Commercial suborbital space flights begin

 From aviationweek.com

Virgin Galactic Sets First Commercial Flight For June 27-30

Virgin Galactic is aiming to begin commercial suborbital spaceflight services between June 27 and 30, the company said on June 15.

Virgin Galactic will be flying three researchers and experiments from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Center of Italy, which are paying an undisclosed sum for the mission aboard the VSS Unity.

Unity will be carried to an altitude of about 40,000 ft. by the White Knight Two carrier aircraft, which will take off from Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Upon release, Unity’s hybrid rocket motor will ignite to catapult the spaceship some 54 mi. above Earth. A Virgin Galactic employee and two Virgin Galaxy pilots will also be aboard.

The mission, known as Galactic 01, will be followed by Galactic 02 in early August , the company said. Monthly flights will begin after that.

How cities can self-destruct

 Here is a link to a short paper about how cities can self-destruct.

How Ideology Corrupts Science on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

 Sapir and Wright in the Wall Street Journal

It's really about how ideology combined with intolerance and a disrespect for freedom is destroying our civilization.

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A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of a Florida law that prohibits the administration of sex-change procedures on children under 18. The opinion, by Judge Robert L. Hinkle, leans heavily on medical and scientific rationales to argue that it is unconstitutional to ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on teenagers who feel alienated from their bodies.

Twenty states maintain age restrictions on sex-change procedures, and the problem they face is explaining to judges that American medical associations aren’t following the best available evidence. This is known to European health authorities and has been reported in such prestigious publications as the British Medical Journal. But American judges need some way to evaluate conflicting scientific authorities—especially as institutions responsible for ensuring that medical professionals have access to high-quality research aren’t functioning as they should.

A case in point: Springer, an academic publishing giant, has decided to retract an article that appeared last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The retraction is expected to take effect June 12.

The article’s authors are listed as Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz. Mr. Bailey is a well-respected scientist, with dozens of publications to his name. The other author writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of her daughter, who suffers from gender dysphoria.

Their new paper is based on survey responses from more than 1,600 parents who reported that their children, who were previously comfortable in their bodies, suddenly declared a transgender identity after extensive exposure to social media and peer influence. Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Diaz’s sin was to analyze rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. Gender activists hate any suggestion that transgender identities are anything but innate and immutable. Even mentioning the possibility that trans identity is socially influenced or a phase threatens their claims that children can know early in life they have a permanent transgender identity and therefore that they should have broad access to permanent body-modifying and sterilizing procedures.

Within days of publication, a group of activists wrote a public letter condemning the article and calling for the termination of the journal’s editor. Among the letter’s signatories is Marci Bowers, a prominent genital surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy organization that promotes sex changes for minors.

Nearly 2,000 researchers and academics signed a counter letter in support of the article. Springer nonetheless decided to retract the paper without disciplining its editor. Springer initially asserted that the study needed approval from an institutional review board. But it quickly abandoned that rationale, which was false.

The publisher now maintains that the retraction is due to improper participant consent. While the respondents consented to the publication of the survey’s results, Springer insists they didn’t specifically agree to publication in a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. That’s a strange and retrospective requirement, especially considering that Springer and other major publishers have published thousands of survey papers without this type of consent.

Anyone familiar with the controversy over transgender medicine knows what is going on. Activists put pressure on Springer to retract an article with conclusions they didn’t like, and Springer caved in. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these capitulations in academia, media and the corporate world, but it is especially disturbing to see in a respected medical journal.

Rather than appreciate the long-term risk to itself and the scientific community from doing the bidding of activists, Springer has instead agreed to evaluate and retract all survey papers that lack the newly required consent. If Springer follows through on its promise, hundreds of authors who chose to publish in Springer’s journals may have their research retracted.

The publications that support what they call “gender-affirming care” rely heavily on surveys. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, for instance, has generated several influential papers. As it happens, the USTS didn’t inform participants that their answers would be published in peer-reviewed journals.

