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The Nub of the North Korea Crisis by Charles Lipson

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

We have entered the most dangerous moment in world politics since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The nightmare is only getting worse, thanks to North Korea’s increasingly rapid development of nuclear weapons, the missiles to deliver them, and the regime’s chilling threats to use them against the U.S., Japan, and South Korea.

Last week, despite U.N. sanctions andChina’s public call for restraint, Kim Jong Un tested his nation’s most powerful nuclear device yet. Analysts are still not sure if it was a hydrogen bomb, but Western intelligence believes those are coming soon. The regime is already miniaturizing its weapons and improving its long- and medium-range missiles. It also has thousands of conventional weapons pointed at South Korea, including some that could hit nuclear power plants.

A succession of U.S. presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, could not slow these North Korean programs. Neither has President Trump. He has tried an open hand to China, a closed fist to North Korea, and repeated demonstrations of U.S. firepower, all to no effect. It is painfully clear that Kim will not pause his weapons program, much less relinquish it, unless he fears imminent death and destruction. So far, he doesn’t. Neither does his major backer, China.

Making that threat credible without actually launching a major war is the nub of the current crisis, not because Kim himself is likely to change course but because Beijing might. China is Kim’s only lifeline, and it dreads a war on the Korean Peninsula. Short of that, Beijing is deeply concerned about a deteriorating security environment, encircled by adversaries, bristling with U.S. troops and ships, and shaken by the prospect of Japan rearming.

China has only itself to blame for this increasingly toxic environment. Facing no serious external threat, it chose to expand aggressively in the South China Sea and ignore international courts that ruled against it. It chose to make North Korea a lethal threat by providing it vital economic and military aid. Now, facing the unhappy consequences, China must decide whether to stay the course or change dramatically.

The choices are momentous. They will be made knowing that, if nothing changes, North Korea will soon be capable of incinerating American cities and millions of lives. Every U.S. president has said that is unacceptable. What we don’t know is whether they meant it.

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Two Resistances The quiet resistance — the one without black masks and clubs — is the more revolutionary force, and it transcends race, class, and gender. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

After the election of Donald Trump, there arose a self-described “Resistance.” It apparently posed as a decentralized network of progressive activist groups dedicated to derailing the newly elected Trump administration.

Democrats and progressives borrowed their brand name from World War II French partisans. In rather psychodramatic fashion, they envisioned their heroic role over the next four years as that of virtual French insurgents — coming down from the Maquis hills, perhaps to waylay Trump’s White House, as if the president were an SS Obergruppenführer und General der Police running occupied Paris. Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone wrote admiringly about the furious Resistance’s pushback against Trump, with extravagant claims that his agenda was already derailed thanks to a zillion grass-roots and modern-day insurgents.

Hillary Clinton belatedly announced that she too had joined up with the Resistance (“I’m now back to being an activist citizen and part of the Resistance”), apparently in approbation of both its methods and agendas.

Appropriating the name of heroic World War II fighters to characterize a loosely formed alliance of Trump resisters has since proven a mockery of history — and creepy as well.

Resisters of various sorts have made use of repugnant assassination pornography: a Shakespearean troupe ritually stabbing Trump-Caesar every night, a widely viewed Trump decapitation video, loud boasts by Hollywood’s stars such as Robert De Niro and Johnny Depp of their desires either to beat Trump to a bloody pulp or to do a John Wilkes Booth hit on him, street demonstrations where the likes of multimillionaire exhibitionist Madonna dream out loud off blowing up the White House, while various state legislators, professors, and activists talk of presidential assassination. Is there a new division at the Secret Service whose sole task is solemnly informing the media that it is “investigating” the latest celebrity’s threat?

In more mainstream fashion, Democrats in Congress have often stalled Trump’s appointees, blocked Obamacare reform, and talked of removing Trump through impeachment or the 25th Amendment or the Emoluments Clause. The Resistance has gone from melodramatic charges of Trump’s collusion with the Russians, to amateur diagnoses of his mental incapacity, to fear-mongering about his supposed wild desire for a Strangelovian nuclear war with North Korea, to castigating him for his apparently callous and uncaring reactions to Hurricane Harvey victims.

