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Gazette editor Vince Bzdek March 14, 2016. Photo by Mark Reis, The Gazette

In the span of one day last week, I heard how The Gazette has become a mouthpiece for the globalist neo-communist left and, a few hours later, how we are a hopeless fount of "fake news" for the neo-fascist right. There's an old saying in journalism: If you're pissing off everyone then you must be doing something right.

What animates most journalists I know is not ideology whatsoever, but facts. And it's not necessarily because journalists are noble, ethical, unbiased creatures (though they are, of course). It's more that the pursuit and defense of a point of view is not nearly as interesting as uncovering something no one knew before. It's much more fun to be a curious human being than a walking, talking point of view.

An old colleague of mine, Tom Ricks, a former military reporter, just published a whole book about how hard - and important - it is to see the facts when politicians and other people are trying to hide or distort them. "Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom" is a book about the two men who last century most clearly saw the "facts" of totalitarianism, on the left and right.

Ricks makes the point that, once a upon a time, it wasn't so clear that communism and Nazism were two sides of the same coin. He writes that George Orwell, author of "Animal Farm" and "1984," alienated his friends on the left when he began to write that communism and Russia had become very totalitarian and Nazi-like. Winston Churchill was also ostracized by many of his colleagues in Parliament because of his persistence that no peace could ever be had - ever - with fascism. Churchill and Orwell saw that both systems gave the state far too much authority over individuals, stealing their basic freedoms away.

Ricks thinks the stubborn clarity of Orwell and Churchill has a lesson for us right now.

"I think in this country, we have especially recently started putting ideology over facts," Ricks said in a radio interview about his book. "And on this I blame both the left and the right. The left and the right both have a responsibility to tell the truth. I don't expect it of politicians. I do expect it of the media, that even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's not supporting your account, your view, your narrative, that the responsibility of journalists and honest intellectuals is to present the facts, to first observe the facts and not to suppress facts that disagree with your own personal views."

Ricks said his favorite Orwell quote came in an interview during the Spanish Civil War, which Orwell fought in and came to see as a dress rehearsal for World War II.

"I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men have been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories. And I saw newspapers in London retailing those lies and eager intellectuals building superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written, not in terms of what happened, but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines."

That experience led directly to Orwell's chilling line in "1984:" "Whatever the party holds to be the truth, is truth."

Ricks concludes his book with a passage about the essential importance of finding facts when all odds are against you.

"The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter."

A Washington politician of all people - a Republican senator from Nebraska who was in town for a conference - underscored the importance of this idea for me last week. Ben Sasse made the point that, at this political moment, we need to make sure our freedoms are not compromised or warped or overshadowed by our politics.

"I think we have a whole bunch of people in Washington who think that politics are the center of the world. They think Washington is the center of the world. That's not what our founders intended. As D.C. becomes more and more prominent in our politics and our economics, people who are addicted to politics, they take up an inappropriately large space in the national mindshare. And there are very few people in Washington right now who want to pause our legislative fights, and while lots of those legislative fights are important, there is a civic issue that's prior to that, that is the American idea."

When you boil it down, what is the American idea?

Sasse believes the American idea, what makes us a truly exceptional country, is "the five freedoms of the First Amendment." Freedom of religion, speech, press, association, and the right to petition for the redress of grievances.

"I believe the First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment," he said.

And he's "very worried" that the basic Americanism the First Amendment represents is under assault.

It was great to hear a reminder, from a Washington insider himself, that we ought to keep our political battles in perspective, and not lose sight, or God forbid undermine, the very things that make us most American while fighting those fights.

In his recent book, "The Vanishing American Adult," Sasse writes that the "First amendment is a roadmap for how a nation of 320 million people, with an inevitably wide divergence of opinion on theological, existential and cultural matters, can nonetheless guard against the tyranny of the majority and can respect everyone's dignity, everyone's natural rights."

We are more, so much more, than our politics, in other words. We are our freedoms more than our politics.

"Politics is not the center of everything," he told the crowd at the conference. "Politics is a means to an end. Politics is definitely not interesting enough to be an end." Our freedoms, rather than our politics, are what give us the framework for pursuing our happiness, for the work that gives us meaning, and the opportunities to live out our lives with others in the best way we can.

It was incredibly refreshing to hear a politician (Sasse) tell a journalist (me) that freedom of the press is one of the essentials that bind us together and make us American. It's just the kind of stubborn, contrarian clarity that Orwell and Churchill would have embraced themselves.

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Vince Bzdek: Freedoms in First Amendment rise above Americans ... - Colorado Springs Gazette

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Letter to the editor: Missouri ruling upends First Amendment - Tulsa World

Since then, the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web mens rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

At the online video conference VidCon a couple of weeks ago, the feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian took the stage for a panel on womens experiences online, only to find the first two rows of seats stacked with her online harassers, leering up at her, filming her on their phones.

