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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

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Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

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‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’

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Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS

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Duke won’t recognize Young Life as a student organization because of its LGBTQ policy

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Anti_Christian Ideology is an Emerging Aspect of White Progressive Populism

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Free Speech Dilemmas in a Global/ Multi-cultural World

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Free Speech Dilemmas in a Global/ Multi-cultural World

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1st Amendment_Freedom of Expression  last edit 10_10_19 (2)

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Schools Struggle to Support LGBTQ Students

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Results like these are just as troubling as the high-profile incidents dominating the news.

If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you'll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech. Second, a shocking percentage of Americans also support censoring speech they don't like. How is this possible? It's simple. "Free speech" is good speech, you see. That's the speech that corrects injustices and speaks truth to power. That other speech? The speech that hurts my feelings or hurts my friends' feelings? That's "hate speech." It might even be violence.

A new survey of college students demonstrates this reality perfectly. Conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for Yale's William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, the survey queried 800 college students attending four-year private or public colleges, and the results were depressingly predictable.

First, the "good" news. Students claim to love free speech and intellectual diversity. For example, 83 percent agree that the First Amendment needs to be "followed and respected." A whopping 84 percent agree that their school should "always do its best to promote intellectual diversity," including by protecting free speech and inviting controversial speakers to campus. Similarly, 93 percent agree that there's value in listening to and understanding "views and opinions that I may disagree with."

But that's not good news at all. It's simply evidence that in the abstract students will claim to be open-minded. They'll claim to value different views - right until the moment they really get offended. For example, 81 percent agree with the statement that "words can be a form of violence." A full 58 percent of students believe that colleges should "forbid" speakers who have a "history of engaging in hate speech."

And what is hate speech? The definition the students liked was staggeringly broad. Two-thirds agreed that hate speech is "anything that one particular person believes is harmful, racist, or bigoted." They further agreed that hate speech "means something different to everyone."

Given these realities, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of students believe that interruptions or even violence are appropriate to stop offensive speech. Almost 40 percent believe that it's "sometimes appropriate" to "shout down or disrupt" a speaker. A sobering 30 percent believe that physical violence can be used to stop someone from "using hate speech or engaging in racially charged comments."

It's a small consolation that a slight majority of students say that they have not felt intimidated out of expressing their views - but this means that, in institutions allegedly dedicated to critical thinking and open inquiry, almost half the student respondents indicated they were indeed intimidated.

Survey findings like this should serve as an alarm bell every bit as important as the shout-downs and attacks that dominate the headlines. Naysayers and defenders of the status quo on campus will argue that the censors represent a mere fringe, that our campuses are still more free than critics suggest. That may be true on some campuses, but these poll numbers indicate that the so-called radicals are perhaps more mainstream than we'd like to admit.

Just at the moment when we need a concerted, bipartisan effort to defend a culture of free speech, our national polarization stands in the way. It becomes more important to win news cycles or to defeat a hated opponent than it is to defend an enduring civilizational value. We care only when our friends suffer censorship, and we sometimes even take a measure of glee when our opponents twist in the wind. Last week leftist protesters blocked an ACLU representative from speaking at William & Mary. Conservatives should find that every bit as outrageous as an effort to censor my friend Ben Shapiro. We should treat the president's calls to punish kneeling football players with the exact contempt that we'd treat progressive calls for reprisals against a praying athlete.

Long after even the memories of modern feuds fade, the First Amendment should still stand.

In other words, it's time to remember that we can strongly disagree with expression - as I disagree with the decision to kneel - while still protecting the right to dissent. Even more, it's time to remember that the impulse to censor is often more offensive than the content of the targeted speech. After all, a kneeling football player doesn't threaten our constitutional order. Campus speeches don't threaten our individual liberty. But when presidents forget their constitutional role - or when campus administrators capitulate to the demands of the angry mob - we incrementally lose respect for the values that truly make America great.

Long after even the memories of modern feuds fade, the First Amendment should still stand. We should still fight for the rights of others that we'd like to exercise ourselves. But if we lose the culture, we'll eventually lose the Constitution, and when that happens America will fundamentally and perhaps irrevocably change. When it comes to the fight for free speech, the stakes are exactly that high.
READ MORE: College Students vs. Free Speech Anti-Free-Speech Radicals Never Give Up Does America Still Believe in the Right to Be Wrong?

David French - David French is a senior writer forNational Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. @DavidAFrench

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New College Student Survey: Yes, Speech Can Be Violence | National Review

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Results like these are just as troubling as the high-profile incidents dominating the news. If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you'll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech.

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Columbia Law Review

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When is freedom of speech outweighed by another public interest (1)

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Harvard Law Review 2014

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Conflict Between Free Speech and Other Values

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Conflict Between Free Speech and Other Values

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The Conflict between Freedom of Speech and Other Rights and Values | ACS

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Have Christians been Marginalized in the PC World?

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Have Christians been Marginalized in the PC World?

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Trump's attacks on the free press don't just threaten the media-they undermine the public's capacity to think, act, and defend democracy.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Are Donald Trump's latest attacks on the press really that bad? Are they that out-of-the-ordinary, given the famous record of complaints nearly all his predecessors have lodged? (Even George Washington had a hostile-press problem.)

Are the bellows of protest from reporters, editors, and others of my press colleagues justified? Or just another sign that the press is nearly as thin-skinned as Trump himself, along with being even less popular?

I could prolong the buildup, but here is the case I'm going to make: Yes, they're that bad, and worse.

I think Trump's first month in office, capped by his "enemy of the people" announcement about the press, has been even more ominous and destructive than the Trump of the campaign trail would have prepared us for, which is of course saying something. And his "lying media" campaign matters not only in itself, which it does, but also because it is part of what is effectively an assault by Trump on the fundamentals of democratic governance.

I don't know whether on Trump's own part this campaign is consciously thought-through and strategic: The evidence suggests that he is a man of instinct and impulse rather than patient multi-move deliberation. The evidence about formal and informal members of his constellation, from official advisor Steve Bannon to unofficial ally and model Vladimir Putin, suggests a far more purposeful approach. But whatever its origin, Trump's record in office is emerging as something different from any previous president's.

Everyone who has sat in the Oval Office has complained about the way various checks on his power-by the judiciary, the press, stated rules and unstated norms, the opposition party, and alliances and diplomatic obligations-interfere with his ambitions. Trump's views amount to a rejection of the very existence of those checks. Even in their bitterest tirades against a hostile press (LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, many others), an intransigent court (FDR), a "do-nothing Congress" (Truman, Obama), or feckless allies (take your pick), previous presidents have shown some inner sign that they recognize the legitimacy of a checks-and-balance system, or at least the need to pay it lip service. The standard presidential complaint boils down to: "Sure, we need a free press. I just want it to be 'fairer' to me."

But what Trump has said about the press and all other institutional buffers on his power reflects a simpler calculus, not institutional but tribal. These other centers of power are either for him, or they are against him. If they are for him, they are good-from foreign leaders who congratulate him or call him "brilliant," to polls that show results to his liking, to " very honorable" news shows like Fox and Friends. Or they are against him, and if the latter they are "so-called," "phony," "failing," "cheating," "crooked," or otherwise to be discredited.

Donald Trump accepts the existence of the formal and informal institutional structure that constitutes American democracy only as long as that suits his purposes, and disdains or directly attacks it when it gets in his way. The consistency and extent of this approach have no U.S. precedent that I'm aware of. During the Republican convention in Cleveland last summer, I was in the hall when Trump delivered the most chilling line of his acceptance speech: "I alone can fix it." Americans have had and supported strong presidents before. This is the closest we have come to a .

***

On the specific problems with Trump's attack on the press, such a rich literature has arisen so quickly that it makes most sense just to list some of the highlights. They include: Jonathan Karl of ABC, " The Free Press is a Big Part of What Makes America Great"; Chris Wallace of Fox, " Trump Has Crossed a Line"; Brian Stelter of CNN on the need for " media literacy"; David Remnick of The New Yorker, on " Donald Trump and the Enemies of the American People"; Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast, on the aptness of the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People; Joel Simon of CJR on Trump's strategic similarities to Hugo Chavez; Allison Hantschel of First Draft, on " Enemies and their people"; Jay Rosen of PressThink on " Steve Bannon's Styrofoam Balls"; Emily Esfahani Smith of New York magazine, on the increasingly tribal dimensions of "fact"; Emily Dreyfuss of Wired on the modern nature of the lie; Jon Finer in The Atlantic on why this is a dangerous time for the press and the presidency; and, for good measure, Anthony Lewis's 2006 review in the NYRB of a biography of Joe McCarthy. Please read all of them and the many others they link to.

Stephens describes a recent exchange Trump had with Bill O'Reilly, in which O'Reilly asked him about his unconnected-to-reality claims that there had been millions of illegal votes. From Stephens's speech:

The president replies [to O'Reilly's challenge]: "Many people have come out and said I'm right."...

I think it's important not to dismiss the president's reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it's darkly brilliant-if not in intention than certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn't telling O'Reilly that he's got his facts wrong. He's saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don't matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn't have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them-or, in his case, both....

If I had to sum it up [this view] in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.

***

Why does this matter? Because the entirety of the liberal-governing experiment of the past four centuries involves checks on what you can get away with. Doing what you can get away with is the governing ethic of the tribe, of the feudal lord, of today's autocrats. It's the ethic of Tony Soprano-although a difference between him and Donald Trump is that Tony showed more awareness of codes he was supposed to observe, and more inner conflict when he did not observe them.

The work of the people who created the American presidency and its surrounding institutions, who moved us from the world of the tribe and the fief to that of the republic, is that the system required checks and limits to survive. I will bet all the money I have that Donald Trump is not familiar with James Madison's Federalist Paper #51 or its famous "if men were angels" argument. But of course the challenge Madison set out in 1788 is the one that confronts the republic all these long years later:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions

The first 44 occupants of the White House have chafed against some implications of that passage, and against the often-frustrating checks-and-balances structure that arose from it: "auxiliary precautions," "control itself," and so on. But they have recognized the legitimacy and necessity of this complex work of governing. Most have tried to maximize their power, while arguing that they are still working squarely and respectfully within established and necessary bounds.

Probably the most sustained of these arguments is that of The Wall Street Journal's editorial writer Bret Stephens, last week in his Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA (as reprinted full-length in Time). He develops at length, and very well, the point I am suggesting here. It's fair to disclose that in the pre-Trump era I disagreed with Stephens's views pretty much across the board on international and domestic policy. He was for the Iraq war and against the Iran nuclear deal; my views were the reverse. Similar, and on the same issues, I took a different view of the pre-Trump world from the Washington Post's editorial writer Jennifer Rubin. I assume I'll disagree with Stephens and Rubin again whenever Trump has gone. But in the year and a half since Trump appeared on the horizon, these two have distinguished themselves in standing up for conservative principles, and the underpinnings of small- l liberal democracy, rather than partisan accommodationism. People looking back on this era will contrast them and their clarity with the party leaders who have been so busily averting their eyes.

Back to Stephens's address. He starts by contrasting Trump's media complaints with those of other politicians (emphasis added):

But the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes- Breitbart News and the rest...

His objection to, say, T he New York Times, isn't that there's a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He's perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt-so long as it's on his side.

And then Stephens extends the argument to one of the traits that most strikingly distinguishes Trump from most other politicians: that he does not care if he is shown to be telling obvious, easily disprovable lies. The inner power of the norm against lying is such that even people later renowned for high-stakes falsehoods-Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Mark Sanford-tried to avoid telling lies until it was "useful" or "necessary," and betrayed their discomfort when they were caught. As I argued just after the election, the unsettling novelty of Trump is that he tells lies when they're not useful, he tells lies when he knows they can be disproven, he lies and shows less remorse than a lizard when the lie is exposed.

Those bounds are what the 45th incumbent is probably unaware of, and certainly now disregards. Of the institutions that might check him:

The most basic is elections, but Trump famously said during the campaign that he would "accept" the results-"if I win." Since then he has of course repeated his false claim that his popular vote loss was rigged by illegal voting, and that his electoral-college win was very large rather than historically small. Imagine Trump on the losing side of a Bush v. Gore-style decision, or even in Hillary Clinton's position now, as the clear winner of the popular vote but the loser of the office.

When the judiciary has ruled against him, he has immediately blasted its "so-called" and "biased" judges, following of course his attacks on the "Mexican" judge who was hearing a fraud case against him during the campaign.

Norms of transparency, notably the post-Nixon assumption that all nominees would disclose their tax information, he has simply ignored.

The more basic norm that a citizen will pay taxes, or "serve" in some other way, he has taken pride in avoiding.

Outright laws and rules to similar effect, from the famous "anti-emoluments" clause to the outright prohibition on the Old Post Office building, site of the Trump Hotel, being leased to an elected official, he has also just ignored.

Because he believed some members of the nation's intelligence agencies were suspicious of his Russian ties, he disparaged them and their work.

And then we have the press. At that hoary institution known as the White House Correspondents Association dinner, ritual demands that a president spend the first two-thirds of his speech cracking jokes and being "wry" about his run-ins with the press. But the iron expectation is that after that set-up the president pauses, dons a sincere look, and says "But seriously now.." Then he goes on about the public's reliance on an active, unafraid press as a crucial tool for accountability and honesty. It is hard to imagine Donald Trump giving the first part of that speech, and impossible to imagine the second.

***

Twenty years ago, in what now seems an Edenic time, I wrote a book called Breaking the News. The Atlantic ran a cover-story excerpt called " Why Americans Hate the Media." The book's main argument was that when reporters presented an overly conflict-centered, tactics-minded, "horse race"-dominant picture of public life, they hurt the news business, and they hurt the function of democracy as well. If the press served up public life as just another version of reality TV, but with less-interestingly scripted plot lines and less-sexy-looking participants, then the public would naturally turn away from this less enticing entertainment and go for the real thing. Back then, it was quaintly possible to think of "news" and "entertainment" as separable realms.

We're now a million miles down the news-as-entertainment road. Instinctively by Trump, perhaps strategically by Bannon and others, the Trump moment has promoted the idea that there are no facts, no reality, no authorities, no actual truth. There's only us and them. Donald Trump's caudillo skill as a performer is being the "I" who can be the voice of the "us." He's simply better at that than the other side is. I expect if any reporters with experience in 1930s Italy were still around, they'd be writing about parallels with . It is no coincidence that reporters who have dealt with state-news systems in autocratic Russia (like David Remnick or Masha Gessen) or China (where I have lived) are more much concerned by Trump than amused.

I won't draw the comparison to reporters who were in Germany in the 1930s; that is heavy-handed, and a stretch. But I'll close with part of an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was one of the great interpreters of that era. This is from an interview published in 1978 in the New York Review of Books, freshly relevant now:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie-a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days-but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

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Trump's attacks on the free press don't just threaten the media-they undermine the public's capacity to think, act, and defend democracy. Are Donald Trump's latest attacks on the press really that bad? Are they that out-of-the-ordinary, given the famous record of complaints nearly all his predecessors have lodged?

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Why Northwestern President Morton Schapiro Favors Safe Spaces

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Alt-right. White nationalist. Free speech. Hate speech.

A number of labels involving the far right have been tossed about once again after a white supremacist allegedly stabbed three people who tried to keep him from shouting at two teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, on the Portland metro.

Fearing trouble because emotions are running high, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler asked the federal government to revoke a permit for a "Trump Free Speech Rally" on Sunday, describing the organizers as "alt-right." But a rally organizer rejected that characterization, insisting he didn't even know precisely what the phrase meant. Left-wing groups also are planning rallies this weekend.

Here's a look at some of the phrases being used to describe the people involved, and what's behind them:
Alt-Right/White Nationalist
White supremacist Jeremy Christian, who has been charged with two counts of aggravated murder, attempted murder and intimidation in the second degree, began his courtroom appearance last week shouting about free speech. "Free speech or die, Portland. You call it terrorism I call it patriotism," Christian shouted. "If you don't like free speech get the f*** out of my country."

