RUTHFULLY YOURS

The natural right of an individual to speak freely has been under assault by the Left for decades. With the election of Donald Trump, the pace and ferocity of the Left’s attacks on the freedom of speech have only accelerated.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/22/what-did-the-founders-think-about-freedom-of-speech/

The urge among progressives to codify into law “hate speech” exceptions to the First Amendment—and even to repeal the freedom of speech altogether—is no longer the stuff of hushed fantasy on the Left. It is open and proudly spoken in the salons of D.C. and Berkeley. Members of the Orwellian-named Antifa movement attack anyone—from neo-Nazis to your run-of-the mill harmless conservative—who disagrees with the Left’s destructive ideology of identity politics.

Yet some speech is still considered more equal than others. Consider the media’s self-serving elevation of their right to speak over and against all other Americans. This has become hard to miss. Pompous news anchors with furrowed brows tell us in tones fraught with “concern” that President Trump’s refusal to be the media’s punching bag is something akin to third world authoritarianism. It is the stuff of a tyrant who wants to crush the press under his heel.

The typical conservative response to these attacks has been less than helpful. In some cases, they even abet the Left.

William J. Haun, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., has penned an important essay at the Library of Law and Liberty blog that delves into these details. In the piece, he traces the feckless conservative response to the progressive rejection of free speech and attempts to shed light on the American founders’ understanding of free speech.

Haun notes that instead of arguing from a basis steeped in the American political tradition, conservatives have adopted an “absolutist” view of the freedom of speech that is fearful of “drawing principled distinctions.” “The Right…seems to find it an alluring posture given dominant cultural forces’ militant hostility to conservative views,” Haun argues.

Afraid of voicing any fundamental concerns regarding the consensus morality of the ruling class, conservatives resign themselves to make dubious utilitarian arguments that cannot possibly meet the challenge the Left has put forward. Nearly every contributor at National Review who writes on free speech, for example, regularly conflates speech that is obscene or vile with speech that is not harmful to the rights of others.

Underlying this “absolutist” rhetoric is the notion that “dissent from the dominant political and cultural orthodoxies (read: conservative views) would be protected” if “drawing content-based restrictions” was prohibited. But this is a fool’s errand. Lines will be drawn always. The real question is where such restrictions are—not if there should be any restrictions in the first place.

As Haun contends, the conservative “absolutist” position can easily descend into a deep moral relativism:

The absolutist position is akin to a compass without a magnet: Without any extrinsic source of objective value—right reason and objective truth—to allow political communities to assign worth to any speech, speech’s worth is determined only by individual perceptions, and these perceptions are informed by one’s passions. When those passions are aggregated, as has happened with Progressive dominance on college campuses, the ‘marketplace of ideas’ lacks any strength to stop a mob silencing views that do not accord with those of the dominant consumers.

Democrats claim to have a monopoly on caring for the poor and suffering, and this week the left is portraying a GOP health-care bill as an attack on society’s vulnerable. So check out the data on how ObamaCare is a tax on some low-income families.

IRS data offers insight into who paid the law’s individual mandate penalty in 2015 for not buying health insurance, the latest year for which figures are available. Spoiler alert: The payers aren’t Warren Buffett or any of the other wealthy folks Democrats say they want to tax. More than one in three of taxed households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.

More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000. Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.

These Americans are paying a fine to avoid purchasing a product they don’t want or can’t afford but government compels them to buy. Such individuals don’t suddenly have access to less expensive or higher quality medical care, but they do have less money for household expenses, which can consume a high share of income for this class of families.

The unfortunate irony is that ObamaCare destroyed the private market that offered options that in some cases made sense for these people. For example: High-deductible, limited coverage for unexpected events.

Then again, the point of this coercion was to substitute the government’s political preferences for individual judgment, while forcing the young and healthy to pay more to finance the mandated benefits that Democrats think everyone must have. This is the status quo that Senators John McCain and Rand Paul are supporting with their opposition to reform.

Vladimir Putin did not hack the election. Barack Obama did.

Donald Trump said earlier this year that the Obama Administration wiretapped his campaign. “Like I’d want to hear more from that fool?” President Obama scoffed.

But CNN reported on Monday, “US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election…. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.”

The network labeled their story an exclusive. But, in fact, Breitbart, radio host Mark Levin, the realDonaldTrump Twitter account, and numerous other sources reported the wiretapping more than six months ago.

In the wake of the belated bombshell, other voices at CNN hung on, precariously but unabashedly, to the dated narrative.

In a story updated subsequent to CNN confirming the Obama administration’s surveillance on Manafort and noting his residence in Trump Tower, CNN reporter Manu Raju continued to characterize the president’s accusation affirmed by his network as Trump’s “unsubstantiated claim that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the election to spy on him.” In March, Raju’s reporting consistently cast doubt on the president’s wiretapping charge.

CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza wrote an article, appearing the day after his network conceded the truth of the wiretap charge, entitled: “Donald Trump still has no evidence that his wiretapping claim was right.” In March, Cillizza wrote a piece in the Washington Post on Trump’s wiretap claim under the headline: “Donald Trump was a conspiracy-theory candidate. Now he’s on the edge of being a conspiracy-theory president.”

The media went all-in this spring on the notion that the loose-tongued Trump once again spoke without reference to the facts. Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh labeled his charge “incendiary.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a phony conspiracy theory.” PolitiFact bluntly judged his accusation “false.”

Who will fact check the fact checkers?

Rather than correct the record, egged-face journalists embark upon a face-saving effort. But the media whitewash stands as neither the only nor the most relevant cover up.

The all-smoke-no-fire Russia investigation looks increasingly like a smoke screen aimed to put out a very different fire. Rather than an investigation into malfeasance by the Trump campaign, does the Robert Mueller inquiry serve as a clean-up operation to justify Obama administration malfeasance? The bugging of the opposition party’s presidential campaign, at least when done by Republicans, ranks not only as criminal but as the biggest political scandal in American history.

Richard Nixon’s henchmen wore surgical gloves to avoid leaving clues for law enforcement. Barack Obama’s henchmen were law enforcement. This makes Obama worse, not better, than Nixon. At least Nixon’s plumbers possessed the decency to leave their skullduggery to lock pickers and burglars. Obama used law enforcement for opposition research. In Banana Republics, the cops double as the criminals. The unprecedented use of the Justice Department to commit injustice marks a sad moment for the republic. It is Watergate on steroids.

Accusations that hit the mark, rather wild ones wide of the target, provoke fierce denunciations, outcry, and Joe Welch, have-you-no-sense-of-decency moralizing. The category-5 storm that engulfed the president after he tweeted about government surveillance on his campaign indicated that he uncovered an inconvenient truth, not that he told an ignoble lie. No one flips out when a critic makes a fool of himself with his own words. People do so when the words threaten to make a fool of them.

The Obama administration using the considerable powers of the federal government to spy on a hated critic’s campaign sets a dangerous precedent. It provides future administrations a means to infiltrate the innermost circle of the opposition party’s presidential campaign. This merely requires the pretext of wrongdoing to engage in wrongdoing.

It would be peculiar if, as he now claims, James Clapper did not know about the Obama administration’s monitoring of Paul Manafort. At the time, which appears to have been the autumn of 2016, Clapper was Obama’s national intelligence director. The (dubious) raison d’être of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — a post-9/11 layering of yet more bureaucracy atop bureaucratic sprawl — was to ensure efficient information flow through the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies.

That said, it is a gross exaggeration to contend, as some are doing, that new revelations about the surveillance of Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, show that Clapper lied in a March 2017 interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd. Instead, what we now know proves what I warned at the time of the interview: It was a mistake to construe Clapper’s answers to Todd as a blanket denial of Obama spying on the Trump campaign.

Carefully parsed, Clapper’s comments left open the possibility — which some of us regarded as a high probability — that Manafort and other Trump associates had been under Obama-administration surveillance.

Much is being made of Clapper’s assertion that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” But what commentators are omitting is a critical qualification that I highlighted right after the interview (as did our Jim Geraghty and NBC News itself). Clapper made clear that he could only speak, as NBC put it, “for the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw.”

Why was that significant? As I elaborated:

The director of national intelligence does not “oversee” the entirety of the government’s national-security apparatus. By statute, for example, the attorney general (who of course runs the Justice Department) oversees the process of requesting and executing electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] (see Title 50 U.S. Code, Sec. 1801 et seq.).

The surveillance of Manafort was conducted under FISA. It would have been known to the Justice Department, which presents warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and to the FBI, which conducts the investigations. But the surveillance operation would be known to the national intelligence director only if the Justice Department, the FBI, and whoever else was in the loop chose to share it with him. Apparently, they did not — confirmation that the ODNI is the excrescence many of us predicted it would be.

At the time of Clapper’s interview, the front-burner topic was whether Trump himself had been monitored. The president had just alleged, in a series of tweets, that his phone lines had been tapped at Trump Tower. I assumed (as I’m sure Clapper did) that Clapper would have been informed if Trump had been targeted for FISA surveillance when he was a candidate or president-elect. But even if that is a safe assumption, it does not mean that Clapper would have been alerted to every surveillance of a Trump subordinate or associate.

What about Clapper’s denials of wiretapping against Trump’s campaign, and at Trump Tower?