The national debt exceeded $21 trillion for the first time on Thursday, a little more than six months after it hit first $20 trillion on Sept. 8.
The national debt was $21.031 trillion on Thursday. The government releases total debt figures each business day, but it lags by one day.
Federal borrowing has been on the rise again since February, when Congress passed legislation to suspend the debt ceiling. That move allowed the government to borrow as much as it needs to fund the activities approved by Congress.
I was shocked too. And VERY disappointed. At this rate, the debt bomb will only reach $34 Trillion or so by 2024, far short of my forecast of $40 Trillion. Pathetic. We need a war or a new entitlement or something. And soon. Let’s us try to think of something easy that we can communicate to Congress – slowly and with pictures, of course. Remember, every Trillion printed means Trillions more at the disposal of the Banksters. We need to make them happier.
How about a war to make the world safe for social security? We could start bombing Brazil in an hour or two. That would beat thinking about our own ticking bomb.
Earlier today I wrote, in a blurb for FP News about the GB-Russia Row: “The US will side with Britain. How that affects US-Russian relations is yet to be seen.” Can’t link to it just yet as its scheduled for tomorrow morning, 6 AM I think. (Cause I’m always a day ahead!) Anyway, I was right.
New York City could be the next site of a chemical assassination attempt if world leaders fail to punish Russia for its alleged role in poising of a former spy in the United Kingdom, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned Wednesday.
“If we don’t take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used,” Haley told the United Nations Security Council. “They could be used here in New York, or in cities of any country that sits on this Council. This is a defining moment.”
Yes. Immediate concrete measures – right up against that Russian veto. A defining moment, defining the meddling stupidity of the neocons.
Strange, but Haley failed to produce any evidence whatsoever of Russian involvement in the London deaths. I suppose allegations are sufficient. And I would suppose someone who’s boss has been accused of Russia pandering, without any proof, would think twice before jumping on the same sort of bandwagon. I would suppose that she so thinks; I won’t knowing that she doesn’t.
Yesterday, in a headline for FP, I celebrated the departure of Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State and the man who ushered in the brave new age of the Boy Scouts of America. But it’s really a mixed bag.
Tillerson never belonged anywhere near government power. His firing is a good thing. A liberal friend rightly pointed out that Trump has the highest and fastest rate of administrative turnover in history. It’s does look like disarray. Oddly, by his own list, leaving aside some major points (Obamacare, the wall, locking HER up, etc.), Trump is actually accomplishing his agenda. If it works…
However, with the cabinet positions, aides, and so forth, the turnover is a mixed bag. We seem to lose one deep state, globalist idiot only to have another step right in to take his place. Seems like it spreads.
The newly nominated Sec. State, replacing T-Rex, in the former Director of the CIA. Do we really want the head of secret police/paramilitary force representing us to the world? Might that not send a mixed message?
The new, nominated Director of the CIA is the former Deputy Director, Gina Haspel. If you’ve never heard of her, that’s probably because you watch America’s mainstream, lamestream, report no real facts media. Stop that. Get all your news and entertainment here!
Anyway, Gina is a career employee of the company, a former honcho for NCS, perhaps the most dangerous and unaccountable part of the deep state. The woman is “quite literally a war criminal.”
She ran the notorious CIA “black site” in Thailand. You’ve probably not heard much about that. It was (is) only one of the many places where the USA, beacon of virtue, engages in illegal torture of enemy combatants (defined as whomever the President says is…). This has been standard operating procedure under the current and past two administrations (Duuuuuuh-wa, no hope and no change, MAGA).
This practice and those like would, if conducted by any other government, constitute actionable offenses against humanity. There has been limited legal action already. The international community has little sway over the US with its thousands of operable nukes. And there is NO justice left in America’s courts. So, what sent Nazis to the gallows (on trumped-up, ex post facto charges and no due process at all), the US gets a pass on. Exceptionalism or something.
And, even honest CIA killers admit this hideous treatment of prisoners doesn’t work. Abu Zubaydah, in US “custody” for something like 15 years, with no rights, and no hope, was horribly battered and abused only to have it discovered he knew nothing and was not a threat. Still at Club GitMo though.
“Thems tarr-ists,” the unwashed roar, “who cares?” What part of “whomever the President says” don’t they get. It can be and has been US citizens.
I’ve been asking of late why Trump doesn’t apply such Draconian “justice” to the globalists, deep staters, and treasoners. Why not release the tortured, no threat, know-nothings, and make room for bankers, Congress Critters, judges, and people like Gina? You know, real threats who’ve actually done harm.
