Category: Constitution

Trump Unites Republicans

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In Wednesday night’s “historic” impeachment vote — the cable news people keep repeating that word, for some reason — not a single Republican member of the House voted “yea,” whereas there were three “nay” votes in Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic caucus: Minnesota Rep. Collin C. Peterson and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew voted against both articles of impeachment, while Maine Rep. Jared Golden voted for the “abuse of power” charge, but voted against charging President Trump with “obstruction of Congress.” Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for president as a Democrat, voted “present” on both articles.

What does this mean? It means Bill Kristol is once again proven wrong. Last month, the #NeverTrump ex-Fox News pundit claimed, on the basis of “private conversations,” that some Republicans in the House would vote in favor of impeaching the president. Oops.

 

What is the “evidence” about which Republicans “refuse to care”? Like Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and CNN’s audience, Kristol apparently still believes Donald Trump is a Russian agent who “stole” the election, and where is the “evidence” to support that paranoid conspiracy theory? If Bill Kristol is ever right about something, let me know. He’s got a Harvard education and zero common sense, but I digress . . .

If Kristol was wrong about the House vote, certainly he must be dismayed by the prospects in the Senate, where it would take a two-thirds majority (at least 67 senators) to convict and remove the President from office. That’s in the Constitution, and in yesterday’s phony “debate” in the House, Democrats repeatedly claimed that impeaching the president was about defending the Constitution, which is an obvious lie. Democrats are against the Constitution — they are against freedom of speech, against freedom of religion, against the “right to keep and bear arms,” against the Electoral College, etc. Basically the entire Constitution is wrong, according to Democrats but . . . ORANGE MAN BAD!

 

Contrary to lectures by, inter alia, noted constitutional scholar Maxine Waters, the President’s authority to conduct diplomacy is practically unlimited and, whatever your opinion about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, there was nothing unconstitutional about Trump’s July request that the newly-elected Ukrainian president “do us a favor” by investigating the corrupt activities of Hunter Biden and Alexandra Chalupa. No Democrat ever wants to talk about what Chalupa was doing in 2016, just like they never want to talk about whether President Obama authorized the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump’s campaign. To those who have bought into the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory, any discussion of these subjects is — you guessed it — Russian propaganda, so that Democrats (and Bill Kristol, but I repeat myself) are living inside an echo chamber where all “evidence” points to Moscow, including the evidence that points in the opposite direction. But once again, I digress . . .

Impeachment has united Republicans in support of Trump, and nowhere is this unity more solid than in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell seems determined that the Democrats’ bogus ginned-up charges against the president will get a fair (but brief) hearing before being dismissed with the contemptuous ridicule it so richly deserves. As might be expected, Nancy Pelosi is not happy about this:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats may wait to send their articles of impeachment against President Trump to the GOP-controlled Senate, for fear that they are incapable of holding a fair trial.
Pelosi held a press conference on Wednesday following the House impeachment vote and was asked what would qualify as a “fair trial.”
“We’ll make a decision as a group, as we always have, as we go along,” she replied.
Pelosi was then asked about possibly withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate until they get certain reassurances, and the Speaker refused to give a direct answer.
“Again, we’ll decide what that dynamic is, but we hope that the resolution of that process will be soon in the Senate,” she said.
Pelosi proceeded to read a statement from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about impeachment procedure and used it as an example of what she considers to be an unfair process.
“Let me tell you what I don’t consider a fair trial,” she told the crowd of reporters. “This is what I don’t consider a fair trial — that Leader McConnell has stated that he’s not an impartial juror, that he’s going to take his cues, in quotes, from the White House, and he is working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.”