So what exactly was Christian ranting about? Was it nonsensical ravings or something more - an exclamation of his political ideology? Was he saying he allegedly stabbed the three men, two of them fatally, because he believed they were interfering with his right to speak to the young women?

Understanding the language of the far right is a good place to start. There's plenty of disagreement and debate about what language to use to describe far right politics and the groups that operate there.

These days, the labels white nationalist and alt-right have become ubiquitous. Radical right and ultra-right are older terms from the 1950s and 60s, and other terms include paleo-conservative, the militia movement, identity movement, American fascists, national socialists, neo-Nazis. But according to Mark Potok, a leader at the Southern Poverty Law Center for the last two decades, essentially these groups can be broken down into two main categories - those who focus primarily on issues of race and those who focus primarily on conspiracy theories. One idea that courses through nearly all of them is the belief that healthy societies are dependent on racial, ethnic and cultural purity - that for the white race, diversity is the path to political and cultural extinction.

The thinking is that each racial/ethnic group should get their own country, but the USA (and Europe) is for white, European, Christian culture. It's why language like Christian's - "get out of my country" - is prevalent among the far right.

This supremacist vision is what separates alternative right/white nationalists from others on the political spectrum. It's an enormous leap ideologically from mainstream conservatism and the main reason why alt-right membership remains relatively low. Where does the term alt-right come from? Paleo-conservative philosopher Paul Grottfried first used the phrase in 2008 but white nationalist Richard Spencer ran with it and helped make alt-right ubiquitous.

Spencer is a new face of the extreme right movement. Well educated at the Universities of Virginia, Chicago and Duke, he is a world away from old images of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Pete Simi, professor of Sociology at Chapman University ant the co-author of the book American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate, the term alt-right was a successful attempt by Spencer to rebrand himself and his followers as something fresh, young and smart for a new generation.

Among its allies, the alt-right embraces President Trump advisor and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon. Bannon has called the site a "platform for the alt-right."
Free Speech or Hate Speech?
Free Speech has grown into a major issue for both mainstream conservatives and the alt-right. For mainstream conservatives, the belief that the left is more intolerant of dissent than the right is evidenced by the protests against right-wing speakers on college campuses.

White nationalists believe their First Amendment rights go further: that they should have the freedom to say whatever they like and not suffer consequences - for example, getting fired from their job for posting something hateful on Facebook.

The alt-right has developed its own language and symbols on the Internet. Parentheses around a person's name means they are Jewish. "Cuckservative" is a particularly ugly racist and derogatory term describing establishment Republicans who aren't considered conservative enough.

Professor Simi says a key feature of white nationalist belief is seeing themselves as victims. "We're not the haters, we're the victims of white genocide," Simi says, describing the alt-right mindset. Marginalized, oppressed, and fighting an uphill battle against the powers that be, they view themselves as noble, courageous, even heroic warriors.
"Patriot" or Terrorist?
A second category of the extreme right in the American militia movement, which can be characterized by its belief in conspiracy theories. On his Facebook page, Christian praised Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, "May all the Gods Bless Timothy McVeigh a TRUE PATRIOT!!!"

Former SPLC director Potok said the movement's fundamental idea is that the federal government is involved in a conspiracy against its people's liberties. The imposition of martial law will be followed by the forced confiscation of guns and Potok explains that in the end, the U.S. government will be forced into a one world government, the so-called "New World Order" that will be run to serve the global elite. Elements of these conspiracy theories recently made a prominent appearance in Texas in 2015 during an armed forces military exercise, which stoked fear among some worried Texans that President Obama was about to use Special Forces soldiers to confiscate guns and round up resisters. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded by ordering the Texas State Guard to monitor the Special Forces soldiers while they trained in Texas.
Martin Kaste contributed to this story.

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Alt-Right, White Nationalist, Free Speech: The Far Right's Language Explained

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Alt-right. White nationalist. Free speech. Hate speech. A number of labels involving the far right have been tossed about once again after a white supremacist allegedly stabbed three people who tried to keep him from shouting at two teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, on the Portland metro.

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America's universities are being roiled by violent protests over "offensive" speech that students say should be silenced. Here's everything you need to know:
What are the protests about?
They center on whether students should be able to prevent guest speakers whom they find offensive from appearing on campus. In January, police at the University of California, Berkeley, had to cancel a talk by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos after "antifa" - anti-fascist - activists stormed police barricades, causing $100,000 worth of damage. Two months later, Berkeley said it couldn't guarantee the safety of an event involving conservative commentator Ann Coulter, leading to its cancellation. At a talk at Middlebury, the liberal arts college in Vermont, the controversial social scientist Charles Murray was shouted down by students and chased out of town. Conservatives and many liberals have decried these and other protests as a dangerous impingement on free speech. But some left-wing students and academics believe bigoted speech is a form of oppression - and thus shouldn't be tolerated. "We won't put up with the violent rhetoric of Milo, Trump, or the fascistic alt-right," said one protester at Berkeley. "We are willing to resist by any means necessary."

How long has this been going on?
Over the past decade, many universities have accepted the argument that they have a responsibility to protect students from material that makes them uncomfortable. Professors provide "trigger warnings" before discussing books or historical events that deal with racism or rape, to avoid "retraumatizing" people who have been affected by those issues. (See below.) Activists are also demanding to be shielded from "microaggressions" - words or phrases that convey subtle racism, sexism, or some other put-down of groups that have suffered discrimination. If a white American asks an Asian-American, "Where do you come from?" that is a microaggression. Students have also vehemently objected to a number of commencement speakers - among them former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde - on political grounds, resulting in their being disinvited. Many students now want their entire campus to be a "safe space," free of any speech that might be considered racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or offensive in any way.

What is their justification?
"Social justice" activists argue that certain kinds of speech reinforce hierarchies and power structures that oppress vulnerable groups. They say that when a white, conservative male like Yiannopoulos mocks Muslims or transgender people, it isn't just an opinion - it is an assault by a member of a privileged class on a less powerful group. This theory essentially holds that words aren't just words; they are also tools of oppression. The right of free speech, says New York University professor Ulrich Baer, "should not mean that someone's humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned, or questioned." Many left-wing academics and students subscribe to the theory of "intersectionality," in which nearly all human interactions have an implicit power and status dynamic. A white male has an advantage over a white female, who has an advantage over a black female, who has an advantage over a black gay female, who has an advantage over a black trans female. In this worldview, people with privileged social rank can use speech to render other people "invisible."

What is the counterargument?
Conservatives and traditional liberals argue that our Constitution enshrines free speech as one of our most basic rights, and that it especially protects words and ideas deemed offensive or forbidden. They say that no one should be given a "heckler's veto" over views he or she doesn't like, and that the best response to "bad" speech is more "good" speech. "If somebody has a bad or offensive idea, prove it wrong," said former President Barack Obama at a graduation speech last year. "Engage it. Debate it. Stand up for what you believe in." Free speech advocates believe that people learn best when their beliefs are challenged and have to be defended. They also argue that safe spaces provide inadequate preparation for the real world; conservatives in particular mock today's students as "Generation Snowflake" - so emotionally fragile they melt whenever they're offended, which is often.

Why is all this happening now?
There are several factors. Some social scientists believe that Baby Boomer parents who grew up in the turbulent, high-crime era of the 1960s and '70s protected and "coddled" their children, making them more susceptible to offense. Political polarization has increased the rancor between people of different views, so that they see their opponents not as merely wrong but as evil. Social media has made it easier for people to share offensive material, and for activists to foment and organize opposition to it. And with the rising cost of tuition, universities are increasingly treating their students like customers - and thus are more willing to yield to protests. All of this has left academics deeply worried about the future of free speech. "If we can't get [this] right at our elite universities," says Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor who was caught up in a fiery debate over Halloween costumes in 2015, "we're doomed."

Warning students about 'triggers'
The rise of trigger warnings and microaggression theory has prompted widespread mockery. Literature that has been deemed "triggering" includes Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (suicide) and even Ovid's Metamorphoses (sexual assault). In 2015, a faculty training guide at the University of California warned that the phrase "America is a land of opportunity" could upset people whose race makes it harder for them to succeed. Other expressions deemed verboten on campuses include "hey guys" and "man up" (sexist) and "crazy" ("ableist"). Yet activists say the use of trigger warnings, in particular, has been blown out of proportion. Fewer than 1 percent of colleges and universities have a policy requiring them, according to a 2015 study by the National Coalition Against Censorship. And most courses - in the sciences, math, engineering - have little or no need for them. Kate Manne, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, describes trigger warnings as a "basic courtesy" for students who have experienced extreme trauma. "They're a pretty small kindness," she says, "in a pretty small range of subjects."

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America's universities are being roiled by violent protests over "offensive" speech that students say should be silenced. Here's everything you need to know: What are the protests about? They center on whether students should be able to prevent guest speakers whom they find offensive from appearing on campus.

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But the biggest problem with Twitter's place in the news is its role in the production and dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It keeps pushing conspiracy theories - and because lots of people in the media, not to mention many news consumers, don't quite understand how it works, the precise mechanism is worth digging into.

We recently saw the mechanism in action when another baseless conspiracy theory rose to the top of the news: The idea that the murder last year of Seth Rich, a staff member at the Democratic National Committee, was linked, somehow, to the leaking of Clinton campaign emails. The Fox News host Sean Hannity pushed the theory the loudest, but it was groups on Twitter - or, more specifically, bots on Twitter - that were first to the story and helped make it huge.

Here's how.

The guts of the news business.

One way to think of today's disinformation ecosystem is to picture it as a kind of gastrointestinal tract.

At the top end - the mouth, let's call it - enter the raw materials of propaganda: the memes cooked up by anyone who wants to manipulate what the media covers, whether political campaigns, terrorist groups, state-sponsored trolls or the homegrown provocateurs who hang out at extremist online communities.

Then, way down at what we will politely call the "other end," emerge the packaged narratives primed for widespread dissemination to you and everyone you know. These are the hot takes that dominate talk radio and prime-time cable news, as well as the viral Facebook posts warning you about this or that latest outrage committed by Hillary Clinton.

How do the raw materials become the culturewide narratives and conspiracy theories? The path is variegated and flexible and often stretches across multiple media platforms. Yet in many of the biggest misinformation campaigns of the past year, Twitter played a key role.

Specifically, Twitter often acts as the small bowel of digital news. It's where political messaging and disinformation get digested, packaged and widely picked up for mass distribution to cable, Facebook and the rest of the world.

This role for Twitter has seemed to grow more intense during (and since) the 2016 campaign. Twitter now functions as a clubhouse for much of the news. It's where journalists pick up stories, meet sources, promote their work, criticize competitors' work and workshop takes. In a more subtle way, Twitter has become a place where many journalists unconsciously build and gut-check a worldview - where they develop a sense of what's important and merits coverage, and what doesn't.

This makes Twitter a prime target for manipulators: If you can get something big on Twitter, you're almost guaranteed coverage everywhere.

"When journalists see a story getting big on Twitter, they consider it a kind of responsibility to cover it, even if the story may be an alternate frame or a conspiracy theory," said Alice Marwick, who was co-author of a recent report on the mechanics of media manipulation for the Data & Society Research Institute. "That's because if they don't, they may get accused of bias."

Twitter is clogged with fake people.

For determined media manipulators, getting something big on Twitter isn't all that difficult. Unlike Facebook, which requires people to use their real names, Twitter offers users essentially full anonymity, and it makes many of its functions accessible to outside programmers, allowing people to automate their actions on the service.

As a result, numerous cheap and easy-to-use online tools let people quickly create thousands of Twitter bots - accounts that look real, but that are controlled by a puppet master.

Twitter's design also promotes a slavish devotion to metrics: Every tweet comes with a counter of Likes and Retweets, and users come to internalize these metrics as proxies for real-world popularity.

Yet these metrics can be gamed. Because a single Twitter user can create lots of accounts and run them all in a coordinated way, Twitter lets relatively small groups masquerade as far larger ones. If Facebook's primary danger is its dissemination of fake stories, then Twitter's is a ginning up of fake people.

"Bots allow groups to speak much more loudly than they would be able to on any other social media platforms - it lets them use Twitter as a megaphone," said Samuel Woolley, the director for research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project. "It's doing something that I call 'manufacturing consensus,' or building the illusion of popularity for a candidate or a particular idea."

How this works for conspiracy theories is relatively straightforward. Outside of Twitter - in message boards or Facebook groups - a group will decide on a particular message to push. Then the deluge begins. Bots flood the network, tweeting and retweeting thousands or hundreds of thousands of messages in support of the story, often accompanied by a branding hashtag - #pizzagate, or, a few weeks ago, #sethrich.

The initial aim isn't to convince or persuade, but simply to overwhelm - to so completely saturate the network that it seems as if people are talking about a particular story. The biggest prize is to get on Twitter's Trending Topics list, which is often used as an assignment sheet for the rest of the internet.

I witnessed this in mid-May, just after the Fox affiliate in Washington reported that a private investigator for Mr. Rich's family had bombshell evidence in the case. The story later fell apart, but that night, Twitter bots went with it.

Hundreds of accounts with few or no followers began tweeting links to the story. By the next morning, #SethRich was trending nationally on Twitter - and the conspiracy theory was getting wide coverage across the right, including, in time, Mr. Hannity.

They may ruin democracy.

A Twitter spokesman said the company took bots seriously; it has a dedicated spam-detection team that looks out for bot-based manipulation, and it is constantly improving its tools to spot and shut down bots.

What's more, because the media is large and chaotic, it is often unclear what role, exactly, bots play in ginning up interest in a story. Conspiracy theories went big long before Twitter was around. If you removed Twitter from the equation, wouldn't Sean Hannity have picked up the Seth Rich rumor anyway?

Yet the more I spoke to experts, the more convinced I became that propaganda bots on Twitter might be a growing and terrifying scourge on democracy. Research suggests that bots are ubiquitous on Twitter. Emilio Ferrara and Alessandro Bessi, researchers at the University of Southern California, found that about a fifth of the election-related conversation on Twitter last year was generated by bots. Most users were blind to them; they treated the bots the same way they treated other users.

"Human users didn't do a good job of separating bots from other humans," Mr. Ferrara said.

Because they operate unseen, bots catalyze the news: They speed up the process of discovery and dissemination of particular stories, turning an unknown hashtag into the next big thing. A trending hashtag creates a trap for journalists who cover the internet: Even if they cover a conspiracy theory only to debunk it, they're most likely playing into what the propagandists' want.

Finally, in a more pernicious way, bots give us an easy way to doubt everything we see online. In the same way that the rise of "fake news" gives the president cover to label everything "fake news," the rise of bots might soon allow us to dismiss any online enthusiasm as driven by automation. Anyone you don't like could be a bot; any highly retweeted post could be puffed up by bots.

"If you can make something trend, you can almost make it come true," said Renee DiResta, a technologist who studies bots.

And if that's the case, why believe anything?

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How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

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But the biggest problem with Twitter's place in the news is its role in the production and dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It keeps pushing conspiracy theories - and because lots of people in the media, not to mention many news consumers, don't quite understand how it works, the precise mechanism is worth digging into.

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Trump Threatens NBC Over Nuclear Weapons Report

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-Not many months ago I was among the millions of moviegoers transfixed and inspired by the work of a small team of journalists at The Boston Globe - the Spotlight Team - who in 2002 told the shocking story of pedophile priests whose vile acts were routinely protected by the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy. The team's effort not only won journalism's highest award, the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal, but also ignited a global attack on such pedophilia.

Theater audiences like mine cheered as the "Spotlight" film credits rolled. I had watched through teary eyes the film's climactic scene - so familiar to newspaper movies - in which the monstrous presses churn out paper bundles for circulation trucks that fan out across the region delivering the edition containing the story. As a journalist for most of my adult life, my heart swelled with pride. I joined those around me in cheering this demonstration of journalists' oft-stated mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Could there be, I wondered, a better time than now to be in that profession?