Instead Trump does the opposite, continually appointing rather than prosecuting.
And, back to this sh!t not working: the real terror threats are here, not out there in the sandbox or some other exotic locale. ISIS-inspired Corey Johnson comes to mind, if you look through the alternative media:
A 17-year-old named Corey Johnson claimed his Muslim faith commanded him to fatally stab a 13-year-old boy during a sleepover and severely injured another 13-year-old along with his mother who was stabbed more than a dozen times.
Palm Beach Florida authorities said the attacker confessed to the killing, attempted killings, and the motive of Islamic Jihad. After killing one teen and stabbing two more people Johnson barricaded himself in a room when police arrived. He was taken into custody at about 8 a.m. by the city’s SWAT team.
Palm Beach isn’t located in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, nor North Korea. And Johnson looks like a shaggy, disgruntled American everyteen. We don’t have to look that far for our boogeymen.
Justice in Amerika. New Yorker.
Platonically speaking, we’re passing rapidly from Democracy to Tyranny. Could we at least get a decent tyrant out of it, someone “cool?”
I don’t give a damn what the powerful National Box Association (NBA) has to say. And the Second Amendment does not concern me. The fact is it is past time for a national discussion on boxes. We need common sense box restrictions. #boxcontrol.
How many people have to die because of boxes? How many? I’m serious as a crisis actor. Tell me how many? Would two mass box attacks in a day be too much? How about three in ten days?
The Washington Post has identified one of the people injured in Southeast Austin during Monday’s second package explosion.
Esperanza Herrera is the 75-year-old woman injured in the explosion at the 6700 block of Galindo Street, according to relatives at the scene, the Post reported. They also said her mother, Maria Moreno, suffered minor injuries, the newspaper said.
The incident happened hours after police responded to a previous package explosion at the 4800 block of Oldfort Hill Drive, killing a teenager and injuring a woman, police have said. LaVonne Mason, co-founder of the Austin Area Urban League, told the Post her grandson was the 17-year-old victim killed Monday morning. The newspaper did not name the grandson.
3:20 p.m. update: A 75-year-old woman was injured after picking up an exploding package outside her Southeast Austin home on Monday in the second blast reported in the city and the third similar incident in two weeks, Austin police said.
Interim Police Chief Brian Manley confirmed that evidence suggested that this bombing was related to two previous blasts from “box-type deliveries” that killed a teenager earlier in the day and a 39-year-old man 10 days ago.
Manley warned the public about receiving unexpected or suspicious-looking deliveries in an “average-size delivery box,” but declined to offer more specifics about the packages to protect the integrity of the investigation.
He said the devices can be detonated by moving or by opening the boxes.
Old ladies scarred and terrorized. Generic men and teenage children killed. Enough is enough! I hereby call on President Donald J. Trump to administratively ban boxes via executive order!
High-capacity box-type device.
Assault-style delivery box.
Mercury-triggered, motion-activated killing box.
These are but synonyms for the plain, pure evil that is the box. The box that you, caring nothing for the children, YOU CLING TO! Box clinger!
A few years ago I tabulated some items and places that should be banned for safety. In a momentary lapse of judgment I left off assault boxes. I say ban them. Ban them all – all types of these “packages.” Think, Dear Lord think, of the children.
It wasn’t a total lapse on my part. I specifically named “houses” as being direct accessory venues to all manner of atrocity. Had my recommendations been followed, I believe all of these poor, innocent people in Austin would have been spared. I guess the National House Association is like the NBA – too powerful and too well-connected. I say it’s time to silence these money-grubbing thugs. They no more have freedom of speech than you or I have the right to bear arms.
Okay … the boxes. It’s time, past time, to face facts:
Only the police and the military need such powerful and deadly cardboard constructed receptacles.
You cannot hunt with a box. (You! You with the stick, string, and rock! STFU, Yous!).
More school children in America are killed by boxes every single day than all the guns, cars, sugars, doctors, abortions, swimming pools, lightning bolts, falling trees, exploding hot water heaters, baseball bats, hammers, baseballs, nails, brimstone, and wars from the last three centuries combined.
Bubble wrap, found in many boxes, sounds when popped a lot like: little gun shots, very, very small bombs, or cap pistol fire. This is generally available to untrained civilians in this a supposedly civilized nation. Great Britain made bubble wrap illegal in 1984.
Someone called and told me CNN may classify these attacks as “school shootings”™. Young Hogg may, or may not be, speaking (agent cannot or will not confirm).