The Democratic National Committee leaders in their speeches resort to scatology to reflect their furor at Trump’s victory. The media, led by CNN in its visceral hatred of Trump, has given up past pretenses of disinterested reporting. Indeed, a number of journalists have sought to ratify their prejudices by claiming that Trump is so toxic that old-style protocols of fairness can no longer can apply.

Street brownshirts such as those of Antifa (too rarely and belatedly disowned by a few mainstream Resistance leaders) justify their anti-democratic and anti-constitutional violence on the grounds that Trump is found guilty of being a Nazi — and therefore those alleged to be Nazis have to be resisted by any anti-Nazi means necessary.

In the olden days, demonstrators decked out in black, with masks and clubs, would have been deemed sinister by liberals. Now are they the necessary shock troops whose staged violence brings political dividends? Antifa’s dilemma is that its so-called good people wearing black masks can find almost no bad people in white masks to club, so they smash reporters, the disabled, and onlookers alike for sport — revealing that, at base, they perversely enjoy violence for violence’s sake. As the cowardly Klan taught us in the 1920s and 1960s: Put on a mask with a hundred like others, and even the most craven wimp believes he’s now a psychopathic thug.

For the most part, the Resistance leadership is not the modern version of a group of grass-roots idealistic outsiders living hand-to-mouth between missions in the scrub. Their announced leaders, such as Hillary Clinton, are often the embodiment of the status quo rich, influential, and elite America. The Resistance sees nothing incompatible in attacking Trump while working out of a townhouse in Georgetown, living in a Malibu compound, flying in a private jet, making a quarter-million a year as a university-endowed professor or a Southern Poverty Law Center grandee, or being a life-time Washington fixture or corporate CEO.

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Shooting the Messenger in Sweden When a Norwegian cabinet minister told the truth about Sweden, the Swedish elite sprung into action. S Bruce Bawer

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

On August 8, I wrote here in praise of Sylvi Listhaug, Norway’s Minister of Migration and Integration, who has criticized hijab in her country’s schools, warned that there are “wolves in sheep’s clothing” in Norway’s Muslim community, and complained about so-called asylum seekers who have been taken in by Norway but who vacation in the countries they supposedly fled from. Recently, Listhaug visited Rinkeby, the Stockholm suburb that is internationally notorious for having become one of the worst of that nation’s large and ever-increasing number of no-go zones. Listhaug said that she was there to study the nightmarish stew of gang crime, welfare dependency, self-segregation, and Islam that has come to be known as “Swedish conditions.” This explanation of her trip made total sense, since her most important job is to prevent Norway from coming any closer than it already is to those “conditions.”

Listhaug’s frankness outraged the Swedish political elite, leading to what Anders Lindberg, editor of Sweden’s largest daily, Aftonbladet, called “a small-scale diplomatic crisis” between the two countries. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, rejecting Listhaug’s claim that immigration is a big problem in Sweden, insisted that Swedish society is “well-functioning.” Social Democrat Karin Wanngård, head of Stockholm’s city council, accused Listhaug of “taking advantage of our hospitality to make populist and untrue points in the Norwegian election campaign.” (Norway’s general election is scheduled for September 11.) Kahin Ahmed, a local politician in Rinkeby, advised Listhaug to put her energy into “creating a more inclusive society.”

Sweden’s establishment media went berserk, too. Heidi Avellan, chief political editor of Sydsvenskan and Helsingborgs Dagblad, charged Listhaug with presenting “an incorrect picture of Sweden.” The above-mentioned Lindberg – who has previously described Listhaug’s party, the Progress Party, as “fascistic” and maligned Denmark, owing to its sensible immigrant reforms, as “a nation of racists” – targeted Listhaug with the worst insult he could think of: he called her “Norway’s answer to Donald Trump.” And Swedish author Lars Åberg, while acknowledging that there are areas in Sweden where “police, fire trucks, and ambulances have been met with stone throwing, aggression, and threats,” managed somehow to deny that these are “no-go zones,” a term he dismissively identified with “far-right bloggers.”

