Monthly Archives: June 2017

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Less than 48 hours after an egomaniacal, snooty, three-toed, sloth-looking wet diaper joked about being a house nigger on Fridays episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, white supremacists armed with bats, bricks and cans of Pepsi rioted in Portland, Ore., at what they deemed a free speech rally.

The day after the Portland Purge, city officials in Charlottesville, Va., announced that they had issued permits to two white supremacist organizations to hold rallies this summer. The hate group ACT for America has also teamed up with organizations around the country to sponsor an anti-Muslim March Against Sharia in 26 cities June 10.

Organizers announced Monday that the next stop on the much anticipated, sold-out White Supremacist

These incidents have all been explained as consequences of the constitutional protection of free speech. According to their organizers logic, being white in America affords them the ability to aggravate and incite people of color because, apparently, freedom of speech is a white privilege.

The term white privilege originated from a 1988 essay by Peggy McIntosh entitled, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Womens Studies. The work was later condensed into a shorter essay, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf).

In her writing, McIntosh listed the ways in which she was afforded white privilege, including not being pulled over by police because of her race, the ability to shop without being harassed or suspected of shoplifting, and enjoying the ability to live in whatever neighborhood she could afford. While all of these things ring true, they underscore an often overlooked fact about the central theme of her thesis:

These arent privileges; they are rights.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of privilege is:

A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

education is a right, not a privilege

The reason white America gets to enjoy these rights is not that they receive a Get out of hate card at birth; it is that the Constitution of the United States guarantees these rights to every American citizen. Walking freely through a store or driving safely down the street isnt supposed to be an entitlement born out of an unseen advantage, like having rich parents or being part of royalty. A privilege is the opposite of a right. The only reason people of color dont get to experience these things is racism, not white privilege.

The protesters in Portland were marching in support of Jeremy Christian, who allegedly stabbed two people and injured another aboard a commuter train. As The Oregonian reports, Christians social media content is thick with references to white nationalist organizations, Nazi insignias and violent rhetoric. Isnt the following Facebook post the definition of a terrorist threat or incitement to gang violence?

Why is this important? Its important because if Christian were black and openly flaunting his allegiance to criminal organizations and speaking of committing illegal acts, he would likely have been flagged by the Portland Police Bureaus gang database. According to The Oregonian, how you conduct yourself, your appearance and who you associate with are all determining factors that can land you in the gang database. Christian has a criminal history, publicly supports white supremacy and looks exactly like what youd expect to see if you snatched the hood off of a Klansman. So why wasnt Christian listed?

Well, even though Portland is the whitest metropolis in America, with a black population of less than 3 percent, the PPBs gang database is 64 percent black and only 8 percent white. Christian had the freedom to assemble with whomever he wanted to because of the First Amendment. Christian was free to say whatever pleased his heart because it is his right. But the reason the government didnt monitor Christians hateful speech, associations and actions that eventually exploded into a double murder is that Christian is white.

White supremacist groups like the ones coming to Charlottesville can waltz into city halls and get permits for hate rallies because the First Amendment guarantees them the right to peacefully assembleregardless of their beliefs. Despite the fact that their rallies are almost never peaceful and they loudly proclaim their desire to wipe out immigrants, non-Christians and people of color, they are still afforded the blank check to come together in whiteness and rail against the mythical white genocide.

Richard Spencer, who was (and I mention this only because it is his claim to fame. Also, I absolutely love white-on-white violence) famously punched in the face on live TV, was recently allowed to speak at Auburn University under the cover of the First Amendment.

Richard Spencer, the self-proclaimed white nationalist and leader of the alt-right (a phrase he

Media reports often refer to white supremacist fight clubs like the Proud Boys (who go to protests to punch 95-pound women in the face) and the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights (FOAKboys) as a fraternity. Oath Keepers parade around with guns and openly promise to disobey the government with lethal force but are never called a gang.