Boxes are scary.
They don’t say “the smoking BOX” for nothing.
You’re move likely to be killed with your own box than to use the box to thwart criminals or common woodland predators.
Blue-haired, be-gauged, tatted-up Tide Pod-eaters agree no one needs boxes.
The Second Amendment only allows Eric Holder to sell (or to give) boxes to foreign criminals and terrorists.
Some “big boxes” are banning rifles. I say ban the big boxes.
If you’re against #boxcontrol, you’re a racist.
UPS, FedEx, and other FOR PROFIT box pushers support capitalism. Marx said that’s bad.
Most assault rifles and almost all bullets are shipped and/or sold in boxes. Tell me that’s a coincidence!
Bibles, Constitutions, IQ tests, soap, and geometry books have also been seen inside boxes!
The ridiculous Trump-Twitter administration recently proposed shipping food to poor, hungry people. Shipping the food in boxes. Proof Twitter hates poor people.
Children, left unattended by horrible parents, used to (maybe some still do!) make rudimentary make-believe forts out of larger boxes. This hideous practice, once promoted by the John Birch Society, encourages free play, imagination, violent reenactments (Cowboys and Indians, my a$$), and boxism.
Thursday, after they’ve warmed up with the walk out for communism gun control, the kids are playing hooky for box control.
And … a whole bunch of other worn clichés!
Stop the madness! #boxcontrol!
Imperial Stormtroopers try to make sense of carnage caused by high-capacity, military-esque, assault-style, wouldn’t-the-Unibomber-be-proud, NBA-has-blood-soaked-cardboard box attack. The Statesman.
When I first saw the following story my initial thought was that the Chinese, as “well-intentioned” as they might be, are a little late in the coming. American and European Communists began infiltrating the academy in earnest in the 1940’s. Today they have virtual control over most US education, from grade school to graduate school.
While many countries, including the United States, fund educational activities abroad, the Chinese government’s direct support for, and control over, student groups appears to be unique. Beijing’s influence over these groups is also beginning to raise questions and concerns among students on American campuses, who fear they will be accused of being agents of espionage. The growing ties are also concerning U.S. government officials, who are wary of China’s political and economic reach in the United States.
At a security hearing last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that American universities are naive about the intelligence risk of Chinese “nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting,” and claimed that China poses a “whole-of-society threat.”
Those comments have alarmed some Chinese students. Several Georgetown University student representatives wrote an open letter to the university president, asking the school to disavow Wray’s statements and calling the comments a “witch-hunt” and a “McCarthyist craze.” The article also cited FP’s recent report revealing that the Georgetown CSSA has received Chinese government funding.
If this is a witch-hunt, modern-day, 21st Century McCarthyism, then rest assured in around 40 years a Venona-ish report will surface, justifying the hunt 110%.
But my initial fears are likely misplaced or over thought. Yes, young American Tide Pod-eaters and their post-hippy professors, and SJW administrators would surely appreciate a little more official indoctrination. However, the Chinese variety – geared towards a xenophobic nationalism and eco-techo progression – probably isn’t for them. I suspect they are more in favor of old-school Soviet central planning, with all the speech and religion quashing, heavy-handed social and work assignments, and mass murdering.
There’s sure to be some small crossover. Maybe forced abortions and population limitations could replace the religion of Row and specious climate change, blame-it-on-man reactionism. But the main focus of the article and of Wray’s concerns is that of a fifth column of potentially nefarious foreigners embedded in, and drawing resources from, American culture or what remains of it.
There may be a place for the left’s new meddling here, on the side against the infiltrators – a sort of American nationalism for those who really hate America. Odd but possible. East Asians, minorities though they be, here, are rapidly becoming the new white men, especially in employment and double-especially in academia. High IQ, serious students, who naturally excel at math and science, don’t exactly help the numbers or the narrative. It’s something for someone to think about. Feel, maybe.
For the rest of us, all of this kind of fits with Vox Day’s second edition of Voxiversity, Sink the Ships. Watch on YouTube (before they SJW it away):
Voxiversity/YouTube.
It’s a quick work from a quick study. It builds on the inaugural episode. History shows time and time again that egalitarian kindness is often the worst source of the worst violence and pseudo-genocidal changes any culture or people can subject themselves too. Sinking the ships, figuratively or literally, an overt act of unpleasantness to be certain, may just be more humanitarian in the long run than the alternative.
Something else to think about. Maybe best without the feels.
It’s like the Fourth of July! Scott Olson/Getty/Foreign Policy.
