In 1964, Stanley Kubrick released a dark comedy classic titled “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The title captured the absurdity of getting people to embrace the concept of weapons of mass destruction. The movie came to mind recently with the public campaign of Facebook calling for people to change her attitudes about the Internet and rethink issues like “content modification” – the new Orwellian term for censorship. Continue reading “Evolving With Big Tech: Facebook’s New Campaign Should Have Free Speech Advocates Nervous”
Category: Politics
Below is my column in The Hill on the new lawsuit against Seattle for its allowing the establishment of an autonomous zone within the city called CHOP. According to the compliant, what Mayor Jenny Durkan called “a summer of love” proved instead to be a month of mayhem resulting in deaths, robberies and sexual assaults. Now the city may be relying an immunity defense despite leaders opposing such defenses for individual police officers.
Here is the column:
Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association and the Law Enforcement Labor Services has taken the unusual (if not unprecedented) step of asking the University of Minnesota to investigate a student for her call to make the lives of campus police a living “hell.” In a video conference captured on video, student Lauren Meyers is caught making the statements in her capacity as Chief Financial Officer of the Minnesota Student Association Executive Board. Continue reading “Police Groups Ask The University of Minnesota To Investigate Student’s Call To Make Life “Hell” For Officers”
There are growing complaints about faculty using classes for raw advocacy or political diatribes. The most recent such complaint arose at Cypress College where an instructor slammed a student, Braden Ellis, after he called police “heroes.” The unnamed adjunct professor insisted that police were created in the South to track down runaway slaves and represent a danger to her and others. What is particularly ironic is that the presentation was on cancel culture.
We have been writing about the assault on foundational concepts of neutrality in journalism in academia. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Now the University of North Carolina has awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism to New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized (including on this blog) for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.
The conservative site College Fix has an account from a Cornell student that caught my eye today in light of the lawsuit yesterday against Twitter by Project Veritas for violating ill-defined “privacy rule.” Joseph Silverstein says that he was suspended after showing a widely available picture of Hunter Biden in his underwear — one of the pictures taken from his laptop. Twitter insists that the picture violates privacy rules despite being taken from an allegedly abandoned laptop, widely discussed in the public domain, and concerning a matter of public debate. It is also another example of Twitter’s strikingly conflicted censorship policies where images of Rudy Giuliani allegedly groping himself are permissible but a media confrontation in front of a home with a Facebook executive or a picture connected to the Biden laptop are not. Continue reading “Twitter Suspends Cornell Student For Showing Embarrassing Picture Of Hunter Biden”
Below is my column in the Hill on the spate of recent police shootings and the resulting calls for reforms and criminal charges. Two new incidents have occurred in the last week and both raise serious questions that must be answered on the use of lethal force. In North Carolina, Andrew Brown Jr., 42, was shot and killed during execution of an arrest warrant. He was reportedly shot in the back while trying to flee but no gun was found. In Virginia, Isaiah Brown, 32, was shot more than six times by a deputy who appears to have thought that a cellphone was a gun. The officers had previously given Brown a ride home and they were later called back to the home due to a disagreement. The tape shows Brown saying that he was going to kill his brother with a gun, but Brown told the 911 operator that he did not have a gun. These and the prior cases capture the dangerously uncertain and chaotic context of such cases. Both Brown cases raise serious questions that need to be answered on the use of lethal force.
Here is the column:
Last year, I testified in the Senate on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with the statement of House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler that Antifa (and its involvement in violent protests) is a “myth.” What was most striking about that hearing was the refusal of Democratic members to condemn Antifa’s activities or recognize the scope of anarchist violence even as riots raged in Portland, Oregon and other cities. Indeed, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, famously walked out of that hearing after Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, challenged her to condemn Antifa and leftist violence. Continue reading “Portland Mayor Condemns Anarchists But Stops Short Of Condemning Antifa”
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that President Joe Biden has thus far failed in unifying the nation. His approval level stands at just 52 percent, one of the lowest polling results for a president since 1945. An NBC poll shows 80 percent of Americans view the country as still deeply divided. The result reflects not just our hardened politics but also the decision of Biden to move forward with a hard-left agenda as well as legislation that is muscled through on a handful of votes. There has been little evidence of an effort to reach consensus or compromise. Nevertheless, the poll is surprising. After all, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is polling at 56 percent and would still win reelection despite allegations that he engaged in rampant sexual harassment, bungled the pandemic, and hid embarrassing data on deaths from Covid-19.