Ms. Sarkeesian has been relentlessly stalked, abused and threatened since 2012, when she started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos critiquing the representation of women in video games.

In retaliation, men have threatened to rape and murder her, dug up and disseminated her personal contact information, called in mass shooting threats to her public events and turned their obsession with shutting her up into a competitive sport. All of this, they insist, is in defense of freedom of speech, to which Ms. Sarkeesian, with her precise, rigorously argued opinions about the relative loincloth sizes of male and female video game avatars, somehow poses a threat.

It is not an enviable position to be in.

There are women who have said to me, or to people in my circles, that they dont want to be me, Ms. Sarkeesian told me. They dont want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet. Absence is invisible. We dont even know who has been lost how many were scared away before they even started. What about their speech?

Refusing to quit, as Ms. Sarkeesian has, yields often invisible professional consequences as well. Our videos on YouTube dont get promoted and supported in their algorithms the same way that hate videos about us do, because we cant have comments open, she said. That punishes us.

You can find disingenuous rhetoric about protecting free speech in the engine room of pretty much every digital-age culture war. The refrain has become so ubiquitous that its earned its own sarcastic homophone in progressive circles: freeze peach! Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you dont like is allowed to criticize you.

The law does not share that interpretation. The First Amendment only regulates the government, explained Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard. Does she think there is any merit in telling a person that her critique of your art is infringing on your free speech? No.

Its been a surprisingly effective rhetorical strategy nonetheless. Americans are fiercely proud of our culture of (nearly) unfettered expression, though often not so clear on the actual parameters of the First Amendment. To defend speech is to plant a flag on the right side of history; to defend unpopular speech is to be a real rogue, a sophisticate, the kind of guy who gets it.

Freedom of speech is such a buzzword that people can rally around, Ms. Sarkeesian said, and that works really well in their favor. Theyre weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance.

The goal of Ms. Sarkeesians detractors was never really to protect the First Amendment. If it were, more than 8,000 of them wouldnt have signed an online petition to have her and the GamerGate target Zoe Quinn arrested that is, detained by the state in retaliation for speech for addressing the United Nations about online harassment. But they did. (Ms. Sarkeesian and Ms. Quinns crime, according to someone who is definitely a lawyer: pushing for a U.N. intervention (Foreign Agents) with the intent to limit internet free speech which violates the First Amendment of the U.S.)

If their goal was really to protect the First Amendment, they would have at least blinked when the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, confirmed that President Trump is considering amending libel laws, presumably so he can prosecute journalists who hurt his feelings.

If the goal was really to destroy political correctness, as Mr. Trump promised was his top priority, they would have rallied behind Kathy Griffin and Stephen Colbert and Johnny Depp instead of by their own definition censoring them with at least as much fury as they generated on behalf of Milo Yiannopoulos and his suspended Twitter account (which was perfectly legal, as per the Twitter corporations speech rights).

If their goal was really to foster free public discourse, we would have seen deafening bipartisan support for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Princeton African-American studies assistant professor and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, who canceled two speaking engagements in late May after Fox News aired video of her calling President Trump a racist and sexist megalomaniac. Professor Taylor received more than 50 hate-filled and threatening emails, many racially charged, some containing specific threats of violence, including murder, she wrote in a statement.

Where were the brave knights of free speech when Professor Taylor was being intimidated into silence?

They were nowhere, of course (except, perhaps, on the other end of some of those emails), because their true goal has always been to ensure that if anyone is determining the ways that we collectively choose to restrict our own speech in the name of values, they are the ones setting the limits. They want to perform a factory reset to a time when people of color and women didnt tell white men what to do. And only one 2016 presidential candidate promised such a reset.

The election of Donald Trump and crying free speech to end any discussion of cultural sensitivity are not unrelated. Casting the dissent of marginalized groups as a First Amendment violation is the kind of pseudo-intellectual argument that seems reasonable to people who dont have enough skin in the game to bother paying attention. Discourse is good! Sunlight is the best disinfectant! The more airtime we give to irrational bigots on high-profile platforms the more assiduously we hear both sides, stay fair and balanced the sooner theyll be rejected by the public at large!

Unfortunately, as any scientist can tell you (for as long as we still have those), more often than not, sunlight makes things grow. Conflating criticism with censorship fosters a system in which all positions deserve equal consideration, no bad ideas can ever be put to rest, and lies are just as valid as the truth.

Its not hard to draw a straight line from internet culture warriors misappropriation of free speech to our current mass delusions over climate change, the Hyde Amendment, abstinence-only education, health care as a luxury and class as a meritocracy. Free speech rhetoric begot fake news, which begot alternative facts.

