RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/18/censorship-has-a-perfect-failure-record/

Free speech is under assault from all angles. States across the West are arresting purveyors of so-called hate speech, and cracking down on alleged mis- and disinformation. Even the US government, despite the First Amendment, has been caught leaning on social-media firms in order to outsource censorship to the private sector. Universities, once places of vigorous, robust debate and unfettered inquiry, have been transformed into ‘safe spaces’ where contrarian views are Not Platformed. We’re not only losing the right to free speech – many seem to have forgotten why it matters at all.

As legal expert Jonathan Turley explains in his new book, The Indispensable Right, free speech is fundamental to our humanity. Without the ability to articulate our beliefs, we become not only less free, but also less human. Jonathan was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are crusades against speech, particularly those driven by the state, undermining free speech?

Jonathan Turley: The Biden administration has created three categories for censorship: disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Of the three, malinformation is my favourite. It’s defined as the use of true facts in a misleading way. It isn’t hard to imagine how the government might abuse that definition.

Current proponents of censorship make arguments that I find very disingenuous. For example, they will raise an issue like child pornography, which is an act that is against the law. They have a habit of taking the most extreme forms of conduct and using it to justify sweeping and ambiguous forms of censorship. If you take a look at the UK, France, Germany and Canada, you begin to see what happens when you allow censorship to take hold. It develops an insatiable appetite.

My book poses the challenge to name a single censorship system that has succeeded in stopping an idea or movement. Censorship has a perfect failure record and my book tries to explain why. In my view, it is because freedom of speech is a human right. It’s something we’re hard-wired for. I even refer to medical studies that show how parts of our brain can shrink if we don’t express ourselves. We are so designed for free speech that we can have a physical response when we fail to use it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-mass-commutation-criminal-justice-retribution

Last week, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 federal inmates. The administration bragged that it was the largest single-day granting of clemency in American history. But a backlash swiftly followed as the public learned whom the president had released: pill-mill doctors, Ponzi schemers, and a judge who got $2.1 million in kickbacks for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit facilities.

Biden’s mass commutation came at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union and others of what Ezra Klein and Michael Lind referred to in a recent postelection conversation as “the Groups”—the vast but inchoate network of left-wing advocacy organizations that moderate Democrats are blaming for the party’s 2024 defeat. Biden’s lame-duck concession to these advocates raises questions about how much influence such radicals continue to hold in the Democratic Party.

But even more importantly, the popular outrage at Biden’s mass commutation highlights a fundamental problem with the argument advanced by criminal-justice-reform groups like the ACLU. Specifically, they deny the importance of retribution, the notion that the criminal-justice system should impose punishments not just instrumentally—for instance, because it makes the nation safer or discourages crime—but also because criminals deserve it.

Many of those who benefited were, on paper, reasonable recipients of a presidential commutation. They had been released under the provisions of the CARES Act Home Confinement Program, a Covid-mitigation strategy created during the Trump administration that sentenced low-risk, nonviolent federal offenders to serve their time at home rather than in federal prisons.

The program seems to have been a public-safety success. Of the 13,204 releasees, just 22 were rearrested between March 2020 and June 2023, and 96 percent had no violations of their parole, technical or criminal, over the same time period.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/18/biden-seals-his-legacy-as-worst-president-in-history/

Since the election, not-soon-enough-to-be-former President Joe Biden has provided a steady stream of reminders as to why the nation will be glad to be rid of him. His unique mixture of incompetence, cluelessness, disdain, arrogance, and sleaziness has been on full display.

Consider what Biden managed in a few short weeks.

The unprecedented, sweeping pardon of his son Hunter made a mockery of not only his solemn pledge that he’d trust the justice system but managed to infuriate every Democratic leader and media fanboy who’d sung his praises for that pledge.

The mysterious appearance of drone swarms around the country has showcased the ineptitude of Biden’s administration, which has attempted to: 1) tell Americans that they must be mistaken, 2) reassure everyone that the drones pose no threat and 3) admit that it has absolutely no idea what’s going on with these drone flights.

The administration’s muddied responses sparked bipartisan outrage. New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul complained that “this has gone too far” after drones temporarily shut down runways at New York Stewart International Airport.

Biden’s decision to commute nearly 1,500 sentences for people – who, he said, “have shown that they deserve a second chance” – and pardon 39 others has raised hackles, even among the mainstream media.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/domestic_propaganda_has_destroyed_the_government_s_credibility.html

Right now, swarms of drones on the eastern seaboard are captivating Americans each night.  Spotted in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Maryland, the flying pests often appear near military installations and other national security hotspots.  While everyday Americans share videos of the crafts on social media, they are not being dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” or “kooks.”  The interlopers hovering in America’s skies have equally intrigued politicians, law enforcement officers, and news reporters.

