08 July 2020

Speech Or Silence: Free Speech Is A Moral Imperative

I have said it before and I will say it again: Free Speech is a moral imperative.

I will keep saying it, because it needs to be said. It needs to be heard. So long as the Big Tech social media platforms believe they can silence and suppress dissenting voices with impunity, it needs to be heard.


Because YouTube banned Stefan Molyneux, accusing him of "hate speech", while the legacy media absurdly characterized him as "far right" (proving that they have not studied any of his content), it needs to be heard.


07 July 2020

Justice Kagan's Accidentally Correct Opinion: The States Elect The President

As the Supreme Court finishes out the 2019-2020 term, it ruled on two small, barely noticed cases from the 2016 Presidential election. Indeed, the cases were noteworthy more for having received a unanimous vote from the Court than from any contentious debate over finer points of Constitutional law, and from the fact that the two cases were heard separately, as Justice Sotomayor had to recuse herself from one case but not the other.

However seemingly minor the cases appear to be, arising from two lawsuits over a state's authority to bind Presidential electors to a specific voting preference, the ruling reiterates an important aspect of Presidential elections that has all but disappeared from political discourse and debate in this country: A President is elected not by the people but by the States. In issuing their per curiam opinion in Chiafalo, et al, v Washington (591 U.S. ___ (2020), Docket 19-465), the Supreme Court laid down a legal reminder of the Constitutional order of things.

04 July 2020

Decent Respect To The Opinion Of Mankind: Declaring The Why Of Independence

Decent Respect To The Opinion Of Mankind: Declaring The Why Of Independence
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate one of the world's most remarkable documents. On that day, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress issued a declaration of their intent to be free from British rule, and by so doing made real a radical proposition that hitherto had only been a quaint abstract concept: that political authority, and the right to govern, descended from the people of a nation.

We are rightly awed by the majesty of Thomas Jefferson's rhetoric. We are properly impressed by the hope and humanity of the ideals he set forth. From that first Fourth of July until now, America has struggled imperfectly to measure up to the premise of universal human equality at the heart of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the Declaration of Independence is more than its ideals. It is more than a mere assertion of inalienable rights. It is also an homage to humanity.