Category Archives: rights

Hypocrisy

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Planned Parenthood has it.  On the matter of DACA and President Donald Trump giving Congress six months to fix the thing—including codifying its current structure in law, but do the law, not Executive Order—Planned Parenthood, through its CEO Cecile Richards had this to say:

Here at Planned Parenthood, we firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation[.]

Every person but babies, apparently.  Far too often, they’re just inconveniences to be aborted and either thrown away or their body parts peddled to…researchers.  These inconvenient babies are not to be permitted to live, work, and raise a family freely.

The Left and the Left’s Police

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And the misrepresentation of the NLMSM.

A hundred members of Left-wing hate groups, including Antifa—hooded, no less, and armed with clubs—”broke through” police lines in Berkeley Sunday to attack the leader of a Conservative group, Patriot Prayer, which the NLMSM claims is “right-wing” rather than Conservative, and a separate group of four.

Notice that.  The Left’s hate groups are hooded and carrying weapons; their targets are unarmed with faces bare, not looking for trouble and unafraid of being identified.

There’s more:

The protesters who wore hoods to conceal their identities chased Patriot Prayer group leader Joey Gibson from Sunday’s rally in a Berkeley park. As Gibson backed away with his hands in the air, the protesters pepper sprayed him.
…
Separately, the anarchist group beat, kicked and punched four other people at the rally.

How did these thugs “break through” the police lines?  They didn’t.  The police deliberately let them through.

Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood says police made a strategic decision to let a group of more than 100 black-clad anarchists enter the park Sunday once it became clear there would not be dueling protests between right and left.

He said “the potential use of force became very problematic” because thousands of mostly peaceful left-wing protesters were already inside the park.

Greenwood said he decided to let the black-clad protesters demonstrate in the park because there was “no need for a confrontation over a grass patch.”

Of course, Greenwood knew there would be violence; that’s what  hooded Antifa, et al., were there for.  The confrontation over a grass patch that Greenwood wanted to avoid was between his police and the Left’s hate groups.

Equal protection under law only applies to the Left.  Other Americans don’t deserve it.

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

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That’s the title of a tortured op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal by Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.  Recall that he and his Cloudflare helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, including the Daily Stormer Web site.  He bragged at the time about having done that, and as despicable as neo-Nazi and Nazi wannabe thugs are, that’s an easy brag.

In this op-ed, though, Prince is claiming to be having second thoughts.

However.

As an opponent of free speech, Mr Prince, of course you were right to censor any speech you personally would consider repugnant.  As a biased opponent of free speech, moreover, you’re entirely correct to leave your favored-of-the-Left hate groups—Antifa and BLM, for instance—untouched by your censorship.

But this—this is impressively shabby.

[T]he First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms.

No, more than merely shabby.  This is utterly, cynically disingenuous. It’s true in the narrowest, most legalist sense that the First Amendment only limits government’s ability to censor speech. But the principle underlying that Amendment, the individual liberty to speak freely in accordance with one’s own conscience rather than in comportment with a Know Better’s diktat is universal. It’s one of our unalienable Rights…among [which] are…Liberty….

Of course, as the son of a journalist [growing up] with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech, you know this full well.

Your Orwellian missive, with its artificial, bodice-ripping anguish, is at best mendacious.

Monuments

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The European Commission had a thought on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, that while not explicitly about monuments is related:

The European Union was built on the common values of human dignity, fundamental rights, rule of law and democracy, and on the rejection of extreme nationalism.

We must never take these rights and freedoms for granted. We pledge to fight for them every day.

Extremism, nationalism, xenophobia and hatred can still be heard in public speech in Europe. Keeping these memories alive is not only a tribute to the victims but also a way to ensure that these ideologies can be forcefully rejected and such atrocities never happen again.

We stand firm in our defense of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, in Europe and worldwide. There is no place in the European Union for extremism, intolerance and oppression.

These remarks dovetail tightly with a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence:

I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress that we have made.

I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments.  What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history, but we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history.

And

When I walked back in 2010 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge…we remembered Bloody Sunday and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, and I can’t help but think that, rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do…we ought to have been building more monuments[.]

Hmm….

Bullies

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Recall how Google, last week, outed a Conservative employee and his critique of Google personnel practices, then bullied him with public opprobrium, then fired him.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was going to have an all-hands town hall this week to address the matter, but then, after employees expressed concerns

about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall[,]

he cancelled the whole affair.  The company put the original teapot tempest into the public’s eye, but when allegedly faced with the same outcome for themselves, they skittered back into their baseboard holes in the walls.

Aside from the breathtaking hypocrisy of this sorry charade, this illustrates an old maxim: bullies are cowards, and Google management and Google’s Precious Ones employees are just the same.