Whatever Happened to Free-Speech Panic?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 02, 2014

After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, members of the American left found one thing they could all agree on: America's Our First Amendment rights were in peril.

The American Prospect insisted on Sept. 12, when the rubble was still burning and the dead had not yet been retrieved, that "a number of government agencies and their cheerleaders would be clearly tempted to lock the Bill of Rights away in some basement dustbin of the National Archives." Two weeks later, novelist Barbara Kingsolver warned, "Patriotism threatens free speech with death." She bravely attacked the claim that "free speech is un-American." Author Richard Reeves penned an op-ed for The New York Times under the headline "Patriotism Calls Out the Censor." Conferences were rapidly convened, vows to fight the crackdown on free speech were issued.

The fact that this response was elicited by no actual crackdown on free speech seemed irrelevant. It was a classic example of "Fire, ready, aim!"

Later, when there was at least some theoretical basis to be concerned about lost liberties, the reaction from prominent liberals was nonetheless unhinged. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, goaded by the press to respond to a bigoted comment from a Republican congressman and a typically stupid comment from "comedian" Bill Maher, said such statements are "reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

Then-New York Times columnist Frank Rich spent much of the next five years treating this comment as the end of liberty in America. He even said Fleischer's comment was as significant as the terror attack itself. "Even as we're constantly told we're in a war for 'freedom' abroad," Rich wrote, "freedom in our culture at home has been under attack ever since."

I will admit I was vexed by this riot of knee-jerkery. At the time, I largely agreed with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who said: "To those ... who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists."

But in retrospect, I have a bit more sympathy with those self-anointed defenders of free speech. It was, in its way, a thoroughly American, even patriotic reaction. Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, remarked -- in 1775! -- that the proto-Americans of the colonies had a tendency to nip attacks on liberty in the bud. "In other countries the people ... judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance," but in the American colonies, "they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."

Fast-forward to another September 11. Failing to anticipate a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, four Americans, including our ambassador, were murdered in a pre-planned and coordinated terrorist assault in Libya. White House officials said they believed it wasn't a terrorist attack but a spontaneous reaction to a video insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad. There is a debate as to whether they knew all along that was untrue. There is no real debate that officials learned very early that it was untrue and continued to lie about it -- or at least wildly and dishonestly exaggerate the role the video played.

President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, hammered the video story. Clinton vowed to the grieving families of the victims that she would get the makers of the video, not the murderers themselves. The White House asked Google if it could censor the video from YouTube. Google partially complied, blocking it in Libya and Egypt. (Later, a U.S. appeals court ordered the film removed entirely.)

Our embassy in Egypt was widely seen to apologize for the video in a statement to protestors there. The administration bought television ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the video and disassociating the U.S. from it. Obama spoke to the U.N. about the video, explaining that we can't ban such things because of our Constitution. Still, the director was arrested. A picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs was splashed in newspapers around the world.

Subtle, that.

All this fueled an earnest debate about the downside of free speech in America. Cable news networks, op-ed pages and public radio lit up with "expert" commentary about how we must find ways to accommodate the sensibilities of Muslims who don't understand or care about free speech. And much of the crowd that once set about to "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze" when George W. Bush was president said nary a word.

Could You Lie to a Bereaved Father?

By Mona Charen

Friday, May 02, 2014

The Ben Rhodes memo revealing the duplicity of this administration on the subject of Benghazi reminds us about the character of those involved. That President Barack Obama could lie so evenly and so passionately (remember the second presidential debate?) is not perhaps surprising at this stage. But let's not forget what it took for Hillary Clinton to lie to the grieving father of an American hero.

First, a refresher on the facts (as they were certainly known to the principals):

A convoy of well-armed terrorists rolled into the complex housing the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. The attackers sealed off streets leading to the consulate with trucks and then commenced the attack on the building using rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, mortars and artillery mounted on trucks. Ambassador Chris Stevens called Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks for help, saying, "Greg, we're under attack." Hicks, who was in Tripoli, conveyed this up the line, but no help arrived.