With the highest gun ownership per capita in the world – by far – the US is only number 111 (of around 200 nations) in per capita murders. The left’s assertion that over-armed America is the murder capital of the world is a ridiculous lie. And, dear God, let’s NOT get into the statistics of who commits the largest measurable percentage of murders in America (hint: it’s not the Amish).
Gun murders and deaths, including those related to rifles (including “assault-style” rifles) are but a near microscopic fraction of total “unnatural” or “preventable” deaths in the US. From 2014:
248 people killed with rifles (all types including … assault rifles);
435 people killed with baseball bats and hammers;
660 people killed with punches and kicks;
8,124 people killed with guns of all kinds (offset by 1,000,000+ lives saved by all guns);
14,249 murders of/by all weapons sources (and unarmed murders);
32,744 killed by automobiles;
Approximately 200,000 killed by doctors and medical professionals;
Approximately 365,000 killed by obesity and fat-related causes;
652,639 killed by “legal” abortions.
One, if one is blind, deluded, and perhaps mentally deficient, or possibly evil, can easily see the way to best save lives in America is to ban the scary AR-15. (Better raise taxes while we’re at it).
And no one ever uses an assault rifle to prevent crime or save lives … except that they do.
Yesterday I ran a rather incomplete, but illustrative, list of current and historic gun control proponents. Show me a tyrant, a dictator, a mass murderer, a genocidal maniac, or an active war-monger, and I’ll show you a loud and proud supporter of disarming the locals.
All of this figures largely into today’s Prepper News Weekly, which you should watch on a regular basis:
Perrin Lovett/FPTV/YouTube.
Yet and still, otherwise decent people, whether they be “average”or “ordinary” or powerful celebrities, continue to mindlessly (no thought, just emotions) clamor to be disarmed. To disarm you. It’s as infuriating as it is embarrassing.
The impressionable youth, students who will walk out of classes to support gun control, are almost understandable. Some (very few) of them are subject to being killed, in schools or without, by bad people armed with guns. Sure, they’re more likely to be killed by bees, lightning, and swimming pools, but those facts are … facts and not really governed by easily manipulated feelings. (Ever hear someone decry “assault-style” ionized plasmatic electricity from the sky?) No.
The kids are far more likely to be killed by incompetent doctors, sugary drinks and starchy carbs, and autos. And many millions of their cohorts never even made it to the schools thanks to Planned Parenthood (aka, Rehashed Nazi Eugenics, Inc.). On that last note, an interesting, telling political cartoon:
Andy Marlette, Pensacola News Journal (via the Tampa Bay Times).
That’s good and bad rhetoric all in one, Mr. Marlette. There’s a vague truth behind it: “conservative” Republicans types, like Rick “Make it 21!” Scott, will claim to be anti-abortion. They’re not. For all the claims, there’s been remarkably little (read: NO) action since 1973 to curtail abortions. The slight numerical decline is more attributable to contraception, lifestyle changes, and the antics of the … um … Junior Anti-Sex League.
The young cartoon lady is well-instructed that the well-dressed, well-fed elephant does not care about her in or out of the womb. His only concerns are: appeasing his corporate overlords, and; getting reelected. (Yes, these are most similar to the real desires of his goofy-looking jackass “opponent”). The rhetorical truth evaporates. Then, mathematically considering the 80:1 and 2,600:1 ratios from 2014, above, the real truth interrupts with force.
For the politicians, especially the currently-in-charge GOPers, there can be no understanding, no sympathy. “Mindless shits” comes descriptively to mind.
“The schools are terrible because the teachers are incompetent, but arm the teachers.”
“No, don’t arm the teachers. Raise the gun-buying age and put a SWAT team in every school. Metal detectors! More drugs!”
“Okay. Let’s ban bump stocks (unnecessary to bump fire anyway)”.
“Take the guns first, due process second.”
Gibber. Gibber. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stupidity to make Democrats look sane by comparison. (One notices that, largely, the Dems are silently hanging back now, allowing the fat, stupid elephants, the kids, and the corporations to fight this one – a wise strategy).
The due process thing is really alarming. Not many of ye old Rights of Englishmen still exist in dying America. DP is kind of important. And it’s kind of under siege. And not just from The Trump. He says a lot of things, many of them unwise sounding:
President Trump on Wednesday voiced support for confiscating guns from certain individuals deemed to be dangerous, even if it violates due process rights.
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.
Trump was responding to comments from Vice President Pence that families and local law enforcement should have more tools to report potentially dangerous individuals with weapons.