But it wasn’t just the powers that be in Sweden who flipped out over Listhaug. So did their Norwegian counterparts. In an interview with NRK, University of Oslo law professor Mads Andenæs compared Listhaug to the Nazis and actually blamed her for a murder that she had nothing to do with. After being accused of libel by other law experts, Andenæs doubled down on Listhaug for “categoriz[ing] an entire group who don’t look like her, with [her] blonde hair.” His NRK interviewer plainly thought his remarks were true (and delightful), and they were admiringly quoted throughout the Norwegian media. If that weren’t enough, Aftenposten gave Wanngård space in its pages to further smear Listhaug as a liar – and to lie herself about Stockholm’s social harmony and “strong economic growth.” Like Andenæs’s insults, Wanngård’s falsehoods were enthusiastically cited all over the place. Oh, and veteran publisher William Nygaard, who over a decade ago put out the memoirs of child-murdering terrorist Mullah Krekar, called Listhaug a dangerous fascist.

It was the Swedish author Katerina Janouch – writing at an independent news website, Nyheter Idag, that Åberg would doubtless defame as “far-right” – who most forcefully responded to the Scandinavian elite’s assaults on Listhaug. Janouch began her powerful August 30 op-ed by making the obvious point that the Swedish government was more worried about Listhaug’s rhetoric, and about the impact it might have on Sweden’s image, than about the ghastly truth about Swedish society. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” Janouch wrote, “that our politicians have no contact with the reality their voters live with, and apparently zero interest in trying to remedy the problems.” Janouch expressed the wish that she could take Winngård and a couple of the other female politicians who were bad-mouthing Listhaug and force them to live in Rinkeby, to shop in grocery stores that have signs only in Arabic, to experience “the judging male glances if they show too much skin,” to know what it’s like to have rocks thrown at them and be called whores by teenage boys.

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The Dire Consequence of America’s Retreat U.S. foreign policy in crisis. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

For most of its history the United States has vacillated among different foreign policy philosophies. Today we face a world in which our rivals and enemies have been emboldened by our seeming retreat from being the dominant power a globalized economy needs to ensure order and stability. Our current inability to decide on a course of action, however, is a dangerous inflection point that may lead to increasing global disorder and the decline of America’s power to protect its security and interests.

When America was a new nation, it wanted to avoid the quarrels of the Old World and its “entangling alliances,” as Thomas Jefferson called them, echoing George Washington’s warning against “permanent alliances.” The United States should influence other nations as an “example” of ordered liberty, a sentiment famously expressed by John Quincy Adams in 1821: America should be a nation of “well-wishers to the freedom and independence of all,” but one that “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Yet even in its youth, the United States found itself embroiled in European wars. The global trade created by the British Empire, and the Napoleonic Wars that followed the French Revolution, necessarily led to conflict with other nations—as when Britain imposed a naval blockade on trade between France and America in 1812, leading to the War of 1812. During the early stages of economic globalization, the U.S. received a lesson in the limits of isolationism.

Since then, the nations of the world and their interests have become even more tightly knit together. These global interconnections have made the question of American foreign policy more complex. Four broad philosophies of interstate relations have developed, and they set the terms of our current debates about America’s role in the world.

“Isolationism” still runs deep in an America created by settlers who put distance between themselves and the old world, and later migrated into the vast western frontier. Unsurprisingly, isolationism regularly recurs in our history, particularly in the aftermath of wars. After World War I, a strong strain of isolationism set the tone of American foreign policy in the following two decades, most obviously in the Senate’s refusal to ratify the 1919 Versailles Treaty. As Theodore Roosevelt said, in words published posthumously, “I do not believe in keeping our men on the other side to patrol the Rhine, or police Russia, or interfere in Central Europe or the Balkan peninsula.” In our day, the long, unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have aroused in many Americans a similar “pox on both your houses” sentiment towards foreign conflicts in distant lands. Barack Obama campaigned for president in part on promises to end both those wars—and indeed in Iraq he honored his pledge, removing American troops in 2011.