This kind of double standard runs through gender-medicine research. Papers advocating “gender transition” are readily accepted by leading scientific journals despite having grave methodological flaws and biases. Work that questions gender-transition orthodoxy stands almost no chance of being published in the best-known journals. Every now and then, an errant research paper slips past the censors, but should it prove significant enough to threaten the settled science narrative, retribution is swift and merciless. The researcher Lisa Littman learned this lesson in 2018, when she was widely attacked after publishing on the topic. Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz are learning it now.

The idea is to manufacture the appearance of scientific consensus where there is none. The pseudo-consensus then allows such American medical associations as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to recommend body-altering procedures for children.

While many Americans have heard news about the wave of states passing legislation that curbs sex changes for the young, few realize that an equally fierce, and arguably far more important, battle is raging: the battle for the integrity of the scientific process. It is a fight for the ability to have censorship-free scientific debate as a means to advance human knowledge.

Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain-spine interface

 From nature.com.

Here is the abstract.

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A spinal cord injury interrupts the communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that produces walking, leading to paralysis1,2. Here, we restored this communication with a digital bridge between the brain and spinal cord that enabled an individual with chronic tetraplegia to stand and walk naturally in community settings. This brain–spine interface (BSI) consists of fully implanted recording and stimulation systems that establish a direct link between cortical signals3 and the analogue modulation of epidural electrical stimulation targeting the spinal cord regions involved in the production of walking4,5,6. A highly reliable BSI is calibrated within a few minutes. This reliability has remained stable over one year, including during independent use at home. The participant reports that the BSI enables natural control over the movements of his legs to stand, walk, climb stairs and even traverse complex terrains. Moreover, neurorehabilitation supported by the BSI improved neurological recovery. The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off. This digital bridge establishes a framework to restore natural control of movement after paralysis.

Inflation Reduction Act tyranny

 An editorial from the Wall Street Journal is on target.

Your Government at work fostering tyranny.

The WSJ is right. If the Government gets away with this, no business is safe, and if no business is safe neither are you.

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Merck Sues to Stop the IRA’s ‘Extortion’

If an assailant points a gun at your head and threatens to shoot if you don’t hand over your wallet, is that a negotiation? This describes the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug-price scheme, which Merck & Co. claims is “extortion” and unconstitutional in a compelling lawsuit filed Tuesday. Merck v. Becerra may be destined for the Supreme Court.

Congress last year gave the Health and Human Services Department carte blanche authority to fix Medicare drug prices under the guise of a negotiation. But as Merck argues in its lawsuit, the program “involves neither genuine ‘negotiations’ nor real ‘agreements,’” and is all “political Kabuki theater.”

HHS forces companies to provide drugs to the government at its dictated prices. The agency selects drugs to negotiate and then compels manufacturers to sign an “agreement” promising to sell their products at whatever “fair” price Medicare decides. The agency could demand Merck sell its drugs at a 90% loss, and the drug maker couldn’t refuse.

The government essentially makes drug makers an offer they can’t refuse. Manufacturers that don’t participate in the negotiations or reject the government’s prices incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. Companies can’t walk away from the table as they would in a real negotiation.

Merck would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a day in penalties on a single drug after a few months of resisting the government’s demands. Non-compliance would be so ruinous that Congress projected the excise tax would raise no revenue. The excise tax isn’t a real tax. It’s a sword hanging over drug makers to guarantee compliance.

Even in Europe, drug makers can refuse to sell products to national health systems if the price is too low. But as Merck explains, Democrats in Congress wanted “to allow the Government to pretend, as it already has done, that HHS’s prices are not top-down mandates but the product of voluntary ‘agreements’ with companies who concede they are ‘fair.’”

Congress also wanted to avoid an “enormous political backlash if certain medications became unavailable through Medicare,” as Merck puts it. “The Act’s structure is instead driven entirely by perception and avoiding accountability.”

Merck says the Medicare price controls are an unjust taking of property under the Fifth Amendment and violate its speech rights. The government confiscates patented products by requiring drug makers to provide them at steep discounts that are far below their market value or what it costs to develop and produce them.

The lawsuit cites the Supreme Court’s Horne (2015) decision, which held that a Department of Agriculture program requiring raisin farmers to turn over a portion of their crop to the government was a per se taking. So is the IRA’s regime, which similarly compels manufacturers to surrender their drugs without just compensation.

