Could have been a chain smoker.
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Will Sessions allow the retired FBI informant to speak out about the uranium deal? If so, when?(See 1 below.)
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Documentation of mass media liberalism and bias. (See 2 and 2a below.)
Whether they want to admit it, far too many Liberals are emotionally puerile and mentally disturbed. In a word, they are sick.
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Bret Stephens' op ed on Univ. of Chicago's President. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Why is Jeff Sessions hiding the Uranium One informant?
Perhaps as startling as the revelation that the FBI was investigating the Hillary Clinton/Russia/Uranium One collusion and that key figures like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe knew about it and said nothing, is the refusal by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to remove the non-disclosure agreement gag order on the FBI informant who arguably could put Bill and Hillary Clinton and a few others in federal prison.
It was said the Jeff Sessions recused himself from all things Russian because of election campaign conflicts but is it really because he thought it would insulate him from having to divulge what he knew about Uranium One and the people who at the very least knew about the deal, some who approved the deal, including past and present members of the FBI, the DOJ, and Special Counsel Robert Miller’s team? Is Jeff Sessions part of the Uranium One cover-up? If not, then he needs to explain why he is thus far refusing Sen. Chuck Grassley’s request to lift the gag order imposed by the Obama administration as part of the Uranium One cover-up:
A top Senate Republican is calling for the Justice Department to lift an apparent “gag order” on an FBI informant who reportedly helped the U.S. uncover a corruption and bribery scheme by Russian nuclear officials but allegedly was “threatened” by the Obama administration to stay quiet….
“Witnesses who want to talk to Congress should not be gagged and threatened with prosecution for talking. If that has happened, senior DOJ leadership needs to fix it and release the witness from the gag order,” Grassley said in a statement
Victoria Toensing, a lawyer for the former FBI informant, told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” that her client has “specific information about contributions and bribes to various entities and people in the United States."She said she could not go further because her client has not been released from a nondisclosure agreement but suggested the gag order could be lifted soon. Toensing also claimed that her client was “threatened by the Loretta Lynch Justice Department” when he pursued a civil action in which he reportedly sought to disclose some information about the case.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Grassley said such an NDA would “appear to improperly prevent the individual from making critical, good faith disclosures to Congress of potential wrongdoing.”…
The Hill reported earlier this week that the FBI had evidence as early as 2009 that Russian operatives used bribes, kickbacks and other dirty tactics to expand Moscow’s atomic energy footprint in the U.S. Grassley on Wednesday released a series of letters he fired off last week to 10 federal agencies, raising the question of whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which approved the uranium transaction was aware of that FBI probe -- and pointing to potential “conflicts” involving the Clintons. The committee included then-Secretary of State Clinton.
So why not just lift the gag order, vacate the non-disclosure agreement, which Sessions has the power to do, and let the informant come forward with information on how and why the Clintons conspired to put 20 percent of our uranium assets under Russian control while lining the pockets of the Clintons and their pay-for-play foundation? As Toensing notes, Sessions could do it, and thereby bring to light the details of this criminal enterprise:
The lead investigators on the case included Rod Rosenstein, who is now the deputy attorney general, and Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy FBI director. Rosenstein is the DOJ official who appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the collusion/campaign investigation. He could waive the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) signed by the informant, said Toensing. "Yes, Jeff could do it," she said. "He is not recused from this matter and should not be."
However, Rod Rosenstein "is conflicted," said Toensing, "because he was the U.S. attorney who oversaw the case involving my client." Toensing added that she has "asked an oversight committee to pursue the release" of the NDA so her client may testify before Congress about what he knows.
By lifting the gag order, Sessions might have to explain the real reasons behind his recusal and why people who knew of actual collusion between Russia and the Clintons were silent, only to reappear to investigate and pursue prosecution of nonexistent collusion between Russia and Team Trump. He might have to explain why Mueller, McCabe, Rosenstein and others were allowed to hide the truth from the American people and why they should not be summarily fired. As Grassley notes, neither Sessions or anyone in the Justice Department has the authority to block the informant from testifying before Congress or issue non-disclosure agreements to thwart Congressional oversight:
“The Executive Branch does not have the authority to use non-disclosure agreements to avoid Congressional scrutiny," Grassley wrote. "If the FBI is allowed to contract itself out of Congressional oversight, it would seriously undermine our Constitutional system of checks and balances. The Justice Department needs to work with the Committee to ensure that witnesses are free to speak without fear, intimidation or retaliation from law enforcement."