Folks, you couldn’t make this up. According to Nancy Pelosi, it is wrong for Republican senators to support a Republican president. This fits neatly into the general pattern of Pelosi’s San Francisco-based belief system, where it is simply wrong for anyone to vote Republican. Her district is 100% urban and the median income is $111,717; Hillary got 77% of the 2016 presidential vote in Pelosi’s district. By contrast, Mitch McConnell represents the Commonwealth of Kentucky with a rural population of 1.8 million (23%) and a median income of $48,375, where Trump got about 63% of the vote. There are more Democrat voters in McConnell’s state than there are Republican voters in Pelosi’s district, so that she can (and does) completely disregard Republican opinions. In her part of California, “Antifa” thugs routinely perpetrate political terrorism against Trump supporters, and Nancy Pelosi refuses to condemn this violent suppression of opposing voices. Pelosi does not recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s election because she considers all Republican voters to be evil. The 1.2 million Kentucky citizens who voted for Trump are wrong, and their votes should count for nothing compared to the 275,000 Californians who voted to elect Nancy Pelosi — such is the cult mentality behind this impeachment. Meanwhile, in Michigan:

President Donald Trump reacted live to the results of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, during an epic long two-hour rally with supporters in Michigan.
“They don’t even have any crime, this is the first impeachment where there’s no crime!” Trump said to the crowd of supporters at his campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan after learning that House Democrats had voted to impeach him.
Trump referred to the “very dark era” of history when President Richard Nixon was impeached and said it was remarkable that the feeling this time around was much different.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time, it’s crazy,” Trump said as the crowd of supporters cheered. . . .
Trump ridiculed Democrats for the partisan vote, even losing support from Americans despite their best efforts to make their case in a series of House hearings.
“I’m not worried. I’m not worried. Because it’s always good when you don’t do anything wrong, you get impeached,” Trump said. “That might be a record that will last forever.” . . .
“I know one thing, Americans will show up by the tens of millions next year to vote Nancy Pelosi the hell out of office,” Trump said as the crowd cheered wildly.
Trump spoke for two hours at the rally, highlighting the work he was doing to help rebuild states like Michigan with more jobs, stock market records, and better trade deals. He also spoke about reviving the auto industry, praising companies like Ford who recently announced a $1.45 billion investment in the state.

Oh, and here’s a little love-tap for the #NeverTrump gang:

Notably, the Trump rally was held inside the congressional district of U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a former libertarian Republican who left the party over his opposition to Trump and was the only non-Democratic vote on the articles of impeachment.

Yeah, f–k you, Justin. Enjoy your upcoming retirement from office.



 

Professor Demands Censorship

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Thomas J. Main is a professor of Public and International Affairs at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Baruch College. He has recently published a book entitled The Rise of the Alt-Right although, unlike me, I don’t suppose he’s ever met anyone who was “alt-right.” Professor Main’s expertise, you see, consists entirely of his hatred for the “alt-right.” This is how liberalism works: Any liberal can claim to be an expert in anything (e.g., climate change) and none of his peers will question his credentials, so long as he has the correct (i.e., liberal) opinion on the subject.

Once upon a time, liberals were adamantly in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Defending the First Amendment rights of Communists to advocate on behalf of Stalinism, for example, was once considered the duty of every bien-pensant liberal. More recently, however — and 2016 seems to have been the tipping point — liberals have begun demanding that anyone who disagrees with them should be silenced. Thus, Professor Main writes in the Los Angeles Times:

After the 2017 “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville, Va., during which counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by a rally attendee, a lot of pundits predicted the demise of the alt-right movement. And for a while, it seemed as if they might be right.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville, alt-right websites spewing white nationalist, misogynist and anti-Semitic diatribes were banned from standard internet service providers, and the de-platforming took a toll. . . .
But the reversal didn’t last. In an era where the U.S. president has offered support for alt-right thinking and new communications technologies have expanded the reach of fringe ideas, the movement quickly sprang back. The alt-right’s web audience is now significantly larger than it was before its supposed Waterloo at Charlottesville, and the Daily Stormer and other publications have found new web platforms from which to broadcast their hate-filled messages. . . .
Without intervention, the alt-right will continue to endure and grow, with predictable violent results. Rebutting the rising tide of illiberalism requires not simply a technological fix, but an intellectual and political response. Certainly, cesspools of hate such as 8chan must be shut down — for good, this time. But we also need, in the short term, sharp but civil rebuttal of alt-right ideologies from influential Americans. Longer-term, and more importantly, we need much better civic education and a government that can effectively address the economic and social issues that underlie alt-right support.