Subsequent developments, particularly the rise of Islamic State and the brutal Syrian civil war, have reaffirmed, for many, that hasty disengagement will create chaos and require the United State to reengage in order to protect its interests and security. Even President Trump, who opposed the Iraq war and campaigned at times as an isolationist, has been putting more troops into the Middle East, despite opposing such a move during the presidential campaign.

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Produce ‘rescue’: Looking to Israeli initiatives to combat world hunger

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Advocating the need for food banks throughout the world, Moon believes that this is the key element in reducing the number of hungry and malnourished people.

“The good news is that if you look at the world population who lives with chronic hunger [people who don’t consume enough calories in their daily diets], that has dramatically decreased over the past 20 years. There are still about 800 million people in the world who go to bed hungry,” Lisa Moon told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview on Monday, adding that they mainly reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

For the past 18 months, Moon has been president and CEO of the Global Food-Banking Network (GFN), an international nonprofit organization working in 32 countries, dedicated to alleviating world hunger by creating, supporting and strengthening food banks around the world that currently serve 57 million people annually.

On her first trip to Israel, Moon is primarily visiting the Leket Israel facilities outside of Ra’anana, meeting with the staff and observing practices that Leket is using in Israel that can be applied throughout the world to combat hunger.

Leket, Israel’s national food bank, has “rescued” some 15,000 tons of produce for the needy which mainly comes from farms throughout Israel.

“So far, the biggest takeaway for me is that Leket’s approach is really unique, because they focus on fresh fruits and vegetables and working with local producers and focusing on nutrition with the people they are serving and people in food banks all over the world,” Moon said.

Moon, an expert on global international policy and food waste, who has been involved with GFN since 2015, explained the shift in world hunger from chronic hunger to “hidden hunger.”

“When people who may have enough to eat on a fairly regular basis but may have to miss meals, and they also don’t have access to nutritious foods, and, regrettably, about one in four people globally has micronutrient deficiencies and is subject to ‘hidden hunger’ – that’s really the hunger that food banks are working to address,” she said.

Moon noted that we are living in a time when there is enough food for everyone, yet the statistics show that one in nine people in the world go to bed hungry.

“It doesn’t matter how much food we produce; if we don’t have a way to distribute it to the people who are in need, we are still going to have a hunger issue,” she said. “So it’s an honor for me to work with food banks, because they really work with distribution.”

Advocating the need for food banks throughout the world, Moon believes that this is the key element in reducing the number of hungry and malnourished people.

“Right now, hunger is not about food production,” she said, “because, right now, we produce enough food for everyone to have enough. It’s a distribution challenge and a logistics problem. And so what is so challenging about that is that a third of all the food that is produced goes to waste.”

Explaining the need to provide impoverished communities with food banks, Moon said the challenge facing these organizations is getting this food directly to those in need efficiently and, of course, cheaply.

“And so we need a mechanism to take that surplus food which is edible,” she said. “We need a way to capture that surplus food and redistribute it to those who can’t access this at the store – maybe the price is too high, maybe they’re too sick. That’s really the role of food banks. And that’s why GFN is so passionate about promoting this model to communities around the world.”

Moon credits Leket Israel for its “unique method of collecting fresh, rescued food from the top of the food chain at the level of agricultural production.”

Hoping to apply Leket’s model on a global level, Moon said: “We must focus on scaling food rescue around the world in order to meet growing demands and enter emerging markets.”

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NORTH KOREA’S ULTIMATUM TO AMERICA . CAROLINE GLICK

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Washington and Pyongyang exchange threats as the latter continues to evoke the wrath of world powers with its latest nuclear test.

The nuclear confrontation between the US and North Korea entered a critical phase Sunday with North Korea’s conduct of an underground test of a thermonuclear bomb.