What is most interesting about this event (barring the emergence of little green men from the aerial vehicles before this essay’s publication) is the public’s general disregard for the federal government’s “official” explanation.  National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has dismissed thousands of sightings as overreactions to “manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully.”  Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists, “We haven’t seen anything unusual.  We know of no threat.”  Meanwhile, millions of Americans who have either witnessed the drones firsthand or watched recordings of their flights online are spurning the government’s response as horse manure–laden propaganda.  

Who can blame them?  Something’s going on.  Maybe amateur pilots are pulling a prank.  Maybe Russia, Iran, or China wants us chasing our tails.  Perhaps Putin is reminding war hawks in D.C. that expanded missile strikes into mainland Russia come with a price.  Or maybe Joe Biden and his Deep State handlers are keeping Americans distracted from the nauseating stench of White House pardons, unchecked inflation, and the growing prospect of WWIII.  While disparaging the drone sightings as a form of public hysteria, Mayorkas took the opportunity to push for greater government authority over drone operations in the United States.  So perhaps the whole thing is just another Intelligence Community psy-op meant to scare Americans sufficiently (à la COVID) to justify new government powers.

A similarly revealing public reaction has come over the last few years with regard to Congress’s increased interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — unexplained sightings including crafts formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  After spending most of the last century dismissing UAP as hoaxes, meteorological events, classified military programs, or mass delusions, members of Congress are now openly investigating whether some faction of the U.S. government (think Deep State) has long covered up evidence of — or even contact with — extraterrestrial beings.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/when-the-supreme-court-threw-the-law-away/

The apex of the tendency to play fast and loose with the letter of the Constitution, and to treat the document as if it were a gnomic oracle into which one could read virtually any meaning, came on June 7, 1965, when the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a law prohibiting contraceptives. The focus of the case made it difficult for many to see the implications of what the Court had done. Even many of those who thought contraceptive use was immoral didn’t think that contraceptives should be illegal, and so they didn’t realize that the Griswold case had implications far beyond the matter at hand.

In his ruling on the case, Justice William O. Douglas, an appointee of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, discovered in the Constitution a “right of marital privacy,” explaining away the absence of this phrase in the Constitution by claiming that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”

This essentially meant that enterprising and politically motivated justices could find anything they wanted in the Constitution, as long as they could argue that it was an “emanation” of a “penumbra.” By the nature of the case, an “emanation” of a “penumbra” could be found anywhere, and could be anything that an enterprising justice wanted it to be. Douglas had opened the door to the total disregard of the letter of the Constitution, in favor of whatever legal fantasies, however flimsy their reasoning was, could gain a majority on the court.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/displaying-not-establishing

In June, Louisiana passed a law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, as part of an educational framework about certain fundamental historical texts, including the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance. A group of parents, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit to block the law’s implementation, contending that it violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause forbidding the government establishment of religion. A federal judge has since ruled that this law is “unconstitutional on its face.” The state is appealing the decision, with arguments scheduled before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in January; in the meantime, state officials have been ordered not to enforce the display requirement.

Such displays were not uncommon in schools until the Supreme Court invalidated them in 1980—the apex of the Court’s hostility to religion in public spaces. More recently, the Court has returned to a narrower approach to Establishment Clause issues, closer to the Founders’ intentions. The Ten Commandments case provides a welcome opportunity for the courts to clarify that children have no more right to a public square scrubbed of religious content than adults do—and that being upset by such a display is not sufficient to warrant courts’ protection against it.

In 2005, the Supreme Court held in Van Orden v. Perry that government buildings may display the Ten Commandments because “religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause.” The Ten Commandments, in fact, feature among other historic iconography in the premises of the Court itself. “Religious acknowledgment” does not amount to prohibited “Establishment,” the Court said. Put differently, the Constitution’s specific ban on providing government support to particular denominations should not be confused with France’s policy of laïcité, a compulsory public secularism that often bars religious symbols and messages from public spaces. One can understand the litigation campaigns against religious displays in the U.S. that began in the 1960s as an effort to project the radical French Revolutionary understanding of religion in the public square onto the more temperate American one.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-doge-brac-commission

Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of our era. He delights in accomplishing what is said to be impossible: mass-producing electric cars, sending private rockets into space, and restoring free speech on the world’s most influential social media platform. He is also a ruthlessly efficient manager, having slashed production costs at his hardware companies, Telsa and SpaceX, and cut 80 percent of the workforce at Twitter, while simultaneously improving the product.