The terrorists killed Stevens and another American and set the building ablaze. (Two more Americans would die later attempting to protect the annex.) As soon as the next morning, Congressman Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described the attack as a "commando-style event" with "coordinated fire, direct fire, (and) indirect fire." A few days later the Libyan president said that it was a planned terrorist attack. He also said that the idea it was a "spontaneous protest that just spun out of control is completely unfounded and preposterous." Yet a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Obama administration managed to put the press off the story and mislead the American people.

The brazenness and scope of the disinformation would make any KGB colonel sigh with admiration. At 10:32 on the night of the attack, Clinton issued a statement deploring violence in response to "inflammatory material posted on the Internet." In the days that followed, the president and his spokesman repeatedly invoked the supposedly offensive video as the cause of the attack. The president and secretary of state even filmed commercials to play in Muslim countries denouncing the video while also upholding America's tradition of religious and political freedom. "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others," said the president. "But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence."

But as the State Department finally disclosed a month after the attack (and as had been widely reported before then), there was no protest outside the American consulate in Benghazi. Nothing. Not a peep.

As the Rhodes memo makes clear, the president sent his U.N. ambassador to the Sunday shows to lie. Susan Rice was "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy." Rice did as she was told. The election was less than two months away. A foreign policy failure would not be politically convenient, so it would be made to go away. It's one of the minor injustices of this sorry story that Rice has received more condemnations than the president or secretary of state, who pulled the strings.

Clinton began to peddle the "Internet video" story from the first moments after the guns went silent in Benghazi. When the Libyan ambassador to the U.S. apologized to her on Sept. 13, 2012, for the "terror attack," she ignored this and burbled on about "the innocence of Muslims."

The president, vice president and Clinton welcomed the bodies of Stevens, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Glen Doherty to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Sept. 14. According to Woods' father, the vice president used remarkably offensive locker room talk about the deceased Navy SEAL, but Clinton stayed on message. She greeted the man whose son had bravely attempted to fight off far more numerous and better-armed terrorists on the roof of the CIA annex and who gave his life. Did she praise the courage and self-sacrifice of the decorated Navy SEAL? Did she express regret that he had been left nearly alone to fight off the Islamist terrorists? No. Not even the flag-draped coffins spread before Clinton could shake her iron determination to stick with the script. She told Woods they would catch the guy who made the Internet film and make sure he was punished.

Most politicians are capable of stretching the truth on occasion. But this question, this setting and this egregious a lie suggest that Clinton's conscience -- if she ever had one -- is growing flaccid from disuse.

Communists Aren’t Cool: Honor Victims of Communism This May Day

By Gabriella Hoffman

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Comrades of the world, unite!

Today is May Day, or International Workers Day. What better way to mark this occasion than calling for the destruction of free enterprise or pledging allegiance to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Don’t you know? Capitalism is evil and has caused more deaths than communism, says self-appointed historian and Occupy miscreant Jesse A. Myerson.

According to the Chicago-based group International Workers of the World, May Day began in 1886 with the help of anarchists and radical leftists:

    On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on strike with the anarchists in the forefront of the public's eye. With their fiery speeches and revolutionary ideology of direct action, anarchists and anarchism became respected and embraced by the working people and despised by the capitalists.

Rather than giving credence to disgruntled Marxists and communists on May 1, why not use this day to highlight the ills of global communism by honoring its victims?

Back in 2007, The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin called on readers to commemorate the 100+ million lives lost under communism:

    May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day…

Why hasn’t more attention been given to global communism? Most academics and figureheads skip over it or downplay its horrors. It’s truly sad.

To better put things into perspective about communism, here are some figures:

    · Historian R.J. Rummel says approximately 62 million people were killed in the former Soviet Union from 1917-1987 in his book, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917.

    · Roughly 45 million people were killed during Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958-1962.

    · 35,000 to 141,000 people were killed in communist Cuba from 1959-1987. (It’s still a communist nation, so that number is subject to fluctuate.)

    · Over 100 million across the globe have died as a result of communism.

There are many of us with anti-Communist backgrounds speaking out against historical revisionism.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), son of a Cuban immigrant, often shares his family story to audiences. He’s inspired to fend off big government and moral relativism thanks to father Rafael Cruz’s influence. Like his father, Cruz speaks out against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and stresses the importance of combating tyranny.

