Armed Woman Stops Career Criminal Shooting at a Birthday Party

Here is a link to news story of an armed citizen with no special training, a woman, who stopped a potential mass murder. If she had been a teacher with her gun in Uvalde, the story might have been different.

More bad statistics on guns from the New York Times

From the New York Times.

From John Lott, who has far better data and is unbiased.

Here is a link to a research paper by John Lott, "Correcting Gun Control false claims about “America’s unique gun violence problem” and “How to Reduce Shootings", that contains a lot more information about gun control claims.

Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe

 Here is a link to a paper by John Lott - an expert on the subject of the effects of gun laws, etc.

There have been lots of critiques of Lott's research. However, his responses have established that the critiques had fatal flaws. I have read Lott's research, the critiques of his research and Lott's responses. Lott's research is what prevails. What is amazing is how much poor data and lying there is in the critiques of Lott's work.

Here ares some excerpts from Lott's paper "Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe: Data on the Rate of Shootings and Accidents in Schools that allow Teachers to Carry"

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Abstract

After the Columbine school shooting 20 years ago, one of the more significant changes in how we protect students has been the advance of legislation that allows teachers to carry guns at schools. There are two obvious questions: Does letting teachers carry create dangers? Might they deter attackers? Twenty states currently allow teachers and staff to carry guns to varying degrees on school property, so we don’t need to guess how the policy would work. There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns. Fears of teachers carrying guns in terms of such problems as students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all, and there was only one accidental discharge outside of school hours with no one was really harmed. While there have not been any problems at schools with armed teachers, the number of people killed at other schools has increased significantly – doubling between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.

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Introduction

Police are very important in fighting crime, but a single officer in uniform faces an almost impossible task in stopping mass public shootings. 1 Officers become the first targets in these attacks, as attackers know that if they kill the officer, they will have free reign to continue their massacre. Even if officers aren’t in uniform, attackers may be able to guess from their behavior that they are standing guard. Putting a guard in every school is also very costly. Florida is spending over $400 million a year to put one police officer in each public school. 2 Increasing funding for mental health services has its benefits, but it is hard for mental-health professionals to identify patients who pose a serious violent threat. It’s common for mass killers to have already been seeing psychiatrists before their attacks. But mental health professionals are often unable to identify when someone is at risk of becoming violent. Psychiatrists overlooked the dangers posed by Ivan Lopez (the recent Fort Hood shooter), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook Elementary), James Holmes (“Batman” movie theater) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech). 3 Indeed, from January 1998 through May 2018, 42 percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. In only one of those cases had the killer previously been identified as a danger to others. 4 We can't foresee every attack, so what's our backup plan when violence does occur? Within hours of mass public shootings, even before we know how the shooter obtained his gun, there are immediate calls for laws such as universal background checks. Ironically, there is not one mass public shooting this century that would have been stopped by universal background checks, even with a perfectly enforced law. 5 Outside of arming teachers and staff, there's only so much that can be done to secure our schools. Schools have multiple entrances to facilitate smooth evacuations in case of fires or other emergencies. Even if school doors are set up so that they can be opened only from the inside, it's easy enough to have someone on the inside to open a door. Even where there is only one attacker, doors can be propped open. Having a single entrance with a metal detector creates its own safety hazards by leading to crowded bottlenecks of people that present easy targets to attackers. Metal detectors won’t stop someone from shooting their way into a school. But if attackers don't know who is carrying a concealed firearm, they won’t know whom they need to attack first. Perhaps because police understand the difficulty of their jobs, they are strongly in favor of abolishing gun-free school zones. Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, PoliceOne, a 450,000-member private organization of police (380,000 active, full-time and 70,000 retired officers), surveyed its members and found that 77 percent supported arming teachers and/or school staff. 6 Eighty-six percent of the officers believed that casualties in mass public shootings would have been reduced or altogether prevented if legally-armed citizens had been able to carry guns. 7 Allowing teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns is nothing new in the United States, and hasn't created any problems. Before the early 1990s, there were no state laws specifically restricting concealed carry on K-12 property so that teacher carry may have been common for much of our history. School insurance rates are no higher for schools that allow teachers to carry. “From what I’ve seen in Utah, rates have not gone up because of guns being allowed,” says Curt Oda, former president of the Utah Association of Independent Insurance Agents. 8 An additional survey of schools in Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas also did not indicate that teacher carry had caused an increase in insurance premiums. 9 Insurance fees significantly declined in Kansas.

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Justice loses to politics at the FBI

 Jonathan Turley gets it right again.

The FBI cannot be trusted to provide justice if politics is involved.

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The Sussmann trial yesterday had another surprising disclosure when an agent revealed that FBI leadership, including then-Director James Comey, was “fired up” about the alleged secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. The question is why Comey and others were so reportedly eager given the lack of foundation for the false claim — a record that even the researchers told the Clinton campaign could be mocked as utterly unsupported. Yet, as with the Steele dossier claims (funded and spread by the Clinton campaign) there was a strikingly receptive audience for such claims at the top of the FBI.

The new disclosure came with the testimony of the supervisory agent for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe (“Crossfire Hurricane”) Joe Pientka. He sent a note to FBI Special Agent Curtis Heide that stated “People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server,” Pientka messaged Heide. “Did you guys open a case? Reach out and put tools on?”

The description of the eagerness of Comey and others only magnified concerns over the alleged bias or the predisposition of the agency on the investigation of Trump and his campaign. It is particularly striking in an allegation that was viewed as unsupported even by the researchers and quickly dismissed by the government as baseless.

According to Durham, the Alfa Bank allegation fell apart even before Sussmann delivered it to the FBI. The indictment details how an unnamed “tech executive” allegedly used his authority at multiple internet companies to help develop the ridiculous claim. (The executive reportedly later claimed that he was promised a top cyber security job in the Clinton administration). Notably, there were many who expressed misgivings not only within the companies working on the secret project but also among unnamed “university researchers” who repeatedly said the argument was bogus.

The researchers were told they should not be looking for proof but just enough to “give the base of a very useful narrative.” The researchers argued, according to the indictment, that anyone familiar with analyzing internet traffic “would poke several holes” in that narrative, noting that what they saw likely “was not a secret communications channel with Russian Bank-1, but ‘a red herring,’” according to the indictment.

“Researcher-1” repeated these doubts, the indictment says, and asked, “How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association.”

The alleged response from Comey and the FBI leadership would seem to confirm the view of campaign associates that they only needed a “useful narrative” to achieve their purposes. It only took an unsupported, implausible theory to get Comey and his top aides “fired up.”

Clintonian and judicial ethics exposed

 Jonathan Turley sums it up on Hillary Clinton.

JT is on target.

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Below is an expanded version of my column in The Hill on the implication of Hillary Clinton in false Alfa Bank claims of Russian collusion. While most media ignored the testimony of Clinton’s former campaign manager in the Sussmann trial, it adds to a damning record on how the Clinton campaign was behind arguably the most successful disinformation campaign in American political history with both the Steele dossier and the Alfa bank claims. Ironically, despite Sussmann efforts to conceal his connections to Clinton in the FBI meeting, it was his counsel who effectively outed Clinton in the scandal. Former Clinton Campaign manager Robby Mook then violated the Eleventh Commandment of Democrats: Thou shalt not name a Clinton in a scandal.

Here is the column:

The trial of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann crossed a critical threshold Friday when a key witness uttered the name “Hillary Clinton” in conjunction with a plan to spread the false Alfa Bank Russian collusion claim before the 2016 presidential election.

For Democrats and many in the media, Hillary Clinton has long held a Voldemort-like status as “She who must not be named” in scandals. Yet, there was her former campaign manager, Robby Mook, telling a jury that Clinton personally approved a plan to spread the false claim of covert communications between the Trump organization and the Russian bank. It was one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in American politics, and Mook implicated Clinton as green-lighting the gas-lighting of the electorate.

The mere mention of Clinton’s name sent shockwaves through Washington. In past scandals, the Clintons have always evaded direct responsibility as aides were investigated or convicted, from the Whitewater land dealings to cattle futures. Even when long-sought documents in Whitewater were discovered outside of the family quarters and bearing Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints, Washington quickly moved on.

Clinton was presumed to be untouchable in the Sussmann trial after Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, issued a series of orders limiting the scope of the trial and its evidence. The orders were viewed as “spar[ing] the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee … potential embarrassment.”

Ironically, after successfully excluding such areas from the trial, it was the defense that called Mook to the stand — and he proceeded to confirm that Clinton herself approved of the collusion disinformation tactic.

It was Washington’s worst-kept but least-acknowledged secret.

On July 28, 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged plan to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Obama reportedly was told how Clinton allegedly approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

Thus, Mook testified that Clinton did precisely what Brennan warned Obama was being planned.

The date of Brennan’s warning is important: It was three days before the FBI’s collusion investigation began. It also was a couple of months before Sussmann contacted then-FBI general counsel Jim Baker while claiming he was not representing any client. (He was counsel to the Clinton campaign and, according to prosecutors, billed the time to the campaign.)

There is a strikingly familiar pattern in both the Steele dossier — which became the basis for the Russia collusion investigation — and the Alfa Bank tale. Campaign associates developed both claims while actively seeking to conceal their connections from the public and the government, including reportedly denying the funding of the Steele dossier and concealing that funding as legal costs.

The campaign then pushed these unfounded claims to the media and the FBI. Indeed, prosecutors this week contended that Sussmann continued to push the Alfa Bank claims after Trump was elected, in an apparent effort to fuel the Russia collusion claims being breathlessly reported in the media at the time.

When Clinton allegedly approved this disinformation effort, her campaign was aware that the Alfa Bank theory was never viewed as credible by researchers tasked with supporting it. Those researchers warned that it would be easy to “poke several holes” in the claim and that the data could be seen as “a red herring.” Yet, trial witnesses admitted that they hoped the media would make the claims stick.

Despite a record of Clinton associates aggressively pushing these false allegations to the FBI on both the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank, Mook and another witness, Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias, insisted they preferred to use the media for such efforts. The campaign found a conduit in one liberal magazine, for example, whose story was then cited as a “bombshell” report, as if the campaign had had nothing to do with it.

For her part, Clinton not only approved using the false Alpha Bank claim but personally helped to portray it as an established fact, tweeting: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

That claim was then further amplified by one of her campaign advisers, Jake Sullivan, who now serves as President Biden’s national security adviser. Sullivan declared at the time: “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” Sullivan added that he could “only assume federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”

As the FBI’s Baker and other witnesses told jurors this week, there was in fact “nothing there.”

The sudden and unexpected inclusion of Hillary Clinton in Sussmann’s trial occurred despite the best efforts of Judge Cooper and the defense. Besides limiting the scope of evidence involving Clinton, the judge allowed three Clinton donors to sit as jurors, along with another juror who is a supporter and donor to liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).

For special prosecutor John Durham, it must seem like the only juror missing is Chelsea Clinton. When we discuss a “jury of your peers,” however, it is not meant to suggest that a Clinton lawyer should be tried by Clinton supporters.

Months after approving the Alpha Bank disinformation strategy, Clinton called in December 2016 to censor opponents who she accused of spreading falsehoods to try to influence elections. She declared that “it’s now clear that so-called ‘fake news’ can have real-world consequences.” Indeed, Clinton has pushed for state and corporate censorship while demanding a “global reckoning” with those who spread disinformation. Of course, Sussmann could still face the real consequence of conviction given the strength of the evidence against him. Yet, there will likely not be consequences, let alone a “reckoning,” for Hillary Clinton.

Don Boudreaux on inflation and greed

 Here is Don Boudreaux on inflation and greed.

DB is on target.

This is a test: if you believe that corporations can, at all times, increase their profit by raising prices - you fail. If you believe that price increases always reflect greed - you fail. Going one step further, if you believe that prices should be "set" at their lowest possible level (whatever that means) - you fail. 

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Thanks for sharing with me Josh Bivens’s blog post in which he blames inflation on high corporate profits. Unlike you, however, I’m unimpressed with Bivens’s thesis.

Profits are a residual. They’re that portion of revenue that’s left to firm owners after they pay all expenses to workers and other input suppliers. Therefore, Bivens’s argument that inflation is caused by profits must rest on the implicit assertion that firms reap higher profits simply by raising the prices of their outputs. But Bivens’s argument illegitimately assumes the existence of that which must be explained – namely, some change in economic phenomena that allows firms successfully to raise prices.

Bivens is silent about what this change might be, but the theory currently in vogue among Progressives identifies it as “greed.” Yet for at least three reasons this ‘greed’ theory is laughable.

First, there’s no reason to suppose that firms have recently become more greedy. Second, “greed” is at least as likely to push prices down as up; after all, the most obvious way for firms that are greedy for more customers to satisfy their lust is to cut prices. Third, even if producers have mysteriously and suddenly become more greedy, and even if this greed incites producers to try to raise prices, prices will not actually rise unless higher prices are able to be paid by consumers. More intense producer greed does not generate the increase in consumer spending power required to sustain the price hikes.

If we’re to coherently explain the sustained rises in many prices, we must reject Bivens’s lazy practice of simply assuming the existence of that which must be explained – namely, producers’ ability to charge, and consumers’ ability to pay, higher prices. We must identify some plausible change in underlying economic realities that incites firms today to raise prices and allows consumers to pay these higher prices. The only plausible change that I’m aware of is the injection into the economy over the past few years of gargantuan amounts of additional purchasing power.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

How Government caused the Baby Formula Crisis – by ignoring tradeoffs

 Here is Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal.

Too often Government's decisions are meant to benefit those making them, not citizens generally. The baby formula crisis is an example. The immediate threat to the bureaucracy was criticism if the cause of sick children turned out to be due to formula and production was not stopped - resulting in the Government being blamed for children's deaths. Subsequent shortages likely could be blamed on the company. Thus, from the bureaucracy's point of view, shutting down production provided a benefit without a corresponding likely cost. The issue of larger adverse consequences to children did not enter the picture because there was little expectation that the bureaucracy would be blamed for its failure to consider their interests properly.

Here is HJ's article.

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Baby formula is a target of shoplifting rings. Its supply has been disrupted by Covid lockdowns. Its pattern of demand has been thrown for a loop by pandemic-spawned changes in retailing and baby-making. Add the fact that half the U.S. supply is consumed by welfare recipients, who are limited by regulation to a choice of three manufacturers. Add federal rules that make it hard to relieve a domestic shortage by importing foreign-made supplies.

And still the shocking baby formula crisis of 2022 is not an occasion for your perfect storm metaphors: The key factor that overwhelms all others is a government decision in February to force a factory shutdown and product recall on an Abbott Labs plant in Michigan.

The four cases of Cronobacter sakazakii infection in infants that the government cited could not be traced to the factory’s products. No contaminated baby formula was found; Cronobacter was identified on the factory grounds but lacked a genetic match to samples from affected infants. A considered response might have been to keep the factory running and carefully check its output for contaminated formula, but that’s not the response the Food and Drug Administration chose and thereby hangs a tale.

As one textbook puts it, Cronobacter is a “one product-population problem”—the product is powdered infant formula; the population is newborns, especially low-birth-weight newborns.

A bacteria common in the environment and resilient to boot, with unusual resistance to arid conditions, Cronobacter typically causes disease only in the elderly and immunocompromised. The big exception is very young infants—2 months or less or with compromised immunity—who can develop deadly complications like sepsis and meningitis.

Cronobacter’s natural reservoir is uncertain but the bacteria are readily found on plants, in soil, on meat, cheese, fruits and cereals, in sewage, in herbal teas, etc. A 2014 U.S. government study found specimens on the premises of 38 of 55 U.S. facilities for making powdered milk, with 4.4% of 5,671 “swabs and sponges” testing positive. Though contamination in factory-sealed products has rarely been found, unlike more expensive liquid versions of baby formula, the powdered variety has proved impractical to sterilize.

In the U.S., contamination in the home is clearly the big risk, “after you open the container,” as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it. Cronobacter has been found on lids, scoops and bottles and in stored water. For parents of infants in the vulnerable categories, the CDC urges mixing powdered formula with water heated to 158 degrees Fahrenheit before serving the cooled solution to an infant.

To make matters more complicated, incubation of Cronobacter is estimated to take at least four days and sometimes as long as 21, so a parent’s anecdotal intuition that a specific formula may be involved is not much to go on. Only one state, Minnesota, tracks Crononbacter infections. The CDC says it receives reports of two to four infant cases a year but has no idea of the true incidence and points to recent evidence suggesting mild infection may not be uncommon among all age groups.

With this context in hand, especially a lack of evidence that the factory was the culprit, a conclusion is hard to resist: In shutting down the Abbott plant, the FDA was acting from a zero-risk mentality in its own bailiwick—protecting infant formula from factory contamination—with zero regard for costs and risks that would be somebody else’s problem. These include a nightmare for parents and a risk of malnutrition for thousands of newborns, particularly those in need of doctor-prescribed formulas that only the Michigan factory produced.

When have we heard this story before? Almost daily during the Covid crisis, from government agencies and politicians who made blinkered decisions more in their own narrow interests rather than in the interests of the public broadly considered. Recall the FDA’s self-protecting perfectionism that delayed lab and later at-home testing for Covid long after other countries had them.

The media are often unhelpful in this regard. “Follow the science” can serve as a smokescreen for avoiding the science, often complex and uncertain, in favor of partisan stereotyping and narratives of villains and heroes. In recent days, the FDA has continued rationalizing its behavior with a labored and showy “settlement” that will allow the Michigan factory to reopen; because the Defense Production Act became a “thing” to the media during the Covid crisis, the Biden administration on Tuesday invoked the DPA and dispatched military-affiliated air carriers to deliver foreign-sourced baby-formula supplies.

Congress held hearings on Thursday. We may be witnessing only the beginning of the political circus to flow from a single act of questionable judgment by the FDA.

Tale of Two Trials: How Sussmann is Receiving Every Consideration Denied to Flynn

 Jonathan Turley gets it right at The Hill.

The Justice System is no better than those who administer it and, in this case, an illustration of how not to give the impression of justice.

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Below is my column in The Hill on the Sussmann trial and the striking comparisons with prior prosecutions of Trump officials like Michael Flynn. The court has limited the evidence available to the prosecution, the scope of questioning, and cleared a jury that includes three Clinton campaign donors. A jury of your peers is not supposed to literal with an array of fellow Clinton supporters. Those negative rulings continued during the trial, including a refusal to dismiss a juror whose daughter is playing on the same team with Sussmann’s daughter. For John Durham, it may seem that the only person missing from the jury at this point is Chelsea Clinton.

Here is the column:

The criminal trial of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann began this week with a telling warning from prosecutors to the D.C. jury: “Whatever your political views might be, they cannot be brought to your decisions.” The opening statement by Deborah Brittain Shaw reflected the curious profile of the Sussmann case. Prosecutors ordinarily have a massive advantage with juries despite the presumption of innocence. When pleas are counted, federal prosecutors can report as high as 95 percent conviction rates. However, with Sussmann, prosecutors clearly have concerns over whether they, rather than the defendant, will get a fair trial.

Sussmann’s trial for allegedly lying to the FBI is being heard in the same District of Columbia federal courthouse where former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and others faced the very same charge brought by another special counsel.

The cases, however, could not be more different.

Whereas Flynn’s prosecution was a no-holds-barred affair, Sussmann’s prosecution has been undermined by a series of unfavorable rulings by the court. Special prosecutor John Durham still may be able to eke out a conviction, but the difference in the treatment of Trump and Clinton associates is striking.

Sussmann is charged under 18 U.S.C. 1001 with lying to the FBI during a meeting with then-FBI general counsel James Baker when he came forward with what he claimed was evidence of possible covert communications between the Trump organization and Alfa, a Russian bank. Sussmann allegedly concealed that he was representing the Clinton campaign, which he billed for his efforts.

Shaw told the jury that the FBI “should not be used as a political tool for anyone – not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not anyone.” She then added that the jurors themselves should not use this trial for their own political judgments.

Looking at the jury box, one can understand Shaw’s unease. During jury selection, one juror admitted he was a Clinton donor and could only promise to “strive for impartiality as best I can.” Prosecutors objected to his being seated, but Judge Christopher Cooper overruled them.

In another exchange, a former bartender and donor to far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was told by a Sussmann defense lawyer that neither Clinton nor Trump were on trial and then asked if she could be impartial. She responded, “Yes, knowing that” — which might suggest she would not be impartial if the campaigns were part of the trial.

Other jurors include a woman who said she thought she was a Clinton donor but could not remember; a juror whose husband worked for the Clinton 2008 campaign; and a juror who believes the legal system is racist and police departments should be defunded.

To be sure, D.C. voters chose Clinton over Trump in 2016 by a breathtaking margin: 90.9 percent to 4.1 percent. While liberal and Democratic jurors still can be fair and impartial, Judge Cooper has seated a couple jurors who seemed to struggle with the concept of impartiality.

The most notable aspect of the trial is what will be missing: context. Durham contends that Sussmann was no rogue lawyer. After the Mueller investigation, Durham’s team revealed information about how people affiliated with the Clinton campaign allegedly funded, developed and spread the false collusion claim.

On July 28, 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged plan to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Obama reportedly was told how Clinton allegedly approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the FBI’s collusion investigation was initiated.

This appears to have been an all-Washington effort assisted by key figures associated with a liberal think tank, Democratic members of Congress, and allies in the media. However, it was the role of lawyers like Sussmann that attracted Durham’s interest.

Durham contends that, in addition to allegedly lying to Baker during their meeting, Sussmann sent a text message to Baker the night before the meeting, reading: “Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”

Notably, the campaign’s law firm was accused by some journalists of hiding the campaign’s role in financing the infamous Steele dossier, which provided the basis for the collusion story. (The Federal Election Commission recently fined the campaign for using the firm to hide those payments.) The Durham team argued that Sussmann’s alleged lying to the FBI was not just some passing omission but a knowing pattern of deceit. That is why one of the first witnesses expected to be called by the prosecution was Marc Elias, Sussmann’s former law partner and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias is not charged with any crime, but at least one reporter has claimed Elias denied the campaign’s connection to the Steele dossier.

Judge Cooper has stressed that this trial cannot be about the Clinton campaign per se, but the specific lie that was told. He specifically barred Durham from arguing that there was a “joint venture” in deception with the Clinton campaign. The judge sharply limited the evidence that Durham can present which, in the words of Politico, “spares the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee … potential embarrassment.”

Without the broader context, the prosecution could sound like a play without a plot — just characters and insular acts. The first witnesses included FBI agents who told the jury that the claims passed along by Sussmann “didn’t make sense” and that the collusion theory was rejected within days of looking at the underlying data. However, Cooper warned that he will keep a tight rein on prosecutors delving into how the underlying data was produced or managed through the campaign.

That is not the only blow delivered to the prosecution by the court. The judge refused prosecution access to some evidence and, while allowing access to some emails between the campaign and an opposition-research firm, he barred their introduction at trial due to the late request from the prosecutors.

The treatment given to Sussmann is in stark contrast to how Trump associates were treated in this same court. In the Flynn trial, Judge Cooper’s colleague, Judge Emmet Sullivan, conducted a series of bizarre hearings, including one in which he used the courtroom flag as a prop to accuse Flynn of being an “unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser” and to suggest that Flynn could be charged with treason — crimes not brought against him. Sullivan then declared: “I cannot assure you that if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration. I am not hiding my disgust and my disdain.”

Likewise, another judicial colleague, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, refused to grant Trump associate Roger Stone a new trial despite disturbing reports of juror bias.

While the judge in Flynn’s case was eager to remove obstacles from the prosecution’s path, the judge in Sussmann’s case seems to have created a virtual obstacle course for Durham. Durham may be able to jump the legal hurdles, but he will do so without much of his evidence. To paraphrase Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities,” for a prosecutor D.C. can be the best of venues or it can be the worst of venues.

Crypto - Where have we seen this before?

 Reminds me of tulips - especially black ones.

Price Controls: An ‘Absurdity’ for the Generations

 Here is Andrew Stuttaford at the National Review.

AS is on target.

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Here’s some advance reaction to the price-control regime that Nancy Pelosi wants to put in place to tackle price “gouging,” an act of remarkable economic destructiveness (as she probably knows), which ought, however, to play well politically (as she undoubtedly hopes). It dates from, uh, 1915 and was cited by the economist Ronald Coase in an essay first published in the 1970s. Both the decade in which Coase’s essay appeared and a reference within it to “our present troubles” give some pretty good clues as to why price controls were on Coase’s mind at that time.

In it, alongside much else, Coase turns his attention to some commentary from 1915 by Edwin Cannan of the London School of Economics:

Buyers who have to pay higher prices suddenly become either ‘the poor’ forced to reduce their consumption of necessary articles or else employers of a particularly needy and deserving class which will be thrown out of work by the rise. All the injured persons are at once represented as being iniquitously robbed by an unscrupulous gang of speculators, middlemen, bloodsucking capitalists, or rack-renting landlords against whom all the resources of the State ought to be brought forthwith. The ideal somewhat vaguely held seems to be an immediate return to the prices of a few months or a year ago.

It’s as if Cannan were given a glimpse of Elizabeth Warren’s tweets, more than a century before they were written.

Coase explains that Cannan argued against price controls “in the usual way,” but then adds that Cannan highlighted a telling paradox:

[W]hen the price of a thing goes up, [people] abuse, not the buyers nor the persons who might produce it and do not do so, but the persons who are producing and selling it, and thereby keeping down its price’.

Why? Consumers are convinced that there is something ‘not quite right’ about the prices they are being asked to pay.

[They] are perfectly convinced that the rise [in prices] with which they have to contend for the moment is unnatural, artificial, and wholly unjustifiable, being merely the wicked work of people who want to enrich themselves, and who are given the power to do so not by . . . economic conditions, but apparently by some absolutely direct and inexplicable interference of the Devil. This has been so since the dawn of history, and no doubt before, but no amount of historical retrospect seems to be of much use. The same absurdity crops up generation after generation.

As alluded to above, I am pretty sure that Warren, Pelosi, Biden, and the rest recognize such nonsense for, to use Cannan’s word, the “absurdity” it is. That they then go and exploit what is essentially a superstitious belief says a great deal about them, none of it good.

For a more up to date look at this belief (in reality, a form of conspiracism), it’s well worth reading this recent article by Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post. After running through her own view of the sources of our current inflation, Rampell turns her attention to those she dubs the “greedflationists”:

“Supply and demand” is not the greedflationists’ preferred lens on inflation. They say inflation is driven by a Manichean struggle between big corporations and their innocent victims, the customers.

Companies are somehow conspiring to boost inflation, this thinking holds, because they can use it as an “excuse” to “profiteer.” No matter that major business groups have actually been hawkish about inflation, since unpredictable price growth can make it difficult for them to plan (and increases the prospect of recession).

So what’s the supposed evidence that businesses are pro-inflation? The greedflationists — including President Biden — complain that executives are boasting on corporate earnings calls about how much money they’re making. This might sound like a smoking gun if you have never listened to an earnings call, in which executives usually boast about how great profits are or will be.

Experience of working in the private sector can come in handy sometimes.

The greedflationists argue that something fishy is afoot because companies are not merely “passing along” their higher costs; their profit margins are expanding, too. But this is exactly what you’d expect when flush customers are buying more stuff and willing to pay whatever’s necessary to get what they want. Prices and profits rise.

Experience of working in the private sector can come in handy sometimes.

Rampell goes on to argue that claims of greedflation have damaged the Democrats’ chances of reelection, by leading them to look in the wrong places for a solution to inflation. I’m unconvinced how true that is. Having poured fuel on the fire with the ARP, I’m not so convinced that a quick solution to inflation was theirs to find. I’m also not so convinced that their belief in the greedflationary narrative runs very deep. There are more cynics running their show than there are the deluded (I think). I suspect what we’re seeing is the result of a piece of cold political calculation. Those pushing the greedflationary myth have simply taken the view that its populist message will be of some help ahead of the midterms. The damage it may cause will come later. And the day after the midterms is another season.

Nevertheless, populist rhetoric generates its own momentum. It won’t be enough for the greedflationists to confine themselves to rhetoric. Before too long — and ahead of the midterms — they will have to be seen to do something. And that something could prove highly damaging, even if the damage is pushed to after November.

Rampell gives two examples:

[A] proposed tax on “windfall” oil profits, which would likely reduce oil production exactly when we want output to increase. Or a mass student debt jubilee, which could drive consumer demand even higher.

In the meantime, I’d ponder the extent to which Warren-style rhetoric is already discouraging companies from making the investments we need them to make if the supply-and-demand gap is to be filled. Best guess: It may well be, and, even if it’s not, Biden’s anti-corporate tax talk is already damping down the willingness to invest.

The Elites in perspective

 Barton Swaim has a beaut in the Wall Street Journal. He provides a perspective about our current nutty culture that nails it.

Here is his piece: "How Disagreement Became "Disinformation".

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The preoccupation with “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the part of America’s enlightened influencers last month reached the level of comedy. The Department of Homeland Security chose a partisan scold, Nina Jankowicz, to head its new Disinformation Governance Board despite her history of promoting false stories and repudiating valid ones—the sort of scenario only a team of bumblers or a gifted satirist could produce.

Less funny but similarly paradoxical was Barack Obama’s April 21 address lamenting online disinformation, in which he propounded at least one easily disprovable assertion. Tech companies, the former president said, “should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression [that] specifically has targeted black and brown communities.” There is no evidence of voter suppression in “black and brown communities” and plenty of evidence of the contrary, inasmuch as black and Latino voter participation reached record levels in the 2020 election.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information—raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview—no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

The roots of this self-deceiving outlook are complicated but worth a brief look.

The animating doctrine of early-20th-century Progressivism, with its faith in the perfectibility of man, held that social ills could be corrected by means of education. People do bad things, in this view, because they don’t know any better; they harm themselves and others because they have bad information. That view is almost totally false, as a moment’s reflection on the many monstrous acts perpetrated by highly educated and well-informed criminals and tyrants should indicate. But it is an attractive doctrine for a certain kind of credentialed and self-assured rationalist. It places power, including the power to define what counts as “good” information, in the hands of people like himself.

There was also, among a host of intellectuals in the middle of the last century, the expectation of a “postpartisan” future of technocratic centrism in which the large ideological questions are mostly settled. What is mainly needed from the political process, the thinking went, isn’t visionary leadership but skillful management. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Vital Center” (1949) is an expression of that outlook, as are John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” (1958) and Daniel Bell’s “The End of Ideology” (1960). These writers wanted the cool control of experts, not the messy brawling of democracy, which they felt lent itself too easily to revolution. “The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge,” Bell wrote, “is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.”

The technocratic impulse is now an integral part of our politics. Those most given to it tend to view themselves not as adherents of any conception of political life but simply as people who acknowledge the world as it is. They regard differing outlooks as deviations from reality that can only cause trouble for no good reason. They believe their critics, who look at the same facts but draw different conclusions, aren’t simply mistaken but irrational, corrupt or both.

No politician deployed the rhetoric of technocratic postpartisanship more openly than Mr. Obama. In a 2007 speech to Google employees, early in his campaign for president, he expressed it concisely. “The American people at their core are a decent people,” he allowed. “There’s a generosity of spirit there, and there’s common sense there.” You could hear the “but” coming. “But,” he said, “it’s not tapped.”

He continued: “Mainly people—they’re just misinformed, or they are too busy, they’re trying to get their kids to school, they’re working, they just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out all the information that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you guys give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.”

The self-regard implicit in that observation is astounding. More important is its naiveté. The prevalence of bad information is nothing new. Lies, half-truths, wild exaggerations and farcical inventions are part of democratic politics and always have been. Mr. Obama’s remarks reveal a failure to understand that large, complex arguments always involve assumptions and philosophical commitments arising from background, experience and personality.

For him—and he shows no signs of change since he made those remarks 15 years ago—politics is a simple Manichaean struggle in which the righteous and well-intentioned use good data, and the malign and ignorant use bad. Mr. Obama’s most ardent admirers, accordingly—I think of the founders of the “explainer” site Vox.com—view themselves not as proponents of a particular ideological conviction but as disseminators of good data.

It was during the Obama years, not coincidentally, that “fact checking” took firm hold in American journalism. This doesn’t refer to the old-fashioned practice of scrubbing an article for errors before publication. Instead, media organizations issue “fact checks” of statements by public officials, candidates and pundits. Websites such as Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-issuing Fact Checker consider themselves America’s arbiters of truth.

But what looked like a renewed appreciation for factual accuracy quickly became, as this newspaper’s James Taranto pointed out relentlessly, an easy way to lend peremptory authority to badly argued opinion pieces and to undermine defensible arguments as “false” or “mostly false” or “lacking context.” In many instances these allegedly scrupulous fact-checkers would count true statements “false” even as they conceded the statements were true.

During a 2020 presidential debate, to take one memorable instance among hundreds, Joe Biden claimed the Obama administration hadn’t separated children from parents caught illegally crossing the border from Mexico. CBS’s fact-checking unit then published a piece claiming Mr. Biden’s statement was “true” on the grounds that “the Obama administration only separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances.”

The fact checkers’ prestige had begun to wane years before the 2020 election, but the belief that our direst social and political ills stem from the circulation of false information hasn’t lost its appeal among opinion makers. A report published in 2021 by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights recommended a federal “Digital Regulatory Agency” to police online content. A New York Times technology columnist wrote favorably of recommendations by “experts” that “the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’ ” Meet Czarina Jankowicz.

Censorship, to adapt a phrase Mr. Obama is fond of, is an idea whose time has returned. A quarter-century ago the word “censorship” was almost a profanity in American politics. By the mid-2010s it was permitted, even praised, so long as it targeted heterodox thought. Speakers on college campuses were shouted down without a word of protest from people who in the 1980s had defended the public funding of sacrilegious photographs. Commentators in mainstream journals of opinion advocated the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues and had the effect of chilling debate on every contentious question. A large number of respected academics and intellectuals suddenly believed the U.S. government had a duty to stop people from saying things those same academics and intellectuals held to be factually inaccurate.

Skeptics mostly attribute this new support for censorship to bad faith. I prefer a more charitable explanation. The new censors sincerely mistake their own interpretations of the facts for the facts themselves. Their opinions, filtered unconsciously through biases and experience, are, to them, simply information. Their views aren’t “views” at all but raw data. Competing interpretations of the facts can be only one thing: misinformation. Or, if it’s deliberate, disinformation.

It is in many ways a strange outcome. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, academic philosophies associated with “postmodernism” coursed through American higher education. They held that there was no objectively knowable truth, only subjective interpretation. As if to demonstrate postmodernism’s total impracticality, yesterday’s straight-A college students have now retreated into a risibly facile non-philosophy in which there is no interpretation, only objective “fact.”

Such was the mental disposition of America’s enlightened politicos and media sophisticates when the pandemic hit in early 2020. The challenge of public policy, as they saw it, was not to find practical, broadly acceptable solutions. The challenge, rather, was to find and implement the scientifically “correct” solution, the one endorsed by experts. Sound policy, for them, was a matter of gathering enough data and “following” it.

But of course you can’t follow data. Data just sits there and waits to be interpreted.

When Covid-19 came ashore, the country’s political class, in thrall to the authority of public-health experts and the journalists who listen to them, was singularly ill-equipped to lead in a sensible way. What the pandemic required was not the gathering and mastery of information and the quick implementation of “data driven” policy. The data was wildly elusive, changing shape from day to day and yielding no obvious interpretation. No one understood the spread of this astoundingly resilient virus, least of all the experts confidently purporting to understand it. There was, in fact, no clinically correct response.

The situation called for the acknowledgment of risk, the weighing of costs against benefits, the clear declaration of reasonable compromises between competing interests. What happened was an exercise in societal self-ruin—in the U.S. and elsewhere in the developed world. Politicians, especially those most inclined to see themselves as objective, pro-science data-followers, ducked accountability and deferred to experts who pretended to have empirically proven answers to every question put to them. They gave us a series of policies—business shutdowns, school closures, mask mandates—that achieved at best minor slowdowns in the disease’s spread at the cost of tremendous economic destruction and social embitterment.

With the two-year pandemic response now all but over, what stands out most is the absence of any acknowledgment of error on the part of anyone who advocated these disastrous policies. There is a reason for that absence other than pride. In the technocratic, data-following worldview of our hypereducated decision makers, credentials and consensus are sure guides to truth, wisdom is nothing next to intelligence, and intelligence consists mainly in the ability to absorb facts. That mindset yielded a narrow array of prescriptions, which they dutifully embraced, careful to disdain alternative suggestions. They can hardly be expected to apologize for following the data.

John Durham Goes to Court

 Here is Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is one of the few real newspapers left.

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Special Counsel John Durham steps into court Monday with the first trial of his probe into Democrats’ Russia-collusion hoax. That’s a formality. Mr. Durham has already won.

Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann stands accused of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by claiming the dirt on Donald Trump he fed to the FBI wasn’t delivered on behalf of “any client.” Mr. Sussmann was in the pay of the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee and worked extensively with outside players and the media to produce the collusion narrative as well as documents that stoked FBI probes of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to Durham filings. Mr. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.

Commentators spent last week warring over whether Judge Christopher Cooper’s rulings on the use of evidence would help or hinder Mr. Durham’s case. It doesn’t much matter. Mr. Durham has already accomplished his far bigger goal with this narrow indictment. He’s put every sleazy collusion player in the hot seat, with ramifications beyond the courtroom.

From the day the special counsel released the 27-page Sussmann indictment in September (and the follow-on charges against dossier contributor Igor Danchenko), it’s been clear he had ambitions that went far beyond a conviction for lying. Each of his filings follows the same, deliberate strategy—lengthy briefs and long exhibits full of names, emails and documents, all of which connect the dots and expose the web that enabled this hoax, and the lies that kept it hidden.

Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias isn’t charged, but he also no longer heads the elite political-law practice at Perkins Coie. The firm last August announced Mr. Elias, who’d been there 28 years, was leaving to start his own small practice. A few weeks later, the Sussmann indictment laid bare the role Mr. Elias, a longtime DNC and Clinton lawyer, played in ginning up and distributing the bogus Trump-Russia claims.

Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier, once lauded by the press as an international superspy, is now a man in search of a reputation. His dossier’s “intelligence,” Mr. Durham’s documents show, came primarily from a Brookings Institution employee, Mr. Danchenko, who was recycling salacious chatter from a Clinton associate. Whatever work Mr. Steele may find in future, it won’t include assisting the FBI or any other respectable agency.

Fusion GPS, which hired Mr. Steele, has become toxic in Washington. The Durham prosecutions show how the opposition-research firm operates—not by producing real research, but by shopping seamy claims to law enforcement, then browbeating journalists into covering the “investigations” Fusion inspires. (Fusion in court filings says its job was to help Perkins Coie with legal advice—a claim the judge largely rejected Thursday.) The Washington press corps knows it got played—and how. A recent Durham filing released dozens of emails showing reporters at top outlets palling it up with their Fusion narrators, with one Slate writer even sending a draft October 2016 article for Fusion to review. Is the DNC going to hire Fusion anytime soon? Even credulous reporters will think twice before running with another Fusion lead.

Mrs. Clinton won’t be in the courtroom, but the campaign’s claims it was in the dark about the Perkins Coie and Fusion work are in ashes. Mr. Durham’s evidence shows top Clinton aides—including campaign manager Robby Mook—were apprised of allegations and helped circulate them. Also among the circulators was current national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who faces calls to resign given his role.

Then there’s James Comey’s FBI. One downside of the Durham “lying” strategy is that it requires prosecutors to present the FBI as dupes of the Clinton operation. Yet amusingly, this has lured the defense into providing evidence of FBI rot. Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers will argue at trial that their client can’t be found guilty of lying to the FBI, since “they have reviewed more than 300 emails that show the bureau understood Sussmann worked for Democratic campaign entities,” as the Washington Post reports.

The FBI knew all along and ran with unvetted political dirt, even if Mr. Sussmann’s alleged lie allowed it to pretend it was aboveboard. And as the Durham evidence shows, it went on pretending, failing to follow up on Mr. Steele, the dossier or its Clinton origins until long after the election (at which point special counsel Robert Mueller failed to follow up on the FBI for nearly two years more). Most of the FBI’s former leaders have been fired or left, its reputation is in tatters, and the GOP will dig further if it regains Congress this fall.

Many conservatives remain frustrated that Mr. Durham hasn’t pursued far more sweeping conspiracy charges. But conspiracy cases are hard to prove. A sweeping prosecution of high-name figures would cause a political feeding frenzy, and be proclaimed by the media a partisan exercise. A court loss would make it easier for the press to cast the entire effort as debunked.

The narrow prosecution of the little-known Mr. Sussmann has allowed for a focus on the bigger story. Stay tuned for a flood of more information coming out of a trial that on its face is about one lawyer, but in reality is the continuing tale of one of the dirtiest tricks in modern U.S. history.

An example of self-destructive Government energy policy

 Here is Matt Ridley on how Britain's obsession with clean energy precluded a sensible energy policy.

The same goes for many other developed countries, including the US.

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The price of gas is through the roof thanks to Vladimir Putin, who has Europe’s energy market by the throat. Britain is on track to spend a staggering £2BILLION on imported liquefied natural gas from Russia this year as war rages in Ukraine.

Household bills will skyrocket even more than they already were — and could hit £3,000 a year. This is what happens when you rely on imported foreign energy. And what makes it more maddening is that we don’t need to do this. We have supplies here.

Under Lancashire and Yorkshire lies one of the best reservoirs of natural gas in the world, known as the Bowland Shale. At current prices, just ten per cent of this gas is worth several trillion pounds and could keep Britain supplied with gas for five decades. And we will need gas for decades whatever happens: To back up wind farms, heat homes and make vital chemicals for industry.

Last year I asked a Texan gas expert, who has drilled into the Bowland Shale, how it compares with American shale gas reserves. “It’s much better than what we have in the US,” he replied, “better than the Haynesville in Louisiana or the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, thicker and richer in gas”.

The technology to get the gas out is proven, safe and improving all the time. So why don’t we tap this treasure? Because wealthy, posh southerners went up North to protest, and the Government caved in.

The technology is usually referred to as “fracking” but that’s misleading. Hydraulic fracturing has been happening in oil and gas wells, including in Britain, for decades. What changed in the past decade was that it was combined with horizontal drilling and became cleaner and more effective. The latest technology promises to tap shale gas without fracking at all.

In 1997 Nick Steinsberger, of Mitchell Energy, almost by mistake tried cracking shale rocks a mile underground with water, instead of gel, and discovered a recipe for getting gas to flow from the very source rocks of gas, the shales.

The anti-frackers like to call this recipe “toxic chemicals” and imply it could poison aquifers (areas of rock underground that absorb and hold water), but that’s nonsense. The water is mixed with sand and a small amount of soap and bleach, of the kind you keep under your kitchen sink. It is pumped about a mile down, way below the aquifers, and into rocks that are, by definition, full of methane, ethane and petroleum, so they are already “toxic”.