Answer me this, Professor: How is one to offer “sharp but civil rebuttal of alt-right ideologies” if, as you say, adherents of those ideologies are to be denied any platform on which to express them?

Yet this leads to another question the Professor cannot answer: If the ideas expressed on “cesspools of hate” are so self-evidently wrong, as you seem to believe, then why are so many millions of people directing their attention to these online venues? In other words, while I certainly don’t endorse some of the viewpoints expressed by the “alt-right,” and would never approve any advocacy of lawless violence, it occurs to me that there must be something the “alt-right” is offering, as an alternative to “mainstream” journalism, that must be considered valuable to its online audience. Permit me to quote a Virginia slave owner:

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself … she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

So wrote Thomas Jefferson in the  Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and what he wrote more than 200 years ago, I still believe. Alas, I’m not an “expert” like Professor Main.



 

AG William Barr Tells The Truth, and Liberals Are Losing Their Minds

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Mike LaChance at Legal Insurrection:

Attorney General William Barr gave a speech at the Federalist Society this weekend in which he called out Democrats and the so-called “resistance” for their constant obstruction of Trump. . . .
The speech has set off a bit of a firestorm on the left and the right for the frank manner in which Barr characterizes the left’s “dangerous” approach. . . .
From the Department of Justice website:

As I have said, the Framers fully expected intense pulling and hauling between the Congress and the President. Unfortunately, just in the past few years, we have seen these conflicts take on an entirely new character.
Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called “The Resistance,” and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, “resistance” is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government. . . .
The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of “Resistance” against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly Federalist, Fisher Ames, in an essay during the early years of the Republic.
In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

The Obama administration used a bogus “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory as a pretext to engage in illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign, and then tried to conceal their crimes by doubling-down on that narrative. The firing of James Comey at the FBI was then turned into an excuse for the Mueller investigation and, when that failed to provide any evidence of “collusion,” next Democrats turned to this “Ukrainegate” scam. If this fails, they’ll find something else.

All of this is simply a way for Democrats to portray the Trump presidency as illegitimate, as if the 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump were of no account, because ORANGE MAN BAD!


 

Let’s Take Chris Hayes Seriously

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Nothing was easier than the point-and-laugh reaction over the weekend after Chris Hayes argued on MSNBC that “the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.”

This bizarre tautology — “The ocean would be dry if it wasn’t so wet” — provoked howls of laughter, and a stinging rebuttal on Twitter:

As I’ve pointed out before, Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote majority in 2016 was entirely explained by her lopsided margin in California:

One of the “arguments” (an excuse, actually) employed by Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was, “She won the popular vote!” To which the proper reply is, “Where?” In a handful of large urban states where Republican Donald Trump did not campaign, Clinton won by huge margins, and this proves . . .? Nothing, really.
In California, Clinton won with 62% of the vote, 7.4 million to 3.9 million, a margin of nearly 3.5 million votes (3,446,281 to be exact). Nationwide, Clinton got 65,853,516 votes to Trump’s 62,984,825 — a margin of exactly 2,868,691. In other words, her margin in California alone was more than enough to account for why she “won” the popular vote, which is completely irrelevant in our Electoral College system.

If it had been the intent of our Founding Fathers that the president be elected by a nationwide referendum, they could have done that, and yet they didn’t, to the puzzlement of Chris Hayes. Presidential campaigns might be organized much differently — why bother visiting New Hampshire or Iowa? — if it were all just a 50-percent-plus-one referendum. But the Constitution says otherwise.