If the previous round of this confrontation earlier this summer revolved around Pyongyang’s threat to attack the US territory of Guam, Sunday’s test, together with North Korea’s recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental US, was a direct threat to US cities.

In other words, the current confrontation isn’t about US superpower status in Asia, and the credibility of US deterrence or the capabilities of US military forces in the Pacific. The confrontation is now about the US’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

The distinction tells us a number of important things. All of them are alarming.

First, because this is about the lives of Americans, rather than allied populations like Japan and South Korea, the US cannot be diffident in its response to North Korea’s provocation. While attenuated during the Obama administration, the US’s position has always been that US military forces alone are responsible for guaranteeing the collective security of the American people.

Pyongyang is now directly threatening that security with hydrogen bombs. So if the Trump administration punts North Korea’s direct threat to attack US population centers with nuclear weapons to the UN Security Council, it will communicate profound weakness to its allies and adversaries alike.

Obviously, this limits the options that the Trump administration has. But it also clarifies the challenge it faces.

The second implication of North Korea’s test of their plutonium-based bomb is that the US’s security guarantees, which form the basis of its global power and its alliance system are on the verge of becoming completely discredited.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Trish Regan, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton was asked about the possible repercussions of a US military assault against North Korea for the security of South Korea.

Regan asked, “What are we risking though if we say we’re going to go in with strategic military strength?… Are we going to end up with so many people’s lives gone in South Korea, in Seoul because we make that move?” Bolton responded with brutal honesty.

“Let me ask you this: how do you feel about dead Americans?” In other words, Bolton said that under prevailing conditions, the US faces the painful choice between imperiling its own citizens and imperiling the citizens of an allied nation. And things will only get worse. Bolton warned that if North Korea’s nuclear threat is left unaddressed, US options will only become more problematic and limited in the years to come.

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Blacklist The Left’s latest war on free speech. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Blacklists are ugly things. They’re how you terrorize and intimidate people. They’re a weapon of hate. And Color of Change, an extremist group, is using blacklists to smear all conservatives as racists.

Color of Change, the organization founded by Van Jones, a 9/11 Truther and former Communist, has circulated a blacklist to PayPal, Discover, Visa, Master Card and American Express that falsely and libelously groups together a black Harlem church, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an ex-Muslim organization, Jihad Watch and others as “white supremacists” alongside actual Neo-Nazis.

But Color of Change’s definition of “white supremacist” is Republican.

“We must hold every enabler of #Trump accountable,” Color of Change boss Rashad Robinson had tweeted. “#Enablers of white supremacist & nazi sympathizers are not neutral, they are complicit.”

In another Tweet, he laid out his real agenda for bringing down Trump. “Continuing to ensure there are consequences for #enablers – corporate, political and cultural – is critical to forcing him out. Isolate him!”

The Color of Change blacklists aimed at President Trump’s corporate council members and his grass roots supporters are part of the same partisan plot to use false accusations of white supremacy to intimidate corporations into silencing his supporters and forcing him out of office.

“There are no sidelines,” Color of Change declared before Trump’s inauguration. Any politicians or executives who worked with him were traitors. “For those in power—whether in government or in corporations—who choose to enable Trump’s plot against our country, we must be just as uncompromising.”

The blacklist is Color of Change’s weapon in its “uncompromising” war against democracy.

Color of Change has a long history of targeting corporations with pressure campaigns based around false accusations of racism in order to silence supporters of the Republican Party and punish critics of the Democrat Party.

When Glenn Beck expressed his disapproval of Obama, Color of Change warned his advertisers that if they didn’t pull their ads, they would be “publicly associated with his racism”. A more recent campaign targeting Bill O’Reilly also accused him of racism. Neither Beck nor O’Reilly are racists, but Color of Change uses false accusations of racism to intimidate corporations into silencing its political opponents.

When McCain campaigned for the White House, Color of Change accused him of allowing his supporters to shout, “Kill him” at Obama. When Romney ran against Obama, Rashad Robinson accused him of “appealing to the basest racisim [sic].” Rashad and COC’s smears have remained dishonestly consistent.

