From Jonathan Turley.
JT is on target.
Politicians on both sides are guilty of attempts to restrict freedom. However, the Left seems better at it, currently, hence is the most dangerous.
Liberals are Losing their Minds over Elon Musk
Below is my column in The Hill on the Musk mania now sweeping over the media with pundits and politicians unleashing unhinged attacks on the billionaire. In an Age of Rage, Musk is now eclipsing Donald Trump as Public Enemy No. 1. It began with his stance against censorship.
Here is the column:
This week, Elton John publicly renounced the Rocket Man — no, not the 1972 song, but Elon Musk, whom he called an “a**hole” in an awards ceremony.
Sir Elton, 77, is only the latest among celebrities and pundits to denounce Musk for his support of former president Donald Trump and his opposition to censorship. Musk-mania is so overwhelming that some are calling for his arrest, deportation and debarment from federal contracts.
This week, the California Coastal Commission rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It is not because the military agency did not need the launches. It was not because the nation and the community would not benefit from them. Rather, it was reportedly because, according to one commissioner, Musk has “aggressively injected himself into the presidential race.”
By a 6-4 vote, the California Coastal Commission rejected the military’s plan to let SpaceX launch up to 50 rockets per year from the base in Santa Barbara County.
Musk’s SpaceX is becoming a critical part of national security programs. It will even be launching a rescue mission for two astronauts stranded in space. The advances of SpaceX under Musk are legendary. The Air Force wanted to waive the requirement for separate permits for SpaceX in carrying out these critical missions.
To the disappointment of many, SpaceX is now valued at over $200 billion and just signed a new $1 billion contract with NASA. Yet neither the national security value nor the demands for SpaceX services appear to hold much interest for officials like Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom): “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”
Newsom is the former political director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 569. It did not seem to matter to her that increased launches meant more work for electrical workers and others. Rather, it’s all about politics.
Commission Chair Caryl Hart added “here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that was just described by Commissioner Newsom that I find to be very disturbing.”
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how Musk became persona non grata when he bought Twitter and announced that he was dismantling the company’s massive censorship apparatus.
He then outraged many on the left by releasing the Twitter Files, showing the extensive coordination of the company with the government in a censorship system described by a federal court as “Orwellian.”
After the purchase, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called upon Europeans to force Musk to censor her fellow Americans under the notorious Digital Services Act. Clinton has even suggested the arrest of those responsible for views that she considers disinformation.
Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee called for Musk’s arrest and said that, as a condition of getting government contracts, officials should “require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.”
Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wants Musk arrested for simply refusing to censor other people.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called for Musk to be deported and all federal contracts cancelled with this company. As with many in the “Save Democracy” movement, Olbermann was unconcerned with the denial of free speech or constitutional protections. “If we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity. Get Elon Musk the F out of our country and do it now.”
Of course, none of these figures are even slightly bothered about other business leaders with political opinions, so long as, like McNamee, they are supporting Harris or at least denouncing Trump. Musk has failed to yield to a movement infamous for cancel campaigns and coercion. The usual alliance of media, academia, government and corporate forces hit Musk, his companies and even advertisers on X.
Other corporate officials collapsed like a house of cards to demands for censorship — see, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Musk, in contrast, responded by courageously releasing the Twitter Files and exposing the largest censorship system in our history.
That is why I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech. The intense hatred for Musk is due to the fact that he was the immovable object in the path of their formerly unstoppable force.
The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.
Their frustration became anger, which became rage. As Elton John put it in “Rocket Man,” he was supposed to be “burning out his fuse up here alone.”
Yet, here he remains.
George Bernard Shaw once said “a reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable people.”
With all of his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, Elon Musk just might be that brilliantly unreasonable person.
Monday, October 14, 2024
Saturday, October 12, 2024
The Con in Consensus
From Ross McKitrick.
RM is a Professor of Economics and is extremely knowledgeable about statistics.
A little old, but still relevant.
Here is the link to his article in the Financial Post.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/con-in-consensus.pdf
RM is a Professor of Economics and is extremely knowledgeable about statistics.
A little old, but still relevant.
Here is the link to his article in the Financial Post.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/con-in-consensus.pdf
Saturday, October 05, 2024
On Marxism
Phillip Magness at iea.org.uk.
PM is on target. Marxism does not build – it destroys.
PM is on target. Marxism does not build – it destroys.
Here is the link.
Here are some excerpts.
------------------------------
Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.