When you look at election maps, you see that the Republican Party suffers from a disadvantage because it has failed to organize or campaign effectively in three large states — California (55 Electoral College votes), New York (29) and Illinois (20). Given the landslide majorities enjoyed by Democrats in those states (62% for Hillary in California, 59% in New York, 56% in Illinois), the GOP begins every presidential campaign by conceding 104 Electoral College votes to Democrats, who thus more or less automatically have 39% of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. And yet if you look at the county-by-county map, you realize that, even in these three Democrat landslide states, there are still large areas where the GOP vote is a majority. Republicans win among rural, small-town and suburban voters, whereas the Democrat vote is concentrated in urban areas. Does anyone, even Chris Hayes, imagine that the authors of our Constitution intended the federal government to represent only urban interests? Don’t be absurd.

Seriously, what was the substance of Chris Hayes’s argument?

You can see why, on just basic tactical grounds, why the Republican Party would want to continue a system in which they can lose a majority of votes and still get all the powers of the presidency, appointing the Supreme Court justices and judges and signing legislation, vetoing legislation, commanding the army, everything, right? All of that with less [or fewer] votes than the Democrat got.
No wonder they like. But I think there’s actually a deeper philosophical thing happening, which is the question of what exactly American democracy is for. And the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.
Here’s what I mean by that. Starting the 1960s, 1961 particularly, the Supreme Court started developing a jurisprudence of one person, one vote, right? The idea is that each individual vote has to carry roughly the same amount of weight as each other individual vote which is a pretty intuitive concept but it was not a reality.

In other words, Chris Hayes is basing his argument against the Constitution on Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s. What he calls “a jurisprudence of one person, one vote” was established in a series of cases (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Gray v. Sanders, 1963; Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, 1964) in which the Warren Court replaced the actual requirements of the Constitution with an egalitarian doctrine derived from an imaginative interpretation of the Fourteen Amendment.

Justice John Marshall Harlan II’s dissent in Reynolds is a memorable denunciation of the Warren Court majority’s usurpation of authority that the Constitution never contemplated for the Supreme Court, given that nothing in the Constitution (and certainly not in the Fourteenth Amendment) gives the federal government any role in determining legislative districts. As in so many other issues during the 1960s and ’70s, the Supreme Court’s claim to near-dictatorial power (“the pervasive overlordship of the federal judiciary,” as Harlan called it) helped inspire the rise of the conservative movement as a means of limiting this kind of judicial tyranny. The mischievous activity of the Warren Court, which Chris Hayes argues is more relevant than the Constitution itself, tended toward a manifestly un-democratic system — centralized government by an elite that recognized no limitations to its power to interfere with the lives of citizens in ways that would have shocked the Founders.

The fact that Chris Hayes and other Democrats are now arguing for the abolition of the Electoral College is yet another reason to re-elect Trump in 2020, just in case you needed another reason.



 

They Told Me If I Voted for Trump, Jews Would Suffer Legal Persecution …

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. . . and they were right!

A non-profit is fighting back against a lawsuit from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has forced its closure and shut down its crowdfunding platform.
Arthur Goldberg has been a target of SPLC since 2012. He and non-profits with which he is affiliated have been sued twice, once as the co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) — which offered counseling for those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction — and most recently as co-director of Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA), the parent organization for Funding Morality.
On Thursday, Hudson County, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter Bariso, Jr. slapped Goldberg and JIFGA with over $3.2 million in punitive fines and legal fees for allegedly violating a 2015 injunction and settlement agreement against JONAH that forbids him from providing counseling referrals.
In a move meant to “deter and punish,” he also barred Goldberg from serving as a director of any nonprofit organization in the state of New Jersey —–a condition that may violate Goldberg’s rights. As a result, JIFGA and the crowdfunding site, Funding Morality, will have to suspend operations. . . .
“We expect to appeal the decision, which we believe is at odds with the facts and infringes upon our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association,” [Goldberg] said.
“Our appeal seeks to vindicate our constitutional right to promote biblical values,” he said. “Today’s politically correct progressive ideology seeks to eliminate the free exchange of ideas whenever certain views may be antithetical to current prevailing opinions.”
“This is part of the left-wing agenda to cut off conservative speech and shut down voices that disagree with them,” Goldberg said.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Anyone with an iota of common sense can see that New Jersey’s law against “reparative therapy” (a/k/a “conversion therapy”) is an unconstitutional infringement of First Amendment religious liberty, when such counseling is provided through the auspices of a religious institution. Careful examination of the SPLC’s role in this case demonstrates how these tax-exempt totalitarians are endangering free speech, seeking to limit “acceptable” opinion and, in effect, to make it illegal to express disapproval of homosexuality.

“There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.”
— Deuteronomy 23:17 (KJV)

Do the courts of New Jersey intend to declare the Word of God illegal?



 

Don’t Mess With the Grand Poobah

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What’s the first thing you notice about that photo? Yeah, there’s Gavin McInnes looking like a Kentucky colonel on Derby Day in his white suit, but there in the background is noted First Amendment lawyer Ron Coleman, looking like the third Blues Brother in his shades.

After it was announced Monday that McInnes was suing the SPLC, I arranged an interview with the plaintiff, and this is the result:

When he decided in 2016 to create a club for his supporters, Gavin McInnes says he had in mind something fun — like the “Loyal Order of Water Buffalo” lodge to which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble belonged in the old cartoon series. A humorist-turned-political commentator whose YouTube channel has nearly 270,000 subscribers, McInnes certainly didn’t intend the Proud Boys to be a “hate group,” but that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled them, and a federal lawsuit McInnes filed this week accuses the Alabama-based SPLC of “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, defamation, and false light invasion of privacy.”
The 61-page complaint in the case details how the SPLC began targeting McInnes in 2017 and continued upping its characterization of him as an “extremist” and labeling the Proud Boys a dangerous “white nationalist” group until they succeeded in getting McInnes banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram last year. Citing numerous articles on the SPLC website as “false and defamatory,” the complaint accuses the tax-exempt left-wing group of using the “hate” label in a deliberate campaign to “destroy” its chosen ideological enemies. It seems the SPLC considers more or less anyone who supports President Trump to be a “far-right” extremist.
“I made it fun to love Trump, and I’m effective — that scares the Left,” McInnes said in a telephone interview this week, explaining his opinion of how a comedian ended up being branded with what he calls the “Scarlet Letter” of the SPLC’s hate label. Employing a metaphor made popular by the 1999 film The Matrix, McInnes says, “I’m red-pilling an entire generation.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Gilmore v. Jones, et al., Hearing

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia
Defendants in a major First Amendment case today urged a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by former State Department official Brennan Gilmore, who claims he was defamed by Alex Jones and others who criticized his activities at the August 2017 riot where a woman was killed.

Attorneys for Jones and his co-defendants, including Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft and investigative journalist Lee Stranahan, not only disputed Gilmore’s claims of defamation, but also argued that the U.S. District Court for Western Virginia does not have proper jurisdiction in the case. Stranahan is a Virginia resident and, his attorney Aaron Walker argued, this fact defeats the “diversity of citizenship” requirement for federal jurisdiction over a state law case, as the plaintiff Gilmore is also a Virginia resident. Walker has filed a motion for sanctions against the plaintiff’s attorneys under Rule 11, alleging they did not exercise due diligence in their filings. (Which is not legally the same as saying “they lied,” but readers are free to draw their own conclusions.)

Gilmore was on the scene of the August 2017 riot in Charlottesville, where left-wing counter-protesters engaged in sometimes violent confrontations with white supremacists at a “Unite the Right” rally. Gilmore captured video of the fatal incident in which 20-year-old James Alex Field Jr. rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of leftist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. In subsequent TV appearances and a column for the Politico website, Gilmore sought to blame President Trump for what he called the “escalating, toxic politics of hate” that resulted in Heyer’s death.