Giving the orange man the benefit of the doubt, which I tire of doing, I’m sure he means what he says in limited, emergency circumstances. There are actually times when a situation sort of dictates dispensing with the technicalities of formal due process.
For instance, if a police officer sees someone committing (or about to start committing) what the officer reasonably believes to be a crime or dangerous activity, then the officer is lawfully authorized to use force, up to and including lethal force, to stop said crime or activity. No need to trouble a judge up-front. It happens all the time. And it many times doesn’t even involve the police; see the linked example of the armed citizen of Illinois, above.
And there is, in such emergency situations, a built-in due process anyway: people know or should know not to commit or attempt to commit crimes! At least not where others might see them. And with the expectation that they might be resisted if they proceed. It’s as much common sense as it used to be common law.
You know, the common law with the due process specter floating around?
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law …” (5th Amend., U.S. Const., as amended, 1791)(See also: Amend. 14).
If there is to be formal legal action, then it needs to take place before any subsequent state taking action. Before, first, Donald, not second. And a gun would seem to fit the description of “property.” Of course, explaining this to a man who will use executive, administrative action, in defiance of Articles I and II, to ban superfluous rifle accessories, seems tenuous. Then again, the man says a lot of things; sometimes he rationally clarifies afterwards. Time will tell, time permitting.
It’s odd, given The Trump’s hasty pronouncements and the quasi-legal developments of the past 20 years, that he does not (yet) take a similar approach to the deep state, the treasonous lukers, the pizza-lovers, the banksters, and the Dreamers. Would not a delayed due process, say via Enemy Combatant proceedings, benefit the stabilization of whatever remains of this political mess? Dunno but, the fact that I, a anarcho-libertarian type, would even ask such a question speaks to where we really are in the here and now…
This article runs a little long but it is worth considering the whole of the fallen government and how it reacts to the law. Joe Bob Briggs considers the TeeVee-ification of the Third Branch:
The genius element of the English justice system is the invention in the Middle Ages of the state prosecutor, or, in its original incarnation, the king’s prosecutor. His purpose was to keep vengeance out of the courtroom. Before that you had the aggrieved-kinsman system. The suffering family brought charges against the alleged offender, so that if a Hatfield killed a McCoy, it was up to the McCoys to file charges, and if the Hatfield was found guilty, the McCoys were allowed to take vengeance in the form of executing the offender themselves. Eye for an eye, family member for family member, murder for murder, rape for rape. This is the system that, in various forms, still exists today in many Muslim cultures, and it’s the system that we supposedly got rid of 800 years ago after agreeing that eye-for-an-eye is not what we wanted. Henceforth the only person allowed to bring criminal charges was an unbiased public official representing the state and the people, and that person had to be emotionally uninvolved with either side of the case.
Then, as the court system developed in England and America, we became strict about excluding from trials anyone who had any kind of bias, even if he otherwise qualified as a witness. In fact, bias caused by friendship or blood relation is one of the principal ways that witnesses are impeached.
…
*Please read the whole original at Taki’s, via the above hyperlink.*
Our courts, judges, and prosecutors are every bit as out of control as their legislative and executive counterparts. It’s a very good article as are most that pass through that source. Still, I will note that there was a time and place for private prosecutions, ones involving really process and decorum. The Romans, for example, ran a system of private felony proceedings similar to those used in their major civil cases. The aggrieved party, usually of Patrician class, brought charges and prosecuted them before the whole Senate or before a large jury of the accused’s actual friends, his peers.
We don’t do that anymore … to our detriment. We still, to a degree, use the Roman system of magistrates to quickly resolve minor cases. But the felonies are now handled by self-serving government agents, before government judges, with government witnesses, all before a jury carefully selected so as to favor the government. In short: you are screwed.
Maybe the Romans, like the ancient English, were a little more civilized. More honest. More intelligent. “We” certainly tend to be none of those things.
Also, to partly answer Joe Bob, the changes (to due process, equal protection, etc.) may have started prior to the 1980’s. It might have come through the example of 1945-46 and the Nuremberg Trials, which essentially threw out hundreds, thousands even, of years of legal refinement. Threw them out for temporary expedience and feel-good-isms. And with ramifications for the future.
And so we are left with a system based on: ignoring facts, ignoring history, emotionally driven nonsense, collectivist actions, always geared towards taking the maximum amount of freedoms away from the maximum numbers of innocent or disconnected persons.