Remember when Black Lives Matter protesters were thugs and going about it the wrong way? Remember when they rioted in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore? Remember how they were such a nuisance during the die-ins after Eric Garners death?

Now every weekend, there are white women in pink pussy hats or some other aggrieved group staging a march. But when the scientists, white women, teachers, health care advocates or one of the other members of the Caucasian contingent protest using the same tactics they vilified BLM for, they say they are resisting. The melee in Portland this weekend was called a skirmish, but headlines described a recent Las Vegas Black Lives Matter protest this way:

To be fair, violence did break outwhen a Donald Trump supporter wearing a Make America Great Again shirt grabbed a female protester by the throat and slammed her to the ground.

Similarly, the Capuchin-monkey-looking late-night host we call Bill Maherwho looks as if he belongs on the shoulder of an organ grindercan throw the n-word around all willy-nilly because he knows he has the First Amendment in his back pocket. After he was kicked off of ABC for arguing that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowardly, he made himself a martyr for free speech. He backed up the white mans claim to free speech by bringing on Milo Yiannopoulos on his HBO show this season, painting the racist hero of the white supremacist movement as a victim of political incorrectness.

Remember the black people whose free speech Maher defended? Remember when he publicly advocated for Isaiah Washingtons free speech when he was kicked off Greys Anatomy? Did you see the episodes when he had Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan on Real Time to discuss political correct ... ? Oh, waitMaher didnt do any of that.

When you hear white supremacist asswipes like Richard Spencer, the Ku Klux Klan and Bill Maher conjure white tears when their freedom of speech has been infringed upon, remember that they dont care about the universal right of free speech; they care about their own free speech. (To be fair, Maher is not really a white supremacist asswipe; he really is a white, supremacist asswipe. He doesnt believe that white people are better than everyone. He just believes thathe is better than everyonethe comma placement makes all the difference.)

The hooded terrorists, the alt-right gangs and the one particular TV host who believes he can denigrate black people because he regularly inserts his penis into black vaginas dont want freedom of speech, because that would mean equality. They want the privilege to say whatever they want, but still be able to make Colin Kaepernick a pariah. They want to fight anti-fascists but condemn black-on-black violence. They want Milo Yiannopoulos to be able to spew his rhetoric while calling for boycotts when Beyoncs clothes remind them of Black Panthers.

They dont really give a damn about the right to free speech.

Theyd rather have the privilege.

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Apparently, Free Speech Is A White Privilege - The Root

Nazi salutes high in the air, white supremacists rallying on the town green, colorful banners telling homosexuals they are going to hell this is what democracy looks like.

But the right to say and do those things no matter how offensive many Americans will find them is that First Amendment freedom of speech thing that demonstrators in Portland rallied for over the weekend.

Because as far as we know, the folks taking part in the Trump Freedom of Speech rally werent jailed by their government for anything they said.

They may have been ridiculed, harassed, marginalized, ostracized, asked to leave businesses, refused service, lost their jobs or positions of influence because of the things they said.

But they havent been jailed.

And thats the freedom the First Amendment guarantees. The right to speak out without being jailed though not the right to speak out without being criticized.

So its easy to see that we wield the greatest power punishing peer pressure to stop the growing tide of hatred in America. We have to speak out.

Heres an extreme example the white supremacist in the gym.

Richard Spencer, the Hail Trump alt-right movement leader who champions an American apartheid, complete with a whites-only state, was quietly working out in his Alexandria, Va., gym when he was confronted by another gym member.

I just want to say to you, Im sick of your crap, Georgetown University professor C. Christine Fair said to Spencer, as he was lifting weights.

As a woman, I find your statements to be particularly odious; moreover, I find your presence in this gym to be unacceptable, your presence in this town to be unacceptable, she went on.

Spencer wasnt wearing a swastika shirt or handing out white power fliers at the gym. He was just doing reps. It was the professor who went after him. And she was relentless, calling him a Nazi, then a cowardly Nazi after he refused to identify himself.

