Tag Archives: free speech

Muddled Editor “Thinking”

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This time, by the August Ones of The Wall Street Journal‘s board of editors. They’re upset because Attorney General Pam Bondi openly decried “hate speech,” and then said that when that speech clearly crosses a line, it becomes criminally actionable. Their lede:

Is a basic understanding of the First Amendment too much to expect from the nation’s Attorney General?

What Bondi said that drew their…attention:

There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

Targeting someone with hate speech isn’t general hate speech; it’s making threats, and it’s incitement to violence, and that is illegal.

Bondi went on the next day, as…paraphrased without context by the editors:

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But then she incoherently mixed in everything from “violent rhetoric,” to doxxing, to calling a SWAT team to the home of a Member of Congress.

Those all are forms of threats of violence or of actual violence. The only incoherence is in the imaginations of the editors.

And this from the editors:

The AG also didn’t recant her statement on Monday that the Justice Department might “prosecute” Office Depot or its ex-employee who refused to print a Kirk vigil poster.

Nor is there any reason to. What the editors omitted from this particular excerpt is that DoJ might prosecute on illegal discrimination grounds, not on speech grounds.

Apparently, basic reading/listening comprehension is too much to expect from opinion writers.

Free Speech Climate Funding Industry Style

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The UN is at it again; this time it’s the UN arm of the Climate Funding Industry that’s attacking individual freedoms.

A United Nations climate expert is calling for people who question the goal of avoiding a climate catastrophe by rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to face criminal penalties.

Elisa Morgera, UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change is insisting that nations have an obligation to

defossilize information systems to protect human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence and from information distortions.

In order to protect human rights, our most basic, intrinsic, and inalienable right—free speech—must be circumscribed to suit Climate Funding Industry personages’ definition of proper and properly free speech.

This is just one more reason climate activists cannot be taken seriously and must be cut off from government funds, tax credits, subsidies, and so on.

Bad Idea

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Socialist Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Angus King (I, ME) are proposing a new law that would

ban pharmaceutical manufacturers from using direct-to-consumer advertising, including social media, to promote their products.

This is a bad idea. Not just singly bad; it’s bad on three grounds.

One is the ground of free speech. We don’t get to ban speech based on who’s doing the speaking any more than we get to censor speech based on what’s being said. That includes pharmaceutical companies that want to advertise their wares, so long as they don’t misrepresent them. Truth in Advertising laws, though, are agnostic regarding both advertisers and products.

Our nation went over who is allowed to advertise when lawyers wanted to engage in direct advertising, including via television ads, lots of years ago. Our courts, and we as a nation, came down on the side of free speech when we all decided lawyers advertising was entirely jake. The worst that got us is ads like The Texas Hammer‘s.

It’s a bad idea because it’s insulting to us average Americans. We are not as droolingly imbecilic as these two Wonders of the Left insist that we are. We are fully capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to take pharmaceutical company’s word at face value or our doctor’s advice. Certainly the advertisements can lead us to peppering our doctors with questions, but we should be doing that, anyway, regarding his diagnoses and proposed treatments. That some of us are foolish enough to remain willfully ignorant about our own health and blithely (and blindly) accept our doctor’s word unquestioningly is between us and our doctors. It’s no excuse for government censoring other parties.

That brings me to the third reason this is a bad idea. It’s not government’s role to protect us from ourselves, or even from each other except on criminal matters. Government’s role is to protect us from external criminal elements and threats to our nation as a whole. It’s not even the Federal government’s sole role to protect us from domestic criminal elements—that is primarily the role of each of our several State governments, with help from the Feds only when invited in by the States.

This is a move that only Socialists and their monarchist Progressive-Democratic Party ally could love.

Government Funding of Speech

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PBS has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the latter’s moves to defund the service.

The system is centering its beef on two things: free speech and the potential to upend public television.

Last thing first. The risk of upending public television is wholly irrelevant. What’s relevant here is what our Constitution and the statutes cited in their suit say. What our Constitution says about PBS‘ business model or about any public business model is…nothing. There is no Constitutional right to a particular business model, and disruptions to models occur all the time, ranging from competitors to changing consumers to governments’ decisions to donate money or not.