Again, perhaps the reluctance of Jeff Sessions stems from the web of deceit and complicity that ensnares many in the FBI and the Justice Department. As Fox News analyst Gregg Jarrett notes on the Uranium One scandal:
It seems it was all covered up for years by the same three people who are now involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump over so-called Russian “collusion.”…
But why has there been no prosecution of Clinton? Why did the FBI and the Department of Justice during the Obama administration keep the evidence secret? Was it concealed to prevent a scandal that would poison Barack Obama’s presidency? Was Hillary Clinton being protected in her quest to succeed him?The answer may lie with the people who were in charge of the investigation and who knew of its explosive impact. Who are they?
Eric Holder was the Attorney General when the FBI began uncovering the Russian corruption scheme in 2009. Since the FBI reports to him, he surely knew what the bureau had uncovered.
What’s more, Holder was a member of the “Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States” which approved the uranium sale to the Russians in 2010. Since the vote was unanimous, it appears Holder knowingly and deliberately countenanced a deal that was based on illegal activities and which gave Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium assets.It gets worse. Robert Mueller was the FBI Director during the time of the Russian uranium probe, and so was his successor James Comey who took over in 2013 as the FBI was still developing the case. Rod Rosenstein, then-U.S. Attorney, was supervising the case. There is no indication that any of these men ever told Congress of all the incriminating evidence they had discovered and the connection to Clinton. The entire matter was kept secret from the American public.
It may be no coincidence that Mueller (now special counsel) and Rosenstein (now Deputy Attorney General) are the two top people currently investigating whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mueller reports to Rosenstein, while Comey is a key witness in the case. It is not unreasonable to conclude that Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey may have covered up potential crimes involving Clinton and Russia, but are now determined to find some evidence that Trump “colluded” with Russia.
Boom. The question is now whether Jeff Sessions wants to help President Trump to drain the swamp be vacating the gag order and letting evidence come forth proving the Clintons orchestrated the greatest criminal conspiracy in U.S. history at the expense of American national security or whether he is just another swamp thing committed to clogging up the drainage pipes. Justice may be blind, but it should never be gagged.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
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Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias
Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.
This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.
I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.
At Urbana, I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a “powered parachute” over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring — and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute — but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.”
Early this year, I drove west from Houston to Gonzales, Texas, to try my hand at pig hunting. It was my first time with a gun, and the noticeably concerned owner of the ranch at first banished me to a solitary spot on the grounds. Here, he said, the pigs would come to me and I could not pose a danger to anyone else. It was a nice spot indeed but did not make for much of a story, so I wandered off into the woods, hopefully protected by my Day-Glo hunting vest.
I eventually joined up with a family from Georgia. The group included the grandfather, Paps, and the father, CJ, but it was young Isaac, all of 8 years old, who took on the task of tutoring me in the ways of the hunt. He did a fine job, but we encountered few pigs (and killed none) in our morning walkabout. In the afternoon, with the Georgians heading home, I linked up with a group of friends from Houston who belied the demographic stereotyping of the hunt; collectively we were the equivalent of a bad bar joke: a Hispanic ex-soldier, a young black family man, a Serbian immigrant and a Jew from DC.
None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times. In truth, the only one who was even modestly angry was me, and that only had to do with my terrible ineptness as a hunter. In the end though, I did bag a pig, or at least my new friends were willing to award me a kill, so that we could all glory together in the fraternity of the hunt.
I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health. They mourned the passing of the old days, when factory jobs were plentiful, lucrative and honored and lamented the destruction and decay of their communities, their livelihoods and their families. To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had.
Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.
Take for instance the issue of the legitimate defensive gun use (DGUs), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.
At one point during my research, I discovered a video of a would-be robber entering a Houston smoke shop, his purpose conveyed by the pistol that he leveled at the store clerk. But the robber was not the only armed person in the store. The security cameras show Raleigh, the store clerk, walking out from behind the counter, calmly raising his own gun and firing an accurate stream of bullets at the hapless robber. The wounded robber stumbles out, falls over the curb and eventually ends up under arrest.