Once Gilmore’s ties to the State Department and the Democrat Party became public knowledge, Jones accused Gilmore of being a CIA operative and suggested he was on the payroll of liberal billionaire George Soros. Some of Jones’s claims were echoed by other defendants (Hoft called Gilmore “a deep state shill with links to George Soros”) and Gilmore blames the defendants for his being targeted for harassment.

During today’s court hearing, Gilmore’s lawyers — Andrew Mendrala of the Georgetown University Civil Rights Clinic and Brianne Gorod of the Constitutional Accountability Center — repeated the assertions in their complaint that the defendants had sought to make Gilmore a “scapegoat” for the violence in Charlottesville, in order to deflect blame from right-wing white supremacists. Lawyers for the defendants, including former Republican congressman and Army Lt. Col. Allen West, mostly emphasized the jurisdictional issues in the case. However, Walker and defense attorney Andrew Grossman, representing Jones, also strongly disputed the plaintiff’s characterization of Stranahan’s comments in an interview with Lee Ann McAdoo on Jones’s InfoWars site.

Reporters for several media organizations were on hand for the hearing and, in a brief interview outside the courthouse, Walker emphasized the importance of the First Amendment issues involved. “Free speech isn’t just for people we like or opinions we agree with,” Walker said, mentioning his personal dislike for Alex Jones. Walker made reference to Supreme Court cases including Brandenburg v. Ohio. “Today, it’s Alex Jones, but tomorrow it could be the New York Times.”

 

I made this trip with John Hoge of Hogewash, who made a guest appearance in court as an easel, holding up a large display poster that Walker had prepared for the case. He summarizes today:

The Plaintiff’s attorneys spent most of their time trying explain why the case should be left standing in spite of the facts and law.
The judge did not rule from the bench, so it will be a while before we know whether the case will go forward.

As longtime readers know, Hoge, Walker, Stranahan and I were all co-defendants in lawsuits filed by convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, whose pro se shuttuppery LOLsuits failed miserably. Whether the current Gilmore v. Jones et al. litigation has more merit than Kimberlin’s nuisance suits is a matter of opinion, but the whole point is that as Americans we are entitled to express our opinions, and the Gilmore suit might conceivably infringe our rights . However, while we still have our freedom, I wish to remind you of an important truth, that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Why Freedom of Speech Matters (And Why ‘Hate Speech’ Is Protected, Too)

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“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself . . . [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson

When news of Tommy Robinson’s arrest in England made headlines, Americans were shocked. A judge had sentenced Robinson to 13 months in prison for attempting to publicize the trial of men accused of operation a criminal sex ring that trafficked underage girls in Leeds.

The case involved one of several so-called “grooming” gangs that have been exposed in England in recent years, the most notorious of which was The Rotherham Horror. Basically, lower-class white English girls are seduced (“groomed”) by young Muslim men, mostly the sons of Pakitani immigrants, and then gang-raped and/or pimped out as prostitutes. The racial aspect of this phenomenon obviously has the potential to inflame public opinion, especially since investigations have shown officials failed to act promptly in many cases because of political correctness.

Why was Robinson arrested?

The Contempt of Court Act 1981 lays down strict limitations on what can be reported in the press regarding active criminal proceedings. This is to prevent outside influences from affecting jurors, ensuring that the defendant has a fair trial based only on the evidence put before the court.
Robinson was already serving a suspended sentence for contempt of court concerning a 2017 case in Canterbury when he was arrested by police while live-streaming on Facebook outside a grooming trial in Leeds on Friday morning.
In the broadcast, played to the court, Robinson “got into a shouting match with several men who appeared to be defendants in the case”, Buzzfeed reports. He also read out the names and charges against the men, some of them inaccurate.
“No-one could possibly conclude that it would be anything other than highly prejudicial to the defendants in the trial,” said Judge Geoffrey Marson QC, presiding. . . .
A temporary order had been imposed by the court banning media coverage of Robinson’s trial and conviction while the Leeds grooming trial was ongoing over fears it could further publicise Robinson’s prejudicial broadcast.
“If the jurors in my present trial get to know of this video I will no doubt be faced with an application to discharge the jury,” Marson told Robinson on Friday, the Hull Daily Mail reports.
“If I have to do that it will mean a re-trial, costing hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pounds.”

