example of saying the quiet part out loud – this is how the converged establishment intends the Internet to work now.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD. The mom suing a Nevada high school for compelled speech in a class based on “intersectionality” is asking for support. According to the complaint, “Plaintiff William Clark’s first graded assignment for the class … required him to reveal his racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities” (and later, of course, dealt with his alleged “privilege”). FIRE dealt with a similar situation at the University of Delaware back in 2007. It was bad then and it’s bad now.

TRUMP SHOULD DEMAND AN IMMEDIATE CRIMINAL TRIAL FOR INCITEMENT. Impeachment is a political circus that, as we learned last time, is nothing more than a Congressional popularity contest based on emanations from the penumbra of the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” or something. So skip it! Trump should demand his day in court on the exact charges in the articles of impeachment, and when he’s acquitted, let Congress explain how words have no meaning anymore.

HILLARY CLINTON SUGGESTS VLADIMIR PUTIN IS BEHIND “THE DAY INSURGENTS INVADED OUR CAPITOL.” Consider this your daily you-aren’t-the-crazy-one reminder. I thought we needed to clamp down on free speech to stop these damaging conspiracy theories!

Admittedly, if she’s right, that would be awful, but it also means we might as well surrender now because it’s over and we lost.

TRUMP’S SPEECH WAS NOT INCITEMENT TO IMMINENT LAWLESS ACTION. Not if words and precedent have any meaning. You don’t need to be a lawyer to figure this out – read it for yourself. The entire media and political apparatus (apparently including the interim dean of Cornell Law School) is determined to gaslight you into believing it was. But you are not the crazy one.

And, as a lawyer, I really hate to say this, but it’s now wildly apparent you can’t trust our legal system on anything even remotely political either. Don’t expect sanity from that quarter.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

JUST A LITTLE TOO MUCH ON THE NOSE TO BE FUNNY. Seen around the internet – it’s real, from a workplace mental health organization. I checked, because it was so on the nose that I thought it might be a clever fake. Save it before it’s inevitably purged, or definitions conveniently change.

ACTUAL DISCUSSION IS THE WAY FORWARD, BUT WILL WE TAKE IT? The elite and media response to the riot at the Capitol has been of one voice: this is an attack on “our democracy.” What they don’t understand (or refuse to) is that if you think the election was unfree and unfair, as 30-40% of people apparently do according to polling, the fake election was the attack on democracy, and it already happened, making the government illegitimate! The endless hot takes by people racing to be the first or most vigorous to give these people the “to a gas chamber – go!” treatment, rather than trying to convince them they’re wrong about the election itself, is the opposite of what a healthy polity would produce, and vastly different from the elite reaction to the riots this summer. It’s straight out of the campus playbook I’ve dealt with for the last 17 years, and the consequences are likely to be even more dangerous.

(Bumped, by Glenn, because this is important.)

I SURE HOPE THIS IS JUST SOME BAD INFO…

PROTESTORS STORM U.S. CAPITOL, HALT ELECTORAL COLLEGE CERTIFICATION. They are inside the Capitol, with reports of one person shot in the chest.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’ve been mostly offline this week as I recover, but this isn’t right, tempting as it is to call this “mostly peaceful” or somesuch after the past year’s sanctioned riots. Follow the PJ Liveblog for minute by minute coverage. Excerpt:

With 40% of the country thinking the election was stolen, this was to be expected — especially after the unified voice of the media saying for years that if you feel disenfranchised it’s okay to riot. Our ruling class, and particularly our media, have been playing with fire for years and I hope that this will be enough to shock them into more sensible behavior. But so far they’ve not lived up to my hopes.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Bumped. I’ll be interested to see who these protesters in the Capitol are.

Also: Expert Andy Ngo: It wasn’t antifa at the Capitol riots.

ANOTHER BAD FREE SPEECH TAKE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES. I know, bottom story of the day, etc., but even so, how do you unironically print this?

Mr. Dong, who moved to Hong Kong from New York in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, decided to leave Hong Kong because the city has felt anemic during the pandemic, while many mainland cities seem to glow with energy and hope. “I don’t think I can find the kind of freedom I want in Hong Kong,” he said.

Could something other than COVID have contributed to a lack of freedom (and “energy and hope”) in Hong Kong over the last year or so?

Exit question: Given that the country that appears to have benefited most from COVID is China, does our ruling class have a plan just in case a slightly different germ “gets out” next time? Or do we shut down every other economy in the world for a year plus all over again?

THE MARTIN CENTER ON REFORMING HIGHER ED IN 2021: A lot of good suggestions for reform here, some of which some colleges may even be willing to try! (Or, due to shrinking enrollment, may be forced to try…)

“TWAS A FEW NIGHTS AFTER CHRISTMAS, AND AT FIRE HQ…” Sheesh, I take a few days off for the holidays and my colleagues start writing FIRE’s year end review in verse.

