Tag Archives: free speech

Frightening the Snowflakes

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It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.

Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

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The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel.  The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided.  You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

A Slip of the Mask

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When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not.  Now, more information is coming to light about that incident.  Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account.  There’s more, too.

Inside Twitter, the brief deactivation elicited celebration or amusement even in the upper ranks. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey Liked a tweet with an image of his face superimposed on celebrity painter Bob Ross standing before a canvas depicting Mr Trump’s deactivated account. “There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents!” the caption said.

And

One former employee said that deleting Mr Trump’s account was a “running joke” among employees about things they wanted to do on their last day.

And

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former head of entertainment and talent partnerships, retweeted a post about the rogue employee that said, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

“Doing good on the way out the door,” is how another former employee described the episode.

And

A former employee involved with Twitter Moments, a product that highlights tweets curated by the platform or users, said on a number of occasions during the campaign that senior executives expressed displeasure with Moments that portrayed Mr Trump in a good light.

It’s also instructive that so many of these Twitter, Inc, responses are exposed by ex-Twitter employees, and not by current ones.

The mask has slid away momentarily, quickly reset, and the slip has exposed what free speech would be under a Left-leaning government.  And it looks a lot like the “free” speech of our colleges and universities.

Free Speech at the Universities

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Kent Fuchs, University of Florida President, and Glenn Altschuler, Cornell Professor of American Studies, have some…interesting…thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Public universities that choose to grant access to speakers who are not invited or affiliated with the institution are legally obligated to accept all such speakers. As a result, they may become hostage to Nazis or other extremists—forced to stand by as these groups capitalize on their university’s visibility and prestige to amplify their vile messages.

Fuchs and Altschuler wrote that as if it were a bad thing.  I have to ask: why are they so terrified of a contest of ideas in an open, public forum?

And:

[A] partial solution [to handling costs] could entail a new Federal Extremist Speakers Fund to help universities with their exorbitant security costs. That would shift the financial burden of following the First Amendment to the government that requires universities to do so.

Wow.  Apparently, Fuchs and Altschuler slept through their eighth-grade Civics class.  Government isn’t making universities do anything here.  We the People, through our 1st Amendment, are making the government protect free speech in all public forums.

And:

Meanwhile, when openly racist and virulently anti-Semitic speakers show up on campus, we need to deprive them of attention and confrontation, the oxygen on which they thrive, by shunning them.

Certainly.  And that will happen pretty much automatically over the course of the ideas contest of which Fuchs and Altschuler are so terrified.

Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”

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After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.

Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem.  Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.

Let’s set aside Kaepernick’s beef against Trump.  Aside from being utterly laughable, it casually insults the team owners as being cowards unable to run their businesses in the face of a Presidential tweet parade.  That’s a minor point.

What illustrates the risible nature of Kaepernick’s grievance is its centering on his free speech rights and his claim that he’s been blackballed as a result of his so-called protests.

Carefully elided is everyone else’s free speech right to object to his behavior, just as vociferously, including with ticket dollars and TV viewing.  This particularly includes team owners, who don’t give up their free speech rights to respond in the same forum to Kaepernick’s, et al., free speech “protests.”

Also: a private company employee’s free speech rights, within very broad limits, are matters of employment contract parameters. The 1st Amendment limits Government, not private entities.

Beyond all of that, neither a broad functional consensus—paralleling the fans’ broad consensus—of owners disliking this particular misbehavior, nor a separate broad functional consensus that employees publicly disparaging our national symbols and insulting those who fought to defend them is bad for business, even remotely approach collusion.

There is no case in this lawfare assault.