Apparently, either (a) English courts do not have the authority to sequester the jury in high-profile trials, or (b) the courts are deliberately attempting to suppress public knowledge of the Leeds case. As an American unfamiliar with British law, I can’t say which is true, but I do know that there is a smoldering resentment among many Britons about the role of the “respectable” media in cases like these.

One sees Robinson described in headlines as a “far-right” figure, or an “anti-Muslim” activist, but who is to blame for this situation? When you examine the facts surrounding The Rotherham Horror and other such cases, it is apparent that the media was largely complicit — along with the police and other public officials — in permitting the problem of the so-called “grooming” gangs to flourish. Class prejudice was clearly a factor in this. Most British journalists are from the college-educated upper classes, while the girls being raped and pimped out by these Muslim gangs were mostly from a class that Americans would call “white trash.”

It’s not as if the “grooming” gangs were a big secret, after all. Young Pakistani men were parking their cars in front of schools to pick up their 14- and 15-year-old “girlfriends” and, because these girls were generally from the welfare-dependent lower classes, nobody seemed to care. Police, educators and social-service agencies ignored what was going on, and as for the media, well, they wouldn’t want to be accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia” for reporting on this phenomenon.

One of the first journalists to call attention to this problem was radical feminist Julie Bindel, who wrote a 2007 column in the Sunday Times of London about two men — Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32 — who had pleaded guilty to abduction, sexual activity with a child, and the supply of a controlled drug:

Blackburn, in common with many northern towns, is experiencing a huge upsurge in pimping, and it is an unpalatable truth for the authorities — and indeed the police — that many of the newest wave of pimps come from within the Asian community. . . .
The Mall in Blackburn is popular as a meeting place for the town’s young men and women. Set on two floors, with over 100 high-street stores, it is brightly lit and usually busy. It teems with young women with pushchairs, elderly people window-shopping, and teenagers meeting up with their friends. The crackle of security guards’ radios mingles with the cheesy piped music.
Not everyone is there to shop. Well-dressed Asian teenage boys can be found on the lookout for young white girls, following them around those stores that sell cheap jewellery and perfume. Meanwhile, older men sit on the benches, watching their workers and potential recruits in action. The older men are “employing” the boys to chat up the girls and eventually hand them over.
The Mall is widely known locally as the Lap because of the way young men and girls circle around the arcade, seeking each other out. The girls, keen to hook up with a boyfriend, call it “doing the Lap”. Young men stop to chat to the giggling girls, teasing and flirting. To many, they look like any other group of teenagers. One security guard, asked if the men are pimps, said he neither knew nor cared. “It’s the girls,” he says, “they love the Pakis. We can’t get a look in.” Nearby, a young man takes two of the girls into a shop, where he buys them make-up and perfume. Later on, the groups of men move on to the Vue cinema complex near Blackburn station. The younger men are on bicycles, the older ones in expensive-looking cars, sound systems blaring out bhangra and gangster rap. Girls begin to approach them, and are soon driven away in cars by the older men. It is possible that they are taken to “slag houses”, where they will be sold for sex.

“It’s the girls. They love the Pakis.”

One might think such a sentence, reported in the Sunday Times, would have caused responsible adults to raise an eyebrow and become curious as to what was happening with young girls in Blackburn, and in other communities in rundown post-industrial northern England. Oh, but these girls were just lower-class “slags” and, like the mall security guard, the upper classes who run England’s”respectable” media were indifferent to the fact that teenagers were being whored out by Pakistani pimps.

