All posts by Rand Simberg

Education, History, Law

“I Love Free Speech…”

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…but:

In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.

Not sure which is more dismaying, that they’re unaware of the First Amendment, or that they oppose it. But clearly the Left is continuing its march through the institutions. Which is why books like this one could be very valuable:

Why a father-son collaboration? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I asked the elder Paulsen, who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. Mike reported that he had given a lecture at Princeton in 2006, after which the law professors and college professors at dinner complained about their students’ “goofed-up ideas” about the Constitution. The law professors blamed the college professors, the college professors said “they came to us this way,” and blamed pervasively bad ideas about the Constitution in the culture, the media and even textbooks. Stuck in an airport the next day, Prof. Paulsen killed time writing an outline.

If they can get them to read it. The problem starts in kindergarten, and extends all the way into post-docs.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Fred Hof

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“I was wrong“:

I’ve indicated I admire Hof’s honesty and courage in admitting this. But that doesn’t mean I admire everything about him. For example, why didn’t he speak up in September of 2012, which after all was prior to Obama’s re-election? Might it have mattered? I really don’t know, but maybe. And why, oh why, had this very smart man not noticed that the biggest “policy priority” of the Obama administration has long been politics and spinning to political advantage?

Seriously, by March of 2012, how could he have not realized this? His bio doesn’t say much about his political affiliation—I would guess “Democrat” and probably “liberal Democrat”—and this is the most likely explanation for his failure to notice things that were absolutely obvious but would mean splitting with the party.

And there is no more unforgivable thought crime than splitting with the Party, regardless of the damage to the nation