Category: Leftist Virtue(!)

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Child Abuse Corruption Education How sick is this? Leftist Virtue(!)

Outrage! Young Girl Forced Into Public Apology and Given Cruel Restriction After A BLM Poster She Made Angers Woke School

Views: 85

Looks like the “Golden State” is actually Iron Pyrite.

In a school discrimination case that could set a precedent for beleaguered parents across the country frustrated with Critical Race Theory-related issues in the classroom, a California woman is set to file suit against her child’s school district after her 7-year-old daughter was punished and humiliated for drawing a Black Lives Matter picture for her friends that also included the sentiment that “any lives” matter. In addition, the school never informed her about the incident or the punishment; she only learned about it after another parent mentioned it to her a year later.

At the time of the incident, Black Lives Matter rhetoric could be seen and heard everywhere, from the news to professional sports and even in the classroom. Jane, who is white, decided to draw a picture of her friends, who spanned the racial diaspora at the diverse elementary school that offers a unique “two-way language immersion” program in Spanish/English.

Chelsea Boyle’s daughter was a first-grader at Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, CA, an Orange County suburb nestled about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego.  At the time of the incident, Black Lives Matter rhetoric could be seen and heard everywhere, from the news to professional sports and even in the classroom. Jane, who is white, decided to draw a picture of her friends, who spanned the racial diaspora at the diverse elementary school that offers a unique “two-way language immersion” program in Spanish/English.

The picture was meant to represent her closest friends of all different races, and in her uneven, first-grader scrawl, she wrote “Black Lives mater [sic]” at the top, followed by another sentiment, “any lives.” The picture went home with one of Jane’s friends.

The school never informed her about the incident or the punishment; she only learned about it after another parent mentioned it to her a year later.

Boyle said Jesus Becerra, the principal of Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, forced the girl, then in the first grade, to make a public apology. She had to deliver the apology on the playground in front of her fellow students and school staff. To drive home the point that deviation from prescribed language about race is not allowed, the child was “benched” as punishment, meaning she had her recess time revoked and was forced to sit on a bench while her classmates played during their free time.

In an even more infuriating turn of events, Boyle says she wasn’t notified of the incident by school officials. It was not until nearly a year later, in March of 2022, that she heard about the issue from someone who was a mutual friend of both Boyle and the offended family.

All of this had happened without her knowledge, even though Boyle was heavily involved in school activities and volunteered hundreds of hours in the classroom and for school events. She had been kept in the dark, and her daughter, not fully understanding what had happened or what she had done wrong, had kept the incident to herself.

It wasn’t “all lives matter,” it was “any life.” It was something she came up on her own. She just didn’t understand it. It was completely innocent, and that broke my heart.

Boyle said she was shocked to learn what had happened.

My immediate reaction is just…I feel like I got hit by a bus, but I didn’t understand it. And I thought, oh, you know, my daughter has just been discriminated against. And I didn’t even want to contact a lawyer, but I just didn’t know what had happened to us.

When she talked to her daughter, it became clear that she had no idea why she had been punished for the picture. Boyle says her family does not engage in discussions about specific Black Lives Matter issues or other political topics at the moment because her family is still so young. She says her daughter came up with the picture and phrasing on her own, with perfectly innocent intentions, so not only did the punishment seem unwarranted to Boyle, it seemed cruel.

And then when I talked to my daughter — I think she said it was so sad. And and I said, “Well, what did the principal say to you?” and [she said] “I can’t draw pictures anymore. And I can’t write those words.” And I said, “Why did you write [those words]?”

I don’t teach [about] Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, [or] anything in my house because I think my children are too young [for politics]. My children see color as a color, as a description. I am trying to raise them the way the world should be, not the way it is. That’s how I’m trying to make my personal change. [H]er best friend is brown — not black, but brown — and she didn’t understand why she didn’t matter, why her friend didn’t matter. She has another friend that is Japanese; she doesn’t understand.

It wasn’t “all lives matter,” it was “any life.” It was something she came up on her own. She just didn’t understand it. It was completely innocent, and that broke my heart.

Boyle says the most concerning part of what she felt was an unwarranted punishment was its effect on Jane’s desire to draw. Jane is challenged with ADHD, and drawing has been her biggest and most therapeutic outlet. She had wondered why her artistic 7-year-old had suddenly stopped drawing when previously it was hard to find her without a marker or crayon in her hands. As it turned out, as a part of Jane’s punishment, Principal Becerra allegedly instructed Jane to refrain from drawing any more pictures for her friends at school.

Boyle was heartbroken and immediately reached out to Becerra and other district officials to register her disappointment and try to find some clarity. She says, admittedly she was a bit frenzied.

[I sent] my super angry, all caps email. Within 24 hours, nobody got back to me. So I sent another email, a lot more well-thought-out, took my time, and I said, “Listen, this is what I want. I want a formal apology to me, I want a formal apology to my daughter, and I want a formal apology to this other family, because they didn’t know that you guys didn’t contact me and you made it very uncomfortable for a lot of the parents and students at school, unbeknownst to me. And that’s all I want.”

Haberbush says they essentially told her to “take a hike” and what she was saying was not true.

The Orange County mother said she was hesitant to contact a lawyer but felt strongly that what happened to her daughter was wrong, and the insult was compounded by the terse response from Becerra and relative silence from her school board representatives. Boyle identified one board member, Gila Jones, as responsive and concerned, but in the end, Jones indicated there wasn’t much she or the school board could do in this case.

Interestingly, district disciplinary guidelines provide an apparatus for parents to escalate complaints about disciplinary actions. That apparatus ultimately ends with the authority of the school board.

Not only was Boyle denied the opportunity to lodge her complaints in the timely manner supposedly guaranteed by the official disciplinary procedural guidelines, the school board was not able to provide any resolution either.

Boyle had seen enough. She researched pro-bono civil rights attorneys and found herself connected with The Gavel Project, a Phoenix-based non-profit charity committed to representing civil rights in government overreach cases. From there, CEO and founder Ryan Heath helped her to secure in-state representation by Alexander Haberbush of the LexRex Institute, a “legal and public outreach organization that works to empower private individuals to hold government officials at every level accountable to their sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States and of their various states by informing, persuading, and advocating on behalf of those who have been denied its liberties.”

