E-Pluribus | December 21, 2023
A wrong response to riots; government should be held responsible for its actions; and diversity at the bar (the American Bar Association, that is.)
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jeffrey Cieslikowski: Banning Hate Speech Is The Wrong Response to Ireland’s Riots
There is always pressure on politicians to act in the wake of a crisis, but the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression’s (FIRE) Jeffrey Cieslikowski writes at Persuasion how Ireland should not respond to the recent unrest in that country. Rioting itself violates many people’s rights, so responding to riots by limiting speech simply compounds the problem, Cieslikowski says.
On the afternoon of November 23, a deranged man stabbed three children and an adult caretaker outside a school in northeast Dublin. Three passersby intervened, successfully disarming and incapacitating the attacker. One of the victims, a five-year-old girl, sustained critical injuries.
As news of the attack spread, many social media users began baselessly speculating that the attacker was an illegal immigrant, or that the stabbing was an act of Islamic terrorism. Reports swirled and were amplified by Gript, a right-wing news site, that the attacker was an Algerian national. Authorities later announced the man had immigrated from Algeria but that he had come to Ireland more than 20 years ago and had since become a naturalized citizen. The hashtags “#IrelandIsFull” and “#IrelandBelongsToTheIrish” began trending.
[. . .]
Within hours of last month’s attack, anti-immigrant organizers on Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) had assembled hundreds of people in the area surrounding the stabbing. Towards evening, protesters pushed through the police cordon and some began punching police (Gardaí) officers. Violence escalated with the torching of, ultimately, eleven police vehicles, three buses, and a tram—and then with the looting of stores. By the time the Gardaí finally restored order many hours later, rioters had committed damage to the tune of around €20 million.
There is no question that Irish prosecutors should use every tool at their disposal to ensure that those individuals who committed acts of arson, theft, and assault be punished for their crimes.
But Irish officials have instead focused on decrying the country’s lack of laws on so-called hate speech, insisting that the solution is not proper police response to violence but deeper restrictions of free expression. “It’s now obvious to anyone who might have doubted it that our incitement to hatred legislation is just not up to date for the social media age,” Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said in the aftermath of the event.
[. . .]
In any case, how would a hate speech law have prevented these riots? It seems obvious that such a law would not have changed any of these protesters’ minds; most, if not all, already distrust the government, and what better way to cement that distrust than criminalizing their opinions? Moreover, when social media companies suspend users for hate speech, many migrate to less-restrictive, often anonymous, sites like Telegram and 4chan, where they are more easily radicalized.
Read it all.
Billy Binion: This Innocent Woman Is on the Hook for Thousands After a SWAT Team Destroyed Her Home
In dangerous and volatile situations, a SWAT team can be invaluable. But when a SWAT team acts on bad information, the results can be catastrophic. In such cases, who is accountable? Not the government, says… the government. At Reason, Billy Binion, explains the excuses officials use to leave innocent homeowners high and dry, but those excuses are incompatible with a government of, by and for the people.
In June of 2022, law enforcement arrived at a modest home on East Calvert Street in South Bend, Indiana. They threw dozens of tear gas grenades into the house, launched flash-bangs through the front door, smashed windows, destroyed the security cameras, punched holes in the walls, ripped a panel and fan from the bathroom wall and ceiling, ransacked and tossed furniture, snatched curtains down, and broke a mirror and various storage containers. The tear gas bombs left openings in the walls, floors, and ceiling. Shattered glass lay strewn across the interior, and a litany of personal belongings—from clothing, beds, and electronics to childhood drawings and family photos—were ruined.
Police had their sights set on a man named John Parnell Thomas, then a fugitive, who is now behind bars. But law enforcement didn't apprehend Thomas at the residence on East Calvert, as he did not own the home, did not have any relationship with its owners, and had never been there.
[. . .]
A year and a half post-raid, those agencies have paid her nothing. Her home insurance helped her in part but declined to pay the full amount, which totaled at least $16,000 in damages, per her suit, leaving her thousands of dollars in the hole.
It's not the first time the government has destroyed an innocent person's property and left them to pick up the pieces, both literally and figuratively. Hadley's experience once again requires that we answer the following: When law enforcement wrecks someone's house or business in pursuit of public safety, who should bear the cost?
[. . .]
Whether or not such victims are entitled to relief comes down to the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which promises that people are entitled to "just compensation" when their property is usurped, or in this case destroyed, for public use. But various jurisdictions have been able to dance around that thanks to some federal jurisprudence which has held that actions taken under "police powers" are exempt from the pledge in the Takings Clause. "Apprehending a dangerous fugitive is in the public interest, and 'in all fairness and justice,' the cost of apprehending such fugitives should be borne by the public as a whole," says Hadley's suit, "not by an unlucky and innocent property owner whose property is put to a public use to serve the public's interest."
Read it all here.
David Randall: ABA’s Diversity Agenda Gives Universities a Run for Their Money
It’s universities’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs that get most of the attention these days, but at Minding the Campus, David Randall says the American Bar Association is getting into the act as well. DEI in education is bad enough, Randall asserts, but DEI in the law is disastrous.
The ABA’s been running wild with “diversity” initiatives. It’s committed in principle to Diversity & Inclusion, it’s got a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Center, it’s imposing DEI accreditation standards on law schools, it’s bullyragging law firms to make “diversity” hires, and it only abandoned one racially discriminatory “diversity” requirement when it was sued by the state of Florida. The Business Law Section Diversity Clerkship Program is just one part of the ABA going all in to substitute race preferences for individual equality—which is to say, it is doing its best to undermine the law of the land.
This, mind you, from the nation’s foremost professional association of lawyers.
The diversity regime damages America in no end of ways. Our universities have abandoned the missions of education and the search for excellence, our diversified air traffic controllers are one near-miss away from a major air accident, our public health officials want to ration health care on DEI principles, and DEI powers censorship—above all in the search algorithms and the advertising demonetizations of the tech lords.
But the imposition of DEI on the law is the most dangerous of all. Our liberty has always depended upon our law—but how can we be free if the lawyers and judges themselves are all carefully curated to be supporters and clients of the DEI regime? The ABA’s embrace of “diversity,” of all the squalid tyrannies of the DEI regime, threatens to eliminate our future paladins of liberty from the legal profession.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Davidson College professor Issac Bailey thinks he’s caught Thomas Chatterton Williams in a case of cancel culture hypocrisy over Harvard president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal, and Williams is incredulous.
Here’s one of the writers from whom Claudine Gay borrowed, Carol Swain, with some advice for Harvard:
And finally, “Duplicative Language” is the latest euphemism from Harvard for its president Claudine Gay’s questionable scholarship practices: