Wednesday, July 13, 2022

The New Founders America Needs

 Bari Weiss gets it right at commensense.news.

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There are nearly 4,000 universities in the United States. Many of them have massive endowments and histories that stretch back to well before the country’s founding. So you’d be forgiven for thinking it a bit ridiculous to try to compete with those Goliaths.

And yet that is exactly what the new University of Austin, or UATX, is doing.

The premise of UATX is simple. It goes like this: While the brand-name schools have the money they no longer have the mission. They have fundamentally abandoned the point of the university: the pursuit of truth.

Anyone with eyes can see the problem. But most of those people spend their time privately complaining about the status quo—while writing yearly checks to their alma mater so their children have a chance of getting in.

The good people at UATX, where I am on the board, aren’t sitting around criticizing. They are not waiting. They are doing.

Since the school’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, announced the project this November in these pages UATX has raised more than $100 million—with no alumni. Within the first week, the school received more than 3,500 inquiries from professors at other universities.

And a few weeks back, it opened its doors to its first students at its inaugural summer school.

I was blown away by the students I met there, and I was honored to lecture alongside teachers like Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson and Thomas Chatterton-Williams.

Today I wanted to share with all of you the talk I gave at the Old Parkland in Dallas to the first class of UATX students.

Before I begin, I must recognize that we are currently sitting on the ancestral home of the Apache and that my pronouns are she, her and hers. Also I am a cis–gendered woman, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, generally able-bodied though my eyesight is less than 20/20 and I can’t run more than half a mile. Also, my own family was displaced by Cossacks at some point in the mid-1800s in what is now called Poland and we’re still waiting for an apology.

I’m older than you guys, so I remember a time when the sentences I just uttered would have been incomprehensible outside of a critical theory class with a couple dozen people. That was back when the idea of “staying woke” was a lyric Lead Belly sang. That was before the phrase cancel culture was a thing.

I distinctly remember the first cancellation I heard about, though we didn’t call it that then. It was 2014. The school was Brandeis–a school founded on the notion of religious freedom, a school with the motto “truth, even unto its innermost parts”—and the school had extended an honorary degree to the magnificent Ayaan Hirsi Ali only to withdraw it. It was a scandal. I remember reading dozens of stories about it.

Those were the days. Now that story would last maybe half a day. Because now, the whole country is a campus.

Now, you can find land acknowledgments at Starbucks (seriously, a reader sent me a photo of a land acknowledgment hung in the coffee shop in Toronto) or pronouns in the email signatures of tech titans, or strange, neo-racist ideas baked into the onboarding programs of our most elite, prestigious companies.

And nowadays, anyone who is anyone—anyone who is vaguely interesting or has something original to say—has been disinvited from somewhere. Larry Summers from the University of California. Ilya Shapiro at UC Hastings, and then Georgetown. Ben Shapiro and Jane Fonda. Also: James Watson, Michael Moore, George Will, Peter Singer, Bjorn Lomberg, Bruce Gilley, Camile Pagila, Christina Hoff Sommers, Randall Kennedy…I could just list names for the next hour. Many of them you are lucky to have here teaching this week: Dorian Abbott, Peter Boghossian, and, of course, Ayaan.

Disinvitation—now called deplatforming—has become a regular feature of American life as the politics of censoriousness, forced conformity and ideological obedience have taken hold.

Now you can get disinvited from our best newspapers, as Donald McNeil or James Bennet well know. You can get disinvited or frozen out from our fanciest magazines, which is why Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi now have newsletters on Substack and Alexi McCammond, hired to be the editor of Teen Vogue, was pushed out before she started because of tweets she wrote in high school. You can be a president of a storied American company, like Levi’s, and be ushered to the door, as Jennifer Sey was, for criticizing school shutdowns. You can devote yourself to students at progressive prep schools, like Paul Rossi at Grace Church, only to be pushed out for standing up against racial essentialism. You can be canceled in medicine, like Pitt’s Norman Wang. Tech companies (like Antonio Garcia Martinez at Apple). Folk bands (Google Winston Marshall). And even high school fundraisers, as Dave Chappelle recently was. Though as he put it: “They’re canceling stuff I didn’t even want to do.”

These stories now whiz by us on our social media feeds daily—did you see the one about the taco truck canceled for cultural appropriation? Or the painter who made the wrong painting? Or the novelist who wrote the wrong novel? Or the museum curator? The Oberlin baker? Or the dog walker? Or the comedian? Or the Palestinian restaurateur?

For each of these examples, you all can no doubt think of dozens more in your communities and schools that have gone unreported.

These incidents are not discreet little firestorms. They are deeply interconnected. They are the result of a zealous and profoundly illiberal ideology that has infiltrated our largest companies, our media, our universities, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our local governments, our elementary schools. Our friendships. Our families. Our language.

If you are sitting in this room you know this better than most Americans because you are living it.

You have all sat in classrooms, posted on social media, and applied to college and felt the pressure at each stage to promote an ideology you disagree with.

Maybe instead of being taught how to read, write, and think, you’ve been taught to obsess over things like race and gender. Maybe instead of debating ideas openly and honestly, you’ve been told to toe the party line or be quiet. Maybe you’ve been asked to trade inquisitive fact-finding for acceptance of a predetermined narrative.

Maybe you have watched as a classmate was shamed for a mistake. Or a bad joke. And watched as people piled on and worried if you would be next.

Maybe instead of writing a paper with an argument you believe in, you’ve been pressured—at the risk of a low grade—to write the paper repeating the argument you know your teacher or professor wants to hear. Maybe you feel afraid to speak up in class—a privilege for which you or your parents pay many thousands of dollars—for fear of enraging the mob.

What has become obvious to anyone paying attention is that we are living through a kind of revolution.

It is not a physical one. As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine, it “is not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media, and giving new shape to our public and private institutions. It is remaking the nation before our eyes.”

In other words, this is a revolution of culture. A revolution of ideas.

For far too long, it resisted description. The revolution’s proponents went from pretending it didn’t exist and insisting that those who suggested it did were wearing tinfoil hats . . . to declaring it was here, and it was excellent, and that if you didn’t get on board you were a bigot and a bad person.

Others, meantime, have tried to deny its existence because they are scared of its implications. Or because what’s happening on the right is also scary. They point to the rise of QAnon and the spread of conspiracy theories about stolen elections and members of Congress who talk casually about Jewish space lasers and insist that any one who suggests that the problem is anywhere but the right is basically abetting the rise of fascism. As if there can’t be two bad things happening at once.

Others pretend away ideological revolution for more craven reasons: Because to see it would be to give up too much status. Too much prestige. To really see it—and to reckon with how completely it has won—might mean giving up on Yale. Or Harvard.

But deny it as they might, it is very much here.

Indeed, this soft, cultural revolution is, I believe, the biggest untold story in America right now. It is one that is happening right under our noses and it promises to reshape the country. It already has.

This is not an abstraction to me.

What I started to witness many years ago as a student at Columbia University . . . has come to impact my friendships . . . my relationships . . . my career . . . It is the reason why I am speaking to you not as an employee of the New York Times, but as a journalist who has had to learn to become an entrepreneur, building new media for our new world.

I didn’t want to run my own company. I didn’t want to be a founder. I don’t own a fleece vest and I don’t wear AllBirds. And despite what you may read on Twitter, I like being part of an institution. I loved telling people I worked for The Times. Part of me imagined I would work there forever.

I also imagined I’d live in a world where I could say with confidence and clarity: I know where I want to work. I know where I want to live. I know where I want to raise my kids. Or send them to school. Or where they should apply to college.

But the truth is I don’t know any of those things anymore.

Those of us in this room–and those Americans who are truly alive to the moment we are in—don’t have the luxury of steady ground. It’s simply not the moment we are living in.

The moment we are in requires something different . . . and seemingly paradoxical.

It requires us to both build totally new things . . . and to conserve very old ones.

It requires us to look for new allies . . . and to strengthen old loyalties.

It requires us to listen to new voices . . . and to heed ancient wisdom that is being lost.

In many ways, what is required of us—especially of you here in this room—is what was required of the people whose images hang on these walls. The founding generation, who married the old and the radically new when they came here to found a New Jerusalem.

So this afternoon, I want to offer you the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the un-American revolution we are currently living through, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon. Then I want to tell you what I think we—liberals, conservatives, independents, trads, whigs, normies, the coalition of the sane—can do to stop it in order to preserve the precious virtues that have made this country the last, best hope on Earth and that have made every single one of our lives possible.

A lot of people want to convince you that you need a PhD or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the revolution that’s transforming America. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears.

The ideology that is trying to unseat liberalism in America begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated.

Persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. The rule of law is replaced with mob rule.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with disinvitation and de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion with exclusion. Excellence with equity.

In this ideology, disagreement is recast as trauma. So speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all—but in fact justice.

In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, information that does comport with The Narrative is recast as disinformation, its proponents as conspiracy theorists. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about re-educating them in what to think. In this ideology the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.

In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant, Lincoln and Washington were torn down. It is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated because he read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.

In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said they thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture. In fact, he was fidgeting with his fingers out of his car window.

In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: you are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. It is why an elementary school in Washington, D.C. gave kindergarteners a “fistbook” asking them to identify racist family members.

In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told “if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.

Victimhood, in this ideology, confers morality. “I think therefore I am” is replaced with: “I am therefore I know.” Or: “I know therefore I am right.”

This ideology says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist.

In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.

Thus the efforts to do away with the SAT, or the admissions test for elite public schools like Stuyvesant and Lowell—for decades, the engines of opportunity that allowed children of poor and working-class families to advance on their merit, regardless of race. Or the argument made by The New York Times’ classical music critic to do away with blind auditions for orchestras.

In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” Why? Because the idea of working hard “supports the illusion of meritocracy.”

In this revolution, skeptics are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.

What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being canceled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.

It has worked.

A recent CATO study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration. And nearly 70 percent of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something that students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. Think about that. A majority of students in America think it is a virtue to inform on their wrong-thinking professors.

How did that become normal? And why have so many, especially so many young people, perhaps your best friends, been drawn to this ideology?

I do not think it is because they are stupid.

All of this has taken place on the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop in which the American dream has felt like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others. And so on.

“I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thrusting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. But the same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit the souls of true believers on fire, eager to burn down anything that stands in their way.

So what are we to do?

The answer is not liberalism, if liberalism means defending the Ministry of Truth as necessary to fight disinformation or protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices in the name of justice. Nor is it conservatism if conservatism means defending the rights of Big Tech to shut down the public square to conservatives, or fawning over European autocrats and theocracies and calling for a similar model of government to dawn on our shores. That’s why the founders left there for here.

No, we have to get more fundamental, more foundational. We have to get beyond the tired and rotted out ideas about left and right and ask: What are the virtues and values that have made America and the West the best, freest, most enlightened, most tolerant of minorities, most open to new ideas, most innovative places in the history of the world?

The Founders that granted us independence from an older tyranny bequeathed to us a world-transforming set of ideas that, nearly 250 years later, still feel radical, especially in the last decade.

I believe that after the un-American revolution we are still living through, a new generation of founders will lead us out by looking to those same bedrock principles.

And I believe that you in this room can and should be among those founders. I believe being here at UATX is a sign that you know something has gone terribly wrong—and you know that only risk-takers are going to right it.

So given that we aren’t literally settling a new frontier or setting up a colony on Mars—at least not yet—what does that look like?

While the original Declaration of Independence had one call to action, I have ten. And none of them requires you to enlist in a local militia.

1. To be a founder in 21st-century America means to reject the politics of resentment and to recognize our privilege.

My dad lost a younger sister to cancer. My dad also has MS. So why does he constantly say he is the most privileged man in the world? Because he grew up in a stable, loving home with two parents. Because he has meaningful work. Because he has Judaism and the community that comes with it. Because he married the love of his life.

And, above all else, because he had the great, good fortune to be born in America.

Even with all our flaws and failings, even with inflation and polarization and tribalization, anyone who is honest will admit that there is nowhere better to build a life.

Saying that right now feels radical, because grievance and resentment define the current cultural moment. It’s a dead end. We must get back to gratitude.

2. To be a founder means to defend the rule of law.

It is just and right that those who participated in the orgy of violence on the Capitol on January 6 are being punished. That’s called the rule of law. It was an attempt to physically intimidate our elected officials. It’s wrong when it’s smashing through windows in Congressional offices and it is wrong when it is outside a Supreme Court Justice’s home.

This kind of violence has become normalized. The other day in the city where I live a man attempted to stab Dave Chappelle in front of tens of thousands of people at the Hollywood Bowl. Thankfully, Chappelle was unhurt, but the Los Angeles District Attorney decided not to charge him with a felony. And don’t even get me started on San Francisco.

Why, in the summer of 2020, could an organized political faction in Seattle take over a police precinct and a whole neighborhood? Or in Portland try to burn down a courthouse? Or in Kenosha burn to the ground the entire business district—shops largely owned by minorities? Why have we come to accept the suddenly rising murder rate as part of anti-racism when most of the people dying are black?

To be a founder, to be a builder, is to absolutely reject such violence as normal and to defend the rule of law.

3. To be a founder means to defend freedom of speech.

“Free speech” is not just a slogan. It is a tool that is essential for the free exercise of the mind, for the ability to search for truth. The only way to get to the truth is to have the freedom to think freely and to speak clearly. Without free speech, there is no truth. No innovation. No ability to persuade or take risks or to make new things. Free speech—allowing horrible things or shocking things to be argued—is a radical value and one that has been the foundation for American success.

Free speech also means refusing compelled speech. It means refusing to speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob.

So do not genially accept the lies told to you.

For example: that Abraham Lincoln’s name on a public school or his likeness on a statue is white supremacy. (It is not; he is a hero.) Or that looting has no victims (untrue) and that small-business owners can cope anyway because they have insurance (nonsense). Or that America is evil. (No, it is the last hope on Earth.)

If possible, be public and vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false.

Cowardice is contagious—but so is courage. And your singular example may serve as a means of transmission.

4. To be a founder means to break your addiction to prestige.

In other words: Worship God more than Yale.

Yale right now is a school where law students scrawl things like “the law is violence” and “we are the law.” It’s where, at the School of Medicine’s Child Study Center, someone gave a talk called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” and got softballs during the Q and A.

So why, again, do so many venereate it? Why do so many get their sense of status and self-worth through it? Why do we accept that our children will be taught at schools that cost $80,000 to hate themselves and the West, think of themselves as perma-victim or oppressor, and get docile at the idea of pushing back?

Because we are unable to let go of the status it confers. That is why.

Even if your goal is reform instead of building anew, fighting this ideology means becoming unpopular within the Good Old Places and getting very clear on what is essential right now. Being popular is not essential. Doing the right thing is essential. Telling the truth is essential.

So worship God more than Yale, and look for Common Sense outside of the Ivy League.

5. To be a founder means to reject moral relativism.

Some cultures are more just than others and it is right to say so. Ibram Kendi says this: “In order to be an antiracist, we have to stop standardizing our own culture and judging other cultures from our standards because whoever creates the standard becomes the top of the hierarchy.” And: “We need to figure out a way to recognize that when we see cultural difference, all we are seeing is cultural difference.”

I say that’s nonsense. You can absolutely judge other cultures. Cultures that force women into burqas. Or practice female genital mutilation. Or hang gay people from cranes. To be a founder means saying: What we are building is harder to do, but, yes, it is better.

6. To be a founder means to defend witches.

Good people right now are being scapegoated. They are being burned as witches, judged based on their worst moment and hung out to dry because of a mistake or a bad joke or a bad thought or a lapse in judgment.

David Sabatani, one of the most important scientists in the country, is now collecting unemployment because of unverified claims of sexual misconduct. Feminist philosophy professor Kathleen Stock was pushed out of the University of Sussex because her research on sex and gender offended some students. Joshua Katz was smeared as a racist by Princeton for speaking out against radical “anti-racist” measures such as institutionalized struggle sessions and race-based compensation for professors—until he was finally fired. I could go on and on and on.

It is appalling, illiberal, and morally wrong. And yet too often too many of us stay silent.

Including me.

Here’s what I mean: The issue of gender ideology is one I did not want to touch. I was scared, sure. But also I didn’t think it was worth it. I didn’t think it was even my issue. Let other people handle it.

And so I watched from the sidelines as women like Abigail Shrier and J.K. Rowling said wild things like: Hey, biological men and biological women probably shouldn’t share a prison cell. Or maybe a 15-year-old is too young to decide on her own sterilization. These women weren’t thrown on a pyre but they were humiliated. They were threatened and slandered. It’s easy to see this happen and say: I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole.

You see, a lot of people are letting other people fight the fight on the logic that it’s not the right hill for them to die on. But at some point one runs out of hills.

Principles are not like money. You do not need to be judicious and stingy about how you spend the capital of integrity. And who you spend it on. No. The more hills you die on the more valuable you become. So find more hills to die on and more witches to defend. Even, and maybe especially, if those witches are flawed.

7. To be a founder means to use your own eyes and ears.

To quote John Adams, “Facts are stubborn things.” Use your own sensibilities to decipher fact from fiction. The mainstream narrative can be addictive and easy to digest, but reality is far too stubborn to fit so neatly into boxes.

Do your own research. Be independent-minded. And seek out the truth—don’t just rely on others to tell you how things are..

You don’t have to become an “expert” to form your own opinion from the facts, and, if the pandemic has taught us anything, you should certainly be skeptical of anyone claiming to be one.

8. Being a founder means refusing to submit your relationships and friendships to political litmus tests.

The other day my wife got an email from an old friend of hers. The friend’s note was like a missive from the Soviet Union in that it demanded that my wife prove her purity of politics by disavowing . . . me. This is not the first time she or I has been asked to do something of this nature.

A politics that forces its adherents to put their most intimate relationships to a litmus test is a politics of totalitarianism.

The beauty of America was that it insisted that there are whole realms of human life located outside the province of politics, like friendships, art, music, family and love. And those are the most important parts of life. And anyone that says otherwise is forgetting what it means to be American and really a human being.

9. Being a founder means resisting nihilism.

That means both the nihilism of the left that says abolish the police because safety is impossible. And it means resisting the new nihilism of the right that says decline is inevitable, we’re in the last gasps of empire. The nihilism that roots for Putin because “in Russia they don’t ask your pronouns.” The nihilism of saying: The Bronze Age was better because men were really men then. But also the historical revisionism of wishing we were still peasants in the Middle Ages because capitalism is so awful. The nihilism that wants to go back fifty years or five hundred years based on some fetishized vision of a better time. The nihilism of losing perspective.

To quote the brilliant Grimes, being a founder doesn’t mean killing what you hate, it means saving what you love.

10. Above all, to be a founder is to build new things.

I began this list with gratitude. But gratitude does not mean settling for the status quo. It means fighting for a more perfect union. It means fighting to make the kind of country and culture you want to live in. And eventually raise kids in. Gratitude means understanding that the reason we have what we have is because lots of people before us lived hard lives and made tremendous sacrifices. And the least we can do is, I dunno, maybe try to start a new university.

Every day I hear from those with means with children at private schools who are being brainwashed; people who run companies where they are scared of their own employees; people who donate to their alma mater even though it betrays their principles; people who are applying to schools or jobs that they know will compromise their integrity but are doing it anyway.

Enough. You have the ability to change the untenable status quo. You have the ability to build new things. If you don’t have the financial capital, you have the social or political capital. Or the ability to sweat. You have the ability to build.

As my friend Katherine Boyle recently wrote in Common Sense: “Building is a political philosophy. It is neither red nor blue, progressive nor conservative. It is averse to the political short-termism and zero-sum thinking that permeates our aging institutions that won’t protect us in this era. There is no fixed pie when it comes to building. Building is an action, a choice, a decision to create and move. It is shovels in the dirt with a motley crew of doers who get the job done because no one else will. Building is the only certainty. The only thing we can control. When the projects we believed were Teflon strong are fraying like the history they toppled, the only thing to do is to make something new again.”

We all wanted certainty. We all wanted to coast on what we knew: that the world we were born into would remain as it was, that the institutions would remain strong and trustworthy and the political parties would remain consistent and fixed. None of us expected this.

But then again, neither did those who decided to leave the Old World and build the New.

Don’t forget: More than a dozen of the actual founders were 18th century millennials—under the age of 35. So don’t tell me that small groups of young people cannot transform the world when they made ours.

If you are in this room there is a very good chance that you are one of our new founders. I can’t wait to see what you build.

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Biden’s Canned Hunt: The Punishment of the Border Agents is about Protecting a President, not Migrants

 Jonathan Turley gets it right, again. Here is his column in The Hill.

Government is not to be believed without corroborating evidence from reliable sources.

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Below is my column in The Hill on the punishment of four mounted Border Patrol agents in Texas and what is says about us as a country. What is particularly crushing is not just that this can occur but that it was predicted almost a year ago.

Here is the column:

President Eisenhower once said that “The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” When it comes to subordinates, that can become a virtual canned hunt for a president. Worse yet, presidents often use other subordinates to pull the trigger.

That is what happened this week when President Biden bagged four Border Patrol agents in one of the most cowardly canned hunts in political history.

After almost a year of investigation, the Biden administration announced the agents would be punished even though investigators found no evidence that they whipped migrants, as Biden and many other politicians and pundits insisted. Since the president declared — before an investigation had begun — that the agents would have to be punished, the agents had to be found guilty of something. So, they were reprimanded for “unprofessional conduct,” “working in an unsafe manner” and “derogatory language.”

Make no mistake: This is not about protecting migrants. It is about protecting a president.

The verdict on these agents was decided ten months ago, after the media went into a frenzy over a false story accusing mounted officers of whipping undocumented migrants near Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19.

A photographer captured the scene, which showed agents using bridle reins to guide their skittish horses. The entire videotape clearly shows the agents using the reins on their mounts, not on the migrants. Not only did the photographer quickly deny seeing any officers whip migrants, the videotape clearly refuted that allegation. However, for many in politics and the media it did not matter because it played into a racial-justice claim of the “whipping (of) Haitian asylum seekers.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) condemned “the inappropriate use of what appear to be whips by Border Patrol officers on horseback to intimidate migrants.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried “images of inhumane treatment of Haitian migrants by Border Patrol — including the use of whips.” Vice President Kamala Harris emoted on “The View” about how the brutality “invoked images of some of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against the Indigenous people of our country, it has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.” Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described the incident as “worse than what we witnessed in slavery” and “white supremacist behavior.”

President Biden rushed to express his own revulsion and rage, too: “It was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”

At the time, some of us objected that the president had, once again, declared the guilt of accused persons without evidence or investigation. The possible innocence of these officers simply did not matter to the president or to many in the press.

Despite being tasked with an investigation, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas joined the condemnations of the agents, saying that their conduct “defies all of the values that we seek to instill in our people.” He then promised swift justice with an investigation that would take “days, not weeks” — yet the investigation dragged on for months.

The reason was obvious. Within hours, the issue was no longer whether the agents whipped migrants. The issue was that the president wrongly claimed they whipped the migrants and would be punished.

Even some in the media admitted that the story was false, but President Biden never apologized for his false accusation. The innocence of the agents simply did not matter.

In a column last year, I explained what was likely to happen. First, the administration would bury the investigation “to wait for public attention to wane.” Then it would issue a long-delayed report and protect the president “by changing the question. For example, what began as an investigation into whether agents used reins to whip migrants might be converted into a long investigation into the use of horses in crowd control operations.”

And that is precisely what has happened. After almost a year, the agents will face relatively light punishment — two weeks without pay — for such transgressions as speaking in a threatening matter or managing a horse too close to a child.

This small detachment of mounted border officers was ordered to the river’s edge to prevent a huge body of migrants from crossing. In previous legal cases, I have deposed mounted officers involved in crowd-control operations. Since horses are commonly used to control crowds, such moments are routine. That does not excuse threatening language or careless maneuvers — but such instances generally result in verbal reprimands at the scene or, occasionally, formal discipline within weeks of the operation. They do not involve multi-agency efforts and almost a year of investigation.

Moreover, these circumstances were known within days of the Del Rio incident. Yet the Biden administration waited until a Friday afternoon ten months later to release its findings. Notably, at no point did it clear the agents of allegations of being racists who whipped black migrants, despite that fact that Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said there was “no evidence Border Patrol agents involved in this incident struck anyone with their reins intentionally or otherwise.”

From beginning to end, these agents have been treated as props for the president and his administration. They were first used as embodiments of alleged systemic racism in law enforcement; they were then used as scapegoats to fulfill the president’s promise that “those people will pay.”

Most Americans would be appalled by this treatment, but few have seen the full story. It is doubtful they will, either, because much of the media was complicit with the president in the original false story and may be reluctant to fully correct the record now.

At the start of his administration, President Biden proclaimed that “the most difficult but important step [for a free nation] is burying the legacy of tyranny” and ensuring “a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.” What few of us expected was that Biden himself would become one of those most persistent challenges.

Monday, July 11, 2022

The one-sided gun control debate

 What you hear about guns during gun control debates is the downside, e.g., mass shootings. The upside is seldom mentioned and often denied - the use of guns by armed citizens to stop mass shootings. Here is a link to a source, the Crime Prevention Research Center, that puts things in perspective.

Here are some excerpts.

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UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote in the Washington Post on April 20, 2015: “Have civilians with permitted concealed handguns stopped such mass shootings before?” We provided Volokh with a list of such cases, which he used.

Below, we have collected news stories on more cases of permit holders stopping mass public shootings with their handguns (we separately collect cases where concealed handguns are used to stop other crimes). There is no reason to believe that this list is comprehensive, given how little media coverage is devoted to these heroic acts. In addition, we make no attempt here to list here the vast number of defensive gun uses in general that are reported daily in the US.

Permit holders stopped some mass public shootings that gained extensive news coverage, but only a few stories mentioned that it was a permit holder who stopped the attack. The stories frequently get other facts wrong.

A note: Gun control advocates raise the concern that concealed handgun permit holders who stop an attack might accidentally shoot a bystander. They are also fearful that the police might accidentally kill the permit holder. While such incidents are a possibility, they have yet to occur. We probably do not have all the cases where a permit holder stopped a mass public shooting, but if a permit holder were to shoot a bystander, it seems clear that such an event would get news coverage.
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Police said a woman who was lawfully carrying a pistol shot and killed a man who began shooting at a crowd of people Wednesday night in Charleston.

Dennis Butler was killed after allegedly shooting at dozens of people attending a graduation party Wednesday near the Vista View Apartment complex. No injuries were reported from those at the party.

Investigators said Butler was warned about speeding in the area with children present before he left. He later returned with an AR-15-style firearm and began firing into the crowd before he was shot and killed.

“Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night,” Charleston Police Department Chief of Detectives Tony Hazelett said. . . .

Butler did have an extensive criminal history.

Hazelett said no charges will be filed against the woman.
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The suspect in a weekend shooting that left one woman dead and four people wounded during a protest in Portland, Oregon, faces several charges, including murder, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The shooting unfolded Saturday night after Benjamin Smith, described by police as an homeowner, allegedly confronted a group of demonstrators who were protesting the killing of Amir Locke by Minneapolis police, authorities said…

“Several participants asked Smith to leave them alone. Moments later, Smith drew a firearm and fired at the crowd, striking five people,” the DA’s office said in the news release…

The shooting ended when a person with the group of demonstrators shot Smith in the “hip area,” critically wounding him. Law enforcement originally detained that person on charges of first degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon, both felonies. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office ultimately decided to bring “no complaint” against the person “based upon our review of facts and evidence.”
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22-year-old Joshua Christopher Hayes launched an unprovoked attack against two men working in Brownsburg Cemetery Tuesday around 1:15 p.m. Hayes first chased 36-year-old Seth Robertson to a nearby intersection before he fatally shot Robertson.

Hayes then chased after the second man and shot a third man who was stopped at a traffic light nearby. The third man was legally armed and fatally shot Hayes.

“This tragic event could have been much more disastrous. So, victim three not only saved victim two’s life, but he saved potentially the lives of many others,” BPD Capt. Jennifer Barrett. “Victim three did exactly what anybody would have wanted him to do at that scene that day.”
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A woman named Ashley Porter started firing at a group of people who were standing in a parking lot outside a marijuana dispensary in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

. . . Detectives say Porter got into an argument with someone near a convenience store over a parking spot.

They say surveillance video from the marijuana dispensary next door shows the argument, then Porter leaving in her car.

They say the video shows Porter coming back minutes later and firing shots toward the crowd of people in front of the store.

Detectives say an armed citizen pulled out a gun and fired back, killing porter. . . .

Detectives say the armed citizen was questioned and released. . .
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A masked man entered a McDonald’s restaurant and immediately started firing his gun. A concealed handgun permit holder returned firing killing the attacker.

“He’s my hero,” he said. “Because I can only imagine how it would’ve went if he wasn’t armed. We might not be here having this interview.” . . .

He said he heard more than 15 shots fired. . . .

— Markus Washington, an employee at the McDonalds’, to WAFF Channel 48 News
From WBRC Channel 6 in Birmingham, Alabama has this note:

A masked man entered the restaurant when an employee opened the door for a father and his sons to leave. The masked man then opened fire in the restaurant. At that point, the father began shooting at the masked man. Both the father and the masked man were struck along with one of the children. Police later confirmed that the masked man is now deceased, and the father had non-life threatening injuries. A minor had non-life-threatening injuries.

The motive of the attacker isn’t clear. While it is possible that robbery was the motive, the fact that the attacker immediately began firing his gun as soon as he entered the restaurant means it is very likely that his goal was most likely just to kill people.

Saturday, July 09, 2022

Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States

 Here is a link to Jonathan Turley's paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Heed JT's warning. Freedom is not the normal state of affairs.

Here is JT's introduction.

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Throughout its history, the United States has struggled with movements that aim to silence others through state or private action. These periods have been pendulous, with acute suppression followed by relative tolerance for free speech. This boom–or-bust pattern for free speech may well continue. However, the United States is arguably living through one of its most serious anti-free speech periods, and there are signs that the current period could result in lasting damage for free speech due to a rising orthodoxy and intolerance on our campuses and in our public debate. Where fighting for freedom of speech was once a near-universal rallying cry, opposing free speech has now become an article of faith for some in our society. This has led to a rising movement that justifies silencing opposing views, often on the grounds that stopping others from speaking is, in fact, an exercise in free speech. This movement has both public and private components, but it is different from any prior period due to new technological, political, and economic pressures on the exercise of free speech.

The struggle for free speech in the United States is interwoven with our history, from the colonial period to the present day. From the outset, there was a clear concept of free speech, but not a clear commitment to protecting it. Indeed, figures like Thomas Paine and John Peter Zenger raised many issues against the English Crown that are still debated today in conflicts over free speech and the free press. Anti-free speech movements tend to rise from deep fractures in our society in periods of unrest. The sense of great injury felt by many can be translated into a license to silence those who are seen as causing or exacerbating that injury. These periods provide an opportunity not only for government abuses but also for extremist groups to feed on social unrest. In recent years, various extremist groups have emerged on both ends of the ideological spectrum, from the Boogaloo movement on the far right to the Antifa movement on the far left. However, the greatest threat to free speech today is the growing support for censorship and speech codes in the mainstream of political and academic thought.

The intolerance for dissenting speech recurs across countries and historical periods. Orthodoxy is the enemy of free speech, and orthodox views are often the result of religious or social values. Heretical and immoral speech has long been the target of majoritarian anger, combining speech intolerance with religious dogma. At one time or another, virtually every religion has tried to compel outsiders to adhere to orthodox views, and blasphemy prosecutions continue in many countries today. Even after the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, dominant faiths continued to use social or governmental controls to perpetuate their values, including abuses directed at other faiths. Yet the most damaging anti-free speech movements in our history tended to be secular efforts involving government-mandated or government-encouraged speech controls. That is true of the current threats against free speech, involving private groups and companies that have imposed unprecedented levels of speech controls across digital and educational platforms.

There has already been a great deal of discussion on the erosion of free speech in the United States. There is obviously no meter that continually measures free speech protection, so this debate is unavoidably anecdotal. Yet objections to the “cancel culture” now extend from academia to journalism to the arts. In each of these areas, long-standing principles of diversity and tolerance of viewpoints have been replaced by increasing rigidity and hegemony. Underlying these controversies is a fundamental debate over the meaning of free speech and its inherent harm. The notion of silencing others as a form of speech reflects a deep and widening disagreement over the protections for heterodoxy in a variety of different fields. Leading publications like the New York Times have apologized for publishing opposing views on issues, while leading journalists, editors, and columnists have resigned under fire for publishing dissenting viewpoints. Museum curators have been forced out for questioning calls for race-based policies on acquisition or preferences. When leading writers, from Salman Rushdie to J.K. Rowling to Noam Chomsky, signed a letter raising alarm over the growing intolerance for opposing views, they were denounced by colleagues. At the same time, legislative proposals to criminalize speech have been proposed in the cause of protecting democracy.

These conflicts are often dismissed because many are the actions or policies of private actors like Big Tech companies rather than a form of state action. While some have called to amend the Constitution to allow for greater speech regulation, others insist that blacklisting of authors or banning certain cable networks are not true free speech conflicts since they fall outside of the First Amendment. However, free speech values are neither synonymous with nor contained exclusively within the First Amendment. As will be discussed below, all of these public and private forms of censorship undermine free speech values.

The rise in speech regulation is often defended on the basis that free speech itself is a danger. This article explores the rationalization that speech controls are justified as a defense or response to the harm posed by opposing views. It is a framing that explicitly or implicitly raises the “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill—with a lethal twist. Many have long relied upon the harm principle in a myriad of areas to define the limits on government controls and action, particularly in defense of free speech. A type of Millian harm principle is now being used to justify both government controls and private action to silence those with opposing views. Indeed, the antifree speech movement on our campuses is often defended as a type of militant Millian movement, a construct that is neither faithful to Mill’s writing nor logical in its application. Yet that same rationale has been used by social media companies as the foundation for the robust censorship programs now enforced across the media in what is often called the “post-truth” environment.

This article looks at the anti-free speech movement and its reliance on the harm rationale. However, it is important to note that arguments for greater speech regulation often reject another aspect of Mill’s writings on free speech: the self-corrective or protective capacity of free speech systems. That view is treated as hopelessly and even dangerously outdated. One commentator wrote, “Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don't compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a ‘marketplace of ideas’ will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news.” Such claims are often presented as manifestly true. The fact that “disinformation” or hateful speech exists on social media is treated as evidence that traditional Millian notions of free speech are proven failures. Such a view ignores that neither Mill nor his adherents ever claimed that free speech would chase bad speech from the media platforms or our lives. Disinformation and hateful speech existed in Mill’s life and have always existed as part of human interactions. Free speech does not cure stupidity; it merely exposes it. Likewise, speech intolerance is pronounced across the ideological spectrum.

Recent controversies have reinforced the view that forms of public and private censorship only make it harder for good speech to prevail. With the rise of speech controls, the faith of the public in both the government and the media has declined. As a result, people no longer have faith in what they read, or they confine themselves to siloed news sources. Ironically, while disinformation is often used to justify censorship systems, the current mistrust is a breeding ground for disinformation that feeds on the isolation and suspicions of citizens. That in turn undermines, rather than strengthens, our democracy. As Alexander Meiklejohn noted, the ability to marshal your own facts and reach your own conclusions is an essential component of self-governance:

Public discussions of public issues, together with the spreading of information and opinion bearing on those issues, must have a freedom unabridged by our agents. Though they govern us, we, in a deeper sense, govern them. Over our governing, they have no power. Over their governing we have sovereign power. 

The distrust fueled by speech controls can undermine not just political but also public health discussions on issues like vaccines. Controlling information tends to diminish faith in that information.

In addressing these rationales for speech regulation, this article looks at our long struggle with free speech over the decades and how a new anti-free speech movement has emerged. This movement is proving far more effective due to a synthesis of private and public forms of speech regulation. The idea that free speech values will be instinctively and jealously defended can no longer be assumed, even by academics and writers who have been traditional advocates for those values. That raises the question of what alternatives exist to ensure free speech values are upheld in our institutions. This article proposes that free speech values can be legislatively protected, even coerced, by the government. There is a role for the government in reinforcing traditional enclaves for the exercise of the freedom of expression in our society. Indeed, with the rise of massive private systems of censorship, free speech may now depend on the government more than at any time in our history.

Monday, July 04, 2022

Lott and Moody show how academics can get it wrong on gun control laws through incompetent research

 John Donohue is a professor at Stanford - an impressive position at an impressive school. He and his colleagues have done a lot of research on the impact "right to carry" laws. Their papers  usually conclude that RTC laws make violent crime worse. In addition, they have strongly critiqued research by John Lott and his colleagues; who find that RTC laws reduce violent crime.

The history of the two sets of authors is, roughly, that Lott, et al, publish a paper followed by Donohue, et al, tearing it apart or presenting their own paper with contradictory results. That is then followed by Lott, et al, showing that either Donohue, et al, commit fatal flaws in their critique or fatal flaws in their paper.

What follows is the latest example of Lott, et al, showing some fatal flaws in Donohue's latest paper.

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Professor Carl Moody and Dr. John Lott have written up some comments on the latest Donohue et al. paper on concealed carry. For some perspective, you can see the academic literature on the issue here and the Amicus brief that we filed with a literature survey here.

Overall, Donohue uses dramatically different specifications and control variables across his multiple papers on right-to-carry laws, which speak of someone running as many specifications as possible to get the desired results. The problem is that measuring the impact of the right-to-carry law with a simple dummy variable not only ignores that more permits are issued over time and thus there is a greater deterrence effect, but this paper ignores how different the various state right-to-carry laws are from each other.

First the comments by Professor Moody and then after that the comments from Lott.

Response by Professor Carl Moody to Donohue, Cai, Bondy, and Cook, 2022, More guns, more unintended consequences

1. Internal consistency

The authors (hereafter DCBC) find that there is a 29 percent increase in violent firearm crime and a 12 percent increase in overall (firearm and non-firearm) violent crime associated with right-to-carry laws; the latter is not significantly different from zero. In fact, DCBC also find that there is no significant increase in murder, robbery, or assault associated with adopting right-to-carry laws. (DCBC, Table 2, p.14). The question arises, are these results internally consistent? Suppose the 29 percent increase is accurate. According to DCBC Table 1 (p.11), the total violent crime rate is 11.28. The firearm violent crime rate is 3.81, approximately 34 percent of the overall rate. This implies that the non-firearm violent crime rate is 7.47. A 29 percent increase in firearm violent crime will raise it to 4.23. If the non-firearm violent crime rate is unaffected by the passage of a RTC law, the total violent crime rate will increase to 11.70, a relatively small increase of 3.7 percent (not 12 percent). A 12 percent increase in violent crime means that 11.28 increases to 12.66. If firearm violent crime increases to 4.23, then non-firearm violent crime must increase to 8.43. (12.66-4.23=8.43) Thus, the only way to get a 12 percent increase in violent crime overall is for non-firearm crime to increase by 13 percent, almost half the increase in firearm violent crime.

Why would the passage of a RTC law cause non-firearm violent crime to increase? DCBC find that non-firearm violent crime, murder, assault, and robbery are not significantly associated with the passage of a RTC law. According to DCBC, “An unintended consequence of the enhanced potential danger from permitholders, however, may be that criminals arm themselves in response to this increased perceived threat, elevating the proportion of crime committed with a firearm.” (pp.7-8). But this implies substitution on the part of the otherwise unarmed criminals to become armed, causing firearm crime to increase, not non-firearm crime.

If the results for overall violent crime are increasing, but there is no statistically significant effect for murder, robbery, or assault, then the results have to be driven rapes. But virtually no rapes involve firearms.

2. A strange data set

DCBC use a sample of 47 US cities with populations over 400,000 for the years 1979-2019. According to DCBC, they chose this rather unusual sample because these cities are where “… violent crime is most concentrated.” (p. 4) Yet a look at the crime data for 2019 shows that 16 out of the top 47 cities in violent crime have populations under 400,000. The situation is worse for murder, the most serious crime. Of the top 47 cities in murder, 21 have populations under 400,000. In fact, the top city in both murder and violent crime rates in 2019 is St Louis, with a population of 310, 284. So, violent crime is not concentrated in cities over 400,000. If we look at the top 100 in terms of the crime rate, the majority (53) are cities less than 400,000. Another question is, why choose the 47 cities with 400,000 and even then drop some of them? Why not cities with a population over 500,000? Or 100,000? Or 10,000? Why not pick cities with the most violent crime? It seems an odd choice.

Those 47 cities account for only 32 percent of violent crime.

Also, why did DCBC use population from 2019? If your sample is from 1979-2019, you should use population values from a census in the middle of the period (i.e., 2000). Instead, they used a 9-year-old census to create an estimate at the very end of the sample period. This could be important because some cities lost population over the sample period while others gained. Ideally, you would use a larger number of cities based on the 2000 census.

DCBC address their choice of using a tiny sample in a footnote, “While there are benefits to using more agencies… there are also potential costs.” (fn. 15, p.9) They then cite two unpublished papers claiming that FBI underreports crime data. And the FBI data “…appears to have even greater reporting flaws for agencies serving smaller populations.” Apparently, these authors do not believe that more information is better than less. But their caution is unnecessary. The coefficient on the right-to-carry dummy variable is the average difference between the crime rate before and after the passage of the right-to-carry law in each city. Even if the underreporting in the smaller cities is greater than that in the larger cities, it is presumably the same before and after the policy change for the small cities, so the difference is unaffected.

