Daily Archives: 4 May 2016

The Left Doesn’t Like Free Speech

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Especially when it differs from the Left’s holy writ.

The political left is threatening to boycott companies that contribute to a GOP convention that could nominate Donald Trump.

Color of Change, MoveOn.org, CREDO and UltraViolet, et al., are threatening to job businesses that support this year’s Republican convention, but not this year’s Democratic convention.

Of course, the rank cowardice of today’s business “leaders” contributes to the Left’s assault.

The campaign appears to have already succeeded in getting Coca-Cola to limit its GOP convention support to $75,000 this year, compared to $660,000 in 2012.

And

In 2012 Color of Change led a similar assault on companies supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promotes free-market policies in the states.  …  ALEC’s reward for decades of pro-growth advocacy was to see its biggest contributors—Coke [again!], General Electric, Kraft, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart —drop funding and head for the tall grass.

Such cowardice shouldn’t be rewarded; this surrender to threatening speech merely contributes to further assaults on speech—one of the most basic freedoms of our Republic.  But, then, cowards don’t like free speech, either.

Schooling

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Recently, some $35 million was raised to support private schooling, in particular Success Academy charter schools.  Naturally, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, thinks this is a terrible idea, an assault.

[It’s] part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling.  Wealthy donors and their political allies [are] pushing unaccountable charter growth in urban centers while stripping communities of a voice in their children’s education.

She’s wrong about the effort to decimate, even if what passes for schooling in the teachers unions’ public schools warrants it.

The unaccountable charter growth in one sense is entirely accountable: it’s due precisely to the failure of the public schools to actually educate our children.

In another sense, Weingarten is being utterly disingenuous with her unaccountable charter growth calumny.  The schools that are stripping—have stripped—communities (and parents, which persons she carefully elided) of their voice are those union-controlled public schools.