The West's headlong rush to jettison fossil fuels and hit 'Net Zero' CO2 emissions is impoverishing us while enriching China, which is ramping up its coal-fired industry to sell us all the 'green' technology.
The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired.
Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
I appreciate the few voices speaking out in favor of principle (eg Librarian of Celaeno), but most favored the vengeance. A sample from my Substack Notes feed:
That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now.
In an ideal world, we would all give one another vastly greater latitude. No one would get mobbed, fired, forced to resign, kicked out of school, or ostracized from their professional networks for the non-crime of an unpopular opinion. No one would have to worry about people combing through decade-old social media posts looking for gotcha words that weren’t gotchas when they were written, but became crimespeak ex post facto.
In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse. This is a simple matter of technological context. Social media means that there is a more or less indelible record of your every public utterance; sure, you can try to scrub it, but that won’t stop screenshots; sure, you can try to cloak yourself behind a pseudonymous identity, but that just means you need to worry about doxxing. Cell phones mean that your private conversations can be recorded. We live in an electronic surveillance society now. We’re all watching one another, all the time, and short of a Carrington Event knocking us back into the iron age, there’s no realistic possibility of that changing. If we keep holding one another to impossible standards of public discourse, we will live in a totalitarian hell; that is, indeed, precisely the world that we have all lived in, for the last decade. The only way we avoid this is by adopting a public ethos that is exceptionally forgiving.
But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault.
[...]
If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.
Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.
I won’t be able to convince anyone of the ethics of seeking vengeance vs. turning the other cheek. But a few thoughts on the specific practical arguments being deployed:
1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted
Going back to that excerpt from the Postcards From Barsoom blog:
If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.
You mean like you’re doing now?
The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.
And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?
If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic
“Given that liberals invented cancel culture ten years ago, shouldn’t we get ten years of conservative cancel culture, just to be fair?” asks someone totally divorced from historical reality.
Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture?
People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on Wikipedia:
[In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies.
When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road:
This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs.
And since righteous vengeance had been attained and both sides now had experience with cancel culture being morally wrong, everyone agreed the ledger was balanced, and nobody ever tried cancelling anyone else ever again.
No, seriously, we got the entire rest of history. Aldous Huxley famously described the state of things c. 1944 as:
Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are—there we are in the Golden Future.
Just one more indispensable cancellation, and there we are!
Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past.
3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People
An old psychoanalyst’s trick: if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice.
The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals.
One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment. White people caused slavery, therefore white people stood condemned. No matter that the actual white person involved was 150 years removed from slavery, or was a Polish immigrant whose family hadn’t even been in the country at the time, or whatever. They have some excuse like “well all white people benefit from white supremacy in tangible ways, or at least didn’t speak out against it”.
I hate to say it, but “some left-wing journalist got people cancelled, therefore I should be able to cancel a left-wing Home Depot employee because The Left endorsed cancel culture” is the same kind of argument.
“But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” You can find some data here. I’m presenting a representative sample of questions, but check the rest to keep me honest:
Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
(the above poll probably overestimates support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time)
Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.
Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet.
4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough
I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same.
“If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!”
This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But:
The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
Any rule of the form “Don’t do X, unless you can think up a big pile of negative adjectives to describe why the people you’re doing X to deserve it” will simply never prevent anyone from doing X, not even once.
5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire
Postcards From Barsoom helpfully includes a list of the cancellations he finds most enraging. I agree most of them are enraging.
But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.
(I would add David Shor to the list as an especially revealing case, and Al Franken as an especially clear own-goal)
This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists.
There’s a deeper problem here where pre-emptive fear of cancellation blocked rightists from joining these institutions in the first place. But in terms of actual cancellations, they’re usually some poor shmuck who put too few exclamation points after “BLM!!!!”
Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence
Cancellation isn’t just morally bad. It also screws over society. And it screws over your own institutions worst of all.
By society I mean: you want scientists to be producing good science, not producing the science least likely to get them cancelled. You want the Federal Reserve filled with the best economists, not the most politically pure economists. No matter how righteous your cause, if you cancel people who don’t agree with it, you end up with the kind of low-quality science and corrupt institutions we’ve grown used to recently. This is bad insofar as you care about things like truth, trust, or national flourishing.