Color of Change used the same tactic when going after ALEC, a pro-business group targeted by leftist activists over its opposition to government regulation. Corporate members of ALEC were warned, “either stop funding ALEC, or become widely known as a company dismantling the gains of the civil rights movement. “

Behind Color of Change’s racism smears are rich white leftists. Its money comes from George Soros, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Behind its posturing about “white supremacy” are the usual targets, FOX News, ALEC, the Republican Party and conservative activist groups, which the left has always plotted to destroy in its quest for total power.

Hitting corporations with racism smears is just how the left’s racism-smearing subdivision goes about it.

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What’s the Matter with Germany? By Robert Curry

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Robert Curry serves on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea from Encounter Books. He also serves on the Board of Distinguished Advisors for the Ronald Reagan Center for Freedom and Understanding. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/04/whats-matter-germany/

Germany is making trouble again. This time it is not sending young men in uniform swarming across its borders to conquer Europe. Instead, it is using its position of economic dominance to cause young Muslim men from outside Europe to swarm across Europe’s borders. In World War II, Germany’s conquest of Europe and subsequent defeat left the continent in ruins. This time, however, Germany’s actions seem designed to bring about Europe’s destruction by inviting conquest rather than by initiating it.

First the Kaiser, then Hitler, now Angela Merkel. Over and over again and in different ways, Germany’s hubris has invented ways to take Europe down. How can we possibly be here again?

If you take a moment to ponder the title of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, you will notice that Germany is conspicuously absent from Himmelfarb’s subtitle and her book. This is an important clue about the shape of the West today. After all, the story of Germany comes close to defining the conflicts and agonies of the 20th century and gives clues about our present crises. It is a remarkable fact that twice in the 20th century Germany fought the three nations in Himmelfarb’s list in two enormously destructive wars. Those conflicts strongly suggest that Germany was the enemy, not just of those nation states, but also of the Enlightenment traditions those nations represent.

The Enlightenment was a period of political revolutions in Britain, America, and France. Those revolutions resulted from a radical change in thinking in those three countries.

Britain’s revolution came first, in 1688. It replaced the divine right of kings with rule by the king (or queen) in Parliament, a regime that is still recognizable in Britain today. The radically new American idea was forged in the American Enlightenment and recognizes the sovereignty of the people (the subject of my book, Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea). America’s original constitutional design is also still recognizable, though America in recent years has been living under an increasingly post-constitutional regime. France keeps trying to make its version of the Enlightenment project work politically, reflecting its inherent problems. France’s current attempt, the Fifth Republic, was established only very recently, in 1958.

During the Enlightenment era there was a crucial parting of the ways between Germany, on the one hand, and Britain, America, and France on the other. Here is Stephen Hicks in his fine book on postmodernism:

Anglo-American culture and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly Enlightenment program, the other a Counter-Enlightenment one.

How would the 20th century have played out if Germany had belonged in Himmelfarb’s subtitle such that war between a 20th century France and Germany would have been as unlikely as war between 20th century France and Britain? That, it seems, would have averted both world wars and saved lives by the tens of millions.

Instead of being part of the Enlightenment project, Germany was the heartland of Romanticism, the 19th-century movement that followed the Enlightenment era. Romanticism was the rejection of Enlightenment thinking, and it started in Germany.

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The Free-Speech Battles of Berkeley The mayor pressures the new chancellor to cancel controversial speakers.

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Fall semester has begun, and the University of California at Berkeley is back at the epicenter of the free-speech wars. Last weekend saw 13 arrests as Antifa activists bloodied their outnumbered foes in the city streets, and conservative journalist Ben Shapiro, former White House aide Steve Bannon and alt-right parvenu Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled or have been invited to speak on campus this month. Stage set, Chekhov’s gun on the table.

The university’s new chancellor, Carol T. Christ, has vowed to restore free speech on campus, saying in August that it was “critical for the Berkeley community to protect this right.” Resilience is “the surest form of safe space,” she told students, and “we would be providing you less of an education” if “we tried protect you from ideas that you may find wrong, even noxious.”