PBS‘ crying about its business model is just cynical fear mongering.

PBS‘ free speech argument might have some force, but that one is centered on President Donald Trump’s (R) commentary regarding how little he likes PBS‘ own commentary and editorial decisions. However, Trump’s comments are irrelevant, also; what is relevant here, too, is what our Constitution and the cited statutes and Trump’s defunding EO say.

What our Constitution says about funding PBS is…nothing. There is no Constitutional obligation for our government to donate any money to it or to any public enterprise. The cited statutes create no such obligation. What Trump’s Executive Order says is this:

Government funding of news media in this environment [today’s, vs mid-last century when Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created] is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.
…
No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.  The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality:  the CPB may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.”

And this [emphasis added]:

The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS.  Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter.  What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.

In the end, whatever Government, or Trump, say about others’ speech, neither Government in general, nor the Trump administration in particular, are obligated to fund it; the only obligation is to not block it except under a few tightly circumscribed situations: lying under oath, false advertising, making threats or otherwise inciting violence, and the like. This is supported by PBS‘ own words:

After careful deliberation, PBS reached the conclusion that it was necessary to take legal action to safeguard public television’s editorial independence, and to protect the autonomy of PBS member stations[.]

What better way to safeguard public television’s independence and protect the autonomy of PBS member stations than to stop receiving corrosive government money, a point Trump made in the opening of his EO?

Why the AP Can’t be Trusted

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Julie Pace, the Executive Editor of the AP gave us a clear lesson in the distortionate nature of the AP‘s “news” writing and commentary. In her WSJop-ed last Wednesday, she wrote this with an entirely straight face:

On Thursday Judge Trevor N McFadden of the US District Court for the District of Columbia hears arguments on whether the government can bar AP reporters from covering presidential events. The White House has locked us out simply because we refer to the Gulf of Mexico by the name it has carried for more than 400 years, while acknowledging that Mr Trump has chosen to call it the Gulf of America.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. While it’s true that President Donald Trump (R) is openly and loudly disgruntled with the AP‘s decision to continue referring to the Gulf of America by its prior name, no AP reporter is barred from covering presidential events. What has happened is that access to severely limited spaces—the Oval Office, air transport—has been released from a long-standing fixed set of reporters. Instead, those limited spaces have been opened to a rotating list (though still limited) of reporters, now including those representing news organizations that heretofore had never had access to such spaces.

That AP representation in this limited pool was the first to be replaced in the rotation is nothing more than whine-bait for the AP. This change to give other news organizations access also is entirely consistent with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s move to open the noon press conferences to previously unrepresented news outlets, a move that comes at the expense, even in this larger but still limited space, of other news outlets that heretofore had enjoyed their privileged permanent status. Now those privileged outlets must wait their turn among the madding crowd of “lesser” outlets.

And this:

The White House claims this is simply a matter of changing which news organizations have access to the president.

What she so carefully omitted here is that changing which news organizations have access to the president is not that at all, but a change to the way news organizations get access to the President. What the change actually does, is grant that access, in those severely limited spaces, to news organizations on a rotating basis. All news organizations, large and small, now have access. The change, as it applies to the AP, is that all of a sudden they’re required to take their turn among the crowd that heretofore had been so far beneath their august selves.

Pace also wrote this:

[N]o president—including Mr Trump during his first term—has ever tried to blacklist us because he didn’t like what we wrote.

And no President, still, has ever tried to blacklist the AP: AP‘s news writers and commenters still have complete and open access to the President in all areas and at all events, including taking their turn in those severely limited spaces. Pace is openly lying here, and her lie here flows from her toddler’s temper tantrum at being denied her privileged status—a status that, in her childishness, she has come to believe is her God-given right.

And this:

The White House is shutting out an independent global news agency….

This is just a repetition of the immediately foregoing. No AP writer or commenter is barred from anything; they just have to take their turn now, instead of being ensconced at the head of the line, at the expense of other outlets’ writers and commenters.

Pace can repeat her lie to her heart’s content; the repetition makes it true only in her fetid imagination, and it demonstrates the intrinsic unreliability of her organization’s output.