Free Speech
February 16, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Current cultural and political developments in the U.S. are so weird that I tend to assume we must be unique. But not so: in the United Kingdom, too, “wokeness” operates as an explicit threat to freedom. The situation is even worse there than here, in fact. The London Times reports: Police have been urged to rewrite the rules on hate crime after a judge likened a force to the Gestapo
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January 30, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Ezra Levant writes: I wrote a best-selling book about Justin Trudeau in the last election. After the election, I received a letter by registered mail notifying me that I was being investigated for that book. Trudeau’s elections commissioner claimed it was an illegal campaign activity and demanded that I submit to an interrogation. So I went to Elections Canada’s Ottawa headquarters last week, where I was grilled for an hour
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January 24, 2020 — John Hinderaker
From France comes this disturbing headline: “French teenager in hiding after insulting Islam online.” Police have told a French teenager to go into hiding after she received death threats for insulting Islam. The 16-year-old has been advised to stay away from her lycée (sixth-form college) in southeast France after calls on the internet for her to be killed, raped or attacked. Great police protection! A 16-year-old girl is threatened with
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January 23, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The Southern Poverty Law Center, as Power Line readers know, is one of America’s pre-eminent hate groups. It smears those with whom it disagrees, and the media, politicians, and, in some cases, law enforcement are happy to take its hate campaign seriously. So fighting back against the lavishly funded, but utterly corrupt, SPLC is important. Happily, one organization smeared by the SPLC, the American Freedom Law Center, has taken the
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December 22, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Last week, I wrote about a case in which the Fifth Circuit, in a unanimous decision, ruled that a suit could proceed against a Black Lives Matter activist for violence he didn’t commit or encourage. The police officer who brought the suit was hit in the head by a rock thrown during a BLM protest. However, he did not claim that the individual he sued, DeRay McKesson, threw the rock,
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December 15, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
A police officer who was hit in the head by a rock thrown at a 2016 demonstration in Louisiana sued DeRay Mckesson, the prominent Black Lives Matter provocateur who organized the demonstration. The officer did not allege that Mckesson threw the rock, that he called on anyone to throw rocks, or that he called on anyone to commit any act of violence. Yet, he sought to hold Mckesson liable for
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December 12, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Once upon a time, Stanley Fish was a state of the art radical professor — “a scrappy advocate of multiculturalism, affirmative-action hiring quotas, campus speech codes and openly subversive strains of post-structuralist critical theory,” to quote the view attributed to his critics by the New York Times. Fish transformed the Duke University English department into a bastion of “deconstructionism” — the view that literary texts acquire meaning only as a
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October 25, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Almost since the start of Power Line in 2002, we have reported with dismay the descent of American colleges and universities into a leftist bastion of illiberalism. Most of our focus has been on professors, and not without reason. They are the ones who have degraded the teaching of humanities through their obsession with identify politics and disdain for Western Civilization. However, I came away from this year’s ATHENA Roundtable
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October 15, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Paul wrote earlier today about Lebron James’s ill-informed and self-interested comments on Chinese oppression of the residents of Hong Kong, and Daryl Morey’s free speech rights. One of my kids noted this lampooning of James by Barstool Sports, on Instagram. Barstool pulls no punches: “In honor of Lebron denouncing freedom of speech…” When you’re being criticized by sources as disparate as Power Line and Barstool Sports, it is probably time
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October 15, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Lebron James has weighed in on the controversy over the expression by the Houston Rockets’ general manager of sympathy for the people of Hong Kong, and on the NBA’s reaction thereto. James accused the GM, Daryl Morey, of thinking only about himself. James said: [A]t times, there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you’re not thinking about others, when you only think about yourself. I don’t want
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October 13, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Americans may be ill-informed about many things, but they know a lot about sports. So, ironically, it could be the NBA’s enforcement of Red China’s strictures on unapproved speech that, more than anything else, educates Americans on the nature of the Chinese regime. This happened on Wednesday, but I just saw it via InstaPundit. At an exhibition game between the Washington Wizards and the Guangzhou Long Lions at Capital One
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October 1, 2019 — John Hinderaker
When city governments can’t handle excrement on the sidewalks, crime, potholes, and other traditional responsibilities, they often respond by launching grandiose but wholly useless initiatives. They might try to change the weather or, as in the case of San Francisco, destroy America’s oldest and most effective civil rights organization. We wrote about San Francisco’s attack on the National Rifle Association here. San Francisco not only adopted a resolution labeling the
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September 29, 2019 — John Hinderaker
New York City is trying to ban the phrase “illegal alien” in various contexts, including employment and housing. It has issued a guidance to that effect under the New York City Human Rights Law. Under the City’s interpretation, calling an illegal alien an “illegal alien” could cost you $250,000. At Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader points out that the guidance is obviously unconstitutional: New York City is seeking to use an
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July 26, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google, alleging that the company wrongly suspended the campaign’s Google Ads account during the critical hours following the first Democratic debate. The Complaint is venued in federal court in central California. Its allegations are explosive. Gabbard accuses Google of trying to sabotage her presidential campaign because she, like Elizabeth Warren, has argued in favor of reining in the tech monopolies, including Google. Here
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July 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Driving over to see the Center of the American Experiment’s worldwide premiere of No Safe Spaces at the Parkway Theater this past Tuesday, I had a flashback to the premiere of a movie that we promoted at the Campus Theater in 2007: Indoctrinate U. That film also depicted the parlous state of free speech in higher education. After working on the film for three years, director Evan Coyne Maloney came
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May 28, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Teresa Seeberger rented rooms in a house she owned in Davenport, Iowa. When Seeberger learned that her tenant’s fifteen-year-old daughter had become pregnant, she told the tenant that she and her daughter would have to leave. When the tenant asked why, Seeberger said: “You don’t even pay rent on time the way it is . . . now you’re going to bring another person into the mix.” The eviction was
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May 8, 2019 — Scott Johnson
All this week we are featuring outstanding reviews and essays from the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute, the Claremont Review of Books. We are featuring one such essay in the adjacent post. It is one of the best magazines in the United States. I should probably add that I am a proud fellow of the Claremont Institute. In my case the fellowship is a purely honorific designation that I
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