The result of Steinsberger’s break-through was that, in a few short years, America became the biggest gas producer in the world, overtaking Russia. It went from importing gas to exporting it and gave itself some of the lowest gas prices in the world — now less than one-quarter of ours.

When I first visited the Marcellus Shale site in 2011 to understand what was happening, experts here were saying this shale boom was a flash in the pan, would not last and could not cope with low gas prices.

They were wrong.

A few years later I was back in Colorado watching Liberty Oil & Gas producing gas profitably and much more quietly from new wells at low prices. The site was right next to a housing estate. “Aren’t the residents worried about tremors and noise,” I asked. I was told they set up monitors and requested to be informed when the fracking would start, then called back a few days after to say: “Why did you not start when you said you would?”

“But we did,” replied the gas company, “didn’t you detect anything?”

It’s a myth that the American shale gas production happens in the middle of nowhere: Steinsberger started it in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas. Almost everything Friends of the Earth and its eco-luvvie rent-a-crowd say about shale gas is a myth. It does not cause water to catch fire, poison aquifers, spill contaminated waste water, increase radioactivity or cause “earthquakes”.

Small tremors do happen during any kind of underground work, but in Britain the shale gas firms such as Cuadrilla were told to stop if they caused a 0.5 tremor on the Richter scale, equivalent to somebody sitting down hard in a chair, and far fainter than what the coal mining or geothermal — or indeed road and rail transport industries — cause all the time.

Why the double standard? The very people who protest about shale gas are often fans of wind farms. But these pour more concrete (a carbon-intensive mat- erial), use more steel (ditto), spoil more views, require more subsidies and, above all, take up far more land.

A single shale drilling pad with 40 wells fanning out in all directions covers a few acres. For a wind farm to produce that much energy it would have to be 1,500 times larger — and it’s useless on a still day.

Britain imports shale gas from America, but — unlike oil — shipping it adds massively to the cost of gas, as well as the carbon footprint.

The Government was wrong to order a moratorium on shale gas, to order the wells plugged and to repeat its dogmatic objections to developing Britain’s shale treasure at a time when war in Europe is reinforcing the need for energy security.

Free Speech under attack

 Jonathan Turley gets it right - again - about Free Speech and those who attack it.

We are at a turning point. Without free speech there is no hope for freedom.

I never expected that George Orwell would turn out to be prescient - but he has. If you haven't read his book "1984", you should.

For me, a test of the extent to which you are ruled by your intellect or your emotions is the extent to which you value free speech. 

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It has become depressingly common to read unrelenting attacks on free speech in the Washington Post and other newspapers. The anti-free speech movement has been embraced by Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, as well as academics who now claim “China was right” on censorship. However, a Time magazine column by national correspondent Charlotte Alter was still shocking in how mainstream anti-free speech views have become. Alter denounces free speech as basically a white man’s “obsession.”

What is most striking about the column is Alter’s apparent confusion over why anyone like Musk would even care about the free speech of others. She suggests that Musk is actually immoral for spending money to restore free speech rather than on social welfare or justice issues.

She suggests that supporting free speech is some disgusting extravagance like buying Fabergé eggs.

“Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?”

The answer, not surprisingly, is about race and privilege. Alter cites Jason Goldman, who was an early figure shaping the Twitter censorship policies before he joined the Obama administration. Goldman declared, “free speech has become an obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite” who “would rather go back to the way things were.”

Alter also cites professor of communication at Stanford University Fred Turner who explains that free speech is just “a dominant obsession with the most elite… [and] seems to be much more of an obsession among men.”

In arguing in favor of censorship, Alter engages in a heavy use of historical revisionism, claiming that

“‘free speech’ in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.”

It is also lost on me.

Censorship has always been based on the notion that the underlying speech was false or harmful. Calling it “disinformation” does not materially change the motivation or the impact. What Alter calls a “Tech Bro obsession” was the obsession of the Framers.

Alter is confusing free speech values with the rationale for the First Amendment. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.

The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.

Key free speech figures practiced what they preached in challenging friends and foes alike. After playing a critical role with our independence, Thomas Paine did nothing but irritate the Framers with his words, including John Adams, who called him a “crapulous mass.”

Yet, free speech was a defining value for the framers (despite Adams’ later attacks on the right). It was viewed as the very growth plate of democracy. As Benjamin Franklin stated in a letter on July 9, 1722: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”

The same anti-free speech voices were heard back then as citizens were told to fear free speech. It was viewed as a Siren’s call for tyranny. Franklin stated:

“In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to publick traytors.”

Yet, Alter assures readers that this is just due to a lack of knowledge by Musk and a misunderstanding of why censorship is a natural and good thing:

“Tech titans often have a different understanding of speech than the rest of the world because most trained as engineers, not as writers or readers, and a lack of a humanities education might make them less attuned to the social and political nuances of speech.”

It appears that Alter’s humanities education in college allows her to see “nuances” that escape the rest of us, including some of us who are not “trained as engineers.”

Just for the record, Alter has a degree in English Language and Literature/Letters (Harvard). Musk has his undergraduate degrees not in engineering but a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics (both from the University of Pennsylvania). None of these degrees bestow any basis for claiming superior knowledge of constitutional law or human rights.

Indeed, no degree offers such determinative authority. Some of the most anti-free speech figures in our history have law degrees. A degree guarantees neither wisdom nor understanding. Many of the Framers were not legally trained but they had an innate sense and commitment to free speech.

James Madison warned us to be more on guard against such nuanced arguments: “There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

As Time, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other media outlets align themselves with the anti-free speech movement, it is more important than ever for citizens to fight for this essential right. There is nothing nuanced in either this movement or its implications for this country.

The New York Times's version of Objectivity

The New York Times seems unable to be objective. "exaggeration" is too mild for what you often see in the Times. For example, in a recent "The Morning" piece, Nicholas Confessore goes after Tucker Carlson saying "Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news". Any fair-minded person who has watched Carlson's show can disagree with some of his views - as I do - but there is no evidence of racism whatever.

As a past New York Times subscriber, I have found that this kind of Woke and Cancel Culture "journalism" is all too frequent at the Times. For me, the Times has lost its credibility - which is why I cancelled it.