How quickly things change. Today the United States has a president who elicits applause when he calls reporters "among the most dishonest human beings on earth." They are "scum," he says, "the lowest form of life" and "enemies." His top adviser, Steve Bannon, labels the news media as "the opposition party."

Today the very meaning of truth and fact is called into question. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that, were it not for massive voter fraud, he - not Hillary Clinton - would have won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. He alleges that "thousands" of Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to vote against him. Both charges lack evidence.

His claims to have drawn record crowds to his inauguration collide with the reality of aerial photographs showing large empty areas of standing room. He won the election despite asserting among other falsehoods that climate change is a Chinese hoax, that campaign rival Ted Cruz's father conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination, and the long-running trope that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

When Mr. Trump is confronted with contradictory evidence, his response isn't to admit error, or even to cease repeating the claims. He attacks the critics, none more vociferously than the news media. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, in one confrontation with a TV interviewer, controversially referred to "alternative facts."

* * *

As stunning as this may seem, historians and veteran reporters can point to numerous precedents. For example, in what remains the low point of press freedom in the US, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which, among other things, criminalized criticism of government officials. Several newspaper editors - all aligned with Adams's political rival, Thomas Jefferson - were jailed under those laws.

And Jefferson was more than ambivalent about the press himself. In 1807 he wrote: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War arrested and imprisoned the editors of two New York newspapers who had published a fake story alleging that Lincoln was about to draft 400,000 men. The newspapers and the wire service that transmitted the story were shut down.

A century later, Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, mocked the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism," and Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, described in an off-color phrase what would happen to Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham if the paper printed a story linking Nixon to the infamous Watergate scandal. (The Post published the story and a sanitized version of Mitchell's quote.) Nixon even kept what he called his "enemies list" on which reporters were heavily represented.

In Trump's attacks on the press he may have found a model in George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist governor and populist presidential candidate. A feisty campaigner who favored mass rallies with a tent-revival feel - something Trump enjoys as well - Wallace routinely and with relish used traveling reporters as his foils. I covered one Wallace rally in the spring of 1976 along with a New York Times reporter who had brought his 9-year-old son with him. True to script, Wallace launched into an anti-press tirade in which he called The New York Times "communist propaganda." He then pointed to the roped-off press section and, in his thick Southern drawl, shouted "and that man right over there works for The New York Times." Wallace grinned broadly as the lathered crowd responded with hissing, booing, and cursing in the direction of the reporter.

This veteran newsman had endured such taunts at rallies many times before and was unfazed. But his terrified child burst into tears. When that was brought to Wallace's attention after the rally, he summoned the Times reporter and his son to his hotel room. When they entered the suite, Wallace quickly picked up the trembling boy, wrapped him in a bear hug, and said in a soothing tone: "Listen here, son, don't you pay no never mind to the things I said about your daddy tonight; it's just politics."

But are Trump's venomous attacks - propelled to countless true believers in his tweets and passed along on partisan websites - "just politics"? The consequences to some journalists have been real and personal. Reporters who have criticized Trump have had their home addresses and the names of their children distributed through extremist sites. The Washington Post retained security guards to protect one of its reporters who had been threatened anonymously for his coverage. Female journalists and reporters with Jewish-sounding names regularly endure scathing assaults on social media. Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's criticisms of Trump so riled some in her audience that she hired an armed guard to accompany her and her children as they vacationed at Disney World.

These threats and attacks come because the news reporters are doing their jobs. They report embarrassing facts about Trump's behavior or his predilection for repeating statements that are - and you can choose your own word here - inaccurate, falsehoods, exaggerations, or lies.

Again, as with presidential disdain for the press, there is ample precedent of presidents who engage in exaggeration, hyperbole, and lying. Contrary to the myth of George Washington and the cherry tree, presidents regularly assault truth, sometimes with major consequences. Lyndon Johnson manipulated a supposed attack by Vietnamese gunboats on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify America's massive engagement in Vietnam. Dwight Eisenhower insisted that a plane shot down over the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war wasn't a US plane - until the Soviets produced the captured pilot who had survived the crash of his U-2. Bill Clinton infamously went on national television to say, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," contrary to all later evidence. In her first presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed she dodged sniper fire after landing at an airfield in war-torn Bosnia in 1996, yet video showed her placidly being greeted by local officials and children. In 2002 George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming to have "proof" that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction - "proof" that didn't exist.

And long before Trump, there was a US president whose statements were so outlandish, so forcefully repeated - and so demonstrably false - that the press nearly gave up reporting them. That was Ronald Reagan, whose authorized biographer, Edmund Morris, described him as a "fabricator" who had an "embarrassing propensity to just make things up." Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he was in Germany with American troops in 1945 as they liberated two Nazi concentration camps exposing the horror of the Holocaust. Yet Reagan had spent the entire war in Culver City, Calif., making Army training films where he viewed footage of soldiers liberating a camp. The film became Reagan's reality.

And at a White House ceremony honoring war heroes, Reagan recounted the bravery of a World War II bomber pilot whose plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. The pilot ordered the crew to bail out, but one crewman was too wounded to do so. Reagan told the audience that the pilot chose to remain on the plane to comfort the crewman as they spiraled to their deaths, thereby earning the pilot a Medal of Honor. Reporters quickly discovered that the story was pure fiction, a scene in the wartime Hollywood movie "A Wing and a Prayer."

White House reporters were flummoxed by the president's disregard for facts like these - and even more flummoxed by the public's disinterest in holding him to account. In a 1983 New York Times article, Steven R. Weisman noted that reporters wearied of reporting the president's frequent "debatable assertions of fact" because the public seemed to shrug them off as "nits and nats" and "inside baseball." When White House press secretary Larry Speakes was asked how it could be that Reagan would repeat stories that were provably false, Speakes replied, "If you tell the same story five times, it's true."

This history could support the argument that Trump's disregard for fact-based statements isn't a big deal. It might suggest that the public will even tire of being reminded of the president's bouts with the facts and reporters will grow weary of reporting them. But there are differences between then and now. The ever-genial Reagan never treated the press as his enemy. Even when his stories were challenged, Reagan didn't accuse the press of creating fake news, perhaps well aware that a solid majority of the public that had long gotten its news from trusted sources such as Walter Cronkite held the press in high regard.

No longer. After decades of assault from such conservative thought leaders as Rush Limbaugh (who popularized the
"lamestream media" label), Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, and countless commentators on AM radio and Fox News, trust in the news media is at its lowest point since Gallup began measuring it in the 1970s. In a September 2015 Gallup poll, just 40 percent of voters said they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in the press. That's in stark contrast to the media's high point of 72 percent in 1976 in the aftermath of their highly regarded coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. And it was down another eight percentage points, to 32 percent, in September 2016 - a drop coinciding with Trump's anti-press attacks.

Nor are relations between the White House and the mainstream media likely to get more genial anytime soon. Mr. Bannon, in fact, recently vowed that they are "going to get worse - every day." The president has said he won't attend the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. From the briefing podium, the administration appears to be implementing a media strategy that pushes back against the traditional news organizations that have covered the White House while favoring those that are unabashedly friendly to the president. White House press secretary Sean Spicer recently barred reporters from CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and The New York Times from participating in an informal daily briefing, while including reporters from such pro-Trump outlets as Breitbart and The Washington Times. Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times said that "nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties."

* * *

So what does this mean? Like wounded animals, the news media seem to be easy prey for Trump's persistent battering. An Emerson College survey in February found that 49 percent of registered voters said Trump was "more truthful" than the news media, while only 39 percent had the opposite view. If that situation is sustained, the news media's ability to hold the president to account for misstatements or misbehavior will have limited, if any, impact. And reversing this situation will be difficult in large part because of the internet's ability to provide echo chambers where individuals of all political stripes can find support for their beliefs. No longer is the news media able to fill its pre-internet role as the gatekeeper of reliable information, separating facts from "alternative facts," a term that has quickly become shorthand for Orwellian falsehood, though Ms. Conway has said she simply meant an alternative perspective. Cognitive neuroscience tells us our beliefs are so tightly held that, even when presented with evidence to disprove them, the typical response is to reject the evidence rather than alter the belief.

At this point in the nation's history, having a president with little regard for facts that challenge his beliefs isn't a trivial matter. American democracy presupposes a well-informed citizenry - that is, it depends upon voters making decisions using factual information. Legendary columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1920, "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." That is as true today as it was a century ago and serves well in defining the purpose of serious journalism in the Trump era.

So what is the embattled media to do? Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron boiled his paper's current mission down to four words: "Just do our job." In a recent speech, Mr. Baron said he remains guided by the principles established in 1933 by then-Post owner Eugene Meyer, which began: "The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained." (Baron, coincidentally, is the former Boston Globe editor who directed its Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into pedophile priests.)

Mr. Baquet of The New York Times sent a memo to newsroom employees in January promising a $5 million budget increase to strengthen the newsroom's reporting on the Trump administration. "Covering this story aggressively, fairly and unrelentingly will be the top priority for The New York Times newsroom this year...," Baquet wrote. "It is not only our mission. It is vital to our business. Our dominance on this story of a changing America will ensure our position as the essential news organization for years to come."

Similar calls to arms are echoing across the media landscape, nowhere more strongly than in the newsrooms feeling the brunt of the president's attacks. If the aim of the president, his top aides, and his supporters in assailing the mainstream media is to intimidate and quiet the criticism, it is missing the target. Trump's "failing" New York Times is adding new subscribers by the minute, as is The Washington Post, and many other stalwarts of the "lamestream media." The same is happening across all platforms. Suddenly, it seems, old-school journalism matters.

Indeed, in what may be one of history's great ironies, the Trump presidency could turn out to be both the economic and psychological salvation of traditional journalism. As the financial health of the news media improves, so will the morale of its reporters and editors who have diminishing cause to worry about the next round of newsroom layoffs. Literary critic Lee Siegel, in the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote: "In presenting the media with a big, unique story that is, all at once, profitable, urgent, and serious, [Trump] is allowing journalists to be journalists without worrying about all of the concerns harbored by the bean counters. What is meaningful journalism is now profitable, and what is profitable is now meaningful journalism."

Whether this call to arms will become the new normal is anybody's guess. But so far the public's hunger for the latest stories emanating from the Trump White House seems limitless. In the weeks after the inauguration, the highest-rated weekday afternoon television show was the daily White House briefing by Mr. Spicer. He became a viral video star after being mocked in "Saturday Night Live" skits featuring comedian Melissa McCarthy wearing a wig and an ill-fitting suit.

Viewers aren't tuning into the briefings for policy reports, though. They - like crowds at NASCAR races - are awaiting the next collision between Spicer and the pack of ravenous reporters eager to trip him up.

But danger lurks for these emboldened journalists and their organizations. A frenzied rush to print or broadcast some salacious tidbit will lead inevitably to mistakes, which not only disserve the public, but also expose all journalists to the "fake news" attacks so readily waged by the president. Such mistakes will lead Trump's allies to dive more deeply into their alternative-fact-filled echo chambers, further convinced that mainstream journalism is the lying enemy, just as the president alleges. A Time magazine correspondent, for instance, incorrectly reported that the Martin Luther King Jr. bust had been removed from the Oval Office when, in fact, it hadn't - something the writer quickly corrected.

Not since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pieced together the Watergate coverup one story at a time has it been more important that information be checked and rechecked, and that objectivity and fairness - words not often heard in today's polarized environment - be used in judging the newsworthiness of information. Conservative writer and former talk-show host Charles J. Sykes put it well in an op-ed in the Times: "If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettoes on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional."

There are few signs at the moment that a détente will come in the poisonous relationship between this administration and the mainstream news media. Both sides seem willing to dig in on opposite sides of the battle line, perhaps as their forebears did when Adams, Jefferson, Nixon, and others occupied the White House. This isn't an encouraging prospect.

But to me conflict between the press and the president is less worrisome than the prospect of being led by an administration for which facts and truths are fungible or irrelevant. The optimist in me believes, like Lincoln, that while the people can be fooled some of the time, they will not be fooled all of the time. I believe that most people know that real knowledge is rooted in facts, and that getting these facts makes them smarter. I therefore believe that the people will search for, find, and support those sources that consistently strive to deliver facts.

Those sources are called journalists.

ρ Tom Fiedler, a former White House correspondent and editor of the Miami Herald, is dean and professor of the practice of journalism at Boston University's College of Communication.

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Not many months ago I was among the millions of moviegoers transfixed and inspired by the work of a small team of journalists at The Boston Globe - the Spotlight Team - who in 2002 told the shocking story of pedophile priests whose vile acts were routinely protected by the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy.

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Alva C. Mather |

In a recent article, the New York Times featured the role craft brewery expansion is having on reviving formerly downtrodden commercial districts and bringing a new wave of tourism into states through locally focused trails and tours.

Zack Needles |

A three-judge panel of the court upheld a ruling by the grand jury supervising judge denying a motion by Pittsburgh-based television station WPXI seeking to intervene and access a search warrant and related documents.

Michael N. Mills |

On Feb. 1, the Ninth Circuit upheld the Hawaii district court's decision finding that the County of Maui (county) violated the CWA when it discharged treated effluent into underground injection wells, which then allowed the effluent to seep into the Pacific Ocean.

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'Masterpiece Cakeshop v. CCRC': A Difficult Balance for Justices | The Legal Intelligencer

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The Supreme Court has again been asked to resolve a closely watched dispute involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The court heard oral argument in December in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission which unlike prior challenges in this area involves the First Amendment.

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Free speech has been a topic of fierce discussion of the last several years, particularly on college campuses. The debate comes down to one essential question: Is all speech free, or should hateful speech be supressed or outlawed?

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AllSides | Balanced news, issues and opinions, media bias ratings, political news

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AllSides will be able to filter the news by region, such as nation, state or local area. Help the AllSides Community by letting us know which regions matter the most to you, and we will work hard to implement those first.

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Federal Funding for Offensive Anti-Christian Art

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Federal Funding for Offensive Anti-Christian Art

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Dyllan Roof/White Supremacist Terrorism/ Confederate Flag

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Dyllan Roof/White Supremacist Terrorism/ Confederate Flag

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Gunmen storm office in Paris with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades

Attackers were reportedly heard shouting: 'the Prophet has been avenged'

'Stalked office asking people's names before killing editor and cartoonist'

Cartoonists Charbonnier, Wolinski, 'Tignous' and Cabut among those killed

Reports Michel Renaud, Philippe Honore and Mustapha Ourad also dead

Two police officers - Ahmed Merabet and Franck Brinsolaro - were killed

Killers fled in stolen car after a 'mass shoot-out' with police - still on loose

Charlie Hebdo editor said 'I'd prefer to die standing than live on my knees'

They were men who stood up for free speech in the face of barbaric threats from extremists. And in the end, their principled stance cost them their lives.

Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine's headquarters on Wednesday morning, opening fire on staff, and shooting them dead.

Among the slain was Stephane Charbonnier, the defiant editor whose satirical newspaper dared to poke fun at everything from religion to feminism.

Scroll down for videos and audio

While others may have left Islam alone amid constant warnings of violence, Mr Charbonnier refused to relent.

'I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no children, no wife, no car, no credit,' he said after receiving death threats two years ago. 'It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.'

Mr Charbonnier - nicknamed Charb - spoke out fiercely against political correctness, saying: 'It should be as normal to criticise Islam as it is to criticise Jews or Catholics.'

The 47-year-old, who took over as editor in 2009, grew up in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northern France and joined Charlie Hebdo in the early 1990s as a designer.

Jean 'Cabu' Cabut was another victim. The magazine's 76-year-old lead cartoonist was an almost legendary cultural figure in France.

Known by the nickname 'Cabu', he was renowned for his quick wit and youthful style. He was also notorious for his drawing of Mohammed, which sparked fury after adorning the cover of Charlie Hebdo in 2006.

