Monthly Archives: October 2017

Free Speech at the Universities

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Kent Fuchs, University of Florida President, and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell Professor of American Studies, have some…interesting…thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Public universities that choose to grant access to speakers who are not invited or affiliated with the institution are legally obligated to accept all such speakers. As a result, they may become hostage to Nazis or other extremists—forced to stand by as these groups capitalize on their university’s visibility and prestige to amplify their vile messages.

Fuchs and Altschuler wrote that as if it were a bad thing.  I have to ask: why are they so terrified of a contest of ideas in an open, public forum?

And:

[A] partial solution [to handling costs] could entail a new Federal Extremist Speakers Fund to help universities with their exorbitant security costs. That would shift the financial burden of following the First Amendment to the government that requires universities to do so.

Wow.  Apparently, Fuchs and Altschuler slept through their eighth-grade Civics class.  Government isn’t making universities do anything here.  We the People, through our 1st Amendment, are making the government protect free speech in all public forums.

And:

Meanwhile, when openly racist and virulently anti-Semitic speakers show up on campus, we need to deprive them of attention and confrontation, the oxygen on which they thrive, by shunning them.

Certainly.  And that will happen pretty much automatically over the course of the ideas contest of which Fuchs and Altschuler are so terrified.

Steve Bannon and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Steve Bannon is acting more and more (and more openly) like a stooge of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Is Steve Bannon working for my agenda—or his?

That’s the question Donald Trump might ask himself….

Indeed, since Bannon’s targets are Republicans of whom he disapproves—which is to say nearly all of them—all of us must ask for whose agenda is Bannon working so hard.  Bannon did, though, give his game away:

The only question on Capitol Hill, he warned Mr [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, is “who’s going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar[?]”

Indeed.  Who’s going to play the role of assassin/traitor to the Senate?

Bannon intends to subject every Republican Senator who is rude enough to support McConnell to a primary contest with a view to removing that Senator from office and replacing him with a more malleable candidate in the general election.

I’ve written elsewhere of the likely outcome of Bannon’s campaign.  William McGurn, the author of the piece at the first link, has one take on Bannon’s motive for that outcome.  I have another.

If Bannon were truly interested in a Conservative victory in the coming series of elections, he’d be going after the Progressive-Democratic Party candidates instead of targeting Republicans, even those who aren’t conservative enough to suit him.  Instead, he’s carefully ignoring the Democrats.

“Fear of Violent Protests Raises Cost of Free Speech on Campus”

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That’s the title of Douglas Belkin’s piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.  However, it’s inaccurate.  What is feared by college/university management is the thugs who protest free speech with violence and others who protest free speech with noise and interruptions and venue entrance blockings that prevent the speaker from speaking.

Schools have struggled to come up with a consistent answer to requests to speak, pitting their free-speech ideals against security concerns.

Schools are being disingenuous when they pretend to these concerns, and the WSJ is misunderstanding the problem when it characterizes the schools as having free-speech ideals. The existence of the schools’ trading off security for free-speech demonstrates the lack of ideals regarding free-speech.

Were the schools’ managers truly concerned, they would understand the greatest violence is done to liberty when they cravenly trade free-speech for security, when they cravenly force disfavored speech into school-mandated “free speech” zones, when they cravenly allow “protestors” to prevent disfavored speakers from speaking, when they cravenly, despicably, allow “protestors” to dictate to others what speech those others will be allowed to hear.

“We have a non-negotiable commitment to provide safety and security for our guests and the public at large and we have an equally unwavering commitment to free speech,” said Mr [UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor, Dan] Mogulof. “That puts us between a rock and a hard place; we can’t step back from either one.”

Mogulof is being disingenuous. There’s no need to step back from either—allow the one, and provide the other. Worried about cost? Get serious about dealing with thugs who masquerade as protestors blocking speech of which the thugs disapprove. Get serious about snowflakes who pretend to being “triggered” when they hear speech they claim frightens them.

What’s plainly of distant secondary importance to these managers is actual free speech.  With their timidity, these managers fail to seriously defend the free speech rights of the speaker and, worse, fail to defend the free speech rights of others to make their own choice of what speech they will hear.

Paying Ransom for Cyber Crimes

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Paying ransom to unlock a hacker’s lock on hard drives and the data stored there, paying protection money to “get back” stolen data, is worse than merely aiding and abetting the criminals.  It puts at risk more than just the ransom-payer. By paying this reward money, by ensuring that this particular crime, at least, pays and pays well, it put others at risk of the same crime.

Now those put at risk by these ransom payers have grown to include children.

Hackers looking to exploit sensitive information for profit are increasingly targeting the nation’s schools, where they are finding a relatively weak system to protect a valuable asset: student data.
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The attackers have gained access to servers containing student names, addresses, social security numbers, birth dates, academic performance, phone numbers and medical and discipline records….

This is the payoff for rewarding hackers for their crimes: child molesting hackers moving to get in on all the paydays.

On Oct 5, a Twitter page using the name of a well-known hacker took credit for Johnston County’s hack in a tweet that read: “With the student directory from JCSD we released, any child predator can now easily acquire new targets and even plan based on grade level.”

Rajoy vs Catalonia

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Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had and has an obligation to uphold the Spanish Constitution which, among other things, made the recent Catalan independence referendum illegal even to hold.  I’ve written elsewhere about what I think of his tactics in his enforcement campaign.

Whether Rajoy ordered his Policia Nacional and his Guardia Civil to engage in the violence they inflicted in Catalonia (nearly 900 Catalan casualties) or they acted on their own initiative, it’s hard to believe Rajoy was so stupid as to not know the violence would ensue when he ordered them in.

Now Rajoy has moved to invoke Article 155, which would allow him to seize control of the autonomous province from Madrid and among other things force new elections in Catalonia to get a new government, hopefully more…respectful…of Madrid imperatives.  The question is before the Spanish Senate as I write this piece on Saturday.

Two questions arise from Rajoy’s tactics (I hesitate to call the performance a strategy, anymore) so far:

1) What will Rajoy do if, as a result of his forced elections, Catalan separatist supporters are again elected to majorities in the Catalan government?

2) Is Rajoy prepared to send Spanish divisions into Catalonia to enforce Madrid’s rule there? Given the tactics he’s already chosen to enforce his will, that’s the choice this affair of his is coming down to.

Whichever way he chooses on the second question will end very badly for both Spain and Catalonia.  Choosing not to send his military across the frontier will amount to abject Spanish surrender to the separatists’ movement, however the latter might choose to play that out (perhaps negotiations would still be possible after Art 155 is officially invoked; the Catalans have been asking for talks all along, even though Rajoy has rejected them out of hand all along).  Choosing to send the military in will both magnify and solidify a political, cultural, and emotional split between Catalonia and Spain, regardless of how militarily successful Rajoy might be.