His next challenge may prove even more formidable. As part of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the bureaucracy, Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy hope to cut government spending by up to $2 trillion per year through the newly established DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency.

On the surface, this seems impossible. While conservatives have promised to reduce the size of government for more than a century, federal outlays have grown with each passing decade. Some congressional insiders, meantime, have already signaled skepticism of DOGE, arguing that Musk and Ramaswamy “know nothing about how the government works” and are destined to fail.

I would like to see Elon’s initiative succeed. America’s budget is unsustainable, and it too often directs resources to captured ideological bureaucracies rather than to the public good. But without proper design, DOGE could become another of Washington’s failed promises. To avoid that fate, the incoming Republican Congress must tailor DOGE’s structure to ensure its success.

One potential model is the BRAC Commission. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan formalized a procedure that, with later amendments and support from a bipartisan group of presidents and lawmakers, closed inefficient military bases and redirected spending to more fruitful ends. The so-called Base Realignment and Closure process, or BRAC, had several rounds, and concluded in 2011. All told, it resulted in the closure of 121 major military bases and saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-features/3258958/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-spending-cuts/

It’s not often that champions of a smaller federal government cheer the creation of a new department. But the Department of Government Efficiency isn’t like the Department of Motor Vehicles. It will be run by two businessmen who have made billions of dollars in the private sector, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It is not really a new federal agency but a task force that has been ordered to wring waste out of old ones. 

Put another way, Musk and Ramaswamy are not tasked with spending taxpayer money. They have been charged with saving it. Their goal is to recommend $2 trillion in spending cuts, or nearly 30% of the federal budget. That’s more ambitious than some of DOGE’s predecessors, such as the Grace Commission under Ronald Reagan or the Al Gore-led Reinventing Government initiative under Bill Clinton (though the Simpson-Bowles commission under Barack Obama dabbled in entitlement spending cuts).

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement. The announcement also quoted Musk as saying, “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/17/postal-service-biden-cant-deliver-on-evs/

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s bizarre and frankly childish behavior during testimony before Congress wasn’t the U.S. Postal Service’s worst moment last week. That came two days later.

DeJoy, appearing before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, was told by Republican Rep. Rich McCormick of Georgia that he is “responsible for the fall of the Postal Service and the lack of accountability.” DeJoy retorted that “this Congress is responsible for it falling apart” and insisted he was “trying to fix” the post office.

He then told McCormick that “you’re talking to yourself” and covered his ears with his hands like the “hear no evil” monkey. (See it for yourself here.)

Appalling as that was, DeJoy’s antics were overshadowed when the Washington Post reported that even after the Biden administration committed $3 billion to buy electric delivery trucks for the post office, the contractor it hired, Oshkosh, has delivered only 93 of what was supposed to be 3,000 EV trucks by now.

“Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule,” the Post says. “The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.” (Concern for the phantom danger of “climate change” outweighs the gross incompetence of the federal government in the eyes of the Post.)

The “historic” White House initiative that was ultimately to deliver 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles to the post office has been “plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting,” says the Post. Rather than building 80 a day, as was the expectation, the company is cobbling together just one.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/blue-collar-workers-reject-bidenomics

Since the election, commentators have pondered why the Biden administration’s left-wing and pro-union economic policies failed to win over working-class Americans. Many argued that Democrats’ cultural radicalism turned off those who would otherwise have embraced Bidenomics. While these voters were certainly angered by Democrats’ leftward turn on issues ranging from crime to gender ideology, they were at least as dismayed by the party’s economic policies. Even beyond the detrimental impact of inflation, nonprofessional Americans saw that the Left’s programs were not taking their concerns into account. Bidenomics was a big-government program, but it aimed to benefit a well-educated elite, not blue-collar workers and those of modest means. These Americans noticed.

Consider President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness program. Though the Supreme Court struck down his larger plan, by election time Biden had successfully forgiven more than $175 billion in loans—over a tenth of all outstanding federal student debt. These subsidies for the college-educated were his most important executive effort; Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to continue student loan relief if elected.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act was another bid to appeal to the well-educated. The law devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to support these voters’ climate obsessions and spending habits—for instance, by subsidizing electric vehicles. Far from being a populist giveaway, more than half the act’s estimated costs came from tax incentives to green corporations. This spending undermined workers in traditional hard-hat industries, such as automotives and fossil fuels.

Biden’s policies benefited industries with workers more likely to hold college degrees. The CHIPS and Science Act, for example, directed tens of billions of dollars in grants and subsidies to the semiconductor industry. With 25 percent of its members holding graduate degrees, the semiconductor workforce is much better educated than the general population. The industry estimated that the act will create jobs for tens of thousands of Ph.D., master’s, and bachelor’s degree holders.