It is not just the defensive gun use that makes the video remarkable — it is Raleigh himself who evidences such a nonchalance that he never bothers to put down the cigarette that he is smoking. At the end, Raleigh, having protected his store, enthuses “Castle Doctrine, baby” — citing a law that allows a person to use force to defend a legally occupied place.
It is an amazing story, though far from unique, but you simply won’t find many like it in mainstream media (I found it on Reddit).
It’s not that media is suppressing stories intentionally. It’s that these stories don’t reflect their interests and beliefs.
It’s why my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.
The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are “frankly disgusting,” “tremendously dishonest,” “failing,” “they make up the stories” and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author “fake news.” And that is just a random Wednesday’s worth of words from Donald Trump.
Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combatting, our growing partisan divide.
Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if our media institutions hadn’t failed us as well.
None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can’t cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.
I did that, and loved it, though I regret waiting until well after I left NPR to do so. I am skeptical that many will do so, since the current situation in an odd way works for Trump, who gets to rile his base, and for the media, which has grown an audience on the back of Washington dysfunction. In the end, they are both short-term winners. It is the public that is the long-term loser.
Ken Stern is the President of Palisades Media Ventures and the former CEO of National Public Radio. His book “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right” (Harper) is out Tuesday.
2a) A Vicious Virtue
When tragedy strikes, you probably deserve it - if you are conservative
By Victor Davis Hanson
Not long ago, late-night comedian and would-be philosopher Steven Colbert signaled the nation his virtuous outrage over the Trump presidency. Colbert offered that Trump had “a feeble f***ing anemic firefly of a soul.” His puerile efforts at alliteration were not helped by the redundant “anemic.”
Obscenity in service to an announced virtuous progressive cause is apparently now Colbert’s brand — and the more vulgar, the more virtuous.
Of Trump, Colbert had earlier announced crudely on national television: “You talk like a sign-language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*** holster.” Do Americans stay up late to hear that?
Yet Colbert’s incoherent crudity is mild compared with the epidemic of assassination chic in which politicians, celebrities, actors, and academics vie to kill Trump by symbolically stabbing, decapitating, hanging, shooting, and maiming his likeness. (The various ways of killing or torturing Trump have exhausted the imagination of the virtuous.) It is as if the more macabre one can be in imagining how to eviscerate Trump, the more virtuous one becomes.
Is vicarious violence and crudity the means by which the modern soft suburbanite — like a Colbert, Michael Moore, or Bill Maher — messages his inner bravery and progressive authenticity?
After the recent shootings in Las Vegas, Frank Sinatra’s daughter and former singer Nancy Sinatra tweeted, “The murderous members of the NRA should face a firing squad.”
She later backtracked by insisting that her attributive adjective “murderous” was really discriminatory, not collective, as if she meant that only the NRA members who are actually murderous should be shot, given that not all NRA members are necessarily murderous. But aside from misleading about her intent, which particular NRA members does she think have committed murder, and how would the selective champion of capital punishment, Nancy Sinatra, know them?
Wanting to kill someone because of his politics is now sort of passé. So is the chilling habit of calibrating empathy for the dead on the basis of their perceived ideology. The now-fired vice president and senior legal counsel at CBS Hayley Geftman-Gold posted her feelings after the Las Vegas massacre: “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
When Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson tried to assassinate Republican legislators during a baseball practice game, and almost killed Republican majority whip Steven Scalise, MSNBC host Joy Reid seemed to all but suggest that Scalise had deserved to be killed, given his conservative politics. She tweeted: “Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet . . . ” And then she followed that outburst with a list of Scalise’s conservative agenda items, such as his vote for a GOP House bill on health care, that apparently were meant to minimize the horror of his near-death. Reid’s commentary was not unusual; the Washington Post reported recently on liberal anger that a recovering Scalise was honored by being asked to throw out the first pitch at a Washington baseball game. His opposition to Obamacare and support for the Second Amendment should evidently have disqualified him from receiving sympathy for his near-fatal shooting.
The social-media practice of predicating empathy for the dead or wounded on the basis of their perceived politics first received wide national attention with Michael Moore. Moore posted unhinged commentary on his website the day after nearly 3,000 were murdered on September 11, 2001. Moore seemed outraged at the carnage largely because he deemed the dead to be mostly blue-state Al Gore voters — and thus the incorrect people to have perished:
Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California — these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush.