Congressional candidate Igor Birman, former chief of staff for Congressman Tom McClintock who’s running in California’s 7th District, escaped the former Soviet Union and came to America in 1994. Birman has amassed support for his campaign due to his story of fleeing tyranny for freedom. If he wins the June primary and later the general election in November, he’d be the first Soviet born representative in Congress.

Just like National Socialism, global communism deserves equal, if not more, condemnation. Fortunately, many Americans aren’t allowing its horrors to go unnoticed.

Radio Free Europe reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to prosecute former KGB officials residing here who’ve committed Soviet war crimes.

Additionally, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is planning to build a museum in Washington, D.C., by 2017 to properly honor communism’s victims and to educate Americans about its sordid history. (Please support the museum’s efforts here.)

I often write about communism at Townhall.com because my family escaped from the former Soviet Union. My maternal grandfather was imprisoned in one of Joseph Stalin’s gulags at the Belomor Canal on the Finnish-Russian border for 18 months because he was Catholic and owned property. My father and his family faced institutionalized anti-Semitism for being Jewish. As a result, I refuse to be silent on the issue.

Much to the chagrin of naysayers, communism doesn’t need to be retried and “perfected.” It’s an equal opportunity oppressor. Why? It tortures and kills people of all races, religions, genders, ages, or social strata for not subscribing to its doctrine.

Fellow freedom-loving Americans: don’t let communists hijack May 1. Instead, use this day to commemorate victims of communism and to educate our peers about its horrors.

The End of Affirmative Action

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Sometimes doctrines just vanish, once they appear as naked as the proverbial emperor in his new clothes.

Something like that seems now to be happening with affirmative action. Despite all the justifications for its continuance, polling shows the public still strongly disagrees with the idea of using racial criteria for admissions and hiring.

Its dwindling supporters typically include those who directly benefit from it, or who are not adversely affected by it. Arguments for the continuance of affirmative action are half-hearted and may explain why some supporters descend into name-calling directed at those who dare question its premises.

The Supreme Court, by a 6-2 majority, recently upheld the decision by Michigan voters that their state would neither favor nor discriminate against applicants to the state's public universities on the basis of race.

Recently, a group of liberal Asian-American state lawmakers in California -- a state that is over 60 percent non-white -- successfully blocked a proposed return to racial considerations in college admissions.

Asian-American students are now disproportionately represented in the flagship University of California system at nearly three times their percentages in the state's general population. If race were reintroduced as a consideration for admission, Asian-Americans would have had their numbers radically reduced in the California system at the expense of other ethnic-minority students, regardless of their impressive ethnically blind grades and test scores.

Expect more such pushback.

In the 1950s, when the country was largely biracial -- about 88 percent so-called white and 10 percent African-American -- and when the civil rights movement sought to erase historical institutionalized bias in the South against blacks, affirmative action seemed to be well intentioned and helpful.

But more than a half-century later, and in a vastly different multiracial America, affirmative action has been re-engineered as something perpetual and haphazardly applicable to a variety of ethnicities.

Class divisions are mostly ignored in admissions and hiring criteria, but in today's diverse society they often pose greater obstacles than race. The children of one-percenters such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z will have doors opened to them that are not open to those in Pennsylvania who, according to President Obama, "cling to guns or religion."

Race itself also is increasingly a problematic concept in 21st-century America. The more we talk about Latinos, blacks, Asians and others as if they were easily distinguishable groups, the less Americans fit into such neat rubrics. In an age of intermarriage, assimilation and global immigration, almost every American family has been redefined by members who are one half this or one quarter that.

Yet if verifiable hyphenation is to be our touchstone to career or academic identity, how do we certify minority status in an increasingly intermarried and multiracial society where there soon will be, as in California, no majority ethnic group? Are we to wear DNA badges to certify the exact percentages of our racial pedigrees -- to prevent another Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill from gaming the system?

Affirmative action once was defended as redress for the odious sins of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But almost 150 years after the end of slavery, and a half-century after the establishment of civil rights legislation, it is hard to calibrate the interplay between race, relative past oppression and the need for compensatory action.