Haberbush says this is more than a case of one wronged child and her angry mother. It could set a legal precedent for other parents dealing with similar things, creating a legal ripple effect that could have drastic consequences for overreaching public school administrators and districts when it comes to compelled speech. And that is exactly how Haberbush identifies this case…one of compelled speech, which would place the burden of proof on Becerra and the school.

It’s a compelled speech issue; obviously compelled speech is one of the toughest tests that they have to meet, if they want to say that this is valid, “we can do it.” We be believe that there is no way that they can meet that standard and we believe this is an egregious deprivation of her rights and that Chelsea should be vindicated.

He added that he took on the case because he believes Boyle and her daughter were genuinely wronged, and he doesn’t want to see it happen again to anyone else.

She did not call Ryan and did not call my office because she was trying to make a buck. In fact, we will not take clients who are only out to make a buck. What she wanted from the school was an apology, [for them to recognize] they had done wrong, to apologize to her daughter and apologize to her.

Haberbush intimated that while money is not a motivator, his firm does occasionally seek damages and may choose to do so in this case. However, what they really want is a formal apology and a judgment.

Primarily what we want is a judicial determination and recognition that wrongdoing occurred, so that it won’t happen again because nobody should have to go through this.

Boyle hopes that the summer break has given the Viejo Elementary principal some time to relax and ponder the situation.

I’m serious. I don’t want this to happen to my kids. I don’t want it to happen to your kids.

Haberbush says the next step in the process is to file a lawsuit against the district. He feels it is necessary to force the school to respond to his client.

When asked if Boyle had plans to return her daughter to the same school in the fall, the small business owner admitted she did want to send her back but wondered what challenges her family may face as legal avenues are being pursued.

Jesus Becerra could not be reached for comment as of the publication of this article.

Reported first by RedState, as well as The Western Journal.

My advice to Mrs. Boyle would be NOT to send her daughter back to that school. These wokester elitists will increase their harassment of the daughter by several orders of magnitude in retaliation. This IS California, after all, home of Nasty Piglosi and Craven Newscum.

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Categories
Crime Leftist Virtue(!) Politics Polls

Oops! Lifelong Dem Turns on Party, Will Vote GOP for First Time After Murder of Her Son

Views: 29

Erica Ingram, life long Dem, leaves the plantation.

Erica Ingram — a lifelong Democrat, whose 24-year-old son was shot and killed in front of their Cleveland home in 2019 — said she is strongly leaning toward voting for Republicans this election cycle.

Ingram singled out Ohio Republican U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance telling NBC News he best reflects her views about the current state of affairs.

“I can see him having compassion as to where the Democrats don’t have no compassion,” she said. “They’re, like, weak. They don’t fight hard enough as to where the Republicans get up there and they pull out all stops.”

See on twitter.

Republicans hold a strong advantage in the handling of crime in Americans’ minds, especially after the left’s whole defund the police thing in 2020,

Citing Cleveland Police Department figures, NBC News reported the city had 179 murders in 2020, its most ever, followed by its second-most in 2021, at 165.

A Gallup poll taken in April found concern over crime and violence at its highest level since 2016, with 53 percent saying that have a “great deal” of concern. “Great deal” of worry hasn’t reached majority since 2016

When combined with those who have a “fair amount” of concern, the number jumped to 80 percent.

Women, Republicans, city residents among most worried about crime

Not surprisingly Republicans hold a strong advantage in the handling of crime in Americans’ minds, especially after the left’s whole defund 0the police thing in 2020, during which Biden stayed pretty much silent.

An ABC/Washington Post poll conducted in April found Republicans have a 12 percentage point lead over Democrats.

“That’s a marked shift from last summer, when Americans were about evenly divided on which party is better positioned to contend with crime,” the Washington Post reported.

Voter frustration with progressives’ approach to handling crime can be seen in the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin last month.

Further south in Los Angeles, over 700,000 residents signed documents seeking to have their county’s district attorney, George Gascón recalled as well, citing his weak-on-crime policies.

These are two very obviously two Democrat-dominated cities, yet even there the left has lost a handle of where the people are concerning crime and violence.

The Associated Press reported last month that Democrats are doing more than saying they’ll vote Republican this election, they’re actually changing their party affiliation.

“More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year.”

“More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year,” according to voter registration data analyzed by the news organization.

“The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump,” the AP said.

The switch is most pronounced in the suburban counties outside of cities like Denver, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

“For example, in Lorain County, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, nearly every party switcher over the last year has gone Republican. That’s even as Democrats captured three-quarters of those changing parties in the same county during end of the Trump era,” according to the AP.

Fox News released its “Power Rankings” on Monday forecasting the GOP will retake the House of Representatives with at least seven seats to spare.

“With redistricting completed and the bulk of the primaries behind us, the Power Rankings model now reveals a clear advantage for the GOP in the House. With 218 seats required to take control, the GOP is forecast to take 225 seats to the Democrats’ 180 seats,” Fox News said.

The news outlet is marking 30 races as “toss-up” meaning the Republican majority could be much greater.

On the flip said, even if the Democrats win every toss-up race, they will still be in the minority as things stand now.

On the Senate side, the outcome is still much more up in the air, but favors a Republican takeover. The upper chamber is currently divided 50-50 between the parties.

Of the 34 seats up for election, 20 are in the solid red, likely red or lean red categories.

“The GOP has to win only two of the five toss-up races to take control of the Senate, whereas the Democrats need to win four of those races just to reach a 50-seat ‘majority’ with the aid of Vice President Kamala Harris,” according to Fox.

The five toss-up states are Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Republicans are better on crime and many other issues, like the economy.

Expect many Democrats and Independents will be following Ingram’s example and look to the GOP to get the nation back on track after the disaster that is the Biden pResidency.

 

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Categories
Leftist Virtue(!) Stupid things people say or do.

Woke Employee Gets Himself Fired for Refusing to Do His Job While ‘in Mourning’ Over Roe v. Wade Reversal

Views: 22

A former Universal Music Enterprises employee said he was fired by the company last month after refusing to work on June 24, the day the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision.

“I’m a queer brown person and I was fired during Pride month for speaking up in defense of abortion rights at Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) (a subsidiary of Universal Music Group),” Michael Lopez wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn post a week ago.