But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire. Cancellers can’t 100% control broader society, but they do control their own party and its organs. I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice. Why didn’t they? Well, would you, as a Democratic Party insider, want to speak out against Kamala Harris, in f**king 2020 of all years? Obviously anyone who tried that would have been cancelled. So nobody spoke out against the decision, they went ahead with it, and now they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.
You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections! All you need to do is adopt cancel culture!
(“But we would only apply it to actually bad things, not to people on our own side just trying to warn us”. I’m pretty sure the Democrats didn’t go into this expecting to punish people on their own side trying to warn them, yet here we are.)
7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision
I think the Democrats as a political party are massively underperforming their fundamentals.
They have most of the elites (elites, by definition, are powerful), most of the donor money, and their two main bases (college graduates and minorities) have both ballooned as a share of the population, while the Republicans’ (white people, rural people) are in decline. They control all the prestige media. Trump has no self-control and dozens of skeletons in his closet. How could they lose?
There are many factors - inflation, Afghanistan, the Electoral College - but part of the story has to be that wokeness and cancel culture are historically unpopular. They produced short-term gains (as people became afraid to speak out against them) but long-term disaster (as their extremism alienated friends and fired up enemies). This is still just my optimistic prediction. But if conservatives ever in fact take enough power that they can wield cancellation more effectively than the Democrats, then it will have been borne out.
In which case, you, too, will have the opportunity for short-term gains at the expense of alienating everybody with a backbone and/or conscience. What could possibly go wrong?
8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power
I can’t remember if this is on the Evil Overlord List, but it should be.
The right is still out of power. For one thing, Biden is still President. There’s even (according to betting markets) a 40% chance that the Dems win the next election.
(The argument in this paragraph isn’t original, but I lost the link to it): Consider an undecided voter in a swing state. As an independent, they’re probably on the right on some issues and on the left on others. Many of them are probably former liberals who left the fold because of wokeness and cancel culture. Now they check out what right-wingers have to offer, and it’s “We also love cancel culture, we plan to drop all of our principles as soon as we win, anyone with lefty opinions should be terrified.” Doesn’t sound like a great advertisement.
But also: even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives still won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government. Even if Trump wins, the median outcome of conservatives endorsing cancellation is that the few liberals in these institutions trying to restrain their worst tendencies get dismissed as useful idiots for conservatives who wouldn’t hesitate to cancel them if they were on the other side.
Why mention this? Because the people talking about cancellation insist they’re “just being strategic” and “just laser-focused on winning” when in fact writing the blog posts at all reveals they couldn’t care less about any of these considerations. It’s psychological re-enactment, plain and simple.
9. There’s Probably Other Options
“But we can’t just do nothing!”
Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked. Here are some possible subtasks:
Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here, but so do some of the civil rights stuff Richard Hanania talks about in Origins of Woke.
Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the Chicago Principles, and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become mission-focused in the style of Coinbase. Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.
Tech companies should come up with better technologies for Internet moderation that help people avoid unproductive comments without letting moderators transition into ideological censors. I’ve written more about this here.
The most important job for bloggers and other public intellectuals in particular is figuring out what the heck we mean by cancel culture. The “bad” kinds of cancellation shade imperceptibly into things like social norms, petitions, and boycotts. Where do we draw the line? If there had never been cancel culture on the left, would it be acceptable for a Home Depot worker to tweet support for a would-be Presidential assassin? What if a comedian makes a joke that normalizes pedophilia? Part of the reason it’s so hard to get a strong anti-cancel-culture coalition is that most people want some things to be socially unacceptable and aren’t sure how to draw a bright line. I’m not saying you can’t be against cancel culture if you can’t define it - if you can be bad, you can also be good. I’m saying that defining it a little better is one of the intermediate steps in fighting it. I’ve tried to start this project here.
As an example of (4) - maybe we should respect in a firewall between people’s work identity and their political identity, unless the person deliberately lowers the firewall by using their work to promote their politics. So if a Home Depot worker says they hate Trump, they’re talking in their capacity as a normal human citizen and not a Home Depot worker, so it’s wrong to cancel them. If a journalist tweets from their official journalism account that they hate Trump, then it doesn’t really seem like there’s a firewall between their work and their politics anymore, and then maybe they’re fair game. I’m not personally suggesting this - I think even cancelling journalists isn’t great - but it’s one of the many principled things you could do if you felt like you really needed to revenge-cancel certain people but also wanted to have some principles and not become exactly what you hated.
The priests of Amun probably felt pretty great revenge-cancelling the priests of Aten after they regained power. But nobody remembers them today and they’re not part of the story of human progress. Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.
