Free Speech and Disruptions

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.

Free Speech Democrat Style

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.

The Charm of the Left

A Massachusetts citizen and Trump supporter has had his Trump yard sign repeatedly stolen by a Clinton supporter.  In the citizen’s latest effort to protect his sign, he put it several feet up a tree in his yard.  “S” stole it again and left a braggadocio note that said in part:

[I]t would appear that you thought that you were outsmarting me when you put the sign on the tree. This is clearly false, because there is no way that a trump [sic] supporter can outsmart anyone. People of your kind are in fact the most dimwitted, low level simpletons that any well-developed nation has to offer.

This is the sort of bigotry and assault on individual liberty we can expect from a Clinton administration.

Elections have consequences.

No, He Doesn’t

Howard Kurtz has joined the frenzy in his cynical piece titled Trump fuels a media furor (again) with Second Amendment comments on Clinton, this time over Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s remark, concerning Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s naked attack on the 2nd Amendment, that 2nd Amendment supporters would exercise their considerable political power to protect this fundamental American right.

This is what Trump actually said.

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.

This is the heart of Kurtz’ claim:

Donald Trump has talked himself into big trouble—and this time it’s not the fault of what he calls the “dishonest media.”

The media’s frenzied claim that Trump is inciting violence is truly breathtaking.  It also takes a truly sick mind—or a wholly dishonest one—to manufacture violence out of a prediction of strong political repercussion.

Kurtz then asked,

I don’t believe Donald Trump wants to incite violence against Hillary Clinton. But does he bear responsibility for an aside, or a joke, that many people heard that way?

And yet here is Kurtz carefully keeping exactly that distortion alive as though it were a legitimate interpretation.  This interpretation is manufactured entirely out of whole cloth by a media Kurtz himself has already called out as in the bag for Clinton.  The only people who “heard” Trump’s remark as a call for violence are Democrats who want to make personal political hay, no matter how much they have to twist facts to harvest it, and a press that has dishonestly chosen to take sides in a political contest that is for us voters alone to decide.

And as Kurtz ironically noted

This uproar is going to dominate the next few days, all but drowning out Trump’s message (and is drowning out the new controversy over emails showing favor-seeking between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s State Department).

Of course it is.  That’s the point of the press’ manufacture.  The decision to distort and then to hype the distortion is entirely the press’.  Just as it’s entirely the press’ choice to spike Democratic Party Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland’s yukking it up over how nice it was that Justice Antonin Scalia had died.  Or to conveniently forget about then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s remark about doing things “the Chicago way,” and about bringing guns to a knife fight.  Nobody has stuck a gun in the press’ ear and made them do any of that.

Does Trump bear responsibility for the behavior of a mendacious media?

Of course not.  Apparently Kurtz doesn’t believe his own press.

Free Speech

British Left style.

The Mayor of London today took action on a pledge made during his election campaign to ban advertisements that could pressurise people to conform to unhealthy or unrealistic body images.

Because speech of which the Left disapproves must be barred.  After all, the Left Knows Better.  This is an aspect of Europe that our own Left so desperately wants our nation to emulate.