Sasha Stone: Calling Out Gender Ideology

It's time to stop sitting on your hands and to start saying what you are seeing. Sasha Stone will help you. This episode is "Welcome to America's Religious War: America at the Hands of a Cult, Part Two."

Are we living through a culture war or a religious war? Can we even tell the difference by now?

The Left demonized the religious for nearly all of my life, yet here we are, a country at the hands of a cult, and the intellectuals can’t get us out of it — No proper boundaries to protect children, no guiding principles beyond categorizing us by skin color or gender identity, a godlessness that has left us awash in narcissism and hollowed out morality.

Progressivism is an invasive species. It can’t stop on its own. It has to blow through everything.

The #MeToo and Times Up movements collapsed. The funds dried up for Black Lives Matter. The box office in Hollywood is like a ghost town. All they have left now is to invade the minds and hearts of children to indoctrinate them into this bizarre new cult that seemingly came out of nowhere (aka Tumblr, Circa 2012).

There is no question that the pendulum is ready to swing, as the Left is long past its sell-by date, and Americans are just done. It is not a question of if, but when. If the Republicans can’t find a way to rescue this country in 2024, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980, they must be the most inept political party in American history.

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Florida and California Both Receive a Failing Grade in First Amendment

If you detest Florida's Stop Woke Act, you should also detest the way that California is trying to turn college professors into its ideological puppets. These are both blatant violations of the First Amendment.

Instead of compelling speech at colleges and allowing professors to be disciplined for doing their jobs, what should college administrators be doing? Greg Lukianoff of FIRE offers this advice:

First, stop breaking the law. When a public university restricts freedom of speech, it violates the First Amendment. Although private universities do not share the same legal obligations, many of them make promises to preserve and promote the free speech rights of students and faculty, and they must honor those commitments.

Speaking of commitments, Greg’s second piece of advice is to enshrine free speech protections in official campus policy. One such policy, the “Chicago Statement,” has been adopted by more than 100 colleges and institutions and is viewed by FIRE as the gold standard for free speech commitments.

But you can’t stop there. It’s easy enough to congratulate yourself for putting a commitment in writing, but the real test is when a campus controversy arises over speech protected by the Constitution or by your school’s commitment to free speech. What do you do then? Do you try and wait it out? Hope that everything will blow over?

Well, FIRE hopes not, because your silence will have a chilling effect on free speech. As the university president, you must “defend the free speech rights of your students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early,” says Greg.

One of the most difficult things you will have to do as president will be to defend unpopular speech, even speech that you disagree with, but that is your obligation. Ultimately, the responsibility falls on college leadership, especially presidents, to publicly and unapologetically show their support for free expression. According to FIRE’s 2022 College Free Speech Rankings, students at the top-ranked schools reported that their administration’s stance on free speech is clear and that their administration would likely defend a speaker’s rights during a controversy on campus, a sentiment that is far less common at schools lower in the rankings.

What else can you do? Well, after you have planned for all of that, you should prepare to teach free speech from day one through campus activities and events. In doing so, you’ll clearly convey to students and faculty that the university places a high value on freedom of speech and civil discourse. FIRE even has free speech orientation materials on our website for interested schools.

Finally, as the leaders of scholarly institutions, you must treat commitments to freedom of speech as yet another scholarly endeavor. Universities should survey students, professors, and administrators to “understand their attitudes toward free expression, and to gather opinions of the campus climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.”

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FIRE Files Suit to Ask Federal Court to Declare that DEI Statements Constitute Compelled Speech

From FIRE: FIRE is suing to stop regulations that force our clients to espouse controversial views about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Here is an excerpt from FIRE's announcement today:

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching.

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”

DEI requirements are controversial within academia. FIRE’s research indicates that half of professors believe mandatory diversity statements violate academic freedom. The sole mention of academic freedom in California’s model framework frames it an inconvenience, warning professors not to “‘weaponize’ academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”

“Hearing uncomfortable ideas is not ‘curricular trauma,’ and teaching all sides of an issue is not ‘weaponizing’ academic freedom,” said Loren Palsgaard, a professor of English at Madera Community College and a plaintiff in the suit. “That’s just called ‘education.’”

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About “Insurrections” “Rebellions” and Trump

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides as follows:

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

At Reason, Constitutional Law Scholar Eugene Volokh takes a close look at the meanings of "insurrection" and "rebellion," as used in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Why is this important, even for those of us who are not supporters of Donald Trump?  Volokh notes that several serious legal scholars with solid conservative credentials are proposing a broad interpretation of this constitutional provision and its related enforcement statute:

Congress has enacted a statute, 18 U.S.C § 2383, which covers participation in rebellion or insurrection, and which provides that those found guilty "shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."

It is noteworthy that not one of the hundreds of people so far prosecuted for their Jan 6 misconduct (not even Donald Trump) has been criminally charged with "insurrection under Section 2383.

Volokh cautions that we should be wary of interpreting these terms loosely, in that they allow political operatives to disqualify their opponents from running, something that we instinctively find to be cringe-worthy when we see it in other countries.

If abused, this is profoundly anti-democratic. "The right to vote freely for the candidate of one's choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government." Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 555 (1964). The broader and more nebulous the definition of engaging in insurrection, and the fewer the procedural safeguards, the greater the danger.

About the terminology:

Section 3 speaks of "insurrection" and "rebellion." These are demanding terms, connoting only the most serious of uprisings against the government, such as the Whisky Rebellion and the Civil War. The terms of Section 3 should not be defined down to include mere riots or civil disturbances, which are common in United States history. Many of these riots impede the lawful operations of government, and exceed the power of normal law enforcement to control. Are they insurrections or rebellions, within the meaning of Section 3?

I have not done the historical work to speak with confidence, but I would hazard the suggestion that a riot is the use of violence to express anger or to attempt to coerce the government to take certain actions, while insurrections and rebellions are the use of violence, usually on a larger scale, to overthrow the government or prevent it from being able to govern.

I was personally outraged by the January 6 incursion, because I consider the Capitol to be a sacred civic space. Making things even worse, Congress was in session, meaning that the trespassers were directly interfering with the operation of my government. I am happy to see all those involved aggressively prosecuted. That said, I am also highly concerned that the U.S. Government itself, though its law enforcement arms (including the FBI), encouraged the protestors to invade the Capitol. See here and here and here and here.  But then, on July 13, 2022, the NYT, which has generally been horrified by the January 6 incursion,  published this bizarre article sympathetic to Ray Epps, who is on several January 6 videos encouraging protestors to go into the Capitol.  Follow up NYT story on July 14, 2022. Consider the second paragraph to the July 13 NYT story:

Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year.

Completely befuddled by the slant of this NYT coverage of Ray Epps, Tucker Carlson commented: "It's all very strange. The New York Times is mounting a propaganda campaign on behalf of a self-described Trump voter insurrectionist." Enough of this detour for now. Back to the Constitutional analysis.

Volokh also looks closely at the Constitutional requirement that one "engage in" one of these prohibited activities in order to be barred from office. In Volokh's analysis, barring someone from running for office requires more than applauding on the sidelines:

Moreover, Section 3 uses the verb "engage in," which connotes active involvement and not mere support or assistance. Significantly, Section 3 also uses the term "give aid and comfort to"—but this is reserved for giving aid and comfort to the "enemies" of the United States, which has historically meant enemies in war. Bas v. Tingy (1800). That Section 3 uses both terms, with different referents, strongly suggests that "engage in" means more than just give "aid and comfort" to an insurrection... In the absence of actual engagement in actual insurrection, judged as such by competent authorities, we should allow the American people to vote for the candidates of their choice.

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