Despite all the controversy, Mr Cabut was insistent that art should not be constrained. Perhaps his most famous quote was: 'Sometimes laughter can hurt - but laughter, humour and mockery are our only weapons.'

Also among the dead was Georges Wolinski, an 80-year-old who was as renowned for his colourful home life as he was for being a 'master of satirical illustration'.

Married twice, he once joked about his dying wish, saying: 'I want to be cremated. I said to my wife, "if you throw the ashes in the toilet, I get to see your bottom every day".'

Mr Wolinski was born in Tunis on June 28, 1934 to a Franco-Italian mother and a Polish Jewish father. He joined Hara-Kiri with Cabu in 1960 and became renowned for his cartoons, which spoofed politics and sexuality.

His fellow victim, cartoonist Bernard 'Tignous' Verlhac, was a renowned pacifist. The 57-year-old Parisian had been drawing for the French press since 1980 and originally made his name on comic publication L'idiot international.

Mourners were also last night paying tribute to Philippe Honore, a regular contributor to Charlie Hebdo who specialised in 'literary puzzles'. The 73-year-old was born in Vichy, central France, and was first published aged just 16.

Victim Bernard Maris was a Left-wing economist, known to readers as 'Uncle Bernard'. Heartbroken friends said the 68-year-old was a 'cultured, kind and very tolerant man'.

Also killed was Michel Renaud, who did not work for Charlie Hebdo, but had been invited to the magazine's offices as guest editor. He was the founder of 'Rendez-vous de Carnet de Voyage', a travel-themed art festival.

It has been reported that the final two victims are Frédéric Boisseau, a maintenance worker, and the only female killed - Elsa Cayat.

Ms Cayat was a columnist and analyst for the magazine, according to Le Figaro.

It is reported the post mortems will be held on Thursday in an announcement by the prosecutor of Paris, François Molins.

Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the 'calm and highly disciplined men', who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.

Two police officers are also among the dead - they have been named as Ahmed Merabet and Franck Brinsolaro, according to French media. Mr Merabet, 42, is believed to be Muslim.

Tributes have been pouring in to 'heroic' men who refused to be intimidated and who saw their work as vital tools of political expression, with one Twitter user stating 'you wanted to kill Charlie Hebdo, you just made it immortal'.

As the world expressed its horror at the massacre, Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief Gerard Biard said 'a newspaper is not a weapon of war.'

The gunmen reportedly asked for the cartoonists by name before shooting them dead and yelling 'the Prophet has been avenged'.

And there were unconfirmed reports that one of the gunmen said to a witness: 'You say to the media, it was Al Qaeda in Yemen.'

President Francois Hollande described the bloodbath - France's deadliest postwar terrorist outrage - as a 'barbaric attack against France, and against journalists'.

The offices of the same magazine were burnt down in a petrol attack in 2011 after running a magazine cover of the Prophet Mohammed as a cartoon character.

Afterwards Charbonnier remained defiant, saying that Islam could not be excluded from freedom of the press.

He said: 'If we can poke fun at everything in France, if we can talk about anything in France apart from Islam or the consequences of Islamism, that is annoying.'

Mr Charbonnier said he did not see the attack on the magazine as the work of French Muslims, but of what he called 'idiot extremists'.

The cover showed Mohammed saying: '100 lashes if you are not dying of laughter'.

Mr Charbonnier, who once said 'a drawing has never killed anyone', was included in a 2013 Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam article published by Inspire, the terrorist propaganda magazine published by Al Qaeda.

In 2012 he said: 'I don't feel as though I'm killing someone with a pen. I'm not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.'

Charbonnier said that he didn't fear reprisals. After publishing naked pictures of the Prophet in 2012, he said: 'I have neither a wife nor children, not even a dog. But I'm not going to hide.'

He added: 'It should be as normal to criticize Islam as it is to criticize Jews or Catholics. I'd rather die than live like a rat.'

Georges Wolinski, who lived in Paris, was married twice, first to Jacqueline Saba, with whom he had two children, Frederica and Natacha, and then in 1971 to Maryse Bachere. They had one daughter together, Elsa-Angela.

STEPHANE CHARBONNIER: THE CHARLIE HEBDO EDITOR WHO WAS DEFIANT TO THE LAST

Wolinski previously lived off the fashionable Boulevard Saint Germain where he was a well-known and well-liked character.

A waiter called Mathieu - who works in a cafe on the Rue Bonaparte where Wolinski lived - tonight paid tribute to him.

He told MailOnline: 'He was a great man and a great cartoonist. Everybody around here knew him and admired him for his work.

'He would come in every morning for an espresso and would chat to everyone, including all of the staff.

'This is a very liberal area, with lots of bookstores, so we are all in shock today.

'A lot of the Charlie Hebdo staff would eat and drink around here and have lots of friends in this neighbourhood, so it is a very sad day for us all and for Paris.'

Cabu's drawings first appeared in a local French newspaper in 1954. He was conscripted to the Army for two years for the Algerian War, but that didn't stop his creative talent, which was put to use in the army magazine Bled and in Paris-Match.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s his career flourished, with the artist co-creating Hara-Kiri magazine, working on children's TV show Recre A2 and eventually working on Charlie Hebdo as a caricaturists.

His most controversial moment came in 2006 when his drawing of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared on the cover with the caption 'Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists' with a speech bubble containing the words 'so hard to be loved by jerks'. Muslims consider any drawings of the prophet to be extremely offensive.

He was the father of French singer/songwriter Mano Solo, who died in 2010.

Victim Bernard Maris was an economist who contributed to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio. He was married to journalist Sylvie Genevoix, who died on 20 September 2012.

The names of four of the other victims have been reported tonight by French newspaper Le Monde.

The former chief of staff of the mayor of Clermont-Ferrand, Michel Renaud was reportedly among those that were killed while visiting the Paris office where he was invited to be a guest editor.

It is thought he was accompanied by friend, Gerard Gaillard, who escaped the shooting by lying on the ground, according to France 3 Auvergne.

Philippe Honoré was born in Vichy in 1941 and had his first cartoon published when he was just 16. He was a regular contributor to the magazine, specialising in puzzles, and had many books published.

The magazine's proof reader, Mustapha Oura, is thought to have recently obtained French nationality.

It also said being reported that two police officers were killed, including Ahmed Merabet who was patrolling the 11th arrondissement when he was shot, and Franck Brinsolaro, who is believed to have been Charb's security officer.

The other victims are still yet to be identified.

Thousands of tributes to the cartoonists have appeared on Twitter.

User Gabriel Heller paid tribute by posting his favourite quote from Jean Cabut: 'Sometimes laughter can hurt, but laughter, humour and mockery are our only weapons.'

'NOT MANY DARED DO WHAT THEY DID': TRIBUTES PAID FROM FELLOW ARTISTS AND JOURNALISTS

Christophe Trivalle wrote: 'This day will be as memorable in France as 11th September in the US.'

User ArtByFab, meanwhile, said that the cartoonists 'made me love and want to draw since I was a child'.

Another, Eleadorable, had a message for the killers: 'You wanted to kill Charlie Hebdo, you just made it immortal.'

As well as the AK47 assault rifles, there were also reports of a rocket-propelled grenade being used in the attack, which took place during the publication's weekly editorial meeting, meaning all the journalists would have been present.

When shots rang out at the office - located near Paris' Bastille monument - it is thought that three policemen on bicycles were the first to respond.

'There was a loud gunfire and at least one explosion,' said an eye witness. 'When police arrived there was a mass shoot-out. The men got away by car, stealing a car.'

A police official, Luc Poignant,told BFM TV: 'It's carnage.'

Survivor and Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Corinne 'Coco' Rey was quoted by French newspaper L'Humanite as saying: 'I had gone to collect my daughter from day care and as I arrived in front of the door of the paper's building two hooded and armed men threatened us. They wanted to go inside, to go upstairs. I entered the code.

'They fired on Wolinski, Cabu... it lasted five minutes... I sheltered under a desk... They spoke perfect French... claimed to be from al Qaeda.'

Florence Pouvil, a salesperson at Lunas France on Rue Nicolas Appert, opposite Charlie Hebdo offices, told MailOnline: 'I saw two people with big guns, like Kalashnekovs outside our office and then we heard firing. We were very confused.'

'There were two guys who came out of the building and shot everywhere. We hid on the floor, we were terrified.

'They came from the building opposite with big guns. It has a bunch of different companies inside. Some of our co-workers work there so we were frightened for them.

'They weren't just firing inside the Charlie Hebdo offices. They were firing in the street too.

'We feared for our lives so we hid under our desks so they wouldn't see us. Both men were dressed in black from head to toe and their faces were covered so I didn't see them.

'They were wearing military clothes, it wasn't common clothing, like they were soldiers.'

Once inside the gunmen sought out Charbonnier, shouting 'where is Charb? where is Charb? They killed him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman. They then sprayed the rest of the room with bullets.

Minutes later, two men strolled out to a black car waiting below, calmly firing on a police officer, with one gunman shooting him in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.

The witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety, said the attackers were so methodical he first mistook them for France's elite anti-terrorism forces. Then they fired on the officer.

'They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace,' he said. 'They ran back to the car. The moment they got in, the car drove off almost casually.'

The witness added: 'I think they were extremely well-trained, and they knew exactly down to the centimeter and even to the second what they had to do.

A visibly shocked French President François Hollande, speaking live near the scene of the shooting, said: 'France is today in shock, in front of a terrorist attack.

'This newspaper was threatened several rimes in the past and we need to show we are a united country.

'We have to be firm, and we have to be stand strong with the international community in the coming days and weeks.

'We are at a very difficult moment following several terrorist attacks. We are threated because we are a country of freedom

'We will punish the attackers. We will look for the people responsible.'

Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief Gerard Biard, who was in London at the time of the attack, spoke of his shock.

He told France Inter: 'I don't understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war.'

He said the magazine, started in 1960 by Georges Bernier and François Cavanna, had not received threats of violence: 'Not to my knowledge, and I don't think anyone had received them as individuals, because they would have talked about it. There was no particular tension at the moment.'

The deaths of the cartoonists will shock France as their work, though sometimes controversial, was extremely popular.

Marie Pommery, a French chef currently living in London, told MailOnline: 'This is the worst attack on press freedom. A whole generation of French people grew up with Cabu and Wolinski's cartoons. It's shocking news.'

Prime Minister David Cameron joined the condemnation of the attack, saying: 'The murders in Paris are sickening.

'We stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.'

The British Foreign Office immediately updated is advice for travellers heading to Pairs, warning: 'There is a high threat from terrorism.'

It added: 'If you're in Paris or the Ile de France area take extra care and follow advice of French authorities.'

Luce Lapin and Laurent Leger, who have both worked at Charlie Hebdo, were using Twitter hours before the attack.

The most recent tweet posted by Lapin praised cartoonist Cabu. It read: 'Cabu, a great man! And honest, he doesn't eat foie gras.'

While Leger's made a political point about taxes. It said: 'Macron [French ministry of economy] wants more billionaires in France, the same that use tricks for not paying ISF [solidarity tax on wealth].'

The latest tweet published by the magazine's official Twitter account featured a cartoon of Abu Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State.

This week's Charlie Hebdo also featured the author Houellebecq, whose new novel imagines Muslims taking over the French government in 2022.

Inside, there was an editorial, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and more cartoons - one showing the Prophet with a clown's red nose.

Depiction of the Prophet is strictly prohibited in Islam, but the magazine denied it was trying to be provocative.

Professor Anthony Glees, Director for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, said: 'The awful carnage in Paris shows, yet again, not just how dangerous Islamists are but how important it is to have strong, intelligence-led security activity to counter it.

'The French have signally failed to keep their country safe.

'We don't know (yet) if this morning's piece of butchery was the outcome of its latest tweeted cartoon of Dr Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the IS leader, another shot following the firebombing of the magazine in 2011 - following a tasteless cartoon the magazine published - or simply yet another Islamist attack on France and the French people.

'But the 'Charlie Hebdo' magazine was an obvious target and however vulgar its journalism may be, in attacking it, these Islamists didn't just attack 'Charlie Hebdo', or France and the French but everyone who believes in western democracy and the freedom of the press to publish, within the law, whatever they think is fit to print.

'It will raise profound questions about the ability of the French state, and the French president, to deliver security and protect core western liberties.

'To think that two policemen could protect the magazine was totally idiotic. No less terrible was the fact that although the attack was self-evidently carefully prepared, French intelligence failed to detect it.'

One of Charb's final cartoons appeared to foretell the tragic events that unfolded at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

It was a picture of a jihadist with a speech bubble carrying the words 'still no attacks in France, we have until the end of Jan to present wishes'.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi strongly condemned the terrorist attack.

HOW CHARLIE HEBDO HAS BECOME BYWORD FOR ANTI-ISLAMIC SENTIMENT

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Cartoonists who mocked Islam were killed in Charlie Hebdo massacre

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Gunmen storm office in Paris with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades Attackers were reportedly heard shouting: 'the Prophet has been avenged' 'Stalked office asking people's names before killing editor and cartoonist' Cartoonists Charbonnier, Wolinski, 'Tignous' and Cabut among those killed Reports Michel Renaud, Philippe Honore and Mustapha Ourad also dead Two

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AllSides will be able to filter the news by region, such as nation, state or local area. Help the AllSides Community by letting us know which regions matter the most to you, and we will work hard to implement those first.

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It's no secret that America's star is fading on the world stage these days, under a president whose authoritarian tactics have outraged allies and enemies alike. But a recent audit by an international human-rights monitor reveals that, even before Trump's buffoonery took over the White House, Washington was failing dramatically to live up to its reputation as a beacon of democracy. UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly Maina Kiai's dissection of the nation's systematic betrayal of basic human rights centers on America's shrinking public square.

Based on a year-long observation of the country's governance and civic life that stretches from mid-2016 through the start of the Trump administration, Kiai, whose post recently ended with the publication of the report, sees a massive erosion of the right to freedom of assembly. The concept encompasses the right to organize and protest and other essential forms of civic and public activism. Though it is formally inscribed in the Bill of Rights, the precept has come under assault under the Trump administration, Kiai says, stoked by the president's "hateful and xenophobic rhetoric during the presidential campaign" and blatant flouting of civil liberties in his policies and governing style.

"The environment for workers is extremely hostile in the US, and frankly it shocked me."

Kiai concludes that over the past year a growing swath of communities of color, workers and immigrants, and other marginalized groups have felt deterred from engaging in social movements, staging protests and other forms of citizen action, or campaigning to defend community and workplace rights.

One overarching obstacle is the ingrained culture of racism, which has persisted since slavery through Jim Crow and the ongoing struggles with institutionalized discrimination. Citing police-community conflict as a primary illustration of structural oppression, Kiai argues, "Racism and the exclusion, persecution and marginalization that come with it affect the environment for exercising association and assembly rights." His report directly denounces government agencies' " hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement," contending that "The government has an obligation under international law to protect and promote" the group's peaceful exercise of the right of free assembly. Similarly, the report describes structural corruption driving the use of perverse incentives in the policing of black communities, with "police departments raising revenue through fines and rewarding or sanctioning police officers based on the number of arrests." These patterns of aggressive policing, Kiai says, disempower neighborhoods by deterring dissent.

The evaluation, focused on field research conducted in 2016 and analyzing issues that have intensified under Trump, documents increasingly anti-democratic enforcement tactics against immigrant communities at risk of civil-rights abuses. Kiai cites reports of immigration agents "conducting surveillance at assemblies focused on migrant issues," which he argues "chills the exercise of assembly rights." As noncitizens who cannot vote and lack other legal rights, he adds, protesting is "one of the only tools they have to voice their concerns. The government should encourage the exercise of this right by everyone, especially marginalized groups."

