This is the continuation of a series of posts dealing with issues where some individuals in the United States government are attempting to hold at least a portion of the rest of the federal government accountable and responsible for its actions and inactions. The public displays we find, however, are not unlike the most bizarre of Kabuki Theater or Theater of the Absurd.
Here, the late Justice Antonin Scalia speaks with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday regarding originalism, textualism, purposivism and gun control.
This is just 1/9th of 1/3rd of our government confirming and upholding our basic freedoms. Further, let me state: this is the best of our government in action. Our government at work. What we pay it to do.
Please remember, ladies and gentlemen, these are your federal tax dollars either
Killed by Leftists, Demorats, Progressives, anarchists and, of all people, aided and abetted by the American Media Maggots.
Whose speech and freedoms will likewise be suppressed.
This used to be true. Is it now?
And even some Republicans who lack actual testosterone or estrogen.
Wait. I take that back. Too many Republicans operate on estrogen though they appear as males.
Stop. Perfect time for this video.
So why the big concern over freedom of speech? Because of past, recent and continuing incidents involving the lack of it on American college campuses. This video summarizes appropriately.
That was the view of a college professor, who accurately reflects the views on way too many American college and university campuses today. Most of these are, of course, funded by American Taxpayer cash.
Your First Amendment freedoms are at stake.
Further, your overall American freedoms are also at stake which, of course, is what makes this nation more exceptional than most any other.
What other nation has this:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Leftists and Demorats will tell you our nation is evil on its face and is everything but exceptional.
But where do Leftists or Demorats actually mention freedom? Where is it that they wish to add to your freedoms in any fashion, instead of removing them? Removing them and then occasionally selling them back to you at a massive profit? Come on, Al Gore only wants $15 trillion of your taxpayer dollars.
Those freedoms buttressed and solidified by the sacrifice of 419,000 US soldiers and civilians in WWII. Yet what passes for state-of-the-art thought on US freedom of speech today by a politician — a Demorat politician mind you — is this.
He couldn’t be more wrong. The First Amendment exists not to protect pablum speech, but specifically challenging speech.
First, let’s be honest: there is no real definition for “hate speech.” It, like pornography, is in the eye of the beholder. The unsaid crux of the biscuit is, naturally: just who determines “hate speech”? That is the key.
Courts have ruled that the First doesn’t protect outright threats, speech that would tend to provoke a personal fight, and child pornography. “Hate speech” is not included as an exception.
KKK speech is protected. Symbols, like a burning cross, are protected. The Westboro Baptist Church is protected.
The Supreme Court has established a general principle that a government administrator can’t decide to charge a group a higher fee for event security based on anticipated public reaction to the content of the event, and a lower court found that this applies to colleges, too. So if Berkeley is basing its security decisions on what it expects Coulter to say, that could pose a problem.
We heard what one professor thinks of free speech. Another example of what passes for state-of-the-art thought on US freedom of speech today by “educators” is this, from the NYTimes.com:
What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech
by Ulrich Baer
Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding.
Translated: the surfeit of emotional, sensitive snowflakes are in fact traumatized by certain speech. Their horror should not be delegitimized.
The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.
Translated: censorship isn’t really the removal of free speech; it’s a guarantee not to offend. Offense is a much worse condition than that of the removal of speech itself. Restricted speech is a “public good.”
But listen to this.
In such cases (“when those views invalidate the humanity of some people”) there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.
Perfect. Who needs actual speech? In public? Just go to the internet. Meanwhile, we as Leftists will keep our politically-correct stranglehold on what it is you can hear and read.
The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth.
Again, Leftists proving there is no real “good” or “bad.” There are simply events that occur on a sliding scale created of their own highly-informed thinking.
We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.
You see? A “sophisticated understanding.” This is akin to saying that because some poor people cannot actually afford to go out and purchase a firearm, we need to eliminate the Second Amendment.
The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks.
Uh, yes it is. You lie. The exceptions are delineated above as determined in US courts.
It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.
Now it gets grotty. At first blush the paragraph above is nothing but mush. I provide this accurate translation for you: if only one of a delineated set of protected species are offended, even in the slightest, that speech is deemed hateful.
Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.
Translated: speech is now hateful when you question someone.
Here is a sentence that doesn’t even warrant reproducing in its entirety.
Unlike today’s somewhat reflexive defenders of free speech. . .
“Reflexive defenders of free speech.” In times past that was considered a positive feature, a wonderful attribute. Now, according to “educators,” that’s a glitch, a quirk, a serious problem requiring repair.
What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse.
Please tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse are being quashed? Examples please. Be specific.
We should thank the student protestors, the activists in Black Lives Matter and other “overly sensitive” souls for keeping watch over the soul of our republic.
