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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.

Read more:
Save Free Speech From Trolls - New York Times

This article first appeared on the Cato Institute site.

The New York Police Departments Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) reported that over a three-year period NYPD officers threatened, blocked, and otherwise tried to prevent individuals from recording them in public in the performance of their duties.

Almost 100 of the 346 allegations made between 2014 and 2016 were substantiated by the board, not counting the many cases that may not have been reported.

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To be fair, there are many thousands of contacts between police and individuals that happen in New York City. Although there is no way to know how many of those interactions are recorded, its fair to assume that many of them have been as cell-phone recording capabilities have become ubiquitous.

However, there is clearly a segment of officersperhaps very small, but nevertheless realwho feel that they may violate the First Amendment rights of people who record them.

To alleviate this, the CCRB suggested that a new entry should be included in the Patrol Manual to reassert the publics right to record police interactions. That insertion is fine, but more could and should be done because it is extremely unlikely that every officer who disrupted lawful, public recording was ignorant of the right to do so. Any officer who already knew the law was committing misconduct.

Police keep guard outside of Trump Tower on May 10, 2017 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty

Police officers should be held accountable for their actions. Unfortunately, New York State law prohibits the Department or the CCRB from releasing the names of officers who have complaints lodged against them, whether or not they are sustained, or what the outcomes of any disciplinary actions taken were short of termination.

As I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2015:

According to an investigation of New York Citys Civilian Complaint Review Board records, about 40 percent of the 35,000 NYPD officers have never received a civilian complaint, but roughly 1,000 officers have more than 10 complaints on file. One officer has over 50 complaints but retains his position.

Institutionally, the NYPD knows these 1,000 officers are repeat offenders several times over. Multiple complaints against a single officer over a period of months or years implies the officer must, at times, operate too close to the line of impropriety.

Those 1,000 officers represent fewer than three percent of NYPD officers but can damage the reputation of the rest of the department. Clearly, some portion of these 1,000 officers are abusing their authority, and the NYPD is unwilling or unable to remove these officers from duty.

And because the public cant know their names and records, we cannot measure how effectively the NYPD addressed these incidents with any given officer. (internal citations omitted)

The lack of transparency is not limited to New York, by any means, but the NYPDs institutional dedication to data collection at least gives us a glimpse of what is going on.

Getting the right to record in the Patrol Manual is a good start, but the State of New York should repeal the anonymity granted to misbehaving officers. Such laws punish the best officers by making them indistinguishable from those who intentionallyand sometimes repeatedlyviolate the rights of the people they are supposed to serve.

Jonathan Blanks is a Research Associate in Catos Project on Criminal Justice and Managing Editor of PoliceMisconduct.net.

Blanks writes: For a robust First Amendment analysis of the right to record, read this opinion by 2014 B. Kenneth Simon Lecturer Judge Diane Sykes . You can read my 2015 USCCR testimony on police transparency and the use of force here . Finally, you can check out the 2014 panel we hosted on recording the police here.

Read more from the original source:
Yes, It's Legal to Record Cops. It's In the First Amendment - Newsweek

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, the man who refused to create a specialty wedding cake for a same-sex couple in Colorado in 2012. The stories that are dominating the coverage distort the publics understanding of the case and its serious implications.

For one thing, no matter how many times people repeat it, the case isnt about discrimination or challenging gay marriage. But when the news first broke, USA Today tweeted, The Supreme Court has agreed to reopen the national debate over same-sex marriage. The headline (like the story) on the website was worse; it read, Supreme Court will hear religious liberty challenge to gay weddings. Others similarly framed the case. (And dont worry, religious liberty is almost always solidly ensconced inside quotation marks to indicate that social conservatives are just using it as a faade.)

There is an impulse to frame every issue as a clash between the tolerant and the closed-minded. But the Masterpiece case doesnt challenge, undermine, or relitigate same-sex marriage in America. Gay marriage wasnt even legal in Colorado when this incident occurred.

Therefore, the Associated Presss headline, Supreme Court to Decide If Baker Can Refuse Gay Couple Wedding Cake, and the accompanying story are also wrong. As is the New York Times headline Justices to Hear Case on Bakers Refusal to Serve Gay Couple, which was later changed to the even worse headline Justices to Hear Case on Religious Objections to Same-Sex Marriage.

A person with only passing interest in this case might be led to believe that Phillips is fighting to hang a No Gays Allowed sign in his shop. In truth, he never refused to serve a gay couple. He didnt even really refuse to sell David Mullins and Charlie Craig a wedding cake. They could have bought without incident. Everything in his shop was available to gays and straights and anyone else who walked in his door. What Phillips did was refuse to use his skills to design and bake a unique cake for a gay wedding. Phillips didnt query about anyones sexual orientation. It was the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that took it upon itself to peer into Phillipss soul, indict him, and destroy his business over a thought crime.

Like many other bakers, florists, photographers, and musicians and millions of other Christians Phillips holds genuine longstanding religious convictions. If Mullins and Craig had demanded that Phillips create an erotic-themed cake, the baker would have similarly refused for religious reasons, just as he had with other customers. If a couple had asked him to design a specialty cake that read Congrats on the abortion, Jenny! Im certain he would have refused them as well, even though abortions are legal. Its not the people; its the message.

In its tortured decision, the Colorado Court of Appeals admitted as much, contending that while Phillips didnt overtly discriminate against the couple, the act of same-sex marriage is closely correlated to Craigs and Mullinss sexual orientation, so it could divine his real intentions.

In other words, the threshold for denying religious liberty and free expression is the presence of advocacy or a political opinion that conflates with faith. The court has effectively tasked itself with determining when religion is allowed to matter to you. Or, in other words, if SCOTUS upholds the lower-court ruling, it will empower unelected civil-rights commissions which are typically stacked with hard-left authoritarians to decide when your religious actions are appropriate.

How could any honest person believe this was the Constitutions intent? There was a time, Im told, when the state wouldnt substantially burden religious exercise and would use the least restrictive means to further compelling interests. Today, the state can substantially burden a Christian because hes hurt the wrong persons feelings.

Judging from the e-mails and social-media reactions Ive gotten regarding this case, people are instinctively antagonistic not only because of the players involved but also because they dont understand the facts. In this era of identity politics, some have been programmed to reflexively side with the person making accusations of status-based discrimination, all in an effort to empower the state to coerce a minority of people to see the world their way.

Well, not all people. In 2014, a Christian activist named William Jack went to a Colorado bakery and requested two cakes in the shape of a Bible, one to be decorated with the Bible verses God hates sin. Psalm 45:7 and Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:22, and the other cake to be decorated with another passage. The bakery refused. Even though Christians are a protected group, the Colorado Civil Rights Division threw out the case. The American Civil Liberties Union called the passages obscenities. I guess the Bible doesnt correlate closely enough with a Christians identity.

Or perhaps weve finally established a state religion in this country: one run on the dogma of social justice.

READ MORE: Three Thoughts on the Masterpiece CakeshopCert Grant The Supreme Courts Religious-Freedom Message: There Are No Second-Class Citizens Legal Radicals Dont Want the Separation of Church and State

David Harsanyi is a senior editor of the Federalist and the author of The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case against Democracy. 2017 Creators.com

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This Is a Fight for the First Amendment, Not against Gay Marriage - National Review