Lopez’s LinkedIn profile indicates he worked at the company as a production coordinator from January 2021 till June. His profile currently says he is a freelance graphic designer.

Lopez said he had to process reports for the company’s upcoming releases every Friday. Part of the work involved writing to an email list with 275 people on it.

The Supreme Court on June 24 upheld a Mississippi law that banned abortions 15 weeks post-conception and overturned Roe v. Wade in a landmark decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

In response to the decision, Lopez emailed the 275 people on the mailing list that day to say he did not do the work he was then supposed to do because he was “in mourning due to the attack on people with uteruses in the US. Federally guaranteed access to abortion is gone.”

“Vivendi and Universal Music Group must stop donating to anti-abortion, anti-queer and anti-trans politicians. Politicians like Marsha Blackburn, Ken Buck, Victoria Spartz, etc. Or expect more unproductive days,” he wrote, naming three Republican members of Congress.

Lopez signed off the email with the words, “Yours in fury.”

He said in his LinkedIn post that although he thought he might lose his job, he “was proud of letting allies know that our company has been donating to these politicians.”

Would you fire an employee who did something like this?
Yes: 99% (910 Votes)
No: 1% (8 Votes)

According to Lopez, fellow employees expressed their support for what he had done, and his manager subsequently asked him to take the day off.

However, the company’s leadership apparently did not take this mutiny lightly.

A week after the incident, a company HR official met with Lopez via Zoom and told him that he was being fired.

“I was being let go,” he said in his LinkedIn post, “for (paraphrasing) ‘Not doing your job, disrupting the day of 275 people and poor judgement.’”

Universal asked him to sign out of his work accounts and took back his work laptop an hour after the meeting, he said.

The entitled snowflake confirmed hir single digit IQ by sending another email to the same group as before — AFTER being fired.

In response to his firing, however, Lopez emailed the mailing list again.

“Just got fired for this email from Friday, so they’re letting you know where they stand on employees speaking out on politicians that support marginalization for folks like me,” he wrote, according to his LinkedIn post.

“A brown queer person terminated during Pride month speaking in support of abortion rights. Seems like that’s exactly what America is all about right now,” Lopez said.

“I don’t speak for my former company. I speak for myself and employees that will suffer under these discriminatory laws,” he said.

“Their actions today, their silence on Friday are indicative of their motivations. Profit at all costs,” Lopez wrote. “Solidarity, only if it’s profitable. And above all of that is maintaining the status quo and saying f*** you to the working class.”

Screenshot pt 1
screenshot pt2

Lopez’s post has grown popular since the time he shared it, earning more than 3,400 reactions and 605 comments as of Tuesday afternoon.

Universal Music Group was asked about the situation, and a representative told the New York Post, “As a matter of policy, we can’t discuss an individual’s personnel record. We can say that what was posted on social media is inaccurate.”

“UMG has a long record of support for women’s issues,” the representative said. “In the wake of the recent US Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v Wade, the company has extended its efforts to assure that these important healthcare services remain accessible to employees.”

“We also financially support non-profit groups working in this area and offer a match for employee’s contributions to those groups, as well.”

 

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Categories
Corruption Faked news How sick is this? Leftist Virtue(!) Progressive Racism The Courts

Like a clock Snopes got it right twice. Did Conservative Justices Lie About Roe v. Wade? Absolutely not.

Image via Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

Views: 53

Snopes usually doesn’t get it right, but I know of two occasions that they did. One was about Thomas and the aborted fetus.

In a June 2022 dissenting opinion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asserted a debunked claim about the use of aborted fetal cells in COVID-19 vaccines.

Rating

False

False

This is the second one.

Five conservative Supreme Court justices dishonestly suggested, in Senate confirmation hearings, that they thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning.

Rating

False

False

Fact Check

In May 2022, after news leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court had provisionally voted to overturn the abortion protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, the left-wing political action committee MeidasTouch briefly caused “#LyingGOP” to trend on Twitter, with a video that accused five Republican-appointed justices of lying about their intentions to overturn the landmark ruling.

MeidasTouch posted the video on various social media platforms and used it to solicit monetary contributions.

Lying GOP

However, the creators of the video badly misrepresented the full scope of relevant facts in two important ways, and we are issuing a rating of “False.”

First, they engaged in highly selective editing of much longer and more nuanced archival clips of future justices during their U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, in order to grossly misrepresent the substance of what they said.

Second, they appeared to misunderstand or misrepresent the meaning of a Supreme Court precedent. In brief, describing a ruling as an important precedent is not tantamount to giving a commitment not to overturn that ruling, or indicating you believe that ruling cannot be overruled. Therefore, the sweeping allegations of premeditated dishonesty on the part of GOP-appointed justices were as poorly supported by evidence as they were wrongheaded.

The following is our breakdown of what the MeidasTouch “megaviral supercut” video claimed, lined up against what the factual record shows.

Justice Clarence Thomas

Room, Indoors, Person
File photo of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Source: Bettmann / Getty Images.

The following is how Meidas Touch presented Thomas’s remarks:

Clarence Thomas: I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue.

Caption: HE LIED

In this section of the video, MeidasTouch mutilated a 1991 quotation from then-Supreme Court nominee Thomas, and grossly misrepresented the substance and meaning of his remarks. In reality, Thomas absolutely did not provide any assurances on how he might rule on the specific case of Roe v. Wade, nor on the question of abortion rights.

The clip of Thomas came from a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Sep. 11, 1991. Readers can watch the exchange in full, or read a full transcript.

U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, had been attempting to pin down Thomas’s views on whether the U.S. Constitution protects abortion rights, and had highlighted what he presented as discrepancies in Thomas’s past pronouncements.

In particular, Metzenbaum asked Thomas to resolve an apparent gap between his putative support for a constitutionally-enshrined right to privacy, more broadly, and abortion rights in particular. Metzenbaum put it to Thomas that:

I fear that you, like other nominees before the committee, could assure us that you support a fundamental right to privacy, but could also decline to find that a woman’s right to choose is protected by the constitution.

At the culmination of his remarks, Metzenbaum asked Thomas:

I must ask you to tell us here and now whether you believe that the constitution protects a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, and I am not asking you as to how you would vote in connection with any case before the court.