Continue reading “ABC-Washington Post Poll: Biden Supported By Bare Majority Of Americans”
Public trust in the media has hit an all-time-low in polling and the reason was evident this week with controversies over partisan and erroneous pieces published by the Washington Post and HuffPost targeting Senators Ted Cruz (R., Tx.) and Tim Scott (R., S.C.). The HuffPost was compelled to take down a tweet falsely accusing Cruz of lying while the Washington Post ran a hit piece on Scott that claimed (but failed) to show false elements to his “cotton to Congress” life story. Continue reading “Hits and Misses: HuffPost and Washington Post Criticized Over Pieces Attacking GOP Senators”
The House Democrats, with the support of President Joe Biden, are set to vote to approve the establishment of the “State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” as our 51st state today. I had testified and written about D.C. statehood for decades and, as noted in a recent column, I believe that the best interests of both the country and the district residents is found in retrocession, not statehood. Continue reading ““State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth”: House Democrats Set To Approve D.C. As The 51st State”
Below is my column in The Hill on two issues that arose on the final day of the trial of Derek Chauvin that could now feature prominently in any appeal. There will likely be an array of conventional appellate issues from the elements of the murder counts to the sufficiency of the evidence. Obviously, any appeal will wait until after sentencing, which will take many weeks. However, two issues were highlighted on the final day which could play a role in the appeal even if the odds are against Chauvin. The first on the denial of a venue change and the sequestering of the jury is very difficult make work on appeal. However, there are strong arguments to be made in this case. I believe Judge Cahill should have granted the venue change and also sequestered this jury. It is not clear if the court polled the jury on trial coverage, particularly after the inflammatory remarks of Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Cal.). However, there are credible grounds for challenging how this jury may have been influenced by the saturation of coverage of the trial as well as rioting in the area.
Here is the column:
We recently discussed the reckless rhetoric of Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Cal., in Minnesota, including declaring that she and protesters would not accept an acquittal in the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin. The comments came after days of rioting, looting, and other violence. The concern is that such rhetoric would inflame those already inclined toward violence, particularly given the gunfire directed at National Guardsman after her comments. Now it appears that protesters targeted one of the witnesses for the defense — an act that is clearly intimidating and retaliatory. It turns out the home defaced was the former home of Barry Brodd, the retired police officer. Continue reading “Protesters Deface The Former Home Of Defense Witness In Chauvin Trial”
A vote is expected on Thursday in the House for granting the District of Columbia full statehood. The bill will reach the floor without a discussion of the alternative options to securing full voting rights for the district. While the House bill is unlikely to pass unless the Democrats can succeed in killing the filibuster, the real loss is that we have gone another year without discussing options that could actually pass and bring a myriad of benefits to the district beyond just adding two Senate seats. That is the option that the Democratic leadership has spent decades blocking from serious consideration. I lived in Washington and have close ties to the city after first coming to Washington as a young congressional page. I have long advocated a “modified retrocession” plan rather than the creation of a micro state because I truly believe that a tailored plan could address long-standing problems for the district in addition to its representational status.
Here is the Hill column: Continue reading “America’s Micro State: Why Congress Should Consider Retrocession Rather Than Statehood”
With rioting continuing in Brooklyn Center, Minn. and around the country, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, went to Minnesota and told the protesters that they “gotta stay on the street” and “get more confrontational.” The statement is ironic since Waters is one of the House members currently suing former President Donald Trump and others for inciting violence on January 6th with his words on the Mall. Waters insists that Trump telling his supporters to go to the Capitol to make their voice heard and “fight” for their votes was actual criminal incitement. Conversely, Waters was speaking after multiple nights of rioting and looting and telling protesters to stay on the streets and get even more confrontational. There was violence after the remarks, including a shooting incident where two National Guard members were injured. Waters has now guaranteed that she could be called as a witness by Trump in his own defense against her own lawsuit. Continue reading “Trump’s Surprise Witness: Rep. Waters Becomes A Possible Witness Against Her Own Lawsuit”