Also, DCBC seem to engage in excessive “data cleaning.” For example, they removed “…crime observations that were sharp discontinuities from the proceeding and following year.” (p. 10) How do DCBC distinguish between recording errors and draws from the tails of the data generating process? They also “… removed all observations for a particular city-crime if the city-crime was missing more than 15 observations ….” (p.10) So, if a city had 15 missing observations, they dropped the remaining 26 observations. That is unnecessarily restrictive. The statistical model does not require all cities have a complete set of observations. Why throw out all that information? Why not at least mention if throwing out all that information impacts the results?

3. Modeling and control variables

DCBC also have an odd set of control variables. The choice of control variables is critical in determining the results of a regression analysis. Omitting a relevant variable will cause the resulting estimated coefficient on the RTC dummy to be biased. DCBC outsourced the modeling problem. “Our choice of control variables makes only one addition to the nine socioeconomic and demographic controls used in Kovandzic, Marvell, and Vieraitis (2005) (hereinafter “KMV”) …. The KMV nine controls are the percentage of the population made up of female headed households, the percentage of people living alone, per capita income, percentage of people in poverty, and four demographic controls….” (P. 10.) Yet, in a paper that DCBC cite many times, Donohue, Aneja, and Weber (2019), Donohue’s “preferred” set of control variables include two variables that he omits in this paper, the unemployment rate and the percent of the population living in urban areas (a measure of density), potentially omitted variables. The unemployment rate is typically included in every crime equation.

Interestingly, despite Donohue in a series of papers and talks demanding that any estimates include crack cocaine, DCBC do not include a variable to account for it (Ayres and Donohue, 2003 and Donohue, 2008). For example, in one talk on National Public Radio, Donohue claimed: “The elephant in the room was crack cocaine. The states that did not pass the right-to- carry laws were states that had a big problem with crack-cocaine which had an enormous influence in running up crime.”

Also, KMV include a lagged dependent variable to capture dynamic effects and individual city trends. DCBC include neither. The city trends are normally included in crime models to capture factors that affect crime, such as advances in DNA analysis, advances in critical care that turn potential homicides into assaults, the growing number of smartphones with cameras, ubiquitous security cameras, etc., that are otherwise omitted from the model. These trends could be different from city to city, requiring that each city have its own. The omission of the lagged dependent variable could be even more important because, if its coefficient is positive, as is very likely in crime models, its omission produces positive autocorrelation, which in turn causes the model to underestimate the standard error and overestimate the apparent significance of the results. DCBC do not report any tests for autocorrelation.

KMV measure the impact of the RTC law with a post-law trend. DCBC use a single dummy variable. If the effect of a RTC law increases with the number of people with permits to carry, as might be expected, the trend will do a better job of measuring the effect of the law. Also, there is evidence that late-adopting states put obstacles in the way of people seeking concealed carry permits, so that the effect could vary across states, possibly biasing the coefficient on the RTC dummy.

Unlike KMV, DCBC use a sample of 142 fewer cities. KMV limited themselves to cities with populations over 100,000 people. Strangely, while DCBC cite Lott’s second edition of More Guns, Less Crime, both Lott’s second and third editions examined city level data for all cities with at least 10,000 people (2010, 191-194), but DCBC seem unaware of this.

4. Replication using state data

DCBC refer to several online appendices. However, I have been unable to find them. So, in an attempt to replicate their findings, I use my state-level data set, on the theory that if RTC laws cause a significant increase in violent crime among the largest cities in the various states they would cause the corresponding state-level crime to rise. My experience is that if you don’t break down the RTC dummy variable into early and late adoption variables, the coefficient on the simple RTC dummy tends to be small and insignificantly different from zero. Nevertheless, I assembled a set of control variables like those used by DCBC, including income, poverty, beer consumption, two demographic variables, and population density. I also include the unemployment rate and a lagged dependent variable, the latter of which is highly significant. Table 1 shows the results.

Table 1: State-level replication of DCBC
(1) (2)
VARIABLES Coefficient T-ratio

Right-to-carry dummy 0.328 0.55
Lag of incarceration per capita -0.83** -2.34
Lag of police officers per capita -2.46** -2.33
Income 0.066 0.35
Poverty rate -0.166 -1.44
Unemployment rate 0.0162 0.09
Beer per capita 0.0122*** 3.40
Population density -0.059*** -5.87
Percent population 15-39 -0.342 -1.43
Percent black males 15-39 2.229 1.64
Yt-1 0.922*** 69.16

Observations 2,000
R-squared 0.984

Notes: *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1; two-way fixed effects model; dependent variable is 100 times log of violent crime rate; standard errors clustered at the state level; a standard Breusch-Godfrey test for autocorrelation is not significant (ρ=0.046, p-value=0.091); coefficients on year dummies are not reported to conserve space.

The coefficient on the RTC dummy is small (one-third of one percent) and insignificantly different from zero. The static version of the model, not reported, has highly significant autocorrelation (ρ=0.913, p-value=0.000). If the same is true for the DCBC static model, their standard errors are seriously underestimated, leading to a potentially spurious regression.

This replication exercise also raises questions for the DCBC analysis of the effects of RTC laws on clearance rates. They speculate, “One reason that clearance rates might fall in the wake of RTC adoption is that the crime increases resulting from the new regime burdens the police, thereby impairing their ability to clear crimes at the same rate.” (P.14) So, more crime causes clearance rates to fall, causing more crime. This is obviously a dynamic relationship and should be modeled as such. The simplest approach is to add a lagged dependent variable. If DCBC had done this for all of their models, I suspect that their results would have been very different.

References

Ayres, Ian, and John Donohue. “Shooting Down the ‘More Guns, Less Crime’ Hypothesis.” Stanford Law Review 55, no. 4 (2003): 1202–1309.

Donohue, John J, Abhay Aneja, and Kyle D Weber. 2019. Right-to-Carry Laws and

Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assessment Using Panel Data and a State-Level Synthetic

Control Analysis. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16(2): 198-247.

John Donohue, “Do Guns Reduce Crime?” debate on National Public Radio, November 5, 2008 (broadcast available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96409853).

Kovandzic, Tomislav V, Thomas B Marvell, and Lynne M Vieraitis. 2005. The Impact

of ‘Shall-Issue’ Concealed Handgun Laws on Violent Crime Rates: Evidence from Panel Data

for Large Urban Cities. Homicide Studies, 9(4): 292-323.

Lott, John R., “More Guns, Less Crime,” University of Chicago Press, third edition (2010).

Response from Dr. John Lott.