In a zero-sum, multiracial society, how do we best appreciate past suffering? How do we compare the Jewish-American whose grandparents were wiped out in the Holocaust with the grandchildren of those Japanese who were interned during World War II?

If compensation is not historically based, what then are the criteria that calibrate ongoing victimization? Would a European-Argentinean immigrant with a Hispanic name better qualified for affirmative action than the Bosnian Muslim refugee?

Affirmative action was also predicated on America's history of discrimination. It was never intended to apply to those who had recently arrived in America without proof of past discrimination in this country.

Who among the newly arrived immigrants from South Korea, Oaxaca, the Punjab or Nigeria becomes eligible for affirmative action, and who does not -- and on what reasoning are their claims of hardship more valid than those of poor fourth-generation Americans of any ethnic background?

There is also not always consistency in the application of affirmation action. Late-night talk-show hosts are not proportionally racially diverse. Neither are Silicon Valley CEOs, the directorship of the Sierra Club, or employees of the U.S. Postal Service or the NBA.

The public is confused about why we might consider ethnic criteria in hiring in the college anthropology department, but not so much when selecting transatlantic airline pilots, neurosurgeons or nuclear plant designers.

Should gender considerations be used to encourage more males on campuses? Female bachelor degree recipients now far outnumber their male counterparts and are skewing notions of gender equality.

Given these complexities and contradictions, the public, the Supreme Court and state legislators increasingly believe that a multiracial United States is unique precisely because race and tribe -- unlike most other places in the world -- are incidental rather than essential to our American identities.

The advice of Martin Luther King -- judge Americans only by the content of their characters -- is not only the simplest but in the end the only moral standard.

Capital Error

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The botched execution of Clayton Lockett is getting a lot of attention this morning. As a supporter of the death penalty, I think it’s necessary for executions to be as humane and unsensational as possible.  But I am unable to muster much sympathy for Mr. Lockett himself, given the nature of his crime:

    Stephanie Neiman was proud of her shiny new Chevy truck with the Tasmanian Devil sticker on it and a matching “Tazz” license plate.

    Her parents had taught the teenager to stand up for “what was her right and for what she believed in.”

    Neiman was dropping off a friend at a Perry residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.

    The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn’t back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.

    The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman’s friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt’s 9-month-old baby.

    “Right is right and wrong is wrong. Maybe that’s what Clayton was so scared of, because Stephanie did stand up for her rights,” her parents later wrote to jurors in an impact statement. “She did not blink an eye at him. We raised her to work hard for what she got.”

    Steve and Susie Neiman asked jurors to give Lockett the death penalty for taking the life of their only child, who had graduated from Perry High School two weeks before her death.

    Lockett later told police “he decided to kill Stephanie because she would not agree to keep quiet,” court records state.

    Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett’s accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.

    Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, “Oh God, please, please” as he fixed the shotgun.

    The men could be heard “laughing about how tough Stephanie was” before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.

    “He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive.”

Meanwhile another Oklahoma death-row inmate, Charles Warner, has had his execution delayed — perhaps indefinitely — because of the fiasco with Lockett. Mr. Warner was convicted of raping and murdering an eleven-month old girl. Yes, you read that correctly. When the baby’s mother came home, she found her “limp and lifeless.” ”Her skull, jaw and ribs were fractured. Her liver was lacerated, her spleen and lungs were bruised.”

In an unrelated case, he was charged with beating a five-year-old girl with an extension chord, and raping her as well.

Many of the accounts of Lockett’s botched execution make it clear that it was a terrible thing to watch. From the L.A. Times:

    The lawyer emerged from Lockett’s execution Tuesday deeply troubled.

    He had filed into the execution observation room with a fellow lawyer and other witnesses, including reporters and corrections staff members.

    Lockett’s family was not there, the lawyer said — the prisoner had asked his relatives not to come.

    “He didn’t want that to be their last image of him,” Sanderford said.

    The lawyer said he was later grateful for Lockett’s decision.

    “It was an awful thing to witness,” he said of the procedure, likening the experience to torture.

I have no doubt it was a terrible spectacle to behold, but it still seems like far easier viewing than the crimes that led to the spectacle.