The right cannot lay claim to the First Amendment when its own president is actively hostile to it. Sometimes disinfectant is the best disinfectant.

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Save Free Speech From Trolls - New York Times

The Republican operative claimed to have been offered hacked Hillary Clinton emails, likely from a Russian source, says Tait. Photograph: MediaPunch/REX/Shutterstock

A former British government intelligence official has said he was approached last summer by a veteran Republican operative to help verify hacked Hillary Clinton emails offered by a mysterious and most likely Russian source.

The incident, recounted by Matt Tait, who was a information security specialist for GCHQ and now runs a private internet security consultancy in the UK, may cast new light on one of the pathways the Russians used to influence the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trumps favour.

Taits account, published on the Lawfare national security blog, demonstrates a willingness to collude with the Russians on the part of the Republican operative, Peter Smith, who had a long history of hunting down damaging material about the Clinton family on behalf of the GOP leadership. It also points towards possible collusion by Trump aides.

According to Tait, Smith claimed to be working with Trumps then foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, and showed documentation suggesting he was also associated with close Trump aides including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.

They have denied having had contact with Smith, who died in May at the age of 81, about 10 days after talking to the Wall Street Journal about his pursuit of the emails. Smith told the paper he had operated independently of the Trump campaign.

In his account, Tait writes that he thought Smith had approached him because of his analysis of Democratic National Commitee (DNC) emails stolen by suspected Russian hackers and then published online.

Smith first contacted Tait out of the blue in late July, he wrote, around the time 20,000 hacked DNC emails were published by WikiLeaks and Trump publicly called for Russia to look for emails from the private server used by Clinton when she was secretary of state.

Russia, if youre listening, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, the Republican candidate said at a press conference in Florida on 27 July 2016.

Smith implied that he was a well-connected Republican political operative, Tait writes. Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clintons private email server had been hacked in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election.

Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the Dark Web who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clintons private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

Tait writes that he warned Smith about serious implications if the emails were being offered by Russian intelligence as part of a wider campaign to disrupt the election.

Smith, however, didnt seem to care, he writes. From his perspective it didnt matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so.

Smith claimed to be closely connected to Flynn and his son, Tait writes, and seemed to be well versed in inner goings on and rivalries within the Trump campaign.

Tait also writes that it is certainly possible that [Smith] was a big name-dropper and never really represented anyone other than himself, but adds: If thats the case, Smith talked a very good game.

In September, Tait writes, Smith sent him a cover page for opposition research on Clinton that named Flynn, Bannon, Conway under the title: Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure).

Tait ended his contact with Smith the same month, he writes, when Smith asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Tait remains unsure if the material Smith received was genuine and from Russian intelligence or whether Smith was being scammed.

However, the Wall Street Journal quoted US officials as saying that investigators looking into Trump links with Moscow had examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs Clintons server and then transmit them to Mr Flynn via an intermediary.

Flynn resigned as Trumps national security adviser in February, after it emerged he had not disclosed the extent of his conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. His role in Trump camp links with the Kremlin is part of a much broader investigation being run by special counsel Robert Mueller.

His lawyer said in March: General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it.

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Cyber expert says GOP operative wanted to expose hacked Clinton emails - The Guardian

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- TV courtroom dramas have made the work of lawyers and police part of our culture.

Above all, our founders wanted to keep government power limited and out of the people's lives.

Part of making sure government stays in check is the Fourth Amendment's enshrining the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The idea was that the founders wanted to prevent political enemies from using the government to punish opponents or others who might just be unpopular in society.

This is why to search you or your property, law enforcement usually has to get a writ of permission, otherwise known as a warrant, from a judge. Involving judges in the process was intended to spread the power to investigate and punish potenial wrongdoers among multiple branches of government.

Of course, the Fourth Amendment's key term is here "unreasonable." where law enforcement can make a case that there is probable cause to believe that someone committed a crime, warrants are quickly issued.

And, it might interest you to know that there are over 20 exceptions to requiring a warrant to do a search. These include the plain sight and exigent circumstances doctrines and they deal with situations in which law enforcement see a crime in progress or believe one is imminent.

The founders also codified rights against self-incrimination, or testitfying against youself, in the Fifth Amendment. This is where the phrase "pleading the fifth" comes from. Meanwhile, the Fifth Amendment also prevents double jeopardy-which is being tried for the same crime twice. And, perhaps most importantly, states clearly that no one shall be denied life, liberty, or property without the due process of law.

Our justice system isn't perfect of course, and people may still fall victim to corruption and incompetence in criminal investigations, but the Fourth and Fifth Amendment go a long way to securing some key safeguards of individual liberties.

(Brian Calfano)

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Analysis: How the Constitution Limits Government Power - OzarksFirst.com