Adding constitutional insult to injury, the IRA launders “its mandates through performative ‘negotiations’ and ‘agreements’” that require “manufacturers to endorse and express the view that they ‘agree’ to HHS-dictated forced prices, and that those prices are ‘fair,’” the lawsuit explains.

“But while the Government can mislead about its machinations, it cannot force those it governs to do the same. Our Constitution does not countenance compelled speech in service of state propaganda,” Merck argues. Touché. The government is also restricting Merck’s speech by prohibiting drug makers from informing the public about what goes on in the sham negotiations.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this year barred manufacturers from disclosing “to the public any information in the initial offer or any subsequent offer by CMS, the ceiling price contained in any offer [or] . . . any information exchanged verbally during the negotiation period.” The government has no compelling justification for this gag order.

The legal implications of this case extend beyond the pharmaceutical market. If Congress can leverage the threat of ruinous penalties to reduce Medicare drug prices, what’s to stop it from doing the same for healthcare provider payments or defense equipment that politicians believe are too costly? At this Hotel California, businesses don’t even get a choice of whether to check in or leave.

Twitter files: FBI assisted Ukraine in targeting Journalists and others for censor-ship

 From Jonathan Turley.

Our Government and much of the Media are untrustworthy.

Both political parties distort (I'm being diplomatic) the truth for their own benefit. But the Democrats appear to be much "better" at it, currently, and have a compliant media supporting them - hence are far more dangerous for now.

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Twitter continues to reveal the extensive censorship system created by government and corporate officials despite continued efforts from the left to drain the company of revenue. (The latest company to cancel Twitter is Ben & Jerry’s which objected to the company’s greater protections for free speech as allowing harmful views to be heard on social media). However, Elon Musk is undeterred and has continued to reduce censorship on the platform while letting the public see what the government has been doing behind the scenes on social media. The latest disclosure is astonishing. The FBI not only targeted individuals that it wanted banned for dissenting views, but it also was enlisted by Ukraine to target its own critics.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has long been criticized for arresting opponents, shutting down opposing parties, and extensive censorship. It was not previously known that the FBI assisted it in the censorship effort, including targeting a number of journalists in America and abroad.

Journalist Aaron Maté reported that the FBI served as an intermediary on these efforts to censor critics.

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”

Previous disclosures have shown an extensive censorship and blacklisting effort. Despite such evidence of direct government censorship efforts, Democratic members continue to oppose attempts to expose the full scope of such government programs and grants. Witnesses who testified about the dangers of such censorship efforts were even denounced as “Putin lovers” and apologists for insurrectionists and racists by leading Democrats.

Even with the targeting of journalists on behalf of a foreign government, most reporters have shrugged and declined to cover this story. It is another example of a de facto state media where journalists support a government by consent rather than coercion.

This would seem a major story on how U.S. citizens are sending tens of billions to Ukraine as Ukraine seeks the censorship of U.S. citizens and others for their criticism or viewpoints.

Twitter has itself been criticized for censorship material under pressure from China. Those are deeply concerning allegations, though it is clear that the level of censorship on the platform has been dramatically reduced with Musk’s removal of much of the corporate censorship infrastructure.

Democrats in Congress are even more open in opposing any investigation into the censorship, particularly after past releases implicated figures like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) in targeting critics. The Democratic leadership has opposed any investigations for years. They have even refused to accept the email evidence. When I testified on the Twitter Files, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) criticized me for offering “legal opinions” without actually working at Twitter. As I have noted, it is like saying that a witness should not discuss the contents of the Pentagon Papers unless he worked at the Pentagon. It was particularly bizarre because I was asked about the content of the Twitter Files. The content — like the content of the Pentagon Papers — are “facts.” The implication of those facts are opinions.

Members like Wasserman Schultz will likely continue to refuse to acknowledge these new emails. However, the public has repeatedly shown in polls that they want transparency on the censorship efforts.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that companies like Facebook have steadfastly refused to be as transparent as Twitter, which is smaller than other social media companies. These other companies likely have equally, if not greater, systems of coordination with the federal government. However, those executives are not allowing the public to know how their companies engaged in censorship by surrogate.