In response, Thomas prevaricated, as so many judicial nominees have in recent decades:

I am afraid though, on your final question, Senator, that it is important for any of us who are judges, in areas that are very deeply contested…I think that to take a position would undermine my ability to be impartial…

I am afraid that to begin to answer questions about what my specific position is in these contested areas would greatly — or leave the impression that I prejudged this issue.

When Metzenbaum again attempted to pin down the nominee, Thomas again prevaricated, providing the quotation that would be mutilated and misrepresented by MeidasTouch in their video:

Senator, as I noted yesterday, and I think we all feel strongly in this country about our privacy — I do — I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue or to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion, which is a difficult issue. [Emphasis is added].

As the transcript makes clear, MeidasTouch cut off the second half of Thomas’s sentence, in which he stipulated that he had “no reason…to prejudge” or “to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion.”

In reality, Thomas was repeatedly urged and asked to make pronouncements on abortion rights, and refused to do so. The notion, therefore, that in this exchange he somehow gave an assurance that he would not ever vote to overturn Roe v. Wade is utterly without basis in fact.

Justice Samuel Alito

 

Tie, Accessories, Accessory
WASHINGTON – JANUARY 10: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito answers questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the second day of his confirmation hearings January 10, 2006 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The following is how MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks:

Alito: Roe v Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973. It has been challenged on a number of occasions and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision. When a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed, that strengthens its value.

Caption: HE LIED

Once again, this presentation gives the grossly misleading impression that, in his confirmation hearings, Alito indicated he would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade. In reality, the full scope of his remarks clearly shows that — like most judicial nominees — Alito very carefully avoided giving any assurances about how he might vote on that precedent.

The clip in question came from Alito’s hearings on Jan. 11, 2006. Readers can examine a full transcript of the relevant exchange, or watch a video of it.

Ironically, the starting point for the exchange was the concern expressed by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that Alito had “decided to create categories of cases that have been decided by the Court that you will concede have constitutional protection, but you have left in question the future of Roe v. Wade.”

In other words, Durbin was concerned that Alito had not stated, for the record, that Roe v. Wade was no longer open to overturning, and indeed had in the past asserted that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

So while MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks as proof that he thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning — “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court” — what those remarks actually constituted was Alito’s careful avoidance of describing the ruling as such. Here’s the key exchange:

Durbin: Do you believe [Roe v Wade] is the settled law of the land?
Alito: Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973, so it has been on the books for a long time. It has been challenged on a number of occasions, and I discussed those yesterday, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision, sometimes on the merits, sometimes [as] in Casey based on stare decisis, and I think that when a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed that strengthens its value as stare decisis…
Durbin: Is it the settled law of the land?
Alito: It is a — if settled means that it can’t be re-examined, then that’s one thing. If settled means that it is a precedent that is entitled to respect as stare decisis, and all of the factors that I’ve mentioned come into play, including the reaffirmation and all of that, then it is a precedent that is protected, entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis, in that way.

What Alito is saying here is that Roe v. Wade is clearly a precedent whose conclusions have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the court, and would not lightly be overturned, taking into account the doctrine of stare decisis — the legal principle of deference to precedent expressed in the Latin phrase, which means “let stand what has been decided.”

What Alito is not saying — indeed, what he is scrupulously avoiding saying, despite Durbin’s best efforts — is that Roe v Wade is beyond overturning, like various other landmark precedents he had mentioned elsewhere in the hearings, such as Brown v. the Board of Education.

So the full scope of Alito’s remarks, when viewed objectively and in context, actually show the opposite of what the brief clip, strategically cut away by MeidasTouch, appeared to show.

Justice Neil Gorsuch

Tie, Accessories, Accessory
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 22: Judge Neil Gorsuch testifies during the third day of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2017 in Washington. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The following is how Meidas Touch presented Gorsuch’s remarks.

Gorsuch: Roe v Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent, like any other.

Caption: HE LIED

MeidasTouch badly misrepresented Gorsuch’s remarks in the same way as it did Alito’s. In reality, by describing Roe v. Wade as a precedent “worthy of treatment as precedent,” Gorsuch was assiduously avoiding going any further or categorizing it as beyond overturning.

The pattern should be familiar by now. Gorsuch’s remarks came during a Senate confirmation hearing on March 21, 2017, and can be read and viewed in their proper context.

During his questioning of the Trump nominee, Judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Gorsuch whether he thought DC v. Heller, a landmark 2008 decision in which the court reaffirmed the Second Amendment right to bear arms, had been correctly decided. Gorsuch said:

Senator, I would respectfully respond that it [DC v Heller] is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court, and as a good judge, you do not approach that question anew, as if it had never been decided. That would be a wrong way to approach it. My personal views, I would also tell you, Mr. Chairman, belong over here. I leave those at home…Part of being a good judge is coming in and taking precedent as it stands, and your personal views about the precedent have absolutely nothing to do with the good job of a judge.

Gorsuch then effectively reiterated the same response in relation to several other landmark precedents, including Citizens United, Hosanna-Tabor, Gideon v. Wainwright and Roe v. Wade. On the latter case, Gorsuch said:

Senator, again, I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent like any other.

Did Gorsuch indicate that Roe v Wade was particularly or unusually vulnerable to being overturned? No. Did he suggest it was immune to overturning? Absolutely not.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Person, Human, Room
Brett Kavanaugh speaks at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 27 September 2018. (Photo: Pool / Getty Images).

The following is how MeidasTouch presented Kavanaugh’s remarks.

Kavanaugh: As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it” I mean Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. Been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent.

Caption: HE LIED

The clip in question came from Kavanaugh’s Senate judiciary committee hearing on Sep. 5, 2018, during questioning by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Readers can consult the relevant transcript and video.

Feinstein had been attempting to pin down Kavanaugh about his views on the status of Roe v. Wade as a precedent, and whether it “could be overturned.” Kavanaugh, stating the obvious, acknowledged Roe was a precedent and described Planned Parenthood v. Casey as “precedent on precedent” but declined to go further, despite repeated invitations by Feinstein.

Feinstein: …It has been reported that you have said that Roe is now settled law. The first question I have of you is what do you mean by “settled law”? I tried to ask earlier do you believe it is correct law? Have your views on whether Roe is settled precedent or could be overturned, and has your views changed since you were in the Bush White House?

Kavanaugh: Senator, I said that it is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. And one of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.

