RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/michigan-republican-sets-the-record-straight-on-hate-crime-bill-that-could-criminalize-using-wrong-pronouns/?

Michigan’s hate-crime bill is subjective and illogical and could criminalize the use of biologically accurate gender pronouns, state representative Andrew Beeler told National Review, pushing back against local supporters of the legislation who have dismissed claims that it threatens free speech.

The bill would punish speech that “intimidates another individual” with up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Democrats blamed misinformation last week after several outlets reported that the bill would criminalize the refusal to use preferred pronouns. The bill doesn’t dismiss an individual’s First Amendment right to constitutionally protected activity but does criminalize speech if a “reasonable” person feels “intimidated,” a standard state Republicans say is too vague.

“This entire bill hinges on how you define ‘intimidation,’” Beeler said. “I’ll define it the way that the bill defines it: The full definition is, ‘willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,’ etc. If you intimidate by that definition, anyone in the protected classes, you are subject to criminal prosecution and a potential felony.”

Although Michigan’s 1988 hate-crime law already makes it illegal to intimidate based on race, religion, sex, or nationality, the new bill expands protections for gender identity or expression, which it defines as “having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

A standard of reason, by which juries determine whether or not a person acted with average care and consideration, is difficult to apply when Michiganders can’t agree on basic truths about the nature of gender, Beeler said.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-affirmative-action-illusion

One byproduct of a half-century of affirmative action is that it has given many Americans the impression that blacks can’t advance without special treatment. The response to last week’s Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in college admissions suggests that even some very accomplished black professionals have internalized this belief.

Joy Reid, the MSNBC host, said in response to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling that racial preferences were the only reason black people like her had access to elite schools such as Harvard. Eddie Glaude, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, said affirmative action was “the only remedy to the legacy of discrimination in admissions in American higher education” and “they’ve taken it away.” Another black academic, Jelani Cobb, wrote in The New Yorker that affirmative action “helped expand the Black middle class” and predicted that one result of the decision will be “fewer students from traditionally underrepresented minorities on college campuses.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case is chock-full of similar doomsaying. The nation’s first black female Supreme Court justice presents a lengthy chronicle of racial disparities in outcomes and argues that they can be linked directly to slavery and the legacy of segregation. Ending racial preferences, she writes, ignores “the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry” and “will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race.”

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/thou-shalt-not-censor

Imagine if we learned Biden Administration officials had secretly jawboned the New York Times on trans issues. Or told baseball teams they should fly pride flags – or face antitrust hearings. Or complained to the History Channel over a documentary depicting the discovery of crude oil positively.

The First Amendment concerns would be obvious. We’d all wonder why government officials thought they could tell private companies what opinions and news to carry.

The American government is hugely powerful. Not even the biggest company can ignore a call from the White House. If the executive branch has something to say, it should do so with press conferences and open advertising – not secretly threaten the media to carry its water.

Yet when it comes to social media companies, the left has forgotten this simple fact. Instead it claims a new age of information warfare demands that the Constitution be set aside – as if propaganda campaigns haven’t always been a feature of mass media. It has forgotten the importance of an open marketplace for ideas and debate.

Now, in a lawsuit brought by two states against the federal government over social media censorship, a judge has reminded the left – and all of us – of what the First Amendment means and why it matters.

And he’s done so in the simplest, most profound possible way.