Kiai tackles direct restrictions on the right to protest as well, noting an "increasingly hostile legal environment for peaceful protesters in some states," particularly trumped-up penalties against spontaneous or "unpermitted" peaceful public demonstrations. South Dakota and Tennessee recently passed laws against blocking streets during protests. Nationwide, about 29 such anti-protest bills have been proposed or passed since November, coinciding with an unprecedented wave of street demonstrations against Trump.

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Some jurisdictions deter activists by charging organizations hefty fees simply for the right to stage a public demonstration. Burdening the citizenry with onerous fees and red tape, Kiai says, clashes with international guidelines against requiring pre-approval of planned protests. The report recommends instead allowing groups to simply notify officials of, rather than seek prior approval for, planned protests, arguing that giving government extensive control over dissent "risks turning the right into a privilege."

Deterioration of free-assembly rights is glaringly apparent in the workplace. Despite the United States' historical role as an architect of the International Labour Organization standards on workers' rights, the report argues that its foundational labor law, the National Labor Rights Act, "legalises practices that severely infringe workers' rights to associate" and "provides few incentives for employers to respect workers' rights."

Labor regulation is eviscerated by weak enforcement and underfunding, particularly "compared to the massive resources dedicated to other law enforcement functions in the United States." Given the prevalence of endemic violations like wage theft in low-wage industries, Kiai observes an imbalance in government priorities: protecting corporations' profits while unraveling basic regulatory protections for workers as well as their right to organize, at a time when traditional unions are shrinking as a political force.

The environment for workers is extremely hostile in the US, and frankly it shocked me.... Where's the outrage? The US had the War on Drugs, so why not a War on Abusive Employers? It's clearly an epidemic that has the potential to deeply damage the economic and social fabric of the country.

Kiai's analysis also extends beyond issues surrounding the right to protest and warns of the corrosive impacts of capitalism on democracy. Citing the mass protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline as an illustration of the corporate assault on grassroots activists, he argues that Trump's crackdown on protesters reflects an agenda of "market fundamentalism," exploiting natural resources for short-term profits while neglecting the human rights of impacted communities, which "undermines indigenous people's land, territorial and resource rights."

Kiai stresses the irony of America failing to "walk the talk" as a liberal democratic superpower. The United States has repeatedly supported, and often helped develop, international standards on, for example, the right to free speech under the United Nations framework, yet systematically fails to institute the same principles in domestic law. Nonetheless, he concludes that despite what appears to be a regression in free assembly rights under the new president, civil society remains a vibrant, if embattled, force of resistance:

Trump's rhetoric is often violent and divisive, with a heavy authoritarian streak. He doesn't even pay lip service to fundamental rights.... It's not an easy environment in which to exercise your expressive rights, and that environment seems to have become markedly worse since my visit. Yet despite this, we've seen the emergence of a massive and sustained protest movement-that's something that is truly encouraging and moving.

Despite, or because of Trump's authoritarianism, a counter-populist movement is building, renewing the meaning of free assembly as a coming together of the dispossessed.

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America's Freedom to Protest Is Under Attack

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It's no secret that America's star is fading on the world stage these days, under a president whose authoritarian tactics have outraged allies and enemies alike. But a recent audit by an international human-rights monitor reveals that, even before Trump's buffoonery took over the White House, Washington was failing dramatically to live up to its reputation as a beacon of democracy.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cities across the United States are seeking ways to head off the kind of violence seen in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend when white nationalists and neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters over the planned removal of a Civil War-era statue.

As they step up efforts to pull such monuments from public spaces and brace for a right-wing backlash, municipalities are re-evaluating their approaches to crowd control, permits, weapon regulation and intelligence gathering.

White supremacists have been emboldened by statements from President Donald Trump. A potentially volatile demonstration with mostly right-wing speakers is set for Saturday in Boston, with other events coming in days ahead.

"When you have an environment of anger and people carrying weapons, and a president that is tossing gasoline on that, I think that America should be deeply concerned," said Corey Saylor, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which tracks Muslim hate groups.

Mayors face a tug-of-war between ensuring public safety and respecting Americans' cherished constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly, said experts and local leaders. The balancing act is further complicated by the right to carry guns, and even concealed weapons, in many states and cities.

"Certainly we recognize everyone's First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but we're also dedicated to freedom from fear," said Allison Silberberg, mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, a city near Washington, D.C., that has long struggled with what to do about a Confederate statue in the middle of a major road.

Silberberg said she is looking forward to the result of a review of how Virginia cities handle permits for demonstrations that was ordered by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe after Charlottesville, where right-wing marchers had a permit.

Many expect McAuliffe's review will lead to stricter limits on who can march and where. The mayor of Charlottesville, where a young woman was killed by a man who crashed his car into a crowd, has called for legislation to let local governments ban openly carrying guns at public events.

In Boston, authorities have granted a permit for a "Free Speech" rally on Boston Common and a counter-rally expected to draw a larger crowd. Police there have barred demonstrators from bringing sticks, bats or backpacks, as they did in Charlottesville.

More than half of U.S. states allow people to attend rallies with firearms, and some allow keeping those guns concealed, said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of police department heads.

Such policies put police in the position of keeping track of demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, while also "waiting for that first shot to go off," he said, a nearly impossible job.

Some cities, but not all, prohibit the other types of weapons used last weekend, such as the long sticks disguised as sign holders that turned into batons, he said.

Police departments' main tool for preventing clashes is the process for evaluating whether to grant a demonstration permit. It gives cities some ability to discern possibly violent intentions, plot march routes to steer adversaries away from each other and restrict weapons, Stephens said.

The Lexington, Kentucky police department is "doing a lot of intelligence sharing" with federal and state law enforcement, said spokeswoman Brenna Angel.

That resulted from a report that a right-wing group planned a rally in Lexington over the possible relocation of two Confederate monuments. Such memorials to those who fought for the Confederacy and the preservation of slavery in the U.S. Civil war are seen by some Americans as offensive and by others as symbols of Southern heritage.

Anger on both sides over Confederate symbols is only the latest symptom of rising U.S. political polarization that sometimes escalates from peaceful protest to public violence.

As recently as the 1990s, white nationalist groups held demonstrations in small towns that were spectacles but usually peaceful, said Will Potter, a University of Michigan fellow and journalist who tracks domestic terrorist groups and civil rights.

More recently, he said, right-wing groups have taken to carrying guns and marching in bigger cities.

"It's just escalated in the last few months: the rhetoric of these groups, their affiliations with the White House... and the shows of force on the streets," he said.

Michael German, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who is now a fellow at the New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, said he first saw a shift in 2016, when violence broke out in Sacramento at a neo-Nazi rally.

Earlier this year, he noted, there was fighting at a handful of pro-Trump rallies between alt-right extremists and anti-fascist, or "antifa," counterprotesters.

In many cases, German said, local police did not do enough to intervene. The current atmosphere is bringing together the ideological and violent wings of white supremacism "in a dangerous way," he said.

Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Lisa Lambert; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Kieran Murray and Lisa Shumaker

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advocacy groups / pressure groups / lobbies

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Far-right protests leave U.S. cities scrambling to balance safety, free speech

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cities across the United States are seeking ways to head off the kind of violence seen in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend when white nationalists and neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters over the planned removal of a Civil War-era statue.

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The right to protest is fundamental to American democracy. The country was born, after all, out of decades of civil disobedience by people angry about taxation without representation. (In Washington, FWIW, we are still angry.)

But according to United Nations human rights investigators, this very basic principle is under attack. Over the past few months, on the heels of a fresh wave of organizing by liberals, at least 19 states have introduced measures that would criminalize peaceful protest. In places such as Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa, Republican lawmakers have proposed laws that would stiffen penalties for demonstrators who block traffic. In North Dakota, GOP leaders are pushing a bill that would allow motorists to run over and kill agitators, as long as the crash was accidental. In Indiana, conservatives want to instruct police to use "any means necessary" to remove activists from a roadway. Opponents worry this could lead to more brutal police response.

Colorado lawmakers are considering a big increase in penalties for environmental protesters. Activists who tamper with oil or gas equipment could be, under the measure, face felony charges and be punished with up to 18 months behind bars and a fine of up to $100,000. A bill pending in the Virginia state legislature would dramatically increase punishment for people who "unlawfully" assemble after "having been lawfully warned to disperse." Those who do so could face a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

In Missouri, some lawmakers want to make it illegal to wear a robe, mask or disguise (remarkably, a hoodie would count) to a protest. Lawmakers in North Carolina want to make it a crime to heckle lawmakers.

Taken together, the United Nations warns, these bills represent an "alarming and undemocratic" trend that could have a chilling effect on activism.

"From the Black Lives Matter movement, to the environmental and Native American movements in opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and the Women's Marches, individuals and organizations across (American) society have mobilized in peaceful protests," Maina Kiai and David Kaye, independent U.N. experts on freedom of peaceful assembly, said in a statement. These bills would make that harder.

"The trend also threatens to jeopardize one of the United States' constitutional pillars: free speech," the pair wrote. And the bills violate international human rights law, they said.

Supporters of the measures argue that the laws are needed to maintain public safety. The experts, though, disagreed. "One person's decision to resort to violence does not strip other protesters of their right to freedom of peaceful assembly," Kaye and Kiai said.

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Americans' right to protest is in grave danger under Trump, United Nations warns

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The right to protest is fundamental to American democracy. The country was born, after all, out of decades of civil disobedience by people angry about taxation without representation. (In Washington, FWIW, we are still angry.) But according to United Nations human rights investigators, this very basic principle is under attack.

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ, arrived in downtown Charlottesville on Saturday morning expecting that there might be violence. She did not expect things to get out of hand so quickly.

But what began as a rally of white nationalists in a city park soon spun out of control, resulting in melees in the streets and the death of a 32-year-old woman after a car rammed a group of counterprotesters. The police have charged a 20-year-old Ohio man described as a Nazi sympathizer, accusing him of intentionally driving his car into the crowd.

On Sunday, Charlottesville tried to recover - as the police, in particular, came in for criticism.

At church services, pastors urged their congregations to fill their lives with love, not hate - a message echoed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe. The downtown mall, a pretty pedestrian plaza, was unusually quiet. People looked grief-stricken, as State Police officers in riot gear sat on a brick wall, taking a break in the midday sun.

At Emancipation Park, where the so-called Unite the Right rally had been planned for Saturday around a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, city workers picked up trash. On Water Street, where the authorities say the man from Ohio, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, took the life of Heather D. Heyer, 32, an impromptu memorial of flowers lay in the middle of the road.

And at City Hall, a planned news conference by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized Saturday's rally, came to an abrupt end when a man wearing a plaid shirt punched him.

"Jason Kessler has been bringing hate to our town for months and has been endangering the lives of people of color and endangering other lives in my community," the man, Jeff Winder, said in an interview later. "Free speech does not protect hate speech."

But if Charlottesville was grieving on Sunday, it was also questioning. Governor McAuliffe fiercely defended the police in an impromptu sidewalk interview, noting that many of the demonstrators were armed, and saying the officers had done "great work" in a "very delicate situation." And he said Ms. Heyer's death, which he called "car terrorism," could not have been prevented.

"You can't stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon," Governor McAuliffe said. "He is a terrorist."

But others, including Mr. Kessler and Ms. Caine-Conley, openly wondered if the violence could have been prevented.

"There was no police presence," Ms. Caine-Conley said. "We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other."

Many cities, among them St. Louis and New Orleans, have wrestled with what to do about Confederate monuments. Like them, Charlottesville - the home of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 - has been navigating tricky terrain. As Mayor Mike Signer asked in an interview Sunday, "How do you reconcile public safety and the First Amendment?"

Saturday was not the first time that white nationalists and white supremacists had rallied in Charlottesville. In May, Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist and a graduate of the University of Virginia, led a torch-lit rally here, and last month, the Ku Klux Klan came from North Carolina.

Sensing there might be trouble, the city tried to deny Mr. Kessler's group a permit for Emancipation Park; officials wanted the gathering in a larger park, where they felt they could better control the crowd. But on Friday evening, a judge sided with Mr. Kessler. Mayor Signer would later lament on Twitter that it was a fateful turn of events.

"This is EXACTLY why City tried to change venue to McIntire," he wrote.

On Saturday morning at sunrise, faith leaders and scores of counterprotesters - some from the Black Lives Matter movement, others from groups like Showing Up for Racial Justice - gathered at First Baptist Church, a historically African-American church here. Around 8 a.m., they started massing for a march downtown, toward Emancipation Park.

Across town, the white nationalists were gathering for their own trek to Emancipation Park, for a rally that was not supposed to begin until noon. "I'm tired of seeing white people pushed around," said one man, Ted, who refused to give his last name.

By the time both groups converged on the park, a line of camouflage-clad militia members toting assault rifles were standing outside the park, looking very much like an invading army. "They had better equipment than our State Police had," Mr. McAuliffe said.

As the white nationalists massed in the park, Ms. Caine-Conley and other members of the clergy locked arms in the street. Behind them were hundreds of protesters, including black-clad, helmet-wearing members of the far left known as antifa.

Brian Moran, Virginia's secretary of public safety and homeland security, was watching the events from a command post on the sixth floor of a Wells Fargo bank on the downtown mall. There were sporadic fights. "I compare it to hockey," he said. "Often in hockey there are sporadic fights, and then they separate."

Suddenly, people were throwing water bottles, some filled with urine. Some used pepper spray; from his perch on the sixth floor, Mr. Moran saw smoke bombs being thrown. People started clubbing one another. The clergy retreated to a "safe house" - a restaurant nearby.

But according to many witnesses, the police waited to intervene. Ms. Caine-Conley called it "fascinating and appalling."

Mr. Kessler, too, complained.

In a statement, he said the authorities had "exacerbated the violence" by failing to separate his followers from counterprotesters. He said his group had "networked with law enforcement officials" months ago on a plan for maintaining safety, which he said was not followed, and he called the police "underequipped for the situation."

At 11:22 a.m. Mr. Moran called the governor and asked him to declare a state of emergency. Mr. McAuliffe did so. Asked why the police did not do more to control the brawling, Mr. Moran said, "It was a volatile situation and it's unfortunate people resorted to violence."

"But," he said, "from our plan, to ensure the safety of our citizens and property, it went extremely well."

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the State Police, said, "It may have looked like a lot of our folks were standing around," because of the sheer number of officers on the scene, but "there were other troopers and law enforcement officers who were responding to incidents as they arose."

The moment the emergency was declared, police officers started announcing on loudspeakers that the gathering was an unlawful assembly, and called for the crowd to disperse, cutting off the rally before it officially began. Both Mr. Moran and Mr. McAuliffe said the police needed time to get the demonstrators out of the park, and off the streets, before riot police officers could move in.

As the riot police pushed protesters back, Ms. Caine-Conley and her fellow clergy members were regrouping inside the restaurant. Suddenly, a woman rushed in, screaming that there had been a terrible car crash on Water Street nearby.

"There were bodies everywhere," said the Rev. Seth Wispelwey of Sojourners United Church of Christ, who rushed to the scene. "There was blood and glass all over the street."

Mr. Fields, who the authorities say was driving the car, has been charged with second-degree murder. He served briefly in the Army, military records show; a former high school teacher of his in Kentucky said that when Mr. Fields was a freshman, he wrote a report for a class "very much along the party lines of the neo-Nazi movement."

The woman who was killed, Ms. Heyer, worked as a paralegal and was known as a strong, sensitive woman who stood up against "any type of discrimination," her supervisor said.

The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation. Marches in support of the counterprotesters were held across the country on Sunday; in some cities, conservative groups also gathered.

Here in Charlottesville, as people tried to make sense of it all, a vigil for Ms. Heyer was canceled, its organizers said, because of the threat or rumor of more white nationalist activity. Still, people here wanted the nation to know that this was not the Charlottesville they knew and loved. Heather Hutton's blue eyes filled with tears as she walked away from the memorial to Ms. Heyer.