Feinstein followed up one last time, asking “What would you say your position today is on a woman’s right to choose?” and Kavanaugh again prevaricated on the future sustainability of Roe v Wade:

As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it,” I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor to remember.

As we have pointed out in other cases, acknowledging that a ruling is a precedent, or even “precedent on precedent,” is not the same as saying you would never overturn it.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

amy coney barrett opinion supreme court
In this Oct. 14, 2020 file photo, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett speaks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)

The following is how MeidasTouch presented Barrett’s remarks.

Barrett: Roe is not a superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.

Caption: THEY ALL LIED

This is perhaps the most egregious example of all, and comes from the second day of Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing, Oct. 13, 2020. An official transcript was not readily available in this case, but readers can consult video footage.

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was questioning Barrett about various Supreme Court landmarks, and the concept of the “superprecedent” — a somewhat ambiguous term coined by former Sen. Arlen Specter.

In a 2013 paper, Barrett wrote “Superprecedents are cases that no justice would overrule, even if she disagrees with the interpretive premises from which the precedent proceeds,” and included the following more detailed explanation from law professor Michael Gerhardt:

[T]he point at which a well-settled practice becomes, by virtue of being well-settled, practically immune to reconsideration is the point at which that precedent has become a superprecedent. Nothing becomes a superprecedent, at least in my judgment, unless it has been widely and uniformly accepted by public authorities generally, including the Court, the President, and Congress.

In that 2013 paper, Barrett also explicitly listed a handful of Supreme Court cases — including Brown v. the Board of Education — which were typically cited as superprecedents.

Earlier in her confirmation hearing, during questioning by judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Barrett had said that, in the context of legal scholarship, a superprecedent was a “precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled” and Barrett would also similarly tell Klobuchar that the term described a precedent that was “so widely-established and agreed-upon by everyone [that] calls for its overruling simply don’t exist.”

That was the background against which Klobuchar asked Barrett whether Roe v. Wade was a superprecedent, and Barrett explicitly excluded Roe v. Wade from the small handful of cases to which that term applies. She said:

The way that [“superprecedent”] is used in the scholarship, and the way that I was using it in the article that you’re reading from was to define cases that are so well settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling. And I’m answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn’t fall in that category. And scholars across the spectrum say that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled, but descriptively it does mean that it’s not a case that everyone has accepted and doesn’t call for its overruling.

…As Richard Fallon from Harvard said, Roe is not superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled. It just means that it doesn’t fall on the small handful of cases like Marbury v Madison and Brown v the Board, that noone questions any more.

Reading Barrett’s remarks in their proper context clearly demonstrates that she directly and explicitly exploded the frankly laughable claim, made by MeidasTouch, that she had indicated Roe v. Wade was immune to overruling. In fact, she did just the opposite.

Sources:

– CONFIRMATION HEARING ON THE NOMINATION OF HON. BRETT M. KAVANAUGH TO BE AN ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg32765/html/CHRG-115shrg32765.htm. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Alito Confirmation Hearing, Day 3 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?190503-1/alito-confirmation-hearing-day-3-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-1/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 2 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-4/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-2. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Becker, Jo, and Charles Babington. “No Right to Abortion, Alito Argued in 1985.” Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2005. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/11/15/no-right-to-abortion-alito-argued-in-1985/bcbd4e02-0c2e-4dac-8caf-0d252c5630a0/.

“Exclusive: Supreme Court Has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows.” POLITICO, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473. Accessed 5 May 2022.

GOP Judges EXPOSED as Liars in Megaviral Supercut. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jbHMHN_mfo. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Gorsuch Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?425138-1/supreme-court-nominee-stresses-independence-calls-criticism-judges-disheartening&airingid=61108104. Accessed 5 May 2022.

“Hunting for ‘Super Precedents’ in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmations – National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.Org, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/hunting-for-super-precedents-in-u.s-supreme-court-confirmations. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Judiciary, United States Congress Senate Committee on the. Nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to Be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, First Session … U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

“Stare Decisis.” LII / Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Roe Is ‘Settled Law,’ Kavanaugh Tells Collins. Democrats Aren’t Moved.” The New York Times, 21 Aug. 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/kavanaugh-collins-abortion.html.

Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?449705-1/supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Thomas Confirmation Hearing Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?21115-1/thomas-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

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The Courts Child Abuse Leftist Virtue(!) Life Opinion

Op-Ed: Goodbye to 50 Years of the Great American Deception

Amazing how fast these PROFESSIONALLY printed signs showed up. Coincidence?

Views: 34

Goodbye to 50 Years of the Great American Deception

 By Rita Joseph  For The Western Journal  June 24, 2022 at 3:54pm

https://i0.wp.com/uploads.dailydot.com/2022/06/prewrite-roe-v-wade-overturned.jpg?resize=580%2C290&ssl=1

By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights

What a well-reasoned and long-awaited Supreme Court decision!

A great wrong has been righted.

Reason and the rule of law have triumphed over the fanatical pro-abortion ideology that refuses to recognize our children in the womb as human beings like ourselves.

Restoration of our duty to protect each new life

By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights — the right to life and the “no property in man” principle — found in the 14th and 13th Amendments, respectively.

Every human being, irrespective of age or size, has an equal and inalienable right to go on living. All human beings are to be treated as persons and never as property.

The Supreme Court has now overturned 50 years of the errant ideological theory that removed all protections from these newest and most vulnerable human beings.

What the court calls “Roe’s abuse of judicial authority” has been exposed: “Roe was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”

The court asserts, “Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative. … We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”

Truth conquers illusion.

As in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, con-men and swindlers back in 1973 pretended to weave abortion “rights” into existence out of nothing — out of “penumbras.” Without solid legal evidence, they refashioned the killing of the unborn as “women’s rights.”

Remember how the emperor’s weavers claimed that their cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or who was unusually stupid? The inventors of abortion rights used the same tactic.

If you didn’t agree with Roe’s faulty arguments, then the fault was in you personally. Anyone who did not go along with their invention was branded as unfit for office or stupid… or misogynist, patriarchal, sexist or racist.

The tactic worked. For too long, too many Americans lacked the courage to challenge error and speak truth to power by denouncing the officially accepted deception.