Internet usage and the prospective risk of dementia

 From the Journal of American Geriatrics Society

I suspect that there are flaws in this study - but since I use the internet a lot ....... :-)

Here is a link to the paper.

Here is a summary.

BACKGROUND

Little is known about the long-term cognitive impact of internet usage among older adults. This research characterized the association between various measures of internet usage and dementia.

METHODS

We followed dementia-free adults aged 50-64.9 for a maximum of 17.1 (median = 7.9) years using the Health and Retirement Study. The association between time-to-dementia and baseline internet usage was examined using cause-specific Cox models, adjusting for delayed entry and covariates. We also examined the interaction between internet usage and education, race-ethnicity, sex, and generation. Furthermore, we examined whether the risk of dementia varies by the cumulative period of regular internet usage to see if starting or continuing usage in old age modulates subsequent risk. Finally, we examined the association between the risk of dementia and daily hours of usage. Analyses were conducted from September 2021 to November 2022.

RESULTS

In 18,154 adults, regular internet usage was associated with approximately half the risk of dementia compared to non-regular usage, CHR (cause-specific hazard ratio) = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.46-0.71. The association was maintained after adjustments for self-selection into baseline usage (CHR = 0.54, 95% CI = 0.41-0.72) and signs of cognitive decline at the baseline (CHR = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.46-0.85). The difference in risk between regular and non-regular users did not vary by educational attainment, race-ethnicity, sex, and generation. In addition, additional periods of regular usage were associated with significantly reduced dementia risk, CHR = 0.80, 95% CI = 0.68-0.95. However, estimates for daily hours of usage suggested a U-shaped relationship with dementia incidence. The lowest risk was observed among adults with 0.1-2 h of usage, though estimates were non-significant due to small sample sizes.

CONCLUSIONS

Regular internet users experienced approximately half the risk of dementia than non-regular users. Being a regular internet user for longer periods in late adulthood was associated with delayed cognitive impairment, although further evidence is needed on potential adverse effects of excessive usage.

Why are insurers leaving California?

 Several insurers have decided to stop insuring property in California. The reason given is fire risk. Is this plausible?

 Roughly, insurance replaces an uncertain and potentially large loss with an insurance premium that approximates the expected loss. That makes sense for risk averse people, for whom losses hurt more than gains feel good – no matter the magnitude of the risk. It also makes sense for an insurer if it can charge a little more than the expected loss and sell enough insurance so that its losses approximate the expected loss.

 So, why would insurers want to leave California? Here are some possible reasons and perspectives.

 1.      There are not enough independent risks to insure for the insurer to be confident that its average loss will approximate the expected loss.

 There are probably enough risks to insure in California, even though fires can cover large areas – after all, not much of California burns every year. Moreover, California fires can be lumped in with, for example, nationwide fires, making possible more accurate risk computations.

 2.      The insurer does not know the expected loss.

 The true expected loss is unknown. It can be approximated if there are enough past events of the same nature so that their frequency distribution can be taken as a good indication of their true probability distribution. This may not be true.

Changes in government regulations and policy, and where property is developed can muddy the future in relation to the past.

 The expected loss is computed from a sample of relevant events.

relevant” may not be “relevant” if the properties actually insured are not a random sample from the same population of events. Consider what might happen once the insurer sets its premium. Property owners who have a reason to think that their expected loss materially exceeds (is materially less than) the insurer’s estimate will buy (not buy) insurance. This gaming of insurers by buyers can cause insurers to lose money.

 3.      The insurer is not able to charge the expected loss plus a premium.

 Governments often regulate insurers in a way that prevents them from setting premiums high enough to be profitable.

Woman shoots crowbar wielding attacker in Philadelphia

Rob Morse at ammoland.com

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Violent crime happens in all kinds of circumstances. It was about 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon when a 27-year-old woman was stopped in traffic. Traffic in downtown Philadelphia is never much fun, but things were about to take a turn from bad to worse. A stranger ran up to her car and smashed her back passenger side window with a crowbar. Fortunately, this driver was armed.