It got so uncomfortable, another gym member yelled at the professor for making a scene.

Guess who lost their gym membership?

And his world howled that this was a violation of his freedom of speech.

Most states ban most businesses from discriminating against clients based on the clients race, religion, sex or national origin, law professor Eugene Volokh wrote in The Washington Post last fall, right after the election, about a case where a New Mexico company said it would stop doing business with Trump supporters.

The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects people from that kind of discrimination, while some states and cities also ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, marital status and other attributes.

But political affiliation is rarely on the list, Volokh wrote. A few cities or counties do ban such discrimination. D.C. bans discrimination based on the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party.

Spencers freedom of speech wasnt violated. He can say whatever he wants without being jailed.

The constitution doesnt protect his right to belong to a private gym that finds his political and social views dangerous and odious.

But what if a coffee place didnt want to serve a Muslim, a hotel wouldnt rent a room to black family, a baker didnt want to bake a cake for a gay couple or a restaurant didnt want someone with a wheelchair eating in their dining room?

Too bad for the businesses in those cases. State and federal laws prohibit businesses from discriminating against protected classes.

Neo-Nazi is not a protected class at least not yet.

The ACLU is used to these sticky debates, and their attorneys have consistently stood their ground in protecting everyones right to say what they want, no matter how disgusting. It probably wasnt easy to defend the Ku Klux Klans right to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, a town filled with survivors of the Holocaust.

Im not defending hate speech, Im defending free speech, said Claire Guthrie Gastaaga, head of the Virginia ACLU, which has been hearing plenty about Spencer, who lives in Alexandria.

As soon as you accept that its OK to suppress speech, you say its OK to suppress your speech.

But what about the rallies that seem so hateful?

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, D, had the wrong idea when he tried to stop that freedom of speech rally over the weekend. It was scheduled before two men were killed on the light rail trying to protect a woman in hijab being attacked by vocal white supremacist Jeremy Christian.

Christian, 35, was arrested for the killing of Rick Best, 53, and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, and for stabbing another man, Micah Fletcher. When he was brought into a Portland courtroom last week, Christian yelled: Get out if you dont like free speech.

Dude, your free speech was protected at all those rallies where you threw the Heil Hitler salute. Killing two men and stabbing a third is not speech.

The protesters in Portland had the right to spew all their hateful views. The feds recognized that and rejected the mayors request to shut down the rally because it could incite violence.

It was the counter-protestors who behaved violently.

Until they started throwing stuff, damaging property and messing with the police who were there to do their jobs, the counter-protesters had the right idea.

The right response to speech you dont like is more speech, Gastaaga said.

The real harm, she said, is the nice people who say nothing.

So do it. Speak, yell, shout.

Dont shut the other guys out.

Just be louder than them.

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Posts local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things.

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In Portland, the haters are entitled to free speech, but not to silence - Herald and News

In testimony on Capitol Hill this week, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said the Department of Education will devolve power from the federal government to families, unleashing a new era of creativity in education.

But big changes may also be underway forthe departments stance on political correctness on college campuses in America, and the all-too-frequent trampling upon the free-speech rights of both students and professors, which has been going on for at least the past 25 years.

Adam Kissel, a free-speech advocate whos gone head-to-head with American universities over speech codes and denial of due-process rights and has almost always succeeded in getting them to back down has been appointed the agencys deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs.

Kissel now works for the Charles Koch Foundation, on grants to colleges and universities, but prior to this, he worked for FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where he was one of the strongest and most active defenders of free speech on American college campuses.

At FIRE, Kissel shot off letters to college administrators nationwide, usuallyon behalf of particular students and professors who had been accused of some minor infraction, often involving expressing an unpopular view, and were being railroaded out of a job or kicked out of school.

In 2008, he wrote a letter to the head of the University of Oklahoma, David Boren, a former governor and United States senator, about the university's new rule that university employees couldn't support or oppose political candidates, and couldn't use the university email system to forward any political commentary or political humor.