The weavers of abortion rights have forged a collective denial that any harm is done in choosing to abort these smallest and most vulnerable human beings in our power and under our care.

Two mistakes in Roe

Roe was wrong. The Constitution is not silent on our duties to our progeny. Our children are guaranteed the same blessings of liberty that we claim for ourselves. The blessings of liberty are promised by the Constitution to ourselves and our posterity — not exclusively to ourselves as women.

That natural entitlement bestowed by the Creator is affirmed as the very first right mentioned in the Constitution, together with the right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Once conceived, every human being is fully and seamlessly engaged in a benign, naturally ordered pursuit of happiness.

Should abortion be banned?
Yes: 91% (62 Votes)
No:     9% (6 Votes)

Nor is the Constitution silent on the injustice at the heart of every elective abortion — the toleration of maternal “ownership” and killing rights in regard to an innocent unborn child flourishing in her or his mother’s womb. Under the 13th Amendment, there can be no such ownership and killing rights over any human being — in utero or ex utero.

There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court warns that “liberty” is a capacious term.

There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution. From the beginning of the republic, the Constitution set up equal entitlement across the generations, i.e., equal entitlement to the blessings of liberty for both mothers and their offspring.

Mothers can’t say to their children in the womb, “This is all about my enjoyment of the blessings of liberty, and to ensure my enjoyment, you must be denied the same blessings of liberty. You are not at liberty to go on flourishing as nature’s God intended you to do. You are not a unique and invaluable human being. You are my property. This is all about me. This is about my right to choose, my right to commission your killing.”

So wrong for so long…

Exposing delusion

Finally, wonderfully, the great day has come — Roe’s logical fallacy of treating children in their mothers’ wombs as their mothers’ disposable property has been exposed as make-believe. At last, Roe v. Wade has been formally invalidated, its faulty reasoning revealed.

Self-importance and self-deception shaped the emperor’s refusal to accept the truth about the weavers’ deception. His refusal to accept the truth once it had been revealed signified his detachment from reality.

Having been steeped so long in a fable of his own unchallenged power and authority, he refused to make a critical and objective examination of the facts that would have revealed the duplicity of the weavers’ spin job.

Once error is exposed, we can’t unknow the truth.

Once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend that they are still closed to the truth. There’s no going back to naivety, to feigning ignorance of the terrible injustice unleashed in Roe.

We can’t recreate a suit of clothes from nothing — from what is not in the Constitution and was never in the Constitution.

One small voice — a common-sense voice, an unintimidated voice — has pierced the illusion.

Justice Samuel Alito has shattered the elaborate deception of Roe.

Common sense has prevailed.

Never again will large numbers of us be manipulated into accepting the illusion that it’s morally defensible for any mother to commission her unborn child to be deliberately killed by an abortionist.

Vale, Roe v. Wade. May your evil never be reinstated!

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Opinion Leftist Virtue(!)

‘Mr. Bean’ Breaks Silence with Message on Cancel Culture: ‘The Job of Comedy Is to Offend’

Views: 16

https://i0.wp.com/image.tmdb.org/t/p/w780/ivvSF7erxJ6g6PHNvglrI6sQmSl.jpg?resize=580%2C326&ssl=1

By Grant Atkinson  June 19, 2022

In recent years, many comedians have come under fire from the left for the subject matter they joke about. One English comic said in a recent interview these attacks demonstrate a misunderstanding of comedy.

“If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”

While Rowan Atkinson’s comedy is well-known in much of the United Kingdom, he is likely most famous in the United States for his character “Mr. Bean.” In an interview ahead of his new Netflix show, “Man vs. Bee,” he explained the character was the brainchild of himself and his colleague Richard Curtis.

“The odd thing about Mr. Bean is that he wasn’t created, he was just the person I naturally became when I was denied words to express myself,” Atkinson, 67, told The Irish Times. “If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”

“Mr. Bean” first debuted in the late 1970s, and the character became so popular that he earned his own sitcom in the early 1990s. Atkinson has been widely recognized for his comedic genius in portraying “Mr. Bean” using very few words.

When you’re excited about your sandwich techniques 😂 pic.twitter.com/zOR1GTcGMs

— Mr Bean (@MrBean) June 19, 2022

As a respected comedian, Atkinson has extensive knowledge about the world of comedy. In his interview with the Times, he said the idea of cancel culture threatens the very existence of comedy.

“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential,” Atkinson said.

While this comment alone is sure to infuriate some progressive leftists, Atkinson went even further.

“Every joke has a victim,” Atkinson said. “That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.”

Atkinson is absolutely correct in this assessment. A joke is meant to poke fun at something, whether it is a person, an object or anything in between.

Do you agree with Atkinson?
Yes: 99% (1772 Votes) No: 1% (12 Votes)

Jokes have had the potential to offend people since the beginning of time, but most people used to be more willing to put aside their differences and recognize comedy for what it is. It is only in recent years that progressive leftists have attempted to tell people who they can and can’t make jokes about.

For example, comedian Dave Chappelle has been attacked — literally — for his jokes about the leftist fascination with transgenderism.

In an October 2021 article for NBC News, writer Michael Crawford wrote that Chappelle’s jokes were “giving narrow-minded people a safe space to deny the existence of trans people and make gays the focus of their taunts.”

“I don’t want Chappelle to be canceled,” Crawford wrote. “I want him to pull out the threads of homophobia and transphobia that run through the quilt of his otherwise brilliant work.”

This line displayed a false idea many progressive leftists have about comedy. They claim they should be allowed to tell comedians what they can and cannot joke about, and Atkinson addressed this problem in his interview.

“I think you’ve got to be very, very careful about saying what you’re allowed to make jokes about,” Atkinson said. “You’ve always got to kick up? Really? What if there’s someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society?

“They’re not all in houses of Parliament or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”

In addition to this problem, leftists suggesting Chappelle is transphobic because his jokes lead to real world consequences when Chappelle was attacked on-stage.

As the left attempts to attack comedy and remove the very aspects that make Americans laugh — whether in movies, nightclubs, or the privacy of their own homes — this message from Atkinson was more needed than ever.

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COVID Back Door Power Grab Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) Reprints from others.

Reprint: How Masking Did Us Wrong

Mandatory Face mask law and by-law for wearing masks and facial coverings as a regulation for public safety as a medical or hospital legal issues with 3D illustration elements.