WE TAKE HARASSMENT SUPER SERIOUSLY AROUND HERE, FELLAS. A student re-attached a fallen note of support to a staff member’s door. Then her university investigated her for harassment.

Weird, it’s like unmooring harassment from any reasonable definition of the term turned out to be a tool for those in power to abuse the plebs.

GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: When you obviously can’t rely on the process we use to determine the consent of the governed anymore, what does that say about our obligations to temporal authority? Just some of my thinking this Sunday, after reading Roger Kimball’s article that Ed posted earlier.

FEDERAL COURT SHOOTS DOWN PENNSYLVANIA BAR’S NEW ‘DISCRIMINATION’ RULE: As with so many such efforts, this one just happened to restrict protected speech. Weird how that keeps happening, huh?

Ultimately, the Court is swayed by the chilling effect that the Amendments will have on Plaintiff, and other Pennsylvania attorneys, if they go into effect. Rule 8.4(g)’s language, “by words . . . manifest bias or prejudice,” are a palpable presence in the Amendments and will hang over Pennsylvania attorneys like the sword of Damocles. This language will continuously threaten the speaker to selfcensor and constantly mind what the speaker says and how the speaker says it or the full apparatus and resources of the Commonwealth may be engaged to come swooping in to conduct an investigation. (Page 22 of PDF)

Disclosure: the plaintiff is my FIRE colleague Zach Greenberg, represented in his personal capacity by the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, as FIRE’s mission is restricted to higher ed.

A FIRST AMENDMENT PROBLEM WITH THE “STABLE” CRYPTOCURRENCY ACT? To be honest, I read this whole thing as just an entering wedge for a banking industry takeover of cryptocurrency. But this provision struck me as being questionable from a free speech perspective:

(2) USE OF THE TERM ‘DOLLAR’.—A person offering or providing a product or service with respect to a stablecoin may not use the term ‘dollar’ or ‘dollars’ to refer to stablecoin balances unless such reference is pre-approved by either the Comptroller of the Currency or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

“Refer to?” I’m no finance expert, but if this means that a crypto exchange or wallet program can’t say that an unlicensed stablecoin balance that’s worth 50 dollars is worth 50 dollars, that strikes me as both dumb and potentially unconstitutional. It’s one thing to ban calling something that’s not a dollar (a stablecoin) a dollar, but if something is truthfully worth 50 dollars, I don’t think the government can prevent someone from saying so.

Possible workaround: Coinbase, Binance, etc. just label stablecoin balances as worth “50 bucks” or “50 smackeroos” or whatever, making this pointless.

IF IT MOVES, REGULATE IT: Apparently “stablecoins” (cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but pegged to the dollar) threaten minorities? All anything like this will do is drive innovation offshore, as it’s hard to think of anything less bound by borders than cryptocurrency.

(BTW, if you like news about law/policy affecting crypto, feel free to let me know in the comments – lots of interesting stuff in that whole area these days.)

NASDAQ TO REQUIRE ALL CORPORATE BOARDS TO HAVE ONE WOMAN, ONE MINORITY: As an Arab (well, half, but that’s good enough to count) let me be the first to say I volunteer for your highly paid phoney-baloney job, Mr. Corporate Bigshot! Heck, I’ll do it for half of what you’re paying whatever Biden, Clinton, or Bush you have in there now.

U. OF MARYLAND PUBLIC POLICY SCHOOL REQUIRES “STOLEN LAND” ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ON SYLLABI: Aside from the obvious free speech and academic freedom problems with this and other provisions, if you are telling everyone you are in possession of stolen land (or stolen anything else), there’s only one moral option: give it back. Not doing so suggests that you’re either a sociopath or a liar. Which one is it, Maryland?

RUNNING AN “ELECTION” ON CLOSED-SOURCE VENEZUELAN VOTING SOFTWARE: That voting machine software in America is not open source and auditable is such a preposterously obvious security and hacking risk that the only reasonable conclusion is that it’s meant to be insecure and hackable. There is no commercial value in closed source voting software (it’s the machines themselves they’re selling; as software goes, it is trivial and nobody wants weird innovations or updates) unless part of the value proposition is that the vote can be rigged. The media and politicians can gaslight us all they want on this, but something this “stupid” doesn’t happen accidentally, even today and with our incompetent ruling class.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE – LEGAL EDITION UPDATE: “Following the [Obama-era] Gainful Employment regulations, Gillen divides law schools into three categories: pass (where the typical graduate’s debt payments are no higher than 8.6 percent of earnings), probation (between 8.6 percent and 12.8 percent) and fail (more than 12.8 percent of earnings)… 73 percent of the schools for which Gillen was able to get data (168 schools) fail.” Yeesh.