"If what the university intended to do was to prevent state-university employees from creating the appearance that the university endorses a particular political candidate, it has wildly overshot," wrote Kissel in his letter. "While it is true that colleges are required because of their tax-exempt status or status as government agencies not to, for example, endorse a candidate, it is simply absurd to argue that any partisan political speech in which employees or students engage using their email accounts can be banned."

"Indeed, by placing such a blanket restriction on political speech, the University of Oklahoma is in clear violation of its legal obligation to uphold the First Amendment on campus. As a public university, Oklahoma is legally bound by the United States Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech. Students and faculty at Oklahoma enjoy this right in full."

He ended the letter by requesting a response not later than "5:00 p.m. EDT on October 10, 2008."

The request for a response was therebecause FIRE doesn't just ask that universities abide by the Constitution: It holds them accountable by waging public-relations battles and taking universities to court when they persist in their violations of constitutional rights.

A Jewish professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, very nearly lost his job when two students, backed by the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel groups, came after him for critical comments he made about Israel's assault on Gaza in 2009. He wrote in an article in Truthout in 2014 that it was a group of graduate students and Adam Kissel at FIRE who defended his right to free speech.

"On June 10, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education (FIRE), a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit, had come to my defense in the name of First Amendment rights and academic freedom. One of their attorneys, Adam Kissel, wrote the chancellor warning him that if all charges against me were not dropped by 5 p.m. on June 24, his organization would launch a major media campaign and a lawsuit against the University of California. An hour or so before this deadline, the university chose to inform me of the decision, made six weeks earlier and kept secret, that the charges against me had already been dropped."

Kissel's writing, however, shows not just a rapid-fire response to free-speech violations on campuses, but a deep understanding of the level of thought control that has developed, and the ways in which students are pressured, under threat of expulsion and ruin, to comply.

"A female freshman arrives for her mandatory one-on-one session in her male RA's dorm room," Kissel wrote in a piece published on the FIRE website on October 30, 2008, entitled "Please Report to Your Resident Assistant to Discuss Your Sexual IdentityIt's Mandatory!"

"It is 8:00 p.m. Classes have been in session for about a week. The resident assistant hands her a questionnaire. He tells her it is 'a little questionnaire to help [you] and all the other residents relate to the curriculum.' He adds that they will 'go through every question together and discuss them.' He later reports that she 'looked a little uncomfortable.' When did you discover your sexual identity?" the questionnaire asks. 'That is none of your damn business,' she writes. 'When was a time you felt oppressed?' 'I am oppressed every day [because of my] feelings for the opera. Regularly [people] throw stones at me and jeer [at] me with cruel names. Unbearable adversity. But I will overcome, hear me, you rock-loving majority.'"

There is a story about the University of Delaware's dormitory diversity program, in which every single incoming freshman is forced to undergo Marxist-inspired questioning and thought-moderation.

The program, Kissel wrote, "crossed the line not just a little, but extensively and in many ways from education into unconscionably arrogant, invasive, and immoral thought reform. The moral and legal problems posed by the residence life education program were abundant and cut to the core of the most essential rights of a free people. What made the program so offensive was moral: its brazen disregard for autonomy, dignity, and individual conscience, and the sheer contempt it displayed for the university's students as well as the so-called dominant culture that made them so allegedly deficient."

As the new deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs at the Department of Education, Kissel will oversee a part of the agency that includes FLAS grants for foreign language study, Fulbright-Hays grants for study abroad, and numerous programs that serve black students, historically black colleges, Hispanic students, students who are veterans, and students with disabilities. It's unclear whether all of these programs will be continued, or whether some will be cut as the department reorganizes to accommodate the 13 percent cut in the president's budget. It's also unknown whether new initiatives will be started under Kissel to correct or prevent abuses on college campuses related to free speech and due process.

Kissel is slated to start hiswork at the department on Monday, June 19.

More:
Department of Education Taps Free-Speech Warrior to Oversee ... - LifeZette