Of course. Thanks, Berkeley and other US universities, for rioting and burning and blockading and threatening so that opposing views cannot be remotely considered on campus. They really are “closed campuses” with regard to alternate views, theories and speech. Closed. Walled off. It is truly suppression by violence. On the part of Leftists.
Here is what Judge Andrew Napolitano said of this specific editorial.
Light to make the cockroaches scatter.
You know you have a serious problem when even Bill Maher skewers Leftists blocking free speech.
That’s an individual on a TV show. What happens when you have a mammoth tech giant like Google censoring from within? From DCClothesline.com:
Google’s Schmidt: “We’re Not Arguing For Censorship, We’re Arguing Just Take It Off The Page”
by Chris Menahan
Google is not going to “censor” their search results, they’re just going to take search results “off [their] page” to “essentially have you not see it.”
Say what?
In a video from March 23 that’s just now going viral, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked by Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo how they plan to deal with extremist content. Eric Schmidt responded by mixing in “fake news” with “extremist things” and suggested their computer algorithms will determine what’s true:
“My own view on most of this sort of extremist things as well as fake news in general is that it’s essentially a ranking problem. We’re very good at detecting what’s the most relevant and what’s the least relevant. It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else.”
Read that again. “We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else.”
And this isn’t censorship how? You’re taking it off the page. Where “else” are you putting it?
You see, of course, just who makes this determination of censorship or hate speech, yes? Me? No. You? No. Leftists.
As far as Leftists are concerned, it is precisely your freedoms that put the world in its predicament today.
It is your freedom of speech that suppresses any number of individuals and makes them feel less a person. It is your Second Amendment that stacks bodies like cordwood and forces young black males to kill each other in large urban venues. It is your ability to drive where you want when you want that has polluted our skies and clogged our cities. It is your ability to eat what you want that has resulted in obese young people and poor people. It is your freedom to manufacture goods and create a mighty industrial base that has resulted in competition globally, which is a terrible idea and rife with pollution, greed, capitalism and consumerism. It is your freedom to regulate borders which has resulted in people unable to enter the US and partake of the Free Cheese available within. It is your freedom to be independent and sovereign which has closed off globalism and failed to consolidate power into a smaller, brighter, more enlightened band of clear-thinking individuals. It is the freedom to embrace religion which creates societal judgments which conflict with secularism. Islam not included.
When you have no Second Amendment, you have no First Amendment. When you have no First Amendment you have no freedom whatsoever.
As Europe is in a terrible cultural war with globalism and sovereignty, so is the United States.
“Hate speech”? I think you know who determines that and why.
THE LATEST: SENATE CONFIRMS SESSIONS AS ATTORNEY GENERAL
The Senate has confirmed Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to be attorney general in the Trump administration.
The 52-47 vote broke largely along party lines and capped weeks of divisive battles over Sessions, an early supporter of Donald Trump and one of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans.
No surprise there. It’s fairly well known that Senator Jeff Sessions will actually enforce the law and abide by the rule of law, as opposed to the two prior racist occupants who could only see cases through the lenses of race and sex.
Democrats laced into Sessions over his ties to Trump and his record on civil rights and immigration. Republicans lauded his four decades in public service and his commitment to fairness and the rule of law.
The nomination drew wide attention after an imbroglio in which Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned a rare rebuke for quoting Coretta Scott King, widow of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., criticizing Sessions in 1986.
In reference to that incident, please see my very prior post. Then watch this — completely skewering the notion that Sessions is some kind of racist — as the niece of Martin Luther King Jr, Dr Alveda King, remarks:
Senator Sessions had to endure this kind of questioning from one of the largest and most officious bozos in the senate, Al Franken.
As my college professors used to say, “compare and contrast” the above interrogation by Franken to the interview by Senator Ted Cruz, below.
The proper thing has been done, the Department of Justice will be clean again, and actual investigations into corruption and various violations of the law — by anyone — may be instigated. My confidence level in the DOJ has increased geometrically. I would suspect that the IRS, the State Department, other governmental entities, national organizations, cities, counties and states — as well as persons — are on official notice.
The rule of law has returned to the Justice Department.
Excerpted From The Hill: The American Civil Liberties Union vowed to sue Jeff Sessions if he violates the Constitution immediately after he was confirmed by the Senate as attorney general.
“If he violates the Constitution, we’ll sue,” the ACLU tweeted on Wednesday night.
I might be forced to conclude: the honeymoon is over before it started.
Feingold: Hillary Might Issue Executive Order on Guns
by Joe Schoffstall
Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who is running again in an attempt to win back his old Senate seat, was recorded at a fundraiser saying that Hillary Clinton might issue an executive order on guns.
That should come as no surprise given her background and history. We knew it was in her playbook.