Views: 16

By Susan Dunham

The Dark Side of an Easy Ask
The mask experiment showed us just how well we would take to a Lord-of-the-Flies level rewrite of social norms overnight.

As an example of this, I was volunteering at a St. Vincent De Paul thrift store. While bringing in a bag of donated clothing, and not wearing a mask since I had been eating a snack, I was confronted by a retired nurse (who should have known better) who — among other things  — said “Don’t you respect us?!?”

Fortunately for her, I didn’t reply.  But after a couple more incidents with other people (although I’m sure she instigated a confrontation with another person,too). I told one of the supervisors that I was going home and wouldn’t be volunteering there anymore because of the harassment. He sadly agreed about the atmosphere. That was the summer of 2021 –18 MONTHS after the CCP virus has shown up in the states.

Mask up or else!

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Back Door Power Grab Corruption Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion Politics

This is what hate and jealousy from Progressives brings you.

Personal attacks on a good man.-MSNBC Photo

Views: 36

What happens when a respected Congressman is cleared by the Capitol Hill Police when he had a group of his constituents on tour the day before the To do about nothing protest?

They make up stuff and drag his good name threw the mud. Based on what? Who knows. But since that mud dragging we’ve seen that the Congressman has been receiving death threats. Please play the video below.

Despite the letter exonerating Rep. Loudermilk, the January 6 Committee on Wednesday released selectively edited video footage of GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk leading constituents on a tour around the Capitol complex on Jan. 5th.

The sham Jan. 6 Committee did this knowing it was a lie and that Loudermilk had been exonerated.

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Corruption Food Leftist Virtue(!) Life

Largest Pork Company in the US Shuts Down California Plant Due to High Costs

Views: 27

Take that!

Who couldn’t see this coming?

Food processing corporation Smithfield Foods will shut down its Vernon, California, plant and scale back operations in California, Utah and Arizona, the company announced Friday.

Smithfield “will cease all harvest and processing operations in Vernon, California in early 2023 and, at the same time, align its hog production system by reducing its sow herd in its Western region,” the company said in a Friday news release.

“Smithfield is taking these steps due to the escalating cost of doing business in California,” the company said.

“It’s increasingly challenging to operate efficiently there,” Smithfield Foods spokesperson Jim Monroe told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re striving to keep costs down and keep food affordable.”

Owned by Hong-Kong-based conglomerate WH Group, Smithfield is the largest pork processor in the country by volume.

Like other food businesses nationwide, the company was hit by a combination of supply chain and labor shortages,  the ongoing record-high inflation, and the war in Ukraine — a major producer of wheat⁠⁠—which sent grain prices soaring worldwide⁠.

Because grain is a crucial ingredient in livestock feed, the impending grain shortage also spiked livestock feed prices, raising the California plant’s production costs.

Adding salt to economic injury were utility costs in California⁠, which, according to the company’s spokesman, were 3.5 times higher per head than those in the 45 other plants in the country run by Smithfield.

Furthermore, according to Monroe, California’s regulatory environment has made it difficult for the pork processor to do business there.

Do you think we are heading toward a global famine?
Yes: 88% (120 Votes)
No: 12% (17 Votes)

The spokesman pointed to Proposition 12, a 2018 voter-approved rule, which mandated that food processing companies confining pigs and sows must have adequate spaces for the animals to lie down and move around.

The regulation effectively rendered confining such animals in smaller stalls unlawful, to the dismay of food producers, who pointed out that the regulation would raise food costs and push up production costs.

In addition to closing down the Vernon plant, the company said in the Friday news release that it would look at “strategic options to exit its farms in Arizona and California” in addition to scaling back its sow herd in Utah.

“Smithfield is providing transition assistance to all impacted employees, including relocation options to other company facilities and farms as well as retention incentives to ensure business continuity until early next year,” the company said.

Smithfield also said that it had reached an agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Union of Operating Engineers on shutting the Vernon facility.

“We are grateful to our team members in the Western region for their dedication and invaluable contributions to our mission. We are committed to providing financial and other transition assistance to employees impacted by this difficult decision,” Smithfield Chief Operating Officer Brady Stewart said.

The closure of the company comes as food prices rise nationwide amidst the ongoing baby formula shortage, growing inflation and soaring gas prices.  Adding to the threats facing the nation’s food security is a looming worldwide fertilizer shortage, from which the U.S. is not exempt.

“We are deeply concerned about the combined impacts of overlapping crises jeopardizing people’s ability to produce and access foods, pushing millions more into extreme levels of acute food insecurity,” United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Qu Dongyu warned.

“We are in a race against time to help farmers in the most affected countries, including by rapidly increasing potential food production and boosting their resilience in the face of challenges,” Qu said.

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Education Leftist Virtue(!) Reprints from others.

Move over ACLU, FIRE is the New Champion of Free Speech.

The new Freedom of Speech Champion. FIRE CEO and President Greg Lukianoff- Photo TK News.

Views: 29

Article is from TK News by Matt Taibbi.

The expansion of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education marks the end of an era, when free speech issues were the sole province of American liberalism

 

After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans.”

FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.

To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children.”

The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail:

Matt: What was the genesis of FIRE and how has it evolved?

Nico: FIRE was founded in 1999 by two Princeton classmates Harvey Silverglate, a left-leaning, civil liberties attorney out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a conservative-leaning professor, Alan Charles Kors, who teaches the Enlightenment, or taught the Enlightenment, at the University of Pennsylvania. They enjoyed their college experience, but were dismayed by the rise of speech codes in the 1980s and ‘90s, so they wrote a book called The Shadow University.

After they published that book, they were flooded with requests from students and faculty members for help to help defend their free speech, due process, and free assembly rights.

The first case was at the University of Pennsylvania. This was even before FIRE was founded, but it’s the case that inspired The Shadow University and therefore inspired FIRE. There was a student, named Eden Jacobowitz, who was studying in his dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a group of students outside making loud noises, it was dark out, and he screamed out his window, “Shut up, you Water Buffalo!” It became known as the Water Buffalo case. The students outside ended up being black students, and the accusation against Eden was that he was shouting a racial slur. It turns out that he was Israeli, or devoutly Jewish, and “water buffalo” was a translation of a word, behayma, which in Hebrew means a loud or unruly person. Kors, our co-founder, came to his defense and became a cause célèbre across the United States and vindicating the rights. That set the stage for what we were going to do at FIRE more generally.