The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
-----
When mainstream economists first noticed Marx’s work in the years following his death, they made mincemeat of his doctrines over their aforementioned contradictions. Alfred Marshall, in his 1890 textbook, described Capital as an exercise in circular reasoning “shrouded in mysterious Hegelian phrases.” When John Maynard Keynes assessed Marx’s works in 1925, he dismissed Capital as “an obsolete economic textbook […] without interest or application for the modern world.”
The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
-----
When mainstream economists first noticed Marx’s work in the years following his death, they made mincemeat of his doctrines over their aforementioned contradictions. Alfred Marshall, in his 1890 textbook, described Capital as an exercise in circular reasoning “shrouded in mysterious Hegelian phrases.” When John Maynard Keynes assessed Marx’s works in 1925, he dismissed Capital as “an obsolete economic textbook […] without interest or application for the modern world.”
Defensive gun uses by people legally carrying guns: Here are 35 cases dur-ing June 2024
From John Lott at the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Here is the link.
https://crimeresearch.org/2024/09/defensive-gun-uses-by-people-legally-carrying-guns-35-cases-during-june-2024/
Here is the link.
https://crimeresearch.org/2024/09/defensive-gun-uses-by-people-legally-carrying-guns-35-cases-during-june-2024/
Crime was up in 2023, not down as the FBI claims
John Lott at the New York Post.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
--------------------------
This week President Biden once again took a victory lap on crime, trumpeting preliminary FBI data on trends in 2024.
“Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office,” he bragged in an official statement.
Yet, with crime a central issue in this year’s election, he and the mainstream media have carefully ignored evidence that the FBI may be fudging its numbers — much like the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the Biden-Harris administration.
Last month, new FBI data showed that reported serious violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023.
But at the same time — and much more quietly — the FBI revised its earlier data for 2022, turning a reported decrease into a worrisome increase in violent crime.
Last year, the media trumpeted the FBI’s claim that reported violent crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%.
But now the FBI admits that violent crime rose in 2022 instead, by 4.5% — off by 6.6 percentage points.
These updated numbers resulted in a net increase in 2022 over 2021 of 80,029 violent crimes: 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.
It’s a concerning change regarding a highly politicized topic. A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation.
For a couple of years now, the mainstream media has been running headlines such as this from NBC News: “Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong.”
USA Today’s take on the 2023 FBI crime data was typical: “Violent crime dropped for second straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
Yet don’t expect the media to let people know that all the headlines over the last year were wrong — or that 2022’s increase was greater than the reported 2023 drop.
Perhaps the FBI’s newest numbers won’t be revised upward next year, after the election has safely passed.
But even if we take them at face value, it’s important to distinguish reported crime from total crime.
We have known for decades that most crimes aren’t reported to the police. That’s why the US Department of Justice provides a measure of total crime, which includes both reported and unreported crime.
And the results of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, released in mid-September, tell a very different story.
Since victims don’t report most crimes, the NCVS interviews 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences.
Instead of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in serious violent crime, the NCVS found a 4.1% increase in violent crime victimization from 2022 to 2023.
While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by an incredible 55.4%. Rapes were up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during his term.
The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.
We compare 2023 rates with 2019’s pre-COVID violent crime rates, the FBI’s new data show virtually no improvement — just a 0.2% drop — while the NCVS shows a 19% increase in that time period.
Much has been made of the recent decline in murder rates. But while murder rates fell by 16.2% from 2020 to 2023, they still exceed pre-COVID levels by a significant 9.6%.
The mainstream media’s treatment of these statistics has been shameful.
Even after the NCVS data was released and former President Donald Trump discussed them in a press conference, most outlets only noted the new numbers in “fact checks” that sought to dismiss their importance.
The bottom line: Trump is correct that violent crime has increased significantly during the Biden-Harris administration.
He has also been correct to point out that many police departments no longer report their data to the FBI.
In 2023, 21% of departments including large cities like New York and Los Angeles, sent no crime figures to the FBI. Another 24% of police departments only partially reported crime data in 2022, the last year available.
The mainstream media refuses to mention any data that doesn’t fit their narrative.
But Americans in many parts of the country see the effects of rising crime every day, from locked-up products in the local Walgreens to constant news about assaults in the subway.
We know that our lives were not like this a few years ago.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
--------------------------
This week President Biden once again took a victory lap on crime, trumpeting preliminary FBI data on trends in 2024.
“Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office,” he bragged in an official statement.
Yet, with crime a central issue in this year’s election, he and the mainstream media have carefully ignored evidence that the FBI may be fudging its numbers — much like the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the Biden-Harris administration.
Last month, new FBI data showed that reported serious violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023.
But at the same time — and much more quietly — the FBI revised its earlier data for 2022, turning a reported decrease into a worrisome increase in violent crime.
Last year, the media trumpeted the FBI’s claim that reported violent crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%.
But now the FBI admits that violent crime rose in 2022 instead, by 4.5% — off by 6.6 percentage points.
These updated numbers resulted in a net increase in 2022 over 2021 of 80,029 violent crimes: 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.
It’s a concerning change regarding a highly politicized topic. A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation.
For a couple of years now, the mainstream media has been running headlines such as this from NBC News: “Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong.”
USA Today’s take on the 2023 FBI crime data was typical: “Violent crime dropped for second straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
Yet don’t expect the media to let people know that all the headlines over the last year were wrong — or that 2022’s increase was greater than the reported 2023 drop.
Perhaps the FBI’s newest numbers won’t be revised upward next year, after the election has safely passed.
But even if we take them at face value, it’s important to distinguish reported crime from total crime.
We have known for decades that most crimes aren’t reported to the police. That’s why the US Department of Justice provides a measure of total crime, which includes both reported and unreported crime.
And the results of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, released in mid-September, tell a very different story.
Since victims don’t report most crimes, the NCVS interviews 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences.
Instead of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in serious violent crime, the NCVS found a 4.1% increase in violent crime victimization from 2022 to 2023.
While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by an incredible 55.4%. Rapes were up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during his term.
The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.
We compare 2023 rates with 2019’s pre-COVID violent crime rates, the FBI’s new data show virtually no improvement — just a 0.2% drop — while the NCVS shows a 19% increase in that time period.
Much has been made of the recent decline in murder rates. But while murder rates fell by 16.2% from 2020 to 2023, they still exceed pre-COVID levels by a significant 9.6%.
The mainstream media’s treatment of these statistics has been shameful.
Even after the NCVS data was released and former President Donald Trump discussed them in a press conference, most outlets only noted the new numbers in “fact checks” that sought to dismiss their importance.
The bottom line: Trump is correct that violent crime has increased significantly during the Biden-Harris administration.
He has also been correct to point out that many police departments no longer report their data to the FBI.
In 2023, 21% of departments including large cities like New York and Los Angeles, sent no crime figures to the FBI. Another 24% of police departments only partially reported crime data in 2022, the last year available.
The mainstream media refuses to mention any data that doesn’t fit their narrative.
But Americans in many parts of the country see the effects of rising crime every day, from locked-up products in the local Walgreens to constant news about assaults in the subway.
We know that our lives were not like this a few years ago.
Friday, October 04, 2024
The most anti-free speech ticket in history
Jonathan Turley is on target.
The road to tyranny is paved with restrictions on free speech.
-----------------------
“Schencking” Free Speech: Walz Makes the Case for the Most Anti-Free Speech Ticket in History
Below is my column in USA Today on the most chilling moment from the Vance-Walz debate when the Democratic nominee showed why he is part of the dream ticket for the anti-free speech movement.
Here is the column:
In the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm.
His opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate.
Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater.
It is the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement. It also is fundamentally wrong.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the justice’s line from his opinion in Schenck v. United States. Holmes wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
‘Fire in a theater’ case supported government censorship
As I discuss in the book, the line was largely lifted from a brief in an earlier free speech case. It has since become the rationale for politicians and pundits seeking to curtail free speech in America.
For example, when I testified last year before Congress against a censorship system that has been described by one federal court as “similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., interjected with the fire-in-a-theater question to say such censorship is needed and constitutional. In other words, the internet is now a huge crowded theater and those with opposing views are shouting fire.
Goldman and Walz both cited a case in which socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were arrested and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Their “crime” was to pass out flyers in opposition to the military draft during World War I.
Schenck and Baer called on their fellow citizens not to “submit to intimidation” and to “assert your rights.” They argued, “If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain.” They also described the military draft as “involuntary servitude.”
Holmes used his “fire in a theater” line to justify the abusive conviction and incarceration. At the House hearing, when I was trying to explain that the justice later walked away from the line and Schenck was effectively overturned in 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio, Goldman cut me off and said, “We don’t need a law class here.”