When you call the cops because you think someone has broken into your house, make sure you don't have any water boiling on the stove, because it could get you killed.
University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko took a break from teaching students to get the word out this week that the entire assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump was a staged event for suckers. Mokoko explained that it was just a ploy to get the votes of “idiots.” He, however, is available to offer sage-like clarity that the Secret Service, local police, and the Trump campaign conspired to fake the assassination, kill a bystander, and seriously wound others to get the sucker vote. He is not alone in this theory while others on the left are simply bemoaning that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.
In his tweet, Mokoko said that security ”ignored [Crooks] because trump & secrete service staged theatrics to win idiots’ vote.”
So let me get the conspiracy down. The Secret Service allowed a kid who flunked out of the high school shooting club as a bad shot to fire multiple rounds at the former president from a sloped roof at 130 yards in the hope that he would only wing him?
Mokoko previously taught at Clemson University, Gold West College, Long Beach City College and University of California, Long Beach, according to his Linkedin page.
His faculty bio states that Mokoko teaches “Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice” and “Writing about Culture and Society.” His focus is “teaching students to appreciate and value social justice rhetorics across media; to become rhetorically listening writers, readers, and viewers; and to understand how global rhetorics shape and define agency and identification.”
He is not alone. Within minutes of the assassination attempt, the staging theory was going viral and has been picked up by many on the left. For example, actress Amanda Seales took to social media to claim that Trump used fake stage blood and sound effects to stage his assassination attempt.
“That sh** was more staged than a Tyler Perry production of Madea Runs for President. I lived in Harlem long enough to know that gunshots do not sound like making popcorn on the stove.”
She does not explain how local fireman Corey Comperatore died from the fake bullets.
Aberdeen, Wash., Mayor Douglas Orr declared “The shooter is dead so we will never know if this was staged. I hope I’m wrong, but because of his record of deceit, that’s the first thing that came to mind.”
Still others accepted that the shooting was real, but complain that Crooks should not have missed. Bellarmine University English instructor John James posted on Instagram: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”
Jack Black’s Tenacious D partner Kyle Gass made a wish while performing with Black that the next assassination would not miss. Various people joined in on regretting that the assassination was not successful.
Below is my column in Fox.com on renewed attacks on free speech and the apologists for this anti-free speech movement, including most recently comedian Jon Stewart. From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, the left is pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.
Here is the column:
“The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” That headline in a recent column in the New York Times warned Americans of a menace lurking around them and threatening their livelihoods and very lives. That menace is free speech and the media and academia are ramping up attacks on a right that once defined us as a people.
In my new book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how we are living in the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history. An alliance of the government, corporations, academia, and media have assembled to create an unprecedented system of censorship, blacklisting, and speech regulation. This movement is expanding and accelerating in its effort to curtail the right that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “indispensable” to our constitutional system.
It is, of course, no easy task to convince a free people to give up a core part of identity and liberty. You have to make them afraid. Very afraid.
The current anti-free speech movement in the United States has its origins in higher education, where faculty have long argued that free speech is harmful. Starting in secondary schools, we have raised a generation of speech phobics who believe that opposing views are triggering and dangerous.
Anti-free speech books have been heralded in the media. University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has written how dangerous free speech is for the nation. Her book, “Attack from Within,” describes how free speech is what she calls the “Achilles Heel” of America, portraying this right not as the value that defines this nation but the threat that lurks within it.
McQuade and many on the left are working to convince people that “disinformation” is a threat to them and that free speech is the vehicle that makes them vulnerable.
It is a clarion’s call that has been pushed by President Joe Biden who claims that companies refusing to censor citizens are “killing people.” The Biden administration has sought to use disinformation to justify an unprecedented system of censorship.
As I have laid out in testimony before Congress, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over “critical infrastructure” to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So, you can cite true facts but still be censored for misleading others.
The media has been running an unrelenting line of anti-free speech columns. Recently, the New York Times ran a column by former Biden official and Columbia University law professor Tim Wu describing how the First Amendment was “out of control” in protecting too much speech.
Wu insists that the First Amendment is now “beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” He bizarrely claims that the First Amendment “now mostly protects corporate interests.”
So free speech not only threatens your life, your job, and your privacy, but serves corporate masters. Ready to sign your rights away?
Wait, there is more.