I don’t know how many times over the last couple of decades I have repeatedly pointed out in my research that you simply can’t assume that all right-to-carry laws are the same. There are huge differences in the percent of the adult population with permits and differences in who get permits (e.g., is it wealthy whites who live in the suburbs and don’t face much of a risk from crime or poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas who are at great risk from crime). Those differences arise from huge differences in the cost of getting permits. At the very least one has to take into account that the longer the permitting rules are in effect, the more permits tend to be issued. But looking at the simple before and after averages is often very misleading. Here is a discussion from the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime (2000) that Donohue, Cai, Bondy, and Cook cite but apparently have not read.



If you use a simple dummy variable to measure the impact of the law, you are implicitly assuming that the crime rate was flat at a certain level before the law and again flat at the same or different level afterward. Yet, Donohue’s own past work has confirmed this is not the pattern we observe so it is puzzling why he would now use a simple dummy variable without any discussion of why he did that. Donohue’s paper with Ian Ayres in the 2003 Stanford Law Review is one of many examples of him accounting for different before and after law trends.

Here is a similar discussion from the first edition of MGLC. At the very least, researchers can’t simply use a dummy variable to measure the impact of right-to-carry laws.



Here is the beginning of one of the sections in the first edition where I explicitly go through the differences across places. Much more of a discussion and attempts to properly address this issue in differences in permit fees, training requirements, places where guns were banned (gun-free zones), and how long the law had been in effect were accounted for in the second edition.


Finally, Donohue, Cai, Bondy, and Cook seem oblivious to the fact that I had already looked at city-level data in addition to examining county and state-level data. Here is a discussion from the Second edition of More Guns, Less Crime. The reader will note that even here I used before and after law trends.

So You Say You Want a Revolution? You Can Count Me Out

 Jonathan Turley provides perspective on our troubled times.

Here is his column in the Hill.

JT points out "rage" as the problem - and there is plenty of that. What strikes me as the key elements are that thinking has succumbed to emoting and raw confidence has replaced understanding.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

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Below is my column in the Hill on overheated rhetoric of revolution that seems to have overtaken our public discourse, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. This week, Arizona Democrats pushed a “F–k the Fourth Event” and told people to “Bring comfortable shoes, water, lawn chairs, posters, and your anger.” It appears that the open secret is that we are “always angry” in the new Hulk-like smash politics.

Here is the column:

“That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” Those words from the Hulk in “The Avengers” came to mind as liberals turned on the Supreme Court this week, calling for everything from impeaching or “disciplining” justices to scrapping the entire court. That included actor Mark Ruffalo, who plays the film-version Hulk, declaring that the court is “a political tool for the extremist, fascist faction of the GOP” and “we must revolt.”

On this July 4 weekend, revolution again seems to be in the air. Even before the recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade, congressional Democrats like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) warned the Supreme Court to reaffirm Roe or face a “revolution.”

After major rulings on gun rights, abortion and climate change, Democratic leaders and pundits declared the court to be “illegitimate.” Democratic leaders seem to have time-warped back to the time before Marbury v. Madison in 1803, when the court ruled that it must be the final arbiter of what the law means.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said the court “defies the will of the people.” Reporter John Haltiwanger insisted that “the court is clearly not representative of the U.S. public. It’s supposed to be the people’s court.”

In reality, the court was never meant to be that. It was meant to be the Constitution’s court, designed to be able to stand against everyone and everything but the Constitution. In a system designed to protect the minority, the court (like the Constitution) is counter-majoritarian in much of what it does.

Until Marbury, there was an argument that Congress, not the court, could be the final arbiter of what the law says. That may have been the assumption of many, given our prior English system which allowed Parliament to interpret laws. That debate ended in 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall declared that, while silent on this point, the intent of the Framers was to make the court the ultimate, final authority of what the law means and demands.

There were good-faith reasons to challenge Marshall at the time. After the decision, he was burned in effigy by those who saw the case as changing the Constitution without an amendment, just 15 years after its ratification.

However, putting aside the basis for the decision, it helped stabilize our system. We need a body to resolve such questions with finality and authority. As Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in a 1953 Supreme Court decision, “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”

Soon after Marbury was handed down, a new argument emerged that seems to be a Democratic talking point today. Some early Americans declared they would simply defy what the court ruled after Marbury. For example, after the court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia in favor of the Cherokee tribe, Georgia refused to obey the court; President Andrew Jackson allegedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Today, we hear the same calls for defiance. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that it “has become necessary to dissolve” the Supreme Court, adding: “The first step is for a state to ignore this ruling. You’re a court? Why and how do [you] think you can enforce your rulings?”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as usual put it succinctly by yelling in front of the court: “The hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.

These are the voices of an earlier age, returned like a dormant virus to our body politic. It has been a particularly virulent strain in the Democratic Party from Thomas Jefferson (who is viewed as a precursor to the party and opposed Marshall) to Jackson (who challenged the authority of the court) to Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sought to pack the Court. For all of the chest-pounding after Marbury, federal and state governments both yielded to the court’s authority. In some ways, it is the most impressive aspect of our constitutional system. Without an army or police force (beyond a relatively small number of marshals), the Supreme Court has compelled compliance with the support of the public. Americans believe in the rule of law; it is in our political DNA. As a people, we are often bitterly divided but we have always recognized the court’s legitimacy and authority.

If Olbermann is channeling Andrew Jackson, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems lately to be channeling Che Guevara. She previously questioned the court’s value, asking: “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” After the Dobbs decision, she led protesters in Washington chanting “Illegitimate!” while adding, “We have to fill the streets. Right now, elections are not enough.”

Even as armchair revolutionaries, these politicians are not very convincing. It is the rage, not the revolution, that interests them. We are becoming addicted to rage, and these leaders traffic in rage to a junkie nation.

Rage can compel action, but rarely reason. Yet President Biden clearly wants to harness his party’s anger. He has long been viewed as a politician guided more by polls than principle; that is how he could express disgust over limits on abortion despite previously maintaining as a senator that abortion is “not a right but a tragedy.”

Politicians have the luxury of just following polls — but courts do not.

Biden’s “Hulk smash” moment is evident in his reckless call to end the Senate filibuster in order to enact a federal right to abortion. Seeing shifting polls, Biden has dropped his opposition to eliminating the filibuster despite once calling such a move “disastrous” for the country. He is now intent on making that disaster a reality.

It is truly the greatest example of rage over reason. The current composition of the court is due to Democrats killing the filibuster rule on Supreme Court nominations despite warnings that it would cost Democrats dearly. When they lost the Senate majority, it cost them not just three seats on the court but the Roe ruling, too.

Now, with predictions of Democrats losing both houses, Biden is calling to end the legislative filibuster. It is akin to the Titanic’s captain spotting the iceberg and immediately ordering the lifeboats to be burned.

Such politics is only likely to increase as we approach the midterms. The current push to pack, change or dispense with the court would have even greater costs. And the greatest cost will be the erosion of faith in our system among many voters. The Constitution is an article of faith that has withstood the tests of wars, economic crises and social upheaval. It was written not only for the worst of times, but in the worst of times — and ratified over the very same objections being raised by politicians and pundits today. It requires us to take a leap of faith, not just in our system but in each other.

That is why some of us take to heart the Beatles‘ lyrics: “So you say you want a revolution … you can count me out.”