It was this attitude of class snobbery, compounded by concerns about inflaming “Islamophobia,” that created the vacuum into which Tommy Robinson and other “far-right” figures eagerly leaped, providing coverage of a phenomenon that the respectable media had deliberately ignored.

Is Tommy Robinson racist? Is he irresponsible? Were his efforts to call attention to the Leeds trial a species of “hate speech”?

British law is different than American law, where the First Amendment guarantees our rights to free speech and a free press. In America, our devotion to liberty is such that in 1977, neo-Nazis were permitted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a notorious decision mocked in a famous scene in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”

 

Yeah, Jake, we all hate Illinois Nazis, too. But what happens if, in our eagerness to suppress “hate speech,” we accidentally silence the truth?

This is a question that has consequences far beyond issues of neo-Nazis and “Islamophobia.” As Jefferson said, truth “is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error,” and a free people can tolerate even free speech for Nazis, as long as we are “permitted freely to contradict” them.

What has happened, however, is that our institutions of higher education have been taken over by soi-disant “progressives” who have taught a generation of young Americans to believe that certain facts are “hate speech.” This problem has concerned me ever since I began researching radical feminism four years ago, and discovered how far academia has gone to enshrine Third Wave feminist “gender theory” as an Official Truth which no one on campus is permitted to criticize.

According to this theory, there are no natural differences between men and women.  Instead, young people are now taught, all apparent male-female behavioral differences are produced by the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize the argument of Professor Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. For many years, Professor Butler’s book has been required reading for university students in Women’s Studies courses, which may explain the increasingly bizarre arguments emerging from the feminist movement. If the leading voices of feminism in politics and journalism have been indoctrinated with a particular theory of “gender,” and if critics of this theory are effectively prohibited from speaking on university campuses, is it any surprise that common-sense talk about human sexual behavior is now routinely denounced as “misogyny,” “rape culture,” “homophobia,” etc.?

The suppression of disagreement and criticism as “hate speech” on university campuses has had consequences far beyond academia. If major corporations are hiring “the best and brightest” from our universities, should we be surprised to see the regime of political correctness being imposed in companies like Google? When it is possible to be fired from the world’s most powerful information provider for daring to raise questions about their “diversity” policies — which is what happened to James Damore — shouldn’t we be concerned that truth is being “disarmed of her natural weapons,” as Jefferson warned?

It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Julie Bindel, who courageously reported on Pakistani “grooming” gangs more than 10 years ago, has been “no-platformed” at British universities because she is also a critic of transgender activists. Bindel is a hard-core radical lesbian, and not someone that American conservatives would agree with on most issues, but she refuses to be bullied away from the important truth that male and female are meaningful biological categories. Maybe you don’t like radical lesbians any more than Jake liked Illinois Nazis, but friends of liberty must always defend “free argument and debate,” as Jefferson said, because we are confident that “truth is great and will prevail.”

It encouraged me to see Ben Shapiro speak up for Tommy Robinson. Shapiro has been whipsawed between competing camps of hatred in recent years. Whenever he shows up to speak on campus, the Left throws a riot. He has been smeared as an “alt-right” fascist while, at the same time, he is a target of Jew-haters in the “alt-right” ranks, and it’s remarkable how he’s maintained his sanity amid the Trump-era madness.

Shapiro calls Robinson “kooky” and “fringe,” even while arguing in defense of Robinson’s efforts to call attention to “grooming” cases. And this is an important point: You don’t have to like Tommy Robinson, or agree with 100% of everything he says and does, to be concerned about what his arrest means for the issue of free speech. Likewise, you may consider Julie Bindel a kooky fringe feminist and still believe it is wrong for universities to “no-platform” her because of her “transphobia.”

In a world where it is considered sane to look the other way while English girls are being raped and pimped out by Pakistani gangs, people will turn to the kooky fringe to find the truth. And if the truth is silenced as “hate speech,” then only liars will be permitted to speak.