There is a movement afoot to rewrite the First Amendment through an amendment. George Washington University Law School Professor Mary Anne Franks believes that the First Amendment is “aggressively individualistic” and needs to be rewritten to “redo” the work of the Framers.
Her new amendment suggestion replaces the clear statement in favor of a convoluted, ambiguous statement of free speech that will be “subject to responsibility for abuses.” It then adds that “all conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.”
Franks has also dismissed objections to the censorship on social media and insisted that “the Internet model of free speech is little more than cacophony, where the loudest, most provocative, or most unlikeable voice dominates . . . If we want to protect free speech, we should not only resist the attempt to remake college campuses in the image of the Internet but consider the benefits of remaking the Internet in the image of the university.”
Franks is certainly correct that those “unlikeable voices” are rarely heard in academia today. As discussed in my book, faculties have largely purged conservative, Republican, libertarian, and dissenting professors. The discussion on most campuses now runs from the left to far left without that pesky “cacophony” of opposing viewpoints.
Experts at leading universities were fired or stripped of positions for questioning COVID claims. Conservative faculty have been hounded from schools and conservative sites have been targeted by government-funded programs. Thousands have been banned from social media.
What is particularly maddening for many in the free speech community is how the left has responded to opposition to censorship and blacklisting. Some are claiming to be victims by those who criticize their work to target individuals and groups as disinformation.
Others, like comedian Jon Stewart mock those who object to the erosion of free speech by noting that conservatives are making these objections on television or online. So, according to Stewart, how can there be a problem if you are able to still object? The suggestion is that there can be no threat to free speech unless people are completely silenced.
Stewart insists that “we are surrounded by and inundated with more speech than has ever existed in the history of communication.” In other words, because people can still speak, the well-documented systems of censorship and blacklisting must not be so bad.
It is not clear what Stewart would accept as sufficient censorship. In universities, polls show both faculty and students afraid to speak openly. The government has funded a host of programs to pressure the source of revenue of conservative sites and to target dissenting voices. Yet, because we are raising objections to these trends, Stewart laughs at the very notion that free speech is under fire. After all, he is doing just fine.
What appears to be a punchline to Stewart is a bit more serious for others who have their livelihoods threatened by the anti-free speech movement.
Stewart has the benefit of being a liberal comedian on a liberal network. Try being a conservative comedian today getting air time on most cable outlets or college campuses. Like so many academics, everything seems just fine to them. With the purging of opposition viewpoints, those who remain have little to complain about.
The effort to assure citizens that “there is nothing to see here” is belied by a massive censorship system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.” Conservatives face cancel campaigns and blacklisting in academic and media forums.
As I discussed in my new book, conservative North Carolina professor Dr. Mike Adams faced calls for termination for years with investigations and cancel campaigns. He repeatedly had to go to court to defend his right to continue to teach. He was then again targeted after an inflammatory tweet. He was done. Under pressure from the university, he agreed to resign with a settlement. Four years ago this month, Adams went home just days before his final day as a professor. He then committed suicide.
Many others have resigned or retired. For them, the anti-speech movement takes away everything that brings meaning to an intellectual life from publications to associations to even employment. It is a chilling message to others not to join the “cacophony of … unlikeable voices.”
Some citizens seem sufficiently afraid or angry to surrender their free speech rights. They have lost faith in free speech. For the rest of us, their crisis of faith cannot be allowed to become a contagion. We must have a reawakening in this country that, despite our many divisions, we remain united by this indispensable human right.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
Agency defends practice as lawful, emphasizes ex-employees still subject to 'certain restrictions under the ethics law.' FDA brass already promotes jabs with claims vaccine makers aren't allowed to make.
Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.
Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
We believe bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech.
We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech.
Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech. We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech. But we will fight for Little Tech – for the freedom to research, to invent, to create jobs, to build the future – with all of our resources.
We find there are three kinds of politicians:
Those who support Little Tech. We support them.
Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.
Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.
We are in this for the long haul.
America
America led the 20th Century because we are preeminent in three dimensions:
Technology – America drove the Second Industrial Revolution through the 1930’s, and then the Computer Revolution since the 1940’s.
Economy – America’s free market system created enormous societal wealth and dramatic improvements in quality of life for everyday people.
Military – American military might drove victory in World War I and World War II, and then catalyzed the unilateral surrender and dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Each of these dimensions reinforces the other two:
Our technology preeminence powers our economy and our military.
Our economic growth pays for our massive investment in technology and in our military.