Moore’s infantile use of emphatic capitalization highlighted his focus on voting against Bush.
Note the logic: Once again, whether or not the loss of so many innocent lives is a tragedy hinges on the perceived politics of the murdered. This is a chilling ideology of the fundamentalist that surfaces in times of crisis, but perhaps it’s an implicit way of thinking in most other times as well.
There are lots of examples of left-wing celebrities and public figures either welcoming the death of conservatives or feeling no compunction in celebrating their demise — apparently on the premise that the greater progressive good is always advanced by destroying impediments.
The former cable-TV host Ed Schultz once saw the death of Vice President Cheney, who was then in ill health, as a plus for the country:
He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion, Dick Cheney is. He is an enemy of the country. . . . You know, Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you? See, I don’t even wish the guy goes to Hell, I just want to get him the hell out of here.
Schultz was only trying to trump what Bill Maher had said earlier about Cheney:
I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.
In fact, vicious virtue signaling reveals a lot about the Left.
For all the progressive talk about opposition to violence, capital punishment, homophobia, and racism, liberals often subordinate ideology to the quest for power. Colbert attacks Trump with a homophobic slur (the same way that President Obama wrote off the Tea Party as “tea baggers”). Long ago, PBS’s Julianne Malveaux dreamed of Clarence Thomas dying from too much fatty food: “You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease.” I suppose Nancy Sinatra would mow down 5 million NRA members with semi-automatic weapons if it would ensure an end to semi-automatic weapons, reminding NRA members why they value the Second Amendment in the first place — for protection from the likes of Sinatra and Hayley Geftman-Gold.
And, of course, selective fury works both ways: Sexual predators such as Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Harvey Weinstein were not sexists deserving censure; they mostly received 24/7 praise, given their commitment to “feminism” and the liberal agenda. Meryl Streep once referred to Weinstein as “God,” and Michelle Obama called him “a wonderful human being” and “a good friend.” As more and more women came forward with decade-old sick stories of Weinstein’s perversity, the mogul noted that he was taking a break to take on the NRA — reminding us of the liberal version of the medieval concept of penance.
The Left’s furor in the Age of Trump has been reignited against the obdurate and unenlightened and deceived working classes as never before. “If we are free to loathe Trump,” the New York Times’ Frank Rich recently wrote, “we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.” If you are condemned for putting millions at risk, then apparently you deserve whatever natural or human calamity ensues.
In the past, Barack Obama felt he was free to write off the population of rural Pennsylvania as clueless, scared haters who had not appreciated his godhead at the polls. Recently a Yale dean trashed a restaurant with the fillip “To put it quite simply: If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!”
After Hurricane Harvey, University of Tampa professor Ken Story explained on Twitter why red states deserved the storm: “I don’t believe in instant Karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas. Hopefully this will help them realize GOP doesn’t care about them.” Referring to Hurricane Irma’s landfall in Florida, he then tweeted: “Those who voted for [Trump] here deserve it as well.”
Shortly after Hurricane Harvey but before the Las Vegas shooting, noted left-winger Michael Tomasky presciently weighed in at the Daily Beast with a sort of counterfactual and conditional “what if” concerning a would-be “gun nut” in a “red state”.
You could say calling Texas politicians hypocrites because they voted against Hurricane Sandy aid but presumably want every federal dollar they can get their hands on now is shooting fish in a barrel. That, of course, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Some fish end up in barrels for a reason. . . . Democrats and liberals need to do a much better job of getting in the faces [an Obama expression from the 2008 campaign] of Texas Republicans, and the ones from all the other deep-red states, and calling them on this. Suppose the next time a gun nut shoots up a movie theater in a red state, Democrats muse about withholding federal crime victim assistance money to that state?
Again, it is hard to repress the liberal impulse that those who died or were injured in some way had it coming because they opposed the progressive agenda.
Something also about Sarah Palin’s accent or look especially infuriated the Left and fed into this idea that right-wingers perhaps deserve any violence they might receive. The smug David Letterman joked about the imagined rape of Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter Willow by New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez: “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” It’s as if small-town Alaskans are of easy virtue or deserve unspeakable things happening to them given their perceived mindless opposition to global ethics.
There was no liberal pushback along the lines of Hillary Clinton’s former crusades to protect “the children” from adult violence and predation. The hip multimillionaire Letterman earlier had revealed what he thought of flight attendants in general and Sarah Palin in particular when he compared her to a “slutty flight attendant.”
There are many ingredients to vicious virtue, in addition to the ancient creed that progressives and liberals believe that their equality-of-result agendas are so virtuous that the means — any means at all — justify the noble ends. In practical terms, correct politics provide an insurance policy that overrides either any defects (in progressives) or virtue (in conservatives) in individual character.
In the case of contemporary vicious virtue, the agendas of hip, cool, and highly educated social-justice warriors apparently should not be held up by supposedly poorly educated working-class rubes. Certainly, red-state Neanderthals should not count as much as the enlightened. Accordingly, America’s opponents to leftist utopia deserve comeuppance — and sometimes the greater and more violent, the better.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, appearing October 17 from Basic Books.
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America’s Best University President
Several years ago Robert Zimmer was asked by an audience in China why the University of Chicago was associated with so many winners of the Nobel Prize — 90 in all, counting this month’s win by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Zimmer, the university’s president since 2006, answered that the key was a campus culture committed to “discourse, argument and lack of deference.”
Reflecting on that exchange in March, Zimmer noted a depressing trend: While Chinese academics have made strides to “inject more argumentation and challenge into their education,” their American peers are moving “in the opposite direction.” As universities go, so ultimately go the fate of nations.
The University of Chicago has always been usefully out of step with its peers in higher education — it dropped out of the Big Ten Conference and takes perverse pride in its reputation as the place where fun goes to die. It was out of step again last year when Jay Ellison, the dean of students, sent a letter to incoming freshmen to let them know where the college stood in respect to the campus culture wars.
“Our commitment to academic freedom,” he wrote, “means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
The letter attracted national attention, with cheering from the right and caviling on the left. But its intellectual foundation had been laid earlier, with a 2015 report from a faculty committee, convened by Zimmer, on free expression. Central to the committee’s findings: the aim of education is to make people think, not spare them from discomfort.
“Concerns about civility and mutual respect,” the committee wrote, “can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”
Those are fighting words at a time when professors live in fear of accidentally offending their own students and a governor needs to declare a countywide state of emergency so that white supremacist Richard Spencer can speak at the University of Florida. They are also necessary words. That isn’t because universities need to be the First Amendment’s most loyal guardians — in the case of private universities, the First Amendment generally doesn’t apply. They set their own rules.
Instead, it’s because free speech is what makes educational excellence possible. “It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” Louis Brandeis wrote 90 years ago in his famous concurrence in Whitney v. California.
It is also the function of free speech to allow people to say foolish things so that, through a process of questioning, challenge and revision, they may in time come to say smarter things.
If you can’t speak freely, you’ll quickly lose the ability to think clearly. Your ideas will be built on a pile of assumptions you’ve never examined for yourself and may thus be unable to defend from radical challenges. You will be unable to test an original thought for fear that it might be labeled an offensive one. You will succumb to a form of Orwellian double-think without even having the excuse of living in physical terror of doing otherwise.
That is the real crux of Zimmer’s case for free speech: Not that it’s necessary for democracy (strictly speaking, it isn’t), but because it’s our salvation from intellectual mediocrity and social ossification. In a speech in July, he addressed the notion that unfettered free speech could set back the cause of “inclusion” because it risked upsetting members of a community.
“Inclusion into what?” Zimmer wondered. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that fails to prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”
These are not earth-shattering questions. But they are the right ones, and they lay bare the extent to which the softer nostrums of higher ed today shortchange the intended beneficiaries.
They’re also questions not enough university presidents are asking, at least not publicly and persistently. Instead, the prevailing conceit is that nothing is really amiss, that censorship concerns are overblown, that there are always creative ways to respect free speech while remaining sensitive to all sensitivities — a balancing act so exquisite that no student need ever be insulted, and no administrator need ever take a stand.
Zimmer knows what bunk this is; that if free speech — never a popular idea to start with — isn’t actively defended, it will rapidly be eroded. For using the prestige of his office to make the case both brilliant and blunt, he has become the most essential voice in American academia today.
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