Over the years, we’ve defended all sorts of speakers. As you can imagine, popular speakers don’t need free speech protections, so we often defended speakers at the margins. People like Ward Churchill, for example. [Editor’s Note: Churchill wrote a book, Some People Push Back, that described the 9/11 hijackings as “counterattacks” to “genocide,” the victims being “little Eichmanns.”]

We defended a student at Valdosta State University, for example, who criticized his University president’s effort to build a parking garage on campus. A Buddhist environmentalist student who thought the president shouldn’t be encouraging more parking on campus, or more driving on campus, and should invest rather in public transportation. He created a collage that described a “Ronald Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.” Well, Zaccari was the name of the president, who thought it was a threat, the idea being that the “Memorial” in the collage meant that he was going to die.

Matt: He thought “Memorial” was referencing his future non-existence?

Nico: Yes.

Matt: Amazing.

Nico: He placed an expulsion note under Hayden Barnes’ dorm room door, and told him he needed to be out of the dorms. If you think someone’s actually a threat, you probably don’t slip a note under their door. We ended up defending Hayden Barnes, this is 2007, and taking his case to court and winning a $900,000 judgment in that case.

Matt: Didn’t you also do that crazy case in Indiana, about the janitor reading the book about Notre Dame and the Klan?

Nico: Yes. We defended the case of Keith John Sampson, a janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, who was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan during his lunch break. He was working his way through school as a janitor. Someone saw, on the cover of the book, burning crosses and reported him to the University administration who found him guilty of racial harassment. The book, of course, was about how Notre Dame defeated the Klan when they marched on the campus. The Klan, people often forget, also hated Catholics, in addition to hating blacks. Someone literally judged the book by its cover. The University found him guilty of racial harassment for reading it. Funny thing is — well, the maybe not so funny thing is — the book was found in the University’s own library.

Matt: Functionally, what is this change going to mean?

Nico: Functionally, we’re getting a lot bigger. This is a $75 million expansion into off campus programming. We’ve already raised $28.5 million of that through a three year fundraising effort. We will be litigating and finding cases off campus. Some of those first cases should be coming down the pipe here shortly. Right now, as of this morning, people will start seeing ads defending a culture of free expression on television. You watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, you’ll see our ads start running with a high degree of regularity. We’re requesting $10 million in ads through the remainder of the year. Also, there will be billboards across the country in major cities. You’ll see free speech messaging out there. The big thing that we haven’t seen is people out there advocating for a culture of free expression in a visible way. We want to create an organization that people can rally around when threats to free speech exists.

That’s what this effort is about and we want to do so in an unapologetic way. Too often, there’s a lot of throat-clearing before for the defense of free speech. A lot of apologies, it almost comes off as apology for free expression. We’re genuflecting before other values before we can say anything about what we believe is a fundamental human right. FIRE doesn’t take a position on the content of speech. You won’t see us condemn speakers, even the most vile, racist, or offensive of them. For us, it’s enough that the speech is protected or should be protected. We’ll defend it. We’ll argue on first principles. That’s what’s necessary to win.

Matt: This question may be a little uncomfortable: isn’t that what the ACLU is for? Don’t we already have an ACLU?

Nico: The ACLU has 19 different issues in values and defense. It’s necessarily going to be a little bit more difficult for them to determine how they prioritize their work and where it directs its limited resources. Ben Wizner, who runs the ACLU’s Free Speech Project, acknowledged as much in Michael Powell’s New York Times article last year. He said, “FIRE does not have the same tensions.” He said that for the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.

We don’t have a racial justice program. We don’t have a reproductive rights program. We don’t have a trans rights program. We have a free speech program. We’re not having to deal with the tensions that may or may not exist with free speech and other values. FIRE believes fundamentally that free speech is supportive of all those values, so we’ll make those arguments where necessary, but no, there’s no other values that we have to defend, which makes our work a little bit easier and more focused.

Matt: Last question. Thirty or forty years ago, when George H. W. Bush pointed at Mike Dukakis and called him a card-carrying member of the ACLU, it was pretty firmly understood that speech was primarily a left liberal concern. Is that still true? And if not, is there a perception now that this has become a conservative fixation?

Nico: My sense is that freedom of expression should be core to every political belief. Our ability to express our political beliefs, whole stop, is the thing that makes debate and discussion about all these other issues possible.

I was in a debate with a professor at George Washington University recently, and he was arguing essentially that free speech, all the conversations that you’re seeing in the media about free speech: that speech doesn’t rate when you have, as he was putting it, abortion rights being restricted all over the country, crackdowns on immigration, things of that nature. I said to him, “The only reason those other issues can rate is because we have our free speech right to discuss them.” So freedom of speech is the first right. It’s the matrix. It’s the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

As far as whether liberals have retreated from the idea? To a certain extent, yes. I think that’s apparent. All you need to do is look at who’s going after Dave Chappelle. Look at the response to Elon Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter. Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, I think, told the New York Times recently, that it’s an interesting time that we live in because free speech used to be a very liberal value, but that was when the censorship was coming from conservatives against Black Panthers, against Lenny Bruce, against anti-war protestors, against civil rights marchers, against —

Nico: Ruth Bader Ginsburg said America is nothing if not a pendulum. When it swings one direction, it always has a tendency to swing back. For a lot of America’s history in the 20th century, it was liberals who were being censored, so they care deeply about free speech. Now conservatives see that they’re being censored or at least feel like they can’t speak. So they are more vocal in support of free expression.

Now, whether they’re consistently supportive of the principle is another discussion, as we’ve seen with what’s happened in Republican legislatures across the country. I think the suggestion is they’re supportive of the principle when it’s convenient for them, but that’s why we need a nonpartisan free speech advocate in this country. An organization that is going to, as Norman Siegel, who was featured in my documentary Mighty Ira, once said, “If I’m going to have anything tattooed on my chest, it’s going to be ‘neutral principles.’” That’s really what we’re advocating for here, that freedom of speech is an insurance policy for us. If we don’t defend the rights of speakers with whom we disagree with, how can we expect our rights to be protected?

Matt: Excellent. Congratulations and good luck.

Nico: Thank you.

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