Yet Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin has already asked the university to cancel controversial speakers. He said last week the city must be “very careful that while protecting people’s free-speech rights, we are not putting our citizens in a potentially dangerous situation and costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing the windows of businesses.”

Mr. Arreguin also suggested that conservative speakers were “just a target” for radical activists “to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street.” Yet the risk comes not from the peaceful speakers but from masked and armed censors.

Meanwhile, Ms. Christ is schooling the mayor on the First Amendment. The chancellor believes allowing the speeches to continue as scheduled is the university’s legal obligation and spokesman Dan Mogulof told us she is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security to protect speakers and attendees.

Ms. Christ is off to a good start, but the pressure to capitulate will increase as the semester goes on. In the student newspaper recently, Berkeley resident Sarah Cordette accused the chancellor of “giving institutional support to white supremacists” and exposing students to “mental and emotional damage.” You can imagine what the faculty is saying.

Past administrators were so intimidated by student protesters that the university installed a $9,000 emergency exit in the chancellor’s office, which soon became known as an “escape hatch.” And when Mr. Yiannopoulos tried to speak on campus last February, Antifa activists threw Molotov cocktails, used commercial-grade fireworks as grenades, shattered windows and set fires, causing about $100,000 in damage.

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A Free-Speech To-Do List for College Administrators Set clear, neutral rules and support the rights of controversial speakers before a crisis begins. By Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman

Posted By on September 5th, 2017

Mr. Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Mr. Gillman is chancellor of the University of California, Irvine. They are authors of “Free Speech on Campus,” recently published by Yale University Press.

During the past year appearances by controversial speakers on college campuses have led to a string of tense, sometimes violent, incidents. As students return to school, administrators will again face the challenge of protecting freedom of speech while ensuring safety for their students, staff and faculty. We offer this checklist to help them prepare for the difficult issues that are sure to arise.

1. Disseminate a clear statement of free-speech values and create opportunities to teach the campus community about free speech. Senior administrators at colleges and universities need to communicate with their communities the vital importance of freedom of expression and academic freedom for higher education. At a minimum, they must state that all ideas and views can be expressed, no matter how controversial or offensive, and must explain why a university can’t fulfill its core purpose without this freedom.

Campus officials can no longer assume this is obvious and therefore unnecessary. Our experience is that too many students, faculty and administrators lack familiarity with basic principles of free expression and academic freedom. Because protection of offensive speech comes naturally to few, campuses should supplement strong free-speech statements with online resources and educational programming that allow all members of the community to develop a better understanding of the issues. For example, schools can include a discussion of free-speech issues at their freshman orientation programs.

But freedom of expression is never absolute. Some speech—such as true threats and harassment and interfering with the speech of others—is not protected. Campuses can enact regulations that ensure ample opportunities for communication while preventing interference with the teaching and research of faculty and students.

2. Publish a clear statement supporting the presence of controversial speakers before particular incidents occur. Speakers should never be excluded because of their views, but campus officials also need to explain that it is completely appropriate, and indeed desirable, for students and faculty to express disagreement with speakers they find objectionable. There can be nondisruptive protests at events, statements of objection through the media, and counter-events that highlight different messages. As the old saying goes, the answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

3. Devise and publicize transparent and neutral procedures for approving events. Campuses typically require advance permission for use of their facilities. There is no free-speech right for groups to demand unconditional access to limited campus venues at a time of their choosing. But the procedures and the criteria for receiving such approval must be clear, stated in advance and applicable to all. Otherwise such fair limitations could be abused.

4. Ensure everyone’s safety. Campuses need to prepare security assessments that ensure adequate protection for controversial speakers and their audiences. A campus might insist on venues that make it easier to prevent protesters from blocking access to the event, and it might require tickets or university identification to minimize the chances of disruption. Speakers in uncontrolled venues on campus public spaces have no right to speak without interruption or rebuttal from a gathering audience, but they do have a right to be protected from violence or threats of violence.