"It just hurts," Ms. Hutton, 52, said, wiping the tears away. "It hurts us all as a town."

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charlottesville  va  violence (august  2017)

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murders  attempted murders and homicides

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Hurt and Angry, Charlottesville Tries to Regroup From Violence

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ, arrived in downtown Charlottesville on Saturday morning expecting that there might be violence. She did not expect things to get out of hand so quickly.

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Protest at National Political Conventions

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Protest at National Political Conventions

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Political conventions, like many large scale national or international summits of high profile decision makers, attract thousands of protesters from nearly every conceivable cause. In theory, this should not be a problem, as after all, conventions are supposed to be touchstone moments in American democracy and what can be more democratic than people marching, organizing, and rallying to espouse their political views?

Apparently, however, not everyone shares that opinion. Political parties don't like displays of dissent, because they want their conventions to be shows of unity that essentially serve as a political infomercial. Local and federal law enforcement view conventions as security events and those who protest as potential threats. While the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago has come to symbolize police repression of protests, protesters at nearly every national convention since have been met with some degree of police repression.

This year's conventions posed particularly unique questions. The Cleveland Police Department is currently party to a consent decree with the Department of Justice due to their excessive use of force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Philadelphia hosted the 2000 Republican National Conventions and the police engaged in a number of outrageous violations of protesters' civil liberties, so many that longtime BORDC/DDF ally Kris Hermes wrote a book on the topic, Crashing the Party .

So just how did the police handle protesters at the convention?

Republican National Convention-Cleveland, Ohio

Police with tear gas canisters have circled parts of public square. #RNCinCLE @Gothamist pic.twitter.com/U4NUXCXEjW

- Max RN (@MaxRivlinNadler) July 19, 2016

The Cleveland Convention was preceded by a number of doomsday predictions and fear mongering by the media, first with dire hypotheticals about violence by Trump supporters if he didn't get the nomination, followed by hyped up fears about potential clashes between Trump supporters and Trump opponents.

This climate of fear was made worse by state intimidation. FBI, Secret Service, and local police visited activists across the country , especially Black Lives Matter activists , and people involved in Occupy Cleveland to question them about their plans for the convention, and in some cases, to tell them to stay away. Jocelyn Rosnick, who coordinated the Legal Observer presence at the RNC told Dissent NewsWire that law enforcement visited people's homes, places of employment, neighbors and family members, and it wasn't just activists who got visited, but even people who "hung out at the wrong bookstore" were targeted by the widespread intelligence gathering. to journalist Arun Gupta (full disclosure Arun Gupta is also a BORDC/DDF board member), "The intimidation worked. Activists say many protesters were so frightened they left town or are avoiding the military-occupied downtown." As a result, Gupta described most protests having fewer than 50 participants and not one with more than 500 participants.

Cleveland made clear they expected trouble, announcing that they had had made room in the jails for hundreds of protesters, and cleared court dockets to process arrestees. The city imported 2,500 police officers from across the country, including mounted units from Texas and Georgia. The city bought " 2,000 sets of riot gear, 2,000 steel batons, 24 sets of bulletproof vests and helmets and 10,000 sets of plastic handcuffs," and a $50 million protest insurance policy costing $9.5 million, to indemnify itself in the case of lawsuits for wrongful arrest which have cost other cities dearly. It would have been less expensive to train police not to make wrongful arrests in the first place.

And, in an innovative twist appropriate for snowy Cleveland, the city deployed snow plows to help keep the peace. The local Fox news affiliate " We've learned ODOT had 15 plows out on local highways last week in mid-July, and those plows had cameras feeding back LIVE video that was recorded as well." Not only did the video feeds help monitor traffic, but "the plows with cameras also served as extra eyes for police in case protesters tried to block a highway." And, the plows could help clear the streets of debris or disabled cars (whether left by protesters or others).

The city also created a bizarre list of items that protesters could not bring with them to the 3.3 square mile area "event zone" created by the Secret Service, which included tennis balls, canned goods, long pieces of string and sleeping bags. Ohio, however, is an open carry state and thus guns could not be prohibited. Activists and the media alike had a field day mocking the "no tennis balls, assault weapons ok" security precautions. Code Pink staged a protest in favor of gun control, entering the event zone carrying the prohibited tennis balls. They were quickly by police who seized the contraband.

Despite low numbers of protesters, police, often in riot gear , were out in full force.

Bike cops in body armor. No PD identification. @Gothamist pic.twitter.com/SdSFWIGmE7

- Max RN (@MaxRivlinNadler) July 17, 2016

The specter of mass arrests never materialized, not only because there were no masses to arrest, but because advocates worked with the city for months ahead of time in an effort to insure protesters rights would be respected, and over 100 Legal Observers were deployed by the National Lawyers Guild.

In the end, there were only 23 arrests, but many of those were questionable. On Wednesday, July 20, Gregory Lee "Joey" Johnson lit a flag on fire. Police arrested him and 17 others who were present, including a photojournalist, for failing to disperse. But Ohio ACLU's Christine Link the Nation, "We've looked at half a dozen tapes from different vantages and we can't hear or see any dispersal order, and the reporters and [National] Lawyer's Guild observers did not see or hear a dispersal either." Nonetheless, the protesters were held in jail overnight and not arraigned until late the next afternoon, and only then because lawyers protested at the delay (with media present).

Democratic National Convention-Philadelphia

The protests in Philadelphia were much larger, and the police presence much lighter than in Cleveland. That is in large part thanks to lessons Philadelphia learned after the disastrous Republican National Convention in 2000 , when over 400 people were arrested, many held in jail for 2 weeks, with court cases dragging on for years. In the end, only about 20 people were convicted (or pleaded guilty) because protesters fought the unjust charges against them. It was largely that fight back and the bad publicity that forced the city to reassess their methods of policing protest.

But there still were some problems. While smiling bike police in polo shirts rode alongside protesters during a Monday afternoon protest, a police copter circled above. While police opened fire hydrants with sprinkler caps to cool protesters, undercover police infiltrated the ranks (attracting the notice of the U.N. Special Rapporteur ).

Philadelphia police may not have gone knocking on doors of activists, but they did have them under watch. Before the protests began, a police spokesperson told The Atlantic that police were "already monitoring some of the groups who have received demonstration permits."

And, while the city said it did not make any arrests, they did issue citations to protesters engaged in civil disobedience.

We had zero arrests. I can't state that enough, 100 people this week who would have had criminal record who do not. pic.twitter.com/LocuLZ6kcF

- Jim Kenney (@PhillyMayor) July 29, 2016

Philadelphia civil rights attorney Paul Hetznecker challenges the mayor's characterization of events. "They were arrested," he told me. They were taken away in handcuffs, detained by police, photographed and fined. And don't tell journalist Abby Martin that she wasn't arrested, when police violently took her into custody and carted her away.

BREAKING: Journalist @AbbyMartin just arrested & abused while following the exact orders of police at #DNCinPHL pic.twitter.com/F3E5mP95Et

- Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner) July 25, 2016

It's true that no jail time was served by those issued citations, but the goal of the process was to remove people from the protest, so they could not protest.

"Certainly, it's good to see that we don't have idealistic young people all being warehoused and framed, like happened at the RNC," Attorney Larry Krasner told the local news. "But what we are seeing a different method, to get at the same thing - that's suppressing their method, by pulling them from where they are, to make sure that they can't be seen."

And, while there were no 'free speech zones' restricting activists to a penned in area, police restrict protesters from certain areas. Perhaps most dangerously, protesters, and even residents, were not allowed to use the subway station near the convention center. The subway stop was the end of the line, and everyone without convention credentials were made to get off the train at a stop a mile away. That was not only an affront to the First Amendment, but to health and safety in the excessive heat.

There was also a pop-up restricted area. Hetznecker represents one of the 11 people who were arrested by the Secret Service for climbing over a fence outside the convention center on Tuesday and Wednesday. They are being charged with a federal crime for entering a restricted area under the control of the Secret Service. But on Monday, protesters who climbed the same fence and entered the same area were given only a citation. This is a problem Hetznecker told me. There was no way for protesters or anyone else to know where the area under control of the Secret Service began, or when it began to be restricted. He called it a "roving geographical area" that could be wherever the Secret Service decides they want it to be, and can come into being at any time.

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So, How'd That "Freedom of Assembly" Go at the National Political Conventions? - Defending Rights & Dissent

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Political conventions, like many large scale national or international summits of high profile decision makers, attract thousands of protesters from nearly every conceivable cause. In theory, this should not be a problem, as after all, conventions are supposed to be touchstone moments in American democracy and what can be more democratic than people marching, organizing, and rallying to espouse their political views?

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Movements have "disruptive" power when they make it more costly for people to support the status quo. Students in the civil rights movement used sit-ins to increase the everyday costs of doing business until business owners capitulated to their demands. In a 2015 study, the sociologist Michael Biggs and I found that sit-ins could prompt business owners even in neighboring cities to desegregate, because they feared the costs of facing future protesters. Disruption can also signal the depth of participants' commitment to a cause and the movement's capacity to withstand repression.

The drawback of disruptive power is that it often inspires counterattacks. The first order of business for elites and authorities facing disruptive protest is to bring it to an end. Some may meet protesters' demands; some will crack down on protest. Others do both. One week Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, was kneeling in apparent solidarity with players seeking to bring attention to racial injustice; the next week he threatened to bench any player who knelt.

Finally, movements build power through organizing. Strong organizations make possible the sort of sustained participation that supports a protest's agenda for the long haul. In recent years, the Tea Party has provided an example of how movements can use organizational power to help bring about social and political change. The political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson have analyzed how Tea Party activists, building on the disruptive power of the movement's initial protests in 2009, established local organizations, supported candidates who shared the movement's ideals and helped transform the Republican Party.

Organizational power faces its own challenges, though, including the difficulty of sustaining meaningful participation. Staging the occasional protest and raising money are one thing; developing leaders and building constituencies are another. Despite substantial resources and hundreds of organizations, the environmental movement, for example, has not generated the sort of participation sufficient to meet the environmental challenges we face. This failure reflects a larger trend of professional advocacy groups that connect to their supporters primarily through fund-raising appeals.

How does a movement manage to combine cultural, disruptive and organizational power? In some cases, this is accomplished through a division of labor. For example, in the civil rights movement, prominent leaders linked the language of rights, the symbols and rituals of the black church, and the Gandhian approach to civil disobedience; student activists fueled disruption through direct-action protests; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, with hundreds of local organizations and leaders across the country, challenged the powers supporting the status quo in their communities and through the courts.

Over the past year, people have taken to the streets and sought to establish or revitalize organizations to resist the Trump presidency and advance broader social change. To capitalize on the energy and urgency of the moment, leaders and activists should look to build a movement that generates new sources of cultural, disruptive and organizational power.

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Movements have "disruptive" power when they make it more costly for people to support the status quo. Students in the civil rights movement used sit-ins to increase the everyday costs of doing business until business owners capitulated to their demands.

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If there's one thing Colin Kaepernick has shown us this week, it's that when a black athlete steps out of line in the eyes of white America, it is clear who is going to overreact, and who's going to understand.

To those outside the black community, people who are largely unaware of the nuances of black life in America, professional athletes speaking out on social issues appears to be breaking news. To black people, however, they have seen this hustle. They know it when they see it. They have seen the likes of Jack Johnson (beats white men in the ring, dates white women), Muhammad Ali (his Muslim faith), Allen Iverson (tattoos and cornrows), Cam Newton (touchdown celebrations, being black in a space usually reserved for white men), Serena Williams ( her body and hair) and now San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick all written and talked about by white sportswriters who take a paternal tone and an air of understanding what goes on in their lives and communities. Yet those who pride themselves on scooping their colleagues on the next big story or writing the hottest of takes can't figure out what ails many of the people they cover.

This is a tale of two views, and it is black and white.

Many of those views assume that Kaepernick, who decided not the stand for the national anthem before a game last week, can't be oppressed because he's rich and that he was adopted by white parents, and wonder why he hasn't focused on "black-on-black" violence and issues. Curt Schilling, the Alt-Right's next great white hope after Donald Trump, chimed in with his thoughts, Trump himself said the quarterback should consider looking for another country " that works better for him." Telling black people and other minorities to go to find another country to live in is one of the oldest racist tropes out there, but this is Trump we're talking about, of course. Yet it goes beyond politicians. Hub Arkush, executive editor of Pro Football Weekly, tweeted that Kaepernick should be grateful for making the money his does. A big change from last season, Arkush thought that the Chicago Bears should trade for the quarterback. Clay Travis of Fox Sports called Kaepernick "a fucking idiot" and wondered "what does the United States do to oppress black people?" and peppered it all with a handful of backhanded compliments.

No one is calling the writers racist. However, the tone that some sportswriters use in these instances is racially insensitive at best, and it's something black people are all too familiar with. We openly talk about these topics in church, at the barbershop and in Facebook groups. We see it in the critiques of President Obama, with All/Police/Blue Lives Matter, and in every comment section of an article on Chicago's heartbreaking violence. We often take on that weight. It is an added layer to what goes with black life in America.

The idea that racism doesn't affect athletes is a myth, an urban legend propped up by the system that perpetuates many of the problems black people in America face to this day. It's the people that don't face these problems that don't understand that. Just earlier this year, Seattle Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor was looking to buy a gym and the employees called the police on him. This happened after he signed a contract extension worth $28 million last season. Before that, it was the racial slurs hurled at Richard Sherman over social media for his rant after the NFC Championship game a few years back. Remember when Atlanta Hawks guard Thabo Sefolosha got his leg broken by NYPD officers? He's a one percenter as well, but he's not immune.

"When I go home, I get pulled over just because," Tennessee Titans linebacker David Bass said about going back to his hometown of St. Louis, "and they'll say, 'We're doing random checks,' which is against the law. Or they say, there was a theft and the getaway car was like my black Durango. When they don't know who you are, all you are is black. They don't know that I graduated from college, or that I'm in the NFL. But when they find that out, they want to stop and have a conversation."

Since Kaepernick's public stance, he's turned into Public Enemy Number One, but he's also exposing this vicious cycle. His stance has made more people stand up and ask, exactly, why he's having his feet held to the fire for exercising his American right to protest and free speech. Black athletes and black sports analyst are often told to "stick to sports" when they venture out of the comfort zone of white male Americana. Bradley Zimanek, a Montgomery Advertiser columnist once suggested that ESPN football analyst Andre Ware favored Blake Sims as the Alabama quarterback over Jake Coker, who's white, because both are black.

"This is not something that I am going to run by anybody," Kaepernick told NFL Network. "I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. ... If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right."

This is what black athletes have to deal with and always have dealt with.

Since Kaepernick didn't stand for the national anthem, everyone has offered an opinion on him. John Isner, the highest-ranking American player in men's tennis, "I thought it was pathetic from him," Isner told reporters. "The cause he was going for, fine by me. He could have found some other ways to present his voice there. A lot of NBA players have done it, and good on 'em." It was one of the most willfully ignorant reactions to Kaepernick outside of Rodney Harrison who said of Kaepernick, " He's not black."

On the other side, there's NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, a legend in the realm of activist athletes and arguably the greatest football player ever. He was happy to see players like Kaepernick speak out on society's ills, saying, "And for a couple of generations it was about making money, not messing with your image. And the agents became the pivotal figure for a lot of these guys," Brown told NFL Total Access. "And the agents kept reminding them that you have to be this all-American boy to make these kind of dollars and these dollars are astronomical dollars. So the money came into the culture and created a couple of generations of individuals who did not want to speak up."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also weighed in, writing for the Washington Post: "What should horrify Americans is not Kaepernick's choice to remain seated during the national anthem, but that nearly 50 years after Ali was banned from boxing for his stance and Tommie Smith and John Carlos' raised fists caused public ostracization and numerous death threats, we still need to call attention to the same racial inequities." He went on to write: "Failure to fix this problem is what's really un-American here."

