Category Archives: culture

Free Speech and Disruptions

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Do high school football fans have a constitutional right to display the American flag at games?

That question headlined Jacob Gershman’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal law blog.  A North Carolina high school principal, Travelers Rest High School’s Lou Lavely, answered that question in the negative, justifying his ban of the American flag from the school’s home football games with the excuse that students had

used the US flag, in conjunction with verbal taunts, to target Hispanic members of the Berea community in a manner that was both unsportsmanlike and also a misuse of our flag[.]

Lavely’s move also was consistent with an earlier 9th Circuit ruling on the other side of the country that

a California high school didn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of white students who were told they couldn’t wear shirts displaying the American flag in an effort, the school said, to defuse a potential fight with Mexican students

a ruling that the Supreme Court then declined to review.

In the face of public outrage over the flag ban, Lavely reversed his position and “allowed” our flag to be displayed after all.  However, that doesn’t cure the misunderstanding, both by Lavely and our courts, underlying such bans of our flag or of shirts with our flag imprinted on them or of any other such display.

The misunderstanding is in the cause of disruptions and how to deal with those disruptions.

Banning the American flag because its display might cause disruption is wrong-headed.  The American flag, or displaying our flag—free speech generally—doesn’t cause disruptions.  The disrupters cause disruptions, and they’re the ones who need to be dealt with.

Full stop.

Update: Clarified a sentence to say what I actually meant rather than the opposite.  Also clarified a later paragraph.

Speaking of Hiding Things

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From Rick Moran, of PJMedia, came this bit.  He quoted from The Daily Caller:

DCLeaks, a website that releases information on powerful political figures, has had its Twitter account suspended and part of its website taken offline after releasing a cache of documents on billionaire donor George Soros.

The website had previously released 2,500 internal Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents in order to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide.” OSF is one of Soros’ networks of organizations.

Moran added his own critique to this:

This was a surgical operation, taking down one specific part of a website and leaning on Twitter to suspend the account. For someone with the resources of George Soros, it was a piece of cake.

Despite the fact that the documents leaked were sheer dynamite, there was a curious lack of, well, curiosity on the part of the media to dig into them.

Now we know why.

Indeed, but frankly, the press doesn’t need much persuasion from the Soroses of the world.  The press already is in the bag for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and the stuff DCLeaks exposed would be very damaging to Clinton as well as to Soros’ OSF were the press to pursue these leads rather than spiking them.

The question remains, though: what is it that George Soros, funder of Progressives and Big Government Mavens, is trying to hide?

Pay to Play, or Slants

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From a Kimberley Strassel column in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal comes this nugget.

…the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

What she said.

And yet the NLMSM insists—brags, really—that it’s entirely appropriate to take sides against Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not in their opinion pieces, but in their “fact” reporting pieces, also.  Objective journalism be damned.

Here’s Ezra Klein, of JournoList infamy:

The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon[.]

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

It’s made starkly clear by Jorge Ramos, of Univision:

…journalists cannot be objective when they are confronted with “racism, discrimination, corruption, public life, dictatorships or violations of human rights.”

These views of Trump, in opinion pieces, are entirely legitimate, but it’s interesting to note that none of this criticism, this assumption of nefariousness, is evident in the same press’ coverage of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite her plain lawlessness and her evident conflicts of interest.

If the press feels free to be this proudly biased against one party, one candidate, it can only feel free to be similarly biased toward any other politician, any other party.  Too much of the Fourth Estate has transformed itself into a fifth column.

Democrats and Security

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First there was Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, personal and private email server on which she conducted official State Department business and which she used for handling over 2,000 classified emails—some of which also were marked classified.

Then there was the breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Committee email servers.

Then there was the similarly breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Convention Committee email servers.

Now there’s this.

[I]n 2009, Hillary Clinton’s top aide mistakenly left potentially classified papers in the front seat of the car she was traveling in.

Huma Abedin realized the significance of her error and sent an email to a fellow Clinton staffer asking that the papers be moved to the trunk.

“I’m going to have ambassador ride on next drive,” she wrote on July 20, 2009. “There’s a bunch of burn stuff in the pocket of my front seat.”

This displays an utter lack of concern by this highly experienced Clinton Aide for the classified documents with which care she’d been entrusted, both in her abandoning them on the front seat of her car and in her request to have them stored (however temporarily) in the unsecured trunk of her unsecured car rather than have them properly taken under control.

There’s also no indication Abedin gave any thought to whether her colleague had either the clearance or the need to know (both of which are necessary before an individual can be allowed to handle classified material) before she requested him to take possession of those abandoned documents.

Nor is there any indication that the unnamed staffer ever was debriefed on his handling of the documents.

There clearly were no sanctions applied to Abedin for her extreme carelessness in her handling of these classified documents.

It seems pretty evident that Democrats, at least senior Democrats, don’t understand security, or they don’t care about security.  Either way, our nation cannot afford such as these in our government.

Free Speech Democrat Style

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Donald Trump roiled Minnesota politics for a few hours Friday night without ever showing his face in public.

Beginning with the Democrats’ Minneapolis house organ the Star Tribune, which opened their coverage of a fund raising meeting by Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump in the city over the weekend with that paragraph.

It’s not just the paper, though; Democrat protestors showed how deeply embedded in the party is disdain for actual free speech.

Later in the evening, a smaller contingent grew unruly. Some fundraiser attendees were pushed and jostled, spit on and verbally harassed as they left the convention center.

And

Many in the later group [the group of violent protestors] hid their faces behind scarves.

And

There was…minor damage, including graffiti on the walls of the Convention Center, and officers had to escort Trump supporters in and out of the lobby because they were being harshly confronted[.]

If you don’t sit down and shut up, we’ll deal with you.  You’re not Democrats.

Play the brief video at the top of the article, too.  It’s illuminating.