248 bad actors (calm down CNN, Google – not those actors) kill people with rifles, some of them surely “assault-ish,” while 100 Million good actors remain armed, responsible, peaceful, and vigilant. The solution is to disarm the many over the actions of the few?
That’s the “thought.” The thought of today’ do-good grabbers and of Hitler, Himmler, Mao, Stalin, Amin, Hussein, and Pot. A somewhat disconcerting truth and conundrum.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the Trump administration’s appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that requires the government to keep the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program going.
Under a lower court order that remains in effect, the Department of Homeland Security must continue to accept renewal applications from the roughly 700,000 young people who are currently enrolled in the program, known as DACA. The administration had intended to shut the program down by March 5, but that deadline is now largely meaningless.
In a brief order, the court said simply, “It is assumed the court of appeals will act expeditiously to decide this case.”
Someone once said that when you assume something, you make an ass out of “u” and me. In this case, it’s you, me, immigration law, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the rest of the America.
Not to worry, the wise Trump proposes to administratively ban bump stocks!
I believe in boys. I believe in my son. Sometimes, though, I see him, 16 years old, swallowing his frustration, burying his worry, stomping up the stairs without telling us what’s wrong, and I want to show him what it looks like to be vulnerable and open but I can’t. Because I was a boy once, too.
There has to be a way to expand what it means to be a man without losing our masculinity. I don’t know how we open ourselves to the rich complexity of our manhood. I think we would benefit from the same conversations girls and women have been having for these past 50 years.
I would like men to use feminism as an inspiration, in the same way that feminists used the civil rights movement as theirs. I’m not advocating a quick fix. There isn’t one. But we have to start the conversation. Boys are broken, and I want to help.
In the second Fred Reed delivers the answers, uncomfortable but incontrovertible; as he notes, “The causes can be argued, but the fact cannot.”
I think feminism plays a large part in the collapse of society in general and specifically in pushing boys over the edge. In my school years boys were allowed to be boys. Neither sex was denigrated. Doing so would have occurred to nobody. Then came a prejudice against boys, powerful today
All of this affected society in its entirety, but especially white boys. They are constantly told that being white is shameful, that any masculine interest is pathological, that they are rapists in waiting. They are subjected to torturous boredom and inactivity, and drugged when they respond poorly. They go to schools that do not like them and that stack the deck against them. Many are fatherless. All have access to psychoactive drugs.
Add it up.
Unintended consequences? Or part of the plan? Either way…
Not by many Americans it seems. Not today. The truth, despite what some will tell you, has never been in vogue. There’s a war over speech.
The free speech wars are getting worse, but it seems that none of the warring factions quite grasp the character of the dispute — or precisely what’s at stake.
At the figurative center of the clash is the norm of near-absolute freedom of speech and expression, which its defenders like to treat as the American default. A number of ideological challenges have arisen in recent years to overturn this norm.
On many college campuses, groups of left-leaning students insist that free speech should be conditional on speakers adhering to explicit standards of diversity and avoiding the infliction of emotional harm on the members of marginalized groups through the spreading of “hate.”
Richard Walker, a University of Central Florida sophomore and member of Knights for Socialism, believes his school should be limiting the voices of those who spew hateful rhetoric on campus.
“The university’s first responsibility is ensuring the safety and well-being of their students,” said Walker, 19. “It might be just words now, but if you let that sort of thing come into the public discourse and become widely accepted, it doesn’t stay words.”
In America’s politically polarized environment, students such as Walker increasingly think colleges should ban speech that may be racist or defamatory, a trend that worries advocates of the First Amendment.
More than 40 percent of students believe the First Amendment does not protect hate speech, according to a Brookings Institute poll taken of 1,500 students nationwide last year. Almost 20 percent believe using violence is an acceptable means to stop such speech, the poll found. In all, 53 percent of students — 61 percent Democrat and 47 percent Republican — believe colleges and universities should prohibit offensive speech, according to the survey.
Time was when everyone assumed the colleges’ first role was to promote knowledge and learning. Learning, to a large degree, requires communication of ideas, speech – even that which may be unpopular or uncomfortable.
That 20% find violence an acceptable alternative to debate or turning away is astounding. The legal concept of “fighting words,” speech unprotected because it could give rise to imminent physical danger, is predicated on what was known as the “reasonable man” doctrine.
We seem to have a shortage of reason today. And that should be the idea that offends.
More to come. It appears the entire “Russia, Russia, Russia” affair was based on known, politically and financially motivated, desperate lies. Developing…
PERRIN LOVETT 
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