And then there's the #VeteransForKaepernick hashtag that's been trending on Twitter over the last 24 hours. Black veterans who fought for this country voicing their support for a man's right to do something they're put in harm's way to protect: speak up. The very people politicians are trying to say Kaepernick is disrespecting with his protest are the offering up some of the clearest and smartest takes on the matter. Not sportswriters or pundits. It was interesting to see that the people they were trying to prop up as "Negro Firewall," joined Kaepernick in calling them out.

Racism is much more complex than we like to imagine. It's more than a word; it's a system that is backed up money, politics and the criminal justice system. We live in a country where when media pundits called U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte, a 32-year-old man, a "kid," for lying about his brotastic experience at the Rio Olympics, but a Cleveland police officer can kill Tamir Rice for doing just that - being a kid. A country where Kaepernick is deemed as being unpatriotic, for exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech, but Dylann Roof can burn the American flag and walk into an A.M.E. church and murder people. A country where a presidential candidate whose slogan is "Make America Great Again," wants to criticize a black man who just wants justice is the epitome of not just hypocrisy, but it's also downright fucking absurd. Black lives seem to matter on game day when America needs to be entertained. The rest of the week, not so much.

Kaepernick used his platform, for all intents and purposes, to call America on its shit. There's nothing wrong with loving our country, while having an honest conversation on how we can make things better. No laws were broken and nobody was hurt. He was just exercising his right to get some peace of mind.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick says he will continue to sit during the National Anthem as protest. Watch here.

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Colin Kaepernick and What White Fans Don't Get About Black Athletes

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If there's one thing Colin Kaepernick has shown us this week, it's that when a black athlete steps out of line in the eyes of white America, it is clear who is going to overreact, and who's going to understand.

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NFL players made the wrong choice by protesting during the National Anthem on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Before this weekend, this was a non-issue for me. Frankly, Colin Kaepernick's protest really made no difference to me. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and to express that opinion, even NFL players. If he wants to sit, kneel, do whatever else he wants, I don't care. Same for any player. I am not here to dispute the merits of "Black Lives Matter" or any other political movement. I am not here to say people aren't entitled to express their opinions.

But September 11th is the wrong day to do it. Anyone who did it should be ashamed of themselves. I don't care what Kaep does on September 12th, but 9/11? Sorry, it's wrong.

Most of the league did the right thing. The Seahawks, as reported by Stephen Cohen of the Seattle Post Intelligence, decided to put aside kneeling and linked arms in a show of unity. But, we had some dissent.

We had Marcus Peters of Kansas City, who decided that 9/11 was the day to raise his fist in the symbol of "black power", as reported by CBS News.

And he wasn't the only one. Multiple players on the Miami Dolphins, including Arian Foster and Kenny Stills decided to kneel during the anthem, as seen here on FOX Sports.

Similar protests occurred by Titans' players. As a fan of the NFL, and admittedly a life-long New Yorker, I am ashamed.

Again, these players have the right to protest. They have the right to their opinion. Ironically, this great country that has this National Anthem is the place that allows these players to stage the protest of the National Anthem. These are people with a national and an international stage, and they have the right to use it.

The problem is on September 11th, the issue is bigger than individual's opinions. We all know, this was the biggest attack on American soil. This is not an issue of "Black Lives Matter". It is not an issue of how police treat the people they interact with. It has nothing to do with the racial inequities in this country.

September 11th is ONLY about horrific people flying planes into buildings and killing our citizens. Black ones, white ones, Jewish ones, Catholic ones, and everything else, it made no difference. This is the fifteenth anniversary of those people being gone. This is about the first responders that gave their lives to save others. This is about families that lost spouses, parents, cousins, and others that lost friends. THAT is what we remember on September 11th.

On a side note, the fact that Mike Tannenbaum is condoning this behavior on the Dolphins is an extra shock, as he was on staff with the Jets on September 11th, 2001 in the front office. Shame on you, Mr. T.

Those are the people that the National Anthem honors on September 11th. Protesting is a slap in the face of all of those people, and any player that did it should be ashamed. Bad choices to those involved, and an apology would be appropriate.

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NFL Players Protesting the National Anthem on 9/11 Should Be Ashamed

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NFL players made the wrong choice by protesting during the National Anthem on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Before this weekend, this was a non-issue for me. Frankly, Colin Kaepernick's protest really made no difference to me. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and to express that opinion, even NFL players.

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In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley, and in the aftermath of the faculty mob that coalesced to condemn gender studies professor Rebecca Tuvel, many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public rituals with more than a passing resemblance to witch-hunts. The second-clearest case of these dynamics that I have ever seen is currently underway at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. ( The clearest case was the protests, hunger strike, and struggle session in response to one word in a well-intentioned email from Dean Mary Spellman, at Claremont McKenna College in 2015.)

The accused witch is Heterodox Academy member Bret Weinstein, a professor of biology. On May 23, a group of Evergreen students disrupted a class he was teaching, surrounded him, cursed at him, screamed at him, called him a racist, and called for him to resign or be fired. Campus police have told Weinstein that for his own physical safety, he should stay off campus for a few days. He held his Thursday class in an off-campus park.

What did Weinstein do to cause this reaction? He violated blasphemy laws. Here's how.

For several years, Evergreen has held a "day of absence" in which students, staff, and faculty of color are invited to stay away from campus and take part in discussions about racism and other intersectional issues, organized by the school's Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, Rashida Love. But this year, the event was inverted; people of color were invited to stay on campus while all white people were asked to stay away from campus. White professors were asked to not teach their classes. White students were asked to not attend their classes.

You may or may not think this is a good idea. But do you think that all professors should simply accept it and do as Ms. Love asks? Or do you think that it should be permissible for a professor to question the policy - perhaps even object to it? Professor Weinstein objected. Here is a screenshot showing the full text of his email:

In response to this email, and to Weinstein's refusal to take part in the "day of absence/presence" (by staying away because of his race), a group of around 50 students marched to his class to disrupt it. Here is a video of the confrontation:

As with the famous videos of students confronting Nicholas Christakis at Yale, the professor tries to hold a dialogue, but students scream obscenities and slurs at him. They make it clear that they are not interested in discussion or dialogue; they accuse him of racism and demand that he apologize and resign. Later that day, the protesters occupied the library; they also found the president of the university, George Bridges, and issued demands to him, including that he fire Weinstein. The video of their confrontation with the president is hard to watch - they scream obscenities at the president of their university, and tell him to "shut the f... up".

It is important to remember that the act that triggered the Yale protests in November 2015 was also a professor questioning-in a polite and reasoned way-a diversity policy. Now is a good time to go back and read Erika Christakis's email to students at Silliman college asking whether the university's heavy-handed guidelines about Halloween costumes was really appropriate. In retrospect, we can see that while there was not a hint of racism in Erika Christakis's email, the mere act of questioning a policy constituted blasphemy and justified the students' demands for the punishment and expulsion of both Erika and her husband. Few people understood this back in 2015.

Similarly with last month's witch hunt at Duke, where Paul Griffiths, a chaired professor of theology objected to the email sent out by the chair encouraging all faculty members to participate in diversity training. He dared to say in public what many faculty know and say in private about diversity training. Once again there was no racism in his email, but the mere act of objecting to the policy was taken as evidence of racism, which must be punished. (He soon resigned, under pressure from disciplinary proceedings launched against him by the administration.)

There are several lessons that American professors can draw from these three events:

1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly.* It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.

2) Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. Your intentions don't matter (as Dean Spellman found out at CMC.) This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.

3) If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative (as the presidents at Yale and Evergreen have done, although the presidents at Middlebury and Claremont McKenna did not).

4) If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, given the new standard operating procedure (which I described in a recent Chronicle article entitled "Intimidation is the New Normal") you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and you can assume that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.

As political passions and political polarization continue to rise, Intimidation and physical violence seem to be becoming more common as a part of our political life. Off campus, such tactics are widely used by extremists on the right, as well as the left. And not just by extremists - by a new member of Congress too. I generally oppose zero-tolerance policies, but if we are to have one, it should be for violence and intimidation on campus. Many faculty and students report being afraid to speak up openly and honestly on many issues, even in seminar classes. What will presidents and administrators do about it? What will alumni and trustees do to put pressure on presidents and administrators to do something about it? When will the faculty begin to stand up en masse?

There is one hopeful sign: in the wake of the Middlebury violence we had a surge of new applicants at Heterodox Academy, raising our membership by 20 percent. More than 800 professors from across the political spectrum HAVE stood up and said that they support viewpoint diversity at universities. Together, we are developing tools that will, in the long run, change the campus climate and make more room for dissent and open discussion. (See in particular our Fearless Speech Index, our Guide to Colleges, and our Viewpoint Diversity Experience).

We think we can turn things around and end the witch-hunt mentality. Fundamentalists can't survive in an open marketplace of ideas. If you are a professor or a concerned grad student, please join us.

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Post Scripts:

*1. I am not really urging professors to keep quiet. I am trying to dramatize the growing authoritarianism of some campuses on which calm, reasoned questioning of the sort the Weinstein engaged in is now likely to be punished. I hope that professors will in fact model their behavior on Weinstein. But I would suggest that in the future they consider finding a few others who agree with them and are willing to co-sign the email. It will be harder for a university to punish or fire a group of professors than a single professor.

2. New video is emerging frequently of the events that occurred after the protesters left Weinstein's class. Here is a 7 minute clip that someone edited to show the most dramatic and angry moments of the day, many from a meeting at 4pm that day, a few hours after the initial confrontation with president Bridges, shown above. Can anyone find a video of the full session, unedited? Thanks to commenter Pjc below who found this hour-long video of the main discussion session that was held at 4pm on May 23.

3. If you want a deeper look into Weinstein's politics and character, look at this footage of him being interviewed by a local TV station. He is extremely measured, diplomatic, and elliptical in what he says, until they turn the camera off. Start watching at the 11 minute mark. At 11:20 he asks "is that thing still on?" When assured that the TV camera is off, he relaxes and speaks more openly. But someone in the small crowd watching the interview was recording everything. If you can find a hint of racism in the way Weinstein speaks when he relaxes, please let me know where it is. The man is an extremely thoughtful, principled progressive.

4. If you wonder why these witch hunts seem to happen so often at highly progressive schools, then this is a good time to read the amazing 1969 prophecy in which Judge Macklin Fleming argued that the very policies Yale Law School implemented in response to protests by black students were likely to make future black students feel more angry and marginalized. The set of policies widely implemented to increase diversity may be backfiring - raising the raw numbers of people in various categories, but doing so in ways that increase tensions and harm the very students they were trying to help.

5. For a view of events that differs from Weinstein's, see this critique by another professor at Evergreen, Peter Dorman.
Opinions expressed are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by Heterodox Academy or any of its members. We welcome your comments below. Feel free to challenge and disagree, but please try to model the sort of respectful and constructive criticism that makes viewpoint diversity most valuable. Comments that include obscenity or aggression are likely to be deleted.

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The blasphemy case against Bret Weinstein, and its four lessons for professors

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In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley, and in the aftermath of the faculty mob that coalesced to condemn gender studies professor Rebecca Tuvel, many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public r

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Republicans and Democrats have completely different priorities on tech

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For LGBT Students, History Lessons Often Leave Out A Key Chapter

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Ally - Someone who advocates for and supports members of a community other than their own, reaching across differences to achieve mutual goals.

Asexual - Having no evident sex or sex organs. In usage, may refer to a person who is not sexually active, or not sexually attracted to other people.

Anarquist - A queer anarchist. Also another name for the annual Queeruption festival. See Queeruption.

Beardache - Also called "Two-Spirit", or even one of the "third gender." In many Native American cultures some individuals are respected and looked upon as people who are both male and female, making them more complete, more balanced than those who identify as men or women. Before those from Europe came from across the waters and took over native land, these people were part of the "norm", connected with the very heartbeat of the life force we are all part of. Even today, beardaches are accepted in many American Indian societies and in other settings. See Intersex, Transgender.

Biological Sex - This can be considered our "packaging" and is determined by our chromosomes (XX for females; XY for males); our hormones (estrogen/progesterone for females, testosterone for males); and our internal and external genitalia (vulva, clitoris, vagina, etc for females; penis, testicles, etc for males). About 1.7% of the population can be defined as intersexual-born with biological aspects of both sexes to varying degrees. So, in actuality, there are more than two sexes.

Bi - Bisexual.

Biphobia - The irrational fear and intolerance of people who are bisexual.

Birth Sex - The sex an individual is assigned at birth, determined by normalized categorize of genetic and physical characteristics.

Bisexual - Also bi. A person who is attracted to two sexes or two genders, but not necessarily simultaneously or equally. This used to be defined as a person who is attracted to both genders or both sexes, but since there are not only two sexes (see intersex and transsexual) and there are not only two genders (see transgender), this definition is inaccurate.

Coming Out (of the Closet) - To be "in the closet" means to hide one's identity. Many LGBT people are "out" in some situations and "closeted" in others. To "come out" is to publicly declare one's identity, sometimes to one person in conversation, sometimes to a group or in a public setting. Coming Out is a life-long process-in each new situation a person must decide whether or not to come out. Coming out can be difficult for some because reactions vary from complete acceptance and support to disapproval, rejection and violence.

Cross-Dress - To wear the

Cross-Dresser - A person who cross dresses.

Drag - The act of dressing in gendered clothing as part of a performance. Drag Queens perform in highly feminine attire. Drag Kings perform in highly masculine attire. Drag may be performed as a political comment on gender, as parody or simply as entertainment. Drag performance does not indicate sexuality, gender identity, or sex identity.

Drag Queen or Drag King - See Drag.

En Travesti - (literally "cross-dressed") was the conventional theatrical portrayal of women by male actors in drag. Up to the late 17th Century this was necessary because the law considered performance on stage by actual women to engender immorality.

Family - Colloquial term used to identify other LGBTIQ community members. For example, an LGBTIQ person saying, "that person is family" often means that the person they are referring to is LGBTIQ as well.

Family of Choice (Chosen Family) - Persons or group of people can individual sees as significant in his or her life. It may include none, all, or some members of his or her family of origin. In addition, it may include individuals such as significant others, domestic partners, friends, and coworkers.

FTM - Female to Male Transsexual. See Transsexual, MTF.

Gay - A term given to males who are attracted sexually and emotionally to some other males. Colloquially used as an umbrella term to include all LGBTQQI persons.

1) A socially constructed system of classification that ascribes qualities of masculinity and feminity to people. Gender characteristics can change over time and are different between cultures. Words that refer to gender include: man, woman, transgender, masculine, feminine, and gender queer.

2) One's sense of self as masculine or feminine regardless of external genitalia. Gender is often conflated with sex. This is inaccurate because sex refers to bodies and gender refers to personality characteristics.

Gender Binary - The notion that everyone in our world is exclusively either male or female. Today we recognize that people exist outside of this binary, with the transgendered and intersexual included. This is commonly the basis for which transgendered and intersexual persons become the victim of Genderism (see below).

Genderism - Holding people to traditional expectations based on gender, or punishing or excluding those who don't conform to traditional gender expectations.

Gender Conformity - When your gender identity and sex "match" (i.e. fit social norms). For example, a male who is masculine and identifies as a man.

Gender Identity:

1) The gender that a person sees oneself as. This can include refusing to label oneself with a gender. Gender identity is also often conflated with sexual orientation, but this is inaccurate. Gender identity does not cause sexual orientation. For example, a masculine woman is not necessarily a lesbian.

2) Our innermost concept of self as "male" or "female"-what we perceive and call ourselves. Individuals are conscious of this between the ages of 18 months and 3 years. Most people develop a gender identity that matches their biological sex. For some, however, their gender identity is different from their biological sex. We sometimes call these people transsexuals, some of whom hormonally and/or surgically change their sex to more fully match their gender identity.