Without the side window in the car, the attacker now had a means to quickly enter the back seat and attack the driver from behind. The crowbar was a dangerous impact weapon, particularly for a victim sitting in the front seat and unable to raise her arms to protect herself or to escape the seatbelt and flee easily.

This driver had a weapon of her own. She owned a gun. She had her permit to carry a loaded and concealed firearm in public. She was carrying her firearm with her, and it was in a location where she could grab it quickly. The driver shot her attacker one time. Before she could shoot again, the attacker turned and ran. The armed defender stopped shooting. She saw that the attacker ran back to a waiting car and then drove off. The armed defender decided that she wasn’t safe in the middle of traffic, so she drove away as well.

Our defender stopped at her relative’s house nearby. She called 911 and asked for help. When the police arrived, she showed them her ID and her carry permit. She also showed the officers the shattered glass inside her car and the crowbar sitting on the back seat. The police found one shell casing from the defender’s firearm inside the car. The driver gave the police a brief statement that described what happened to her.

Officers found the attacker with his car at a nearby intersection. The female accomplice who was driving with him ran from the scene. EMTs took the attacker to a nearby hospital with a single gunshot wound to the groin.

The female defender was not charged with a crime.

As usual, there are additional things we want to know that isn’t included in the news reports or the police statements. How was the defender carrying her firearm in the car, and how did she turn to defend herself?

What many new gun owners don’t know, and many concealed carriers forget, is that your car is considered an occupied dwelling. If you’re where you have a right to drive, then a stranger entering your car is legally considered as if the stranger entered your home. In this case, it was a forceful entry. The driver had every right to defend herself until the attacker was no longer a threat. Know your state laws, so you know when and where you can defend yourself.

The police called this a “road rage” incident, but the second occupant in the attacker’s car ran from the scene. The police didn’t name the attacker, so we can’t search to see if he had a criminal record. This incident could have been a foiled carjacking. The attacker was a 22-year-old male.

Defending yourself while seated in your car is an advanced skill. It is hard to get your hand on your firearm while you’re wearing a seatbelt. From the seated position, it is hard to present the firearm from a hip or appendix holster without pointing the gun at your own legs. It is hard to swing the muzzle onto a target behind you without sweeping a passenger sitting next to you. Try this in your garage with a blue gun to see how well this works for you.

What should you do if you saw this attack on the car next to you? Would you stay and be an armed defender, stay and be a witness, or drive away and call 911 to report what you saw? There is no one right answer. I’d drive away if I had young passengers in the car with me. I have more options if I had armed friends riding next to me.
This defender was armed so that she could defend herself in seconds. Take the time now to see what you might do.

This story is one of many that go under-reported by the mainstream media because it shows a positive image of a law-abiding gun owner defending their life and their family. It is our responsibility at AmmoLand to report these stories to you. While we will continue to report these stories, groups like the Crime Prevention Research Center, led by Dr. John Lott, are fastidious in studying the use of firearms for self-defense. Stay up to date with all news on self-defense by following CPRC and AmmoLand News.

Is there a future for free speech in the US?

 From Jonathan Turley.

As usual, JT is on target.

The failure of many people to understand and value freedom - including free speech - is a tribute to the educational system and superior intellect it has inculcated.

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“Your Speech is Violence”: How the Mob is Using a New Mantra to Justify Campus Violence

Below is my column in The Hill on the increasing justification of violence by the left on our campuses by declaring speech itself “violence.” It is part of the license of our age of rage for many who want to silence opposing viewpoints. There is, however, a way to end this anti-free speech movement sweeping through higher education.

Here is the column:

“Silence is violence.” When those words became a popular mantra years ago on college campuses, I wrote that the anti-free speech movement was moving toward compelled speech while declaring dissenting views to be harmful.

Today, it isn’t just silence that is considered violence on college campuses. It is also speech, as both faculty and students are actively shutting down opposing views on subjects ranging from abortion to climate change to transgender issues.

Recently, many people were shocked by a videotape of Hunter College professor Shellyne Rodríguez trashing a pro-life student display in New York. Most were focused on her profanity and vandalism, but there were familiar phrases that appeared in her diatribe to the clearly shocked students.