Feingold can be heard in the video discussing what Hillary Clinton could do in relation to guns if she were to be elected president.
“If there’s still Republican control in Congress, and if Hillary is elected, is there anything she can do to uhh…,” a person asks Feingold within the video. “Well, there might be an executive order,” Feingold responds.
“Oh, so she can, I know that Bara…” the questioner counters. Feingold then talks of President Obama’s executive orders throughout his two terms.
“He did some executive orders with the aspects of waiting periods. But what we all need is the Senate, have her there, and then put pressure on the House. And we might win the House,” Feingold says.
I wrote earlier that with Obama enacting such sweeping Executive Orders (EOs) he is setting precedent than can be followed by other presidents. The objection is not necessarily with the number of EOs signed by Obama — in fact he has signed, to date, 252 EOs in seven years compared to George Bush’s 291 in eight years, contrasted with Bill Clinton’s 364 in eight years — but with the overarching and wide-ranging content of the EOs, subject matter best left to Congress and not to one man.
Obama’s EOs are the most restrictive in the history of the presidency, utilizing more compulsory, binding and legally obligatory words like “must” and “shall” than the six prior presidents.
Further, Obama has stated he has done so specifically because the entire DC process is frequently too slow and cumbersome for his taste.
When the president — any president — publicly states that his or her intent is to purposely bypass Congress, that eliminates the concept of “checks and balances” and thusly tends to condense the three branches of government — the Judicial, Legisaltive and Executive — into one: the Executive.
With that follows an imperial presidency and on the heels, nothing good save perhaps that of tyranny.
Finally, I ask: when was the last time a Demorat or Leftist increased your American freedoms instead of reducing them?
Right. Because Life is just like that — one big Safe Space.
I mean, I was stupid in college. I was voting Demorat.
But for fuck’s sake, I wasn’t that stupid.
I was taking a full college load and working for four radio stations, was Photo Editor for the college newspaper, woke up at 5 AM and went to bed at 10 or 11 PM. I paid my tuition, had to buy my own used car in order to get to work.
At my peak I had six jobs, four at radio stations, one at a newspaper, one at the college. Plus my classes. I never had a moment to consider protests or safe spaces or microaggressions. I was too busy worrying about how I would pay for my textbooks.
So I bought used textbooks and then learned: they were already highlighted with the salient points. They wouldn’t be salient points if they weren’t highlighted, right?
And that’s how I passed college. Only a portion of my weekends were free.
Student Snowflakes: ALL Universities Should Be Safe Spaces
by Kieran Corcoran
University students are crying out to be swaddled in the cotton wool of trigger warnings and safe spaces, a worrying new survey has found.
Fragile youths also said they love no-platform policies, newspaper bans and knocking down statues to shelter them from controversial or unpleasant ideas.
Its findings are also likely to be broadly applicable in the US, where safe space culture originated.
48% of all students surveyed agreed that all universities should have safe space policies to police debate, with only 20% opposing the idea. Women favored safe spaces by a considerable margin.
Women. Imagine that. The most emotive and most coddled sex extant — except for trannies, cross-dressers and the rest of the 31 flavors.
The survey, conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) also showed that students are terrified of being triggered, with 68% backing their use.
The crimes discussed in a text book are “distressing.” Such petunias, you are.
Confusingly, the survey found most students pay lip service to free speech – with 60% agreeing universities “should never” limit it.
But in practice many of them turned on a dime to support censorious policies in practice.
NEVER trust Millennials when it comes to their support for our foundational documents. I am convinced they 1) are not even remotely familiar with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and 2) frighteningly willing to shed those rights with which they are unfamiliar.
The rights that so many Americans have died for.
NEVER. TRUST. MILLENNIALS.
They are “educated.”
But they have not learned.
BZ
P.S.
You want to read a great article about so-called “safe spaces”? Click on this to read Camille Paglia’s article. You might think that Paglia is a right winger. Uh, no. Full transcript is here.
This is the continuation of a series of posts dealing with issues where some individuals in the United States government are attempting to hold at least a portion of the rest of the federal government accountable and responsible for its actions and inactions. The public displays we find, however, are not unlike the most bizarre of Kabuki Theater or Theater of the Absurd.
Killed by Leftists, Demorats, Progressives, anarchists and, of all people, aided and abetted by the American Media Maggots.
Those freedoms buttressed and solidified by the sacrifice of 419,000 US soldiers and civilians in WWII. Yet what passes for state-of-the-art thought on US freedom of speech today by a politician — a Demorat politician mind you — is this.
He couldn’t be more wrong. The First Amendment exists not to protect pablum speech, but specifically challenging speech.
From the 
Right. Because Life is just like that — one big Safe Space.