And our military dominance keeps us safe from foreign threats and hostile ideologies that could crush our technology, our economy, and our people.
And, America’s success has positive global spillover effects to much of the rest of the world. American technology is the global standard. The American economy is the leading production and consumption partner of many other nations. And the American military has maintained overall global peace and prosperity since World War II to a level unprecedented in world history.
Naysayers say America’s best days are behind us, that the 21st Century will see America play a diminished role in all three dimensions.
We disagree.
There is no reason American technology, economic, and military leadership cannot continue for decades to come.
There is no reason the 21st Century cannot be a Second American Century.
Startups
American technology leadership is the result of a complex system built over the last 150 years that includes our pioneering spirit, our work ethic, our rule of law, our deep capital markets, our higher education system, and long term government investment in scientific research. And university, government, and corporate labs have all played key roles.
But the vanguard of American technology supremacy has always been the startup. From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.
A startup is what happens when a plucky group of outcasts and misfits comes together with a dream, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills – to build something new in the world, to build a product that will improve peoples’ lives, and to build a company that may go on to create many more new things in the future.
The enormous advantage of any startup is a clean sheet of paper – a single shot to imagine and realize a different and better world.
But startups start with every other disadvantage. Specifically, they must go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength – incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.
Incumbents often have another enormous advantage – the ability to wire the government against startup competitors.
Dominant companies don’t start out that way. In fact, they start as startups, fighting their way uphill until they reach a position of power where they seek to lock in their gains, to pull the rope ladder up behind them. They inject themselves into the political system and seek regulatory capture – a wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions, and that new startups cannot possibly scale.
The historical result of regulatory capture in market after market has been government-enforced monopolies and cartels.
And the motto of every monopoly and cartel is, “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”
When this cycle is allowed to play out, when big companies can weaponize the government against startups, the result is stagnation and then decline.
There are many signs of stagnation and decline in the American economy today.
Economists measure the rate of technology improvement in the economy as productivity growth. And productivity growth today, after 50 years of the proliferation of the profoundly powerful technologies of the computer and the Internet, is lower than before the 1970’s.
The real world consequences are staggering:
Low productivity growth means low economic growth.
Low economic growth means a low rate of improvement in quality of life for regular people, if not outright backsliding. See, for example, skyrocketing prices and stagnating quality of education, health care, and housing – sure signs of regulatory capture.
Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics, as gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people.
Zero-sum politics lead to corrosion of the national spirit of opportunity and growth. We can feel this corrosion all around us.
The way to prevent this outcome is to encourage new startups – to drive innovation, competition, and growth – and to prevent big companies from weaponizing the government to crush them.
Problem
The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.
For example:
Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.
Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
Regulatory agencies are applying direct pressure to banks to cut off disfavored startups and founders from the financial system.
Regulatory agencies are punitively blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government is preferencing in so many other ways.
The federal government as a customer in critical sectors like defense and intelligence is more wired than ever to favor big incumbents over innovative startups.
And, the government is currently proposing a tax on unrealized capital gains, which would absolutely kill both startups and the venture capital industry that funds them.
The anti-startup bias that is increasingly pervasive across the American government is a clear and present threat to the health and vitality of American technology success – and therefore to the American economy, the American military, and the American people.
Why is this happening? In part, explicit decisions. In part, inertial drift. But also because tech startups as an industry do not show up in Washington DC and in the political system the way big companies do. As long as this imbalance persists, the war on tech startups and the resulting threat to America will continue.
Therefore the need to politically defend Little Tech.
Opportunity
Reversing ruinous policies is just one side of the coin. We can also imagine positive policies that encourage tech startups to flourish – benefiting those startups and their customers, and forcing big incumbents to stay vital and dynamic due to startup competition.
For example:
Regulatory reform in important industries like health care, education, and housing, to strip incumbents of their current regulatory capture and drive higher quality at lower prices.
Policies to reconstruct the American manufacturing sector around automation and AI, reshoring entire industries and creating millions of new middle class jobs.
Reinvention of the American military industrial base by new companies building defense systems on the leading edge of autonomy and AI.
Environmental reform to encourage the development and deployment of nuclear power for unlimited clean energy production.
Expansion of high-skilled immigration to encourage foreign graduates of American universities and others to build new companies and industries here.
And, a whole-of-government program to drive the success of US technology companies globally, against a hostile China and a regulation-crazed EU.