Before trashing the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”

The videotape revealed one other thing. At Hunter College, and at other colleges, it seems that trashing a pro-life student display and abusing pro-life students is not considered a firing offense. Hunter College refused to fire Rodríguez.

The PSC Graduate Center, the labor organization of graduate and professional schools at the City University of New York, supported that decision and said Rodríguez was “justified” in trashing the display, which the organization described as “dangerously false propaganda” and “disinformation.”

Rodríguez later put a machete to the neck of a reporter, threatened to chop him up and then chased a news crew down a street with the machete in hand. Somewhere between the machete to the neck and chasing the reporters down the street, Hunter College finally decided that Rodríguez had to go.

Rodríguez denounced the school for having “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” She explained that her firing was just a continuation of “attacks on women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.”

The redefinition of opposing views as “violence” is a favorite excuse for violent groups like antifa, which continue to physically assault speakers with pro-life and other disfavored views. As explained by Rutgers Professor Mark Bray in his “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” the group believes that “‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”

As one antifa member explained, free speech is a “nonargument…you have the right to speak but you also have the right to be shut up.”

When people criticized antifa for its violent philosophy, MSNBC’s Joy Reid responded to the critics that “you might be the fascist.”

Faculty members have followed this sense of license to silence others. Former CUNY law dean Mary Lu Bilek even insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech was free speech. (Hunter is part of the CUNY system.)

The same week as the Rodríguez attack at the State University of New York at Albany, sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then allegedly resisted arrest.

Just last week, the Pride Office website at the University of Colorado (Boulder) declared that misgendering people can be considered an “act of violence.”

This week, University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers declared that some of those boycotting the store Target over its line of Pride Month clothing were engaging in “literal terrorism.” (He insists that he was referring to those confronting Target employees.)

Faculty have also justified attacks on pro-life figures. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, feminist studies associate professor Mireille Miller-Young physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

She pleaded guilty to criminal assault, but the university refused to fire her. Instead, some faculty and students defended her, including claiming that pro-life displays constitute terrorism. The University of Oregon later honored Miller-Young as a model for women advocates.

Likewise, at Fresno State University, public health professor Dr. Gregory Thatcher recruited students to destroy pro-life messages.

Other faculty have called for or countenanced violence against Republicans and conservatives. Professors have shouted down speakers, destroyed property, participated in riots and verbally attacked students.

University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis defended the murder of a conservative protester and said he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. He was later elevated to the position of director of graduate studies of history.

As faculty commit or support violence, students are assured that others are the violent ones. Recently, at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Kirsten Bradbury tested her students on psychology by asking them “which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse?” Of course, the answer was wealthy white men.

The lesson took with students. A recent poll shows that 41 percent of college students now believe violence is justified to fight hate speech. At Cornell, a conservative speaker was shouted down, met with the common mantra that “your words are violence.” At Case Western, the student newspaper editorialized against university recognition of a pro-life group because its pro-life views are “inherently violent” and “a danger to the student body.” At Wellesley, student editors declared that it was time to shut down conservative speakers and that “hostility may be warranted.” They added, “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.”

Those views did not spontaneously appear in the minds of these students. At one time, tolerance for free speech was the very touchstone of higher education and a common article of faith for students. These students are the product of years of being told that free speech is dangerous and harmful if left unregulated. From elementary school to college, they were taught that they did not have to be “triggered” by the speech of others.

We are still (thankfully) drawing the line at machete attacks. But it is the underlying views of Rodríguez that are the true threat, and they are being replicated throughout the country. We are raising a generation of censors and speech-phobics.

If we want to stop or reverse this trend, Congress must act. I have proposed legislation that would deny federal funding to schools that do not protect core free speech principles. We are funding schools that are taking a machete to the defining right of our democracy.

It is akin to the recent resolution of the case of an antifa member who took an axe to Sen. John Hoeven’s (R-N.D.) office in Fargo. Thomas “Tas” Alexander Starks, 31, was given probation…and his axe back.

We may not be able to deter people from speaking through machetes and axes, but we can at least stop subsidizing the hardware.