The author is chasing his tail in so many different directions that it’s hard to respond. You should not write a looong post on “misinformation” without defining “misinformation.” For example, during COVID, a NY Times reporter said that getting a COVID vaccine doesn’t prevent you from getting or spreading COVID. Our government labeled that as “misinformation” and coerced tech companies to ban the reporter from social media. Of course, now we know that statement to be true. I could go through more examples but the point is that labeling something as “misinformation” is arbitrary. Pending a definition, I’ll say that “misinformation” generally means “something I don’t want you to read or hear” and is protected speech. The author mentions hate speech. Hate speech is protected speech. Supreme Court precedent is very clear on this. The author mentions fraud. Fraud is the intentional act of deceiving someone to gain a benefit.… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Supreme Court
Freedom of Speech is Too Dangerous
https://t.co/k770FhDgoE — Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 24, 2024 What Justice Jackson said to raise eyebrows was “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” Correct! One clear goal of the First Amendment is to hamstring the federal government from doing what it would like to do: control our speech. I would have expected a Supreme Court justice to have learned this in law school, not in on-the-job training. Justice Jackson went on to say, “The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country . . . by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she said. There’s always a euphemism handy for “information the government doesn’t want you to know,” e.g., “misinformation” “disinformation,” “harmful information,” etc. We can’t have freedom of speech! It’s too dangerous! As a thought experiment,… Read more →
An Alternative Approach to Student Loan Relief
The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's disastrous student loan forgiveness program. We have a bad habit in America of paying people to do the exact opposite of what we want them to do: more $$ to stay at home than to work, more $$ to be a single mother than married, more $$… pic.twitter.com/kexfAig09l — Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 30, 2023 I knew Biden wasn’t allowed to do this. Here’s the good news. You can just flip those signs over, write a new begging message on the back, and go stand on a freeway offramp. Read more →
Supreme Court Kills Affirmative Action
The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. — thenation.com The author of that piece really hates white people. I don’t recommend reading it, you will not be a better person for having done so, as it consists solely of sweeping generalizations, broad judgments, unfounded inferences and racial insults. Even if five points (out of a possible 100) were deducted for each verifiable fact, it still scores at least a 95. Grammar and spelling are passable. The only “fact” I remember being cited in support of affirmative action is actually false: In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities. The article that the author links to doesn’t even say that. Black and Latino enrollment in the… Read more →
Diversity at Harvard
The Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on Thursday. The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The email states that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and “to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.” Whatever that means. But what does race have to do with it? Why is race the deciding factor? I think it would be easy to find a young black person and a young white person who’ve lived very similar lives. Or to find two young white people who’ve led very different… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Same-Sex Wedding Websites
My fellow Americans – The Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act requires a website designer named Lorie Smith to create wedding websites celebrating same-sex couples in violation of her religious beliefs. The state law requires equal access to places of public accommodation regardless of disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. “Places of public accommodation” include any business engaged in offering sales, services, or facilities to the public. It’s an un-American law, anti-freedom. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you want to get married, get married. That doesn’t mean everyone has to accept you and love you and make websites for you. Also note that the law places an unequal burden on the parties involved. The couple can hire any website designer they want for any reason. They’re under no legal obligation to show that they didn’t reject a designer based on the designer’s… Read more →
Trump’s Second Term
Donald Trump is having a pretty good second term for someone who wasn’t elected. Several favorable Supreme Court rulings while Biden continues to mess things up at home and abroad as predicted . . . Read more →
None of Our Business
The New Yorker completely missed the point of the verdict, which was “It’s none of our business. We’re returning the question to the people and the state legislatures so people can vote on it via their elected representatives.” Also: is it intentional that the host looks like a man in a dress? View this post on Instagram A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons) Read more →
Never Retract, Never Apologize
I know you’ve never heard of Ilya Shapiro so first let me tell you that he is on administrative leave from Georgetown University Law Center while the school decides whether to retain him as executive director and senior lecturer for the school’s Center for the Constitution. The rest you can glean from this excerpt from a recent essay by Bari Weiss: I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about a tweet by a Georgetown professor. Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes. That tweet was written in 2018 by Georgetown professor Carol Christine Fair about Republican senators who supported Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Fair also writes a blog called Tenacious Hellpussy,… Read more →
And That’s the Truth: Believe Women
[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE] Believe Women . . . I can’t help thinking about that poor boy Emmett Till. And Norma McCorvey . . . lied about being raped so she could get an abortion. That’s before she became Jane Roe. You never knowed a woman to tell a lie? To tell a lie to hurt someone? Woman can do anything a man can do. Good or bad. And that’s the Truth! Read more →
Lose the Pastels and the Mopey Attitude
Americans love gay people. Since this photo has been posted, it has 60,000 shares, 60,000 comments (including presidential candidates) and 640,000 (that’s six hundred and forty thousand) likes. In the short time since the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling there’s been a national competition to see who can demonstrate the most elation about it. (OK, if you’re gay, a few bad apples will dislike you based on that alone but that’s true if you’re identifiable as a member of any group, which we all are.) I’m afraid about the future. I’m afraid people won’t like me. Leave out the part about being homosexual and you could post a picture of anyone. The percentage of Americans who can’t get through the day without medication — I’m including self-medication via alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, food, etc. — is a lot closer to 100 than it is to zero. Nobody’s life is a fairy… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Hobby Lobby Boycotters
“Don’t tell me what to do” and “Do what I say” – these are not compatible admonitions. — James M. Buchanan I just saw this Boycott Hobby Lobby group on Facebook . . . There’s a longstanding liberal maxim — Keep Government Out of the Bedroom — i.e., “Don’t tell me what to do,” which has gone out the window on the Hobby Lobby case, where the liberal position is “Do what I say,” i.e., that a law requiring everyone to buy certain bedroom supplies whether they want to or not is not only a really great thing, it’s a moral imperative. Individual liberty is a two-way street, folks . . . Read more →
NYT Misrepresents California’s Affirmative Action Results
In reporting on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to uphold a Michigan ban on the use of racial preferences in admissions to public universities, the New York Times looks at results in other states that have banned racial preferences. Here’s what the Times says about my state, California, which voted to ban racial preferences in UC admissions in 1998: Hispanic and black enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles dropped sharply after voters approved a statewide ban on affirmative action. Those numbers have not recovered, even as the state’s Hispanic population has grown. That is a misleading analysis for a couple of reasons: One: Affirmative action was banned at all UC campuses, not just Berkeley and UCLA. Ignoring all the other campuses allows the Times to say that black and Hispanic enrollment “dropped sharply” when there was actually only a 2 percent decline in… Read more →
Well-Meaning but Without Understanding
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. — Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928) Read more →
La Jueza Empática
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. — Judge Sonia Sotomayor President Obama has said he wanted justices with “empathy,” although in fairness he has also insisted that knowledge of the law would not disqualify a prospective nominee. — Best of the Web Today Read more →
HW Solves Two of the Thorniest Problems in American Education
Racial Gaps On average, black students who graduate from high school are equipped with the skills the average white student mastered by the eighth grade, according to federal tests. — “Equal access to schools fails to equalize education,” USA Today Blah blah blah . . . Read more →