We have no doubt that an American government that actually wants startups to succeed and new industries to flourish would drive enormous increases in the standard of living of regular Americans, and underwrite many more decades of American technology, economic, and military strength.
The glory of a Second American Century is within our reach.
The big money is in forcing everyone into a new government subsidized market. Plenty of tax dollars to loot and citizens to force into new products.
For every dollar that was received by oil and gas industry groups and climate-skeptical conservative and libertarian nonprofits, $9.60 went to nonprofits that fight against the use of oil, gas and coal.
ER doctor Kendall Conger objected to Duke Health "acting politically under the guise of medical science" and shared administrator's email admitting no clinical evidence backs its pledge against "racism, bias, and hate."
What are your favorite bits of Chevron powered government overreach that you’d like to see get sued into oblivion now?
In my various jobs I’ve seen unelected bureaucrats make up all sorts of goofy nonsensical shit we had to obey or else.
When I was young and working on farms, factories, or construction I saw OHSA regulations that made job sites LESS safe. “Why are we doing it this stupid way?” “Because that government asshole who has never done this himself said we’d get fined if we don’t.” “Oh cool, let me unnecessarily insert my hands into this thing that can chop them off for the mandatory safety check then.”
I’m a rural westerner. Dear Lord, don’t get us started on the BLM. 90% of their bullshit isn’t law. They just make up wacky shit on the fly. Ignorant fucks who live in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away think they “protect the environment”. Lol no. There can be some obvious terrible problem, but some fucker in DC will say nope, you have to leave that terrible problem there to grow bigger or else we’ll fine you or shoot you if you try to fix it. If you’re in the west and you see some land that’s got some obvious issues or is about to burn down it’s government land.
Then I went into accounting, and the dirty secret of that industry is 3/4 of what companies pay accountants for is to do government mandated paperwork to send to the government which nobody in the government will ever read, and to respond to government audits which are usually useless. IRS just makes shit up as they go. And the shit they made up last time? They changed it this time. Either way, shut up and pay your fine.
But it isn’t just the agency that takes your money directly. Oh no. (honestly, the IRS was one of the more professional agencies I dealt with in my career! Not even joking. The others are worse.) Then there’s the dozens of other agencies that meddle in your industry who you also have to appease, even though sometimes they contradict each other, and all of them can fine you.
Then I worked in the gun business, where I got to discover the wonderful world of ATF inspections, where holy fucking shit, the dumbest people in the universe who don’t know how anything works at all, pretend to be mechanical engineers and lawyers. But Chevron said they’re “experts” so clearly that must be true, and if you disagree they’ll shoot your dog and burn your house down. The list of dumb shit the ATF makes up on the fly could fill a book (literally. I did write this book).
But surely, the ATF is the worst right? Oh no. Not even close. Because then for my next job I went into military contracting! Where the rules are whatever the DCAA or DFAS say they are today. And sure, you violated that secret impossible to know rule on accident, so we’re going to ruin your company and put hundreds of people out of work… but the big megacorporation did the same thing, only on purpose, and a million times worse? Oh well. Fuck you. Lockheed builds missiles. You don’t.
On that note, as an accountant I got companies through audits from probably eight or ten different federal agencies. The DCAA audit is by far the most annoying. This is the industry where the customer actually knows exactly how much profit you expect to make, and then you have to guess what everything will cost in the future, and if you guess wrong, they will fine you. Hell, if you guess in a way that actually SAVES the government money, they will fine you. If you charge the government too little, they will fine you. They will fine you for bookkeeping errors. They will fine you for typos. (keep in mind of the hundreds of government spreadsheets I saw, I never saw a single one that didn’t have serious computational errors on it… which I got to fix for them for free… or they’d fine me).
I once actually had a DCAA auditor sit behind me while I typed on my computer for about 4 hours to WATCH ME TYPE. At the end of this month long colonoscopy which cost the tax payers tens of thousands of dollars in government employee salary, they had found one mistake where I had UNDER CHARGED the government something like $16.
Keep in mind, none of this shit was a law passed by congress. It’s all stuff that the agencies made up based upon a vague idea congress gave them.
But the worst, the absolute worst, dumbest motherfuckers in the entire US government? The SBA.
The motherfucking SBA who I will despise with the fire of a thousand suns until the end of time. This is an agency congress created to HELP small businesses, and instead its a wretched hive of scum and villainy, who because they can just make up the regulations as they go, will always find a way to reward their friends and punish everybody who competes with their friends.