Gender Expression - Refers to the ways in which people externally communicate their gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, haircut, voice, and emphasizing, de-emphasizing, or changing their bodies' characteristics. Typically, transgender people seek to make their gender expression match their gender identity, rather than their birth-assigned sex. Gender expression is not necessarily an indication of sexual orientation.

Gender Identity Disorder - The term used for a condition defined in the DSM4 by the American Psychiatric Association.

Gender Queer (or Genderqueer) - A person who redefines or plays with their gender, or who refuses gender altogether. A label for people who bend/break the rules of gender and blur the boundaries.

Gender Role:

1) Socially defines expectations regarding behavior, mannerisms, dress, etc. as related to socially assigned gender.

2) How "masculine" or "feminine" an individual acts. Societies commonly have norms regarding how males and females should behave, expecting people to have personality characteristics and/or act a certain way based on their biological sex.

3) This is the set of roles and behaviors assigned to females and males by society. Our culture recognizes two basic gender roles: masculine (having the qualities attributed to males) and feminine (having the qualities attributed to females). People who step out of their socially assigned gender roles are sometimes referred to as transgender. Though transgender has increasingly become an umbrella term referring to people who cross gender/sex barriers, many people find any umbrella term problematic because it reduces different identities into one oversimplified category.

Gender-variant / Gender Non-conforming - Displaying gender traits that are not normally associated with their biological sex. "Feminine" behavior or appearance in a male is gender-variant as is "masculine" behavior or appearance in a female. Gender variant behavior is culturally specific, in that it

GLBT - Standing for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

GLBTQQI - Standing for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, and Intersex, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

GLBTA - Standing for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Allied, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

Hermaphrodite - A colloquial term used to refer to a person who is intersexed. It is generally no longer considered an acceptable term and is considered offensive by many. See Intersex

Hate Crime - Hate crime legislation often defines a hate crime as a crime motivated by the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.

Heterosexuality - Sexual, emotional and/or romantic attraction to a sex other than your own. Commonly though of as "attraction to the opposite sex" but since there are not only two sexes (see intersex and transsexual), this definition is inaccurate.

Heterosexism:

1) Assuming every person to be heterosexual therefore marginalizing persons who do not identify as heterosexual.

2) Bias against non-heterosexuals based on a belief in the superiority of heterosexuality. Heterosexism does not imply the same fear and hatred as homophobia. It can describe seemingly innocent statements, such as "She'd drive any man wild" based on the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm.

Heterosexual Privilege - Benefits derived automatically by being (or being perceived as) heterosexual that are denied to homosexuals, bisexuals or queers.

Homophobia - Refers to a fear or hatred of homosexuality, especially in others, but also in oneself (internalized homophobia).

Homosexuality - Sexual, emotional, and/or romantic attraction to the same sex.

Institutional Oppression - Arrangement of a society used to benefit one group at the expense of another through the use of language, media education, religion, economics, etc.

Internalized Oppression - The process by which an oppressed person comes to believe, accept, or live out the inaccurate stereotypes and misinformation about their group.

Intersex/Intersexed/Intersexual/Intersexuality - Intersexuality is a set of medical conditions that feature congenital anomaly of the reproductive and sexual system. That is, intersexual people are born with "sex chromosomes," external genitalia, or internal reproductive systems that are not considered "standard" for either male or female. The existence of intersexuals shows that there are not just two sexes and that our ways of thinking about sex (trying to force everyone to fit into either the male box or the female box) is socially constructed.

An intersexual or intersexed person (or animal of any unisexual species) is one who is born with genitalia and/or secondary sexual characteristics determined as neither exclusively male nor female, or which combine features of the male and female sexes. (The terms hermaphrodite and pseudohermaphrodite, which have been used in the past, are now considered pejorative and inaccurate and are no longer used to refer to an intersexual person.) Sometimes the phrase "ambiguous genitalia" is used. See Beardache

"In The Closet" - Keeping one's sexual orientation and/or gender or sex identity a secret. See Coming Out.

Invisible Minority - A group whose minority status is not always immediately visible, such as some disabled people and LGBTQQI people. This lack of visibility may make organizing for rights difficult.

La Di Dah - Another name for the annual Queeruption festival. See Queeruption.

Lambda - The Gay Activist Alliance originally chose the lambda, the Greek Letter "L", as a symbol in 1970. Organizer chose the letter "L" to signify liberation. The word has become a way of expressing the concept "lesbian and gay male" in a minimum of syllables and has been adopted by such organizations as Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Legal Sex - The sex assigned on an individual's legal documentation.

Lesbian - A term given to females who are attracted sexually and emotionally to some other females.

LGBT - Standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, this term typically tries to encompass all the members of queer society. There are many variations of this term including GLBT, LGBTA, LGBTQ, LGBTQA, LGBTQI, LGBTQQIA, and perhaps more.

LGBTA - Standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and straight Allies, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

LGBTQ - Standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

LGBTQI - Standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning and Intersex, this is a variant of LGBT. See LGBT.

LGBTQQIA - Standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and straight Allies, this variant of LGBT is probably the most inclusive term for a member of queer society, but is often shortened. Shorter variants such as LGBT also imply inclusion of all these queer types. See LGBT.

Marginalized - Excluded, ignored, or relegated to the outer edge of a group/society/community.

Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM) - Men who engage in same-sex behavior, but who may not necessarily self-identify as gay.

MTF - Male to Female Transsexual.

On "E" - When a MTF takes the hormone estrogen.

On "T" - When a FTM takes the hormone testosterone.

"Out" or "Out of the Closet" - Refers to varying degrees of being open about one's sexual orientation and /or sex identity or gender identity.

Pansexual - 1) A person who is fluid in sexual orientation and/or gender or sex identity. 2) A person who is attracted to all of the sexes and/or genders, but not necessarily simultaneously or equally. This is different from bisexual since bi- implies our world consists of a gender binary (that everyone is exclusively male and female), which is not really true since some people are transgendered or intersexual.

PFLAG - PFLAG stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It is a national organization which has become widespread and today has several thousand chapters in every locale imaginable. See their website located in Resources & Links for more information.

Polyamory - Polyamory is the practice of having multiple open, honest committed/love relations.

Pseudohermaphrodite - A colloquial term used to refer to a person who is intersexual. It is generally no longer considered an acceptable term and is considered offensive by many. See Intersex

Queer - Historically a negative term used against people perceived to be LGBT, "queer" has more recently been reclaimed by some people as a positive term describing all those who do not conform to rigid notions of gender and sexuality. Queer is often used in a political context and in academic settings to challenge traditional ideas about identity ("queer theory").

Queercore - a cultural and social movement which arose in the mid 1980s. It is distinguished by discontent with society in general and a disavowal of the mainstream gay and lesbian community in particular, expressing itself through zines, music, art and film.

Queeruption - an annual international Queercore festival and gathering where alternative/radical/disenfranchised queers can exchange information, network, organize, inspire and get inspired, self represent, and challenge mainstream society with DIY ideas and ethics. Shows featuring queer punk bands, performance artists, and others are put on at night, while workshops and demonstrations take place during Queeruption days. Queeruption generally takes place in a different city in a different country every year. Click here for the Official Queeruption Website. Queeruption has also been called Anarquist, La Di Dah, and Queer Mutiny.

Queer Mutiny - Another name for the annual Queeruption festival. See Querruption.

Queer Society - Historically a negative term used against people perceived to be LGBT, "queer" has more

Queer Studies - Queer studies is the study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. In some universities, the field is called sexual diversity studies.

Queer Theory - Queer Theory is an anti-essentialist theory about sex and gender within the larger field of Queer studies. It proposes that one's sexual identity and one's gender identity are partly or wholly socially constructed, and therefore individuals cannot really be described using broad terms like "homosexual," "heterosexual," "man," or "woman." It challenges the common practice of compartmentalizing the description of a person to fit into one particular category.

In particular, it questions the use of socially assigned categories based on the division between those who share some habit or lifestyle and those who do not. Instead, queer theorists suggest complicating all identity categories and groups.

Additionally, queer theory also analyzes the "queer" aspects of a humanist work (such as in literature, music, art, etc.) that are not necessarily sexual. In this regard, "queer" is used to mean "strange" or "different" in the sense that a particular work does not fit within the general rules of a particular genre or category, yet is still classified as being a part of that genre or category.

Influences on queer theory include (among others) Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Jonathan D. Katz, Ester Newton, Andy Warhol, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida, but the primary voices in the development of Queer theory are Gayle Rubin, Kaja Silverman, D.A. Miller, Sue-Ellen Case, Douglas Crimp, Lauren Berlant, John D'Emilio, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Joan Scott, Simon Watney, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan Dollimore, Leo Bersani, David Halperin, Michael Moon, Michael Warner, Shari Thurer and several others.

Check Wikipedia's page on Queer Theory for more information.

Questioning - Refers to people who are uncertain as to their sexual orientation or gender identity. They are often seeking information and support during this stage of their identity development.

Sex Reassignment Surgery - This is the medical procedure

Sexual Diversity Studies - Queer studies is the study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. In some universities, the field is called sexual diversity studies.

Sexual Identity - This is how we perceive and what we call ourselves. Such labels include "lesbian," "gay," "bisexual," "bi," "queer," "questioning," "heterosexual," "straight," and others. Sexual Identity evolves through a developmental process that varies depending on the individual. Our sexual behavior and how we define ourselves (identity) can be chosen. Though some people claim their sexual orientation is also a choice, for others this does not seem to be the case.

Sexual Orientation - This is determined by our sexual and emotional attractions. Categories of sexual orientation include homosexuals-gay, lesbian-attracted to some members of the same sex; bisexuals, attracted to some members of more than one sex; and heterosexuals, attracted to some members of another sex. Orientation is influenced by a variety of factors, including genetics and hormones, as well as unknown environmental factors. Though the origins of sexuality are not completely understood, it is generally believed to be established before the age of five.

Straight Ally - A person who does not self-identify as LGBT, but who supports and stands up for the rights of LGBT people.

Transgender(ed) - Refers to those whose gender expression at least sometimes runs contrary to what others in the same culture would normally expect. Transgender is a broad term that includes transsexuals, cross-dressers, drag queens/kings, and people who do not identify as either of the two sexes as currently defined. When referring to transgender people, use the pronoun they have designated as appropriate, or the one that is consistent with their presentation of themselves. See Transphobia, cross dress, drag queen, drag king, transsexual.

Transman/Transguy - A transgendered man, meaning a person of the male gender who was not always male gendered.

Transwoman/Transgirl - A transgendered woman, meaning a person of the female gender who was not always female gendered.

Transphobia - Fear or hatred of transgender people; transphobia is manifested in a number of ways, including violence, harassment, and discrimination.

Transsexual - Individuals who do not identify with their birth-assigned genders and sometimes alter their bodies surgically and/or hormonally. The Transition (formerly called "sex change") is a complicated, multi-step process that may take years and may include, but is not limited to, Sex Reassignment Surgery.

Ze - a genderless pronoun. Typically used to refer to an intersexual or transgender person, but can be used to refer to absolutely anyone.

Some definitions adapted from Warren J. Blumenfeld, co-author of "Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life" and "Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price"; and "Translating Identities" by Chicora Martin, University of Oregon 2005.

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Ally - Someone who advocates for and supports members of a community other than their own, reaching across differences to achieve mutual goals. Asexual - Having no evident sex or sex organs. In usage, may refer to a person who is not sexually active, or not sexually attracted to other people.

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Bari Weiss and the Left-Wing Infatuation With Taking Offense

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Facebook Allows Housing Advertisers to Exclude by Race

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Joker_ Familiesn of Dark Knight shooting victims horrified by Joaquin Phoenix movie

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Race, Democracy and Political Tribalism    Amy Chua.

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Race, Democracy and Political Tribalism    Amy Chua.

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Results like these are just as troubling as the high-profile incidents dominating the news.

If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you'll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech. Second, a shocking percentage of Americans also support censoring speech they don't like. How is this possible? It's simple. "Free speech" is good speech, you see. That's the speech that corrects injustices and speaks truth to power. That other speech? The speech that hurts my feelings or hurts my friends' feelings? That's "hate speech." It might even be violence.

A new survey of college students demonstrates this reality perfectly. Conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for Yale's William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, the survey queried 800 college students attending four-year private or public colleges, and the results were depressingly predictable.

First, the "good" news. Students claim to love free speech and intellectual diversity. For example, 83 percent agree that the First Amendment needs to be "followed and respected." A whopping 84 percent agree that their school should "always do its best to promote intellectual diversity," including by protecting free speech and inviting controversial speakers to campus. Similarly, 93 percent agree that there's value in listening to and understanding "views and opinions that I may disagree with."

But that's not good news at all. It's simply evidence that in the abstract students will claim to be open-minded. They'll claim to value different views - right until the moment they really get offended. For example, 81 percent agree with the statement that "words can be a form of violence." A full 58 percent of students believe that colleges should "forbid" speakers who have a "history of engaging in hate speech."

And what is hate speech? The definition the students liked was staggeringly broad. Two-thirds agreed that hate speech is "anything that one particular person believes is harmful, racist, or bigoted." They further agreed that hate speech "means something different to everyone."

Given these realities, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of students believe that interruptions or even violence are appropriate to stop offensive speech. Almost 40 percent believe that it's "sometimes appropriate" to "shout down or disrupt" a speaker. A sobering 30 percent believe that physical violence can be used to stop someone from "using hate speech or engaging in racially charged comments."

It's a small consolation that a slight majority of students say that they have not felt intimidated out of expressing their views - but this means that, in institutions allegedly dedicated to critical thinking and open inquiry, almost half the student respondents indicated they were indeed intimidated.

Survey findings like this should serve as an alarm bell every bit as important as the shout-downs and attacks that dominate the headlines. Naysayers and defenders of the status quo on campus will argue that the censors represent a mere fringe, that our campuses are still more free than critics suggest. That may be true on some campuses, but these poll numbers indicate that the so-called radicals are perhaps more mainstream than we'd like to admit.

Just at the moment when we need a concerted, bipartisan effort to defend a culture of free speech, our national polarization stands in the way. It becomes more important to win news cycles or to defeat a hated opponent than it is to defend an enduring civilizational value. We care only when our friends suffer censorship, and we sometimes even take a measure of glee when our opponents twist in the wind. Last week leftist protesters blocked an ACLU representative from speaking at William & Mary. Conservatives should find that every bit as outrageous as an effort to censor my friend Ben Shapiro. We should treat the president's calls to punish kneeling football players with the exact contempt that we'd treat progressive calls for reprisals against a praying athlete.

Long after even the memories of modern feuds fade, the First Amendment should still stand.

In other words, it's time to remember that we can strongly disagree with expression - as I disagree with the decision to kneel - while still protecting the right to dissent. Even more, it's time to remember that the impulse to censor is often more offensive than the content of the targeted speech. After all, a kneeling football player doesn't threaten our constitutional order. Campus speeches don't threaten our individual liberty. But when presidents forget their constitutional role - or when campus administrators capitulate to the demands of the angry mob - we incrementally lose respect for the values that truly make America great.

Long after even the memories of modern feuds fade, the First Amendment should still stand. We should still fight for the rights of others that we'd like to exercise ourselves. But if we lose the culture, we'll eventually lose the Constitution, and when that happens America will fundamentally and perhaps irrevocably change. When it comes to the fight for free speech, the stakes are exactly that high.
READ MORE: College Students vs. Free Speech Anti-Free-Speech Radicals Never Give Up Does America Still Believe in the Right to Be Wrong?

David French - David French is a senior writer forNational Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. @DavidAFrench

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New College Student Survey: Yes, Speech Can Be Violence | National Review

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Results like these are just as troubling as the high-profile incidents dominating the news. If you follow free-speech controversies for any length of time, you'll understand two things about public opinion. First, an overwhelming percentage of Americans will declare their support for free speech.

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Bari Weiss and the Left-Wing Infatuation With Taking Offense