In the vice presidential debate, Walz showed that he and other Democratic leaders most certainly do need a class in First Amendment law.
As I have said, the Biden-Harris administration has proved to be the most anti-free speech administration in two centuries. You have to go back to John Adams’ administration to find the equal of this administration.
Harris has been an outspoken champion of censorship in an administration that supports targeting disinformation, misinformation and “malinformation.” That last category was defined by the Biden administration as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In the debate, Walz also returned to his favorite dismissal of censorship objections by saying that it is all just inflammatory rhetoric.
Recently, Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
That is entirely untrue and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the right called “indispensable” by the Supreme Court. Even after some of us condemned his claim as ironically dangerous disinformation, Walz continues to repeat it.
Free speech advocates view Harris as a threat
This is why, for the free speech community, the prospect of a Harris-Walz administration is chilling. Where President Joe Biden was viewed as supporting censorship out of political opportunism, Harris and Walz are viewed as true believers.
We are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. We have never before faced the current alliance of government, corporate, academic and media forces aligned against free speech. A Harris-Walz administration with a supportive Congress could make this right entirely dispensable.
Others are laying the groundwork for precisely that moment. University of Michigan Law School professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has said that free speech “can also be our Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote a New York Times op-ed with the headline, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” He told readers that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
Walz said in the debate that Vice President Harris is promoting the “politics of joy.” Indeed, the wrong people are perfectly ecstatic. Harris and Walz are the dream team for the anti-free speech movement.
The road to tyranny is paved with restrictions on free speech.
-----------------------
“Schencking” Free Speech: Walz Makes the Case for the Most Anti-Free Speech Ticket in History
Below is my column in USA Today on the most chilling moment from the Vance-Walz debate when the Democratic nominee showed why he is part of the dream ticket for the anti-free speech movement.
Here is the column:
In the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm.
His opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate.
Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater.
It is the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement. It also is fundamentally wrong.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the justice’s line from his opinion in Schenck v. United States. Holmes wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
‘Fire in a theater’ case supported government censorship
As I discuss in the book, the line was largely lifted from a brief in an earlier free speech case. It has since become the rationale for politicians and pundits seeking to curtail free speech in America.
For example, when I testified last year before Congress against a censorship system that has been described by one federal court as “similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., interjected with the fire-in-a-theater question to say such censorship is needed and constitutional. In other words, the internet is now a huge crowded theater and those with opposing views are shouting fire.
Goldman and Walz both cited a case in which socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were arrested and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Their “crime” was to pass out flyers in opposition to the military draft during World War I.
Schenck and Baer called on their fellow citizens not to “submit to intimidation” and to “assert your rights.” They argued, “If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain.” They also described the military draft as “involuntary servitude.”
Holmes used his “fire in a theater” line to justify the abusive conviction and incarceration. At the House hearing, when I was trying to explain that the justice later walked away from the line and Schenck was effectively overturned in 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio, Goldman cut me off and said, “We don’t need a law class here.”
In the vice presidential debate, Walz showed that he and other Democratic leaders most certainly do need a class in First Amendment law.
As I have said, the Biden-Harris administration has proved to be the most anti-free speech administration in two centuries. You have to go back to John Adams’ administration to find the equal of this administration.
Harris has been an outspoken champion of censorship in an administration that supports targeting disinformation, misinformation and “malinformation.” That last category was defined by the Biden administration as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In the debate, Walz also returned to his favorite dismissal of censorship objections by saying that it is all just inflammatory rhetoric.
Recently, Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
That is entirely untrue and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the right called “indispensable” by the Supreme Court. Even after some of us condemned his claim as ironically dangerous disinformation, Walz continues to repeat it.
Free speech advocates view Harris as a threat
This is why, for the free speech community, the prospect of a Harris-Walz administration is chilling. Where President Joe Biden was viewed as supporting censorship out of political opportunism, Harris and Walz are viewed as true believers.
We are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. We have never before faced the current alliance of government, corporate, academic and media forces aligned against free speech. A Harris-Walz administration with a supportive Congress could make this right entirely dispensable.
Others are laying the groundwork for precisely that moment. University of Michigan Law School professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has said that free speech “can also be our Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote a New York Times op-ed with the headline, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” He told readers that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
Walz said in the debate that Vice President Harris is promoting the “politics of joy.” Indeed, the wrong people are perfectly ecstatic. Harris and Walz are the dream team for the anti-free speech movement.
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