Category Archives: culture

Chilling Effects

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Who’s doing the chilling, though?

The FCC has opened an early review of the broadcast licenses of eight of ABC‘s broadcast stations, and ABC has sued to put a stop to it. The FCC says the review is over ABC‘s—in particular, Disney’s—use of DEI initiatives to determine whether they violated the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination. ABC‘s executives claim the review is based on President Donald Trump’s (R) dislike of two program’s anti-Trump coverage.

There’s this, though, that exposes the underlying problem regardless of those competing motives.

In its filing, ABC said the FCC’s actions are already influencing editorial decisions and having a chilling effect on its news operations.

If the executives think the government’s move really is about suppressing ABC speech, any supposed speech chilling is not from anything the government is doing. These executives are preemptively chilling their own speech. If they had the courage of their convictions, they would press ahead with their editorial decisions unchanged. By chilling—altering—their decision making, they could be seen to be tacitly admitting that the FCC’s review is justified—especially since the review is only just getting started and no evidence has yet been collected.

Hate Speech According to Leftists

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The latest example is provided by the Portland, Oregon, Portland Public Schools school district. The district has banned a mother

from her children’s school for a year because she engaged in sidewalk advocacy against its secret gender curriculum and social transitions of gender-confused students, claiming her “hate speech” violated its harassment policy….

That ban included preventing her from witnessing her son’s graduation from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School. Her daughter remains at risk of the school’s indoctrination program, a program of which the school district is so embarrassed, I surmise, that it felt constrained to keep it hidden away from concerned parents.

Regardless of the district’s apparent embarrassment over its program, or its dishonest desire to keep its treatment of the parents’ children from them, it has made its attitude toward speech very clear with the ban and its claimed reason for it.

Hate speech, according to the district, is any speech that disagrees with its Leftist ideology. Contra the Just the News characterization of the school district’s position, though, this attitude—toward free speech and toward transgender abuse of children—isn’t far-left; it’s increasingly becoming mainstream Left.

My Personal Experience Says Otherwise

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Matthew Hennesey, writing in the WSJ‘s Free Expression columns, was concerned about the heavy exposure to the unbridled freedom of everything being abundant and—from the student’s perspective—free and how this gives those still impressionable minds a false sense of the effectiveness of socialism to the point that it seems like to each according to his wants and from each according to what he feels like giving. And then the child faces the world as it is after “graduation” [my euphemism quotes].

College is where young people get a first taste of living on their own. But it’s a false freedom. The cost of things most adults must budget and pay for—food, transportation, housing, entertainment, even laundry—is bundled on campus. There are no price signals. Everything comes out of the big payment made before the semester starts. And who picks that up? Mom, Dad, and maybe Sallie Mae.
…As a result, “they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Everything feels free. When, after graduation, these kids hit the real world, the shock is too much to bear. They have no sense of opportunity costs and trade-offs. They revert to a defense of the all-inclusive economic program they know and love.

The ill discipline, though, is a mark of the degradation of parenting as well as of the schools themselves. My first two years in college, I lived within the allowance my parents gave me. That upfront cost? One semester of each of those two years came from the fruits of my summer jobs. My second two years, I had no parental allowance, I had USAF Sgt’s pay courtesy of an ROTC scholarship. The upfront cost, though, was entirely picked up by the USAF, via my ROTC scholarship.

Nothing in the book store, from books to froo-froo to junk food was free the entire time. Nothing in the student union was free, also. The school’s cafeteria only served lunch and supper, no snacks or anything of the like. Nothing between meals. Snacks could be purchased in the student union or in the book store. The cafeteria might have served breakfast, too, but I wasn’t eating breakfast so I never noticed.

Now helicopter parents or lazily uninvolved parents—no middle ground constituting a measure of parental responsibility—ruin their kids before they get to college, and colleges now coddle those children while burying all of the costs in those upfront payments that the students never experience and indoctrinating them rather than teaching them.

A Clear Path Forward

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FIFA’s (Fédération Internationale de Football Association—International Federation of Football Association(s)—President Gianni Infantino is under pressure to resign over his shenanigans regarding selling off major parts of the Federation to private entities (which itself is only the latest of a number of his unilateralist escapades). Three of the six major football associations, UEFA, Concacaf, and the Asian Football Confederation, have sent an open letter to the Federation “calling for change at the top.” These three associations comprise the vast bulk of FIFA; only CONMEBOL, the South American football association, has any size in the remaining three.

Of course, Infantino is standing fast. He understands that letters, however sternly worded, are only words and entirely empty of force. If the three associations are serious, though, and not content simply to yap from their respective porches, they’ll do two additional things.

The first is to clarify their letter with a hard deadline for Infantino’s resignation, and not only his, but his staff as well. The deadline should be nearby, say a week from the date of their clarifying letter.

The second thing is what would give teeth to the words of their two letters. One minute after their deadline has passed without satisfaction, they would all resign from FIFA and form their own, separate International Federation.

Without those two follow-ups, the three associations will be known as unserious tissue tigers.

Why Weren’t Reporters Told?

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It seems that President Donald Trump (R), on the way back from a NATO meeting in Ankara, boarded a “legacy Air Force One,” moved to a catering truck’s container that was ostensibly transferring provisions to the aircraft, via that catering container transferred to a different aircraft, and flew that one to the UK. On arrival there, he transferred to the legacy Air Force One, which had arrived at the same time, and deplaned in view of the press and onlookers, with none of them the wiser.

The press corps and a number of government officials who had accompanied Trump to the meeting had remained on that Air Force One, uninformed about the President’s having shifted to a different aircraft.

The whole business was a Secret Service response to a threat that Iranians would attempt to shoot down the Air Force One aircraft on its takeoff from Ankara, murdering the President.

The Press Precious Ones have their collective panties in hard wedgies over not having been informed of the switch and having seemingly been used as decoys, as CNN‘s Jake Tapper bleated.

An angry press is demanding answers on why reporters weren’t told of Trump’s plane transfer or whether their presence aboard the supposed Air Force One—alongside senior officials Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—put them at serious risk.

There’s this, too:

The White House didn’t plan to disclose the feint, officials said, until the Washington Post revealed it….

And this from John Kirby, who spent his Navy career in the Navy’s press-facing career track and was ex-Presidents Barack Obama’s (D) and Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon and White House Press Secretary, had this:

They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans….

Sure. Because the sudden mass transfer of passengers from Air Force One to alternate aircraft, coming as close as it necessarily would have to the Air Force One’s scheduled departure given the timing of the decision to set up the President’s transfer, would not have exposed the Secret Service’s and the US and of Israeli intelligence communities’ knowledge of the threat. Right.

WaPo‘s exposure and Kirby’s studied disingenuousness are why the press wasn’t told of the transfer. The press cannot be trusted with information like that. Even revealing the transfer after the fact is dangerous, revealing capabilities and potentially sources as it does.

Pressmen are well aware, as much smarter and so much better informed than us average Americans as they hold themselves out to be, of that danger.

Decoys? That’s the highest value of today’s news writers.