And they make up these arbitrary rules, which their employees don’t understand, and then if you fail to comply with the rule correctly, but they understand it wrong, they will actually actively try to destroy that small business, RATHER THAN ADMIT THEIR MISTAKE. I’ve got a saga about this particular one that would take ten thousand words to tell, where I fought with the SBA making shit up on the fly and lying about it for 6 straight months, and the only reason we got it solved was my company brought it to the attention of @BasedMikeLee who then stomped on their heads (with glee, which is why that dude has earned my vote). So how has Chevron fucked you?
Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he – he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a – by – by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, also on abortion:
I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, on the national debt of the United States:
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the – with – with – with the Covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with – look, if – …. – we finally beat Medicare.
Joe Biden, sitting President of the United States, in his historic debate with former President Donald J. Trump, on the climate crisis:
We find ourselves – and by the way, black colleges, I came up with $50 billion for HBCUs, historic black universities and colleges, because they don’t have the kind of contributors that they have to build these laboratories and the like. Any black student is capable in college in doing any white student can do. They just have the money. But now, they’ll be able to get those jobs in high tech.
“Biden is about to face a crescendo of calls to step aside,” said a veteran Democratic strategist who has staunchly backed Mr. Biden publicly. “Joe had a deep well of affection among Democrats. It has run dry.”
“Parties exist to win,” this Democrat continued. “The man on the stage with Trump cannot win. The fear of Trump stifled criticism of Biden. Now that same fear is going to fuel calls for him to step down.” …
Mark Buell, a prominent donor for Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party, said after the debate that the president had to strongly consider whether he is the best person to be the nominee. “Do we have time to put somebody else in there?” Mr. Buell said.
He added that he was not yet calling for Mr. Biden to withdraw but that “Democratic leadership has a responsibility to go to the White House and clearly show what America’s thinking, because democracy is at stake here and we’re all nervous.” …
Former Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, called it “a crisis,” saying that her phone was “blowing up” with senators, operatives, donors and other distraught Democrats doing “more than hand-wringing” about what happens next.
“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it,” she said on MSNBC. “He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.” …
On Thursday night, Democrats were imagining scenarios in which party elders like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina were to intervene with Mr. Biden.
I have nothing else to say about this, but I’m very eager to read your thoughts.
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Who are the climate activists bringing down Britain's literary festivals with their climate boycotts? Fossil Free Books' leading lights seem to just love jetting off here, there and everywhere.
Dr. Eithan Haim was indicted last week, but he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. (Photo courtesy Dr. Haim)
Eithan Haim, 34, is at the beginning of his career as a surgeon. He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall. And now he is facing a four-count federal felony indictment for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, where he worked while a resident.
At TCH, he discovered the hospital was secretly continuing gender transition treatments on minors—including hormonal intervention on patients as young as 11 years old—after publicly declaring, in March of 2022, it would no longer provide such services.
The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”
Haim, like a growing number of medical professionals around the world, had grave doubts about the safety and efficacy of the explosively growing business of youth gender transition medicine. When he looked into it, he found that children distressed about their biological sex often had multiple mental health challenges—conditions that were being ignored in the rush to put vulnerable young people on hormones, and even to perform surgical interventions. These treatments are profoundly life-altering, with a high risk of rendering a young person sterile. In the last few years, a growing number of countries have investigated these treatments for young people, found the evidence wanting, and have effectively banned interventions such as puberty blockers—drugs that prevent children from entering puberty.
Haim felt he had to act, but he knew the career risks of speaking out could be enormous. He contacted conservative journalist Christopher Rufo, who published an exposé without naming Haim. Before giving Rufo evidence that puberty blockers were still being surgically implanted in young patients, Haim made sure the patient’s names and other identifying information were redacted. This was both to protect patient privacy, and himself from violating the law known as HIPAA, which protects individual patient identities while also allowing various uses of medical information. The story Haim gave to Rufo was published May 16, 2023. The next day, the Texas legislature voted to ban the medical gender transition of minors.
Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk.
As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)
Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.” Haim is raising money for his legal fees through this GiveSendGo account.
Haim told me despite the peril he is now facing he has no regrets about blowing the whistle and is committed to fighting the federal charges. He said, “If we don’t fight back, what world are we delivering our children into?”
Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press. You can follow her on X at @emilyyoffe.
BBC 'Disinformation Correspondent' Marianna Spring worries about Russian spies, trolls, bots and Brexiteers. But most of all she worries "real people" will be "emboldened" to talk about politics online.
Cartman has infected the minds of so many. I can't help but see the cartoon of him screaming about respecting his authority every time I see headlines like this.
In my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I write about the anti-free speech movement that has swept over higher education and how administrators and faculty hold a view of free speech as harmful. Now Harvard is again at the heart of a free speech fight after Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
Bobo warns that public criticism of the school could “cross a line into sanctionable violations.”
“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.”
The column adopts every jingoistic rationale used by anti-free speech critics today, including the invocation of the Holmes “crowded theater” analogy:
“But many faculty at Harvard enjoy an external stature that also opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy. Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker have well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy.
Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”
First and foremost, the ability of faculty to speak out on public disputes should not depend on whether you are more popular or visible.
However, it is the theater analogy that is most galling.
I have an entire chapter in The Indispensable Right that addresses the fallacies surrounding this line out of the Holmes opinion. It is arguably the most damaging single line ever written by a Supreme Court justice in the area of free speech.
I have previously written about the irony of liberals adopting the analogy, which was used to crack down on socialists and dissenters on the left.
One of the most telling moments came in a congressional hearing when I warned of the dangers of repeating the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare, when censorship and blacklisting were the norm. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-New York, invoked Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view that free speech does not give a person the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. In other words, citizens had to be silenced because their views are dangerous to others.
When I attempted to point out that the line came from a case justifying the imprisonment of socialists for their political viewpoints, Goldman cut me off and “reclaimed his time.”
Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left.
Dean Bobo is now the latest academic to embrace the theater rationale to justify the silencing of dissent. At Harvard, he is suggesting that the entire university is now a crowded theater and criticizing the university leadership is a cry of “Fire.” It is that easy.
By punishing criticism of the school’s leadership and policies, Bobo believes that they can look “forward to calmer times” on campus. It is precisely the type of artificial silence that academics have been enforcing against conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters for years. It is the approach that reduced our schools to an academic echo chamber.
The reference to Professor Steven Pinker is particularly ironic. As we have previously discussed, Pinker was targeted for exercising free speech. In past controversies, most Harvard faculty members have been conspicuously silent as colleagues were targeted by cancel campaigns. It was the same at other universities.
As faculties effectively purged their ranks of conservative or Republican members, the silence was deafening. Others either supported such campaigns or justified them. Notably, over 75 percent of the Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Then the Gaza protests began and some of these same faculty found themselves the targets of mobs. Suddenly, free speech became an urgent matter to address. Fortunately for these liberal professors, the free speech community is used to opportunistic allies. Where “fair weather friends” are often ridiculed, free speech relies on “foul-weather friends,” those who suddenly see the need to protect a diversity of opinions when they feel threatened.
Bobo’s arguments are consistent with years of rationales for silencing or investigating dissenting faculty for years. It violates the very foundation for academia in free speech and academic freedom. The university is free to punish students or faculty for unlawful conduct. However, when it comes to their viewpoints, there should be a bright line of protection.
Of course, this criticism is likely to trigger another common fallacy used to rationalize speech controls: as a private university Harvard is not subject to the First Amendment and thus this is not a true free speech issue.
As discussed previously, free speech values go beyond the First Amendment whether it is a controversy on social media or campuses. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media or academic censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies or institutions. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.
The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations and universities to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.
Dean Bobo’s desire for “calmer times” would come at too high a price for free speech as well as Harvard.
University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko took a break from teaching students to get the word out this week that the entire assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump was a staged event for suckers. Mokoko explained that it was just a ploy to get the votes of “idiots.” He, however, is available to offer sage-like clarity that the Secret Service, local police, and the Trump campaign conspired to fake the assassination, kill a bystander, and seriously wound others to get the sucker vote. He is not alone in this theory while others on the left are simply bemoaning that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.
So let me get the conspiracy down. The Secret Service allowed a kid who flunked out of the high school shooting club as a bad shot to fire multiple rounds at the former president from a sloped roof at 130 yards in the hope that he would only wing him?
Below is my column in Fox.com on renewed attacks on free speech and the apologists for this anti-free speech movement, including most recently comedian Jon Stewart. From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, the left is pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.
In my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I write about the anti-free speech movement that has swept over higher education and how administrators and faculty hold a view of free speech as harmful. Now Harvard is again at the heart of a free speech fight after Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”