Commentary: Murthy v. Missouri Goes Down as One of Supreme Court’s Worst Speech Decision

Supreme Court

Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.

(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)

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Commentary: Five Stupid Things the Left Would Have You Believe

I was on a media panel talking about what the Left has done to the Fourth Estate in America and how that damage might ultimately be repaired. And afterward, I spent a lot of time interacting with sponsors and attendees, and a common thread seemed to run through those conversations.

Namely, the multiplicity of utterly indefensible, absurd propositions that make up the narratives and constructs by which our left-wing current ruling class seeks to base its power over us.

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Trump Strongly Hints He May Run for President Again at Arizona Rally for MAGA Candidates

Former president Donald Trump held a Save America rally in Mesa, Arizona on Sunday afternoon to support the MAGA slate of candidates he’s endorsed in the state and to talk about the attacks he’s under. He dropped multiple hints at Mesa’s Legacy Sports Park that he may be running for president again in 2024.

Trump said, “We’ll be making a decision soon. I think everyone is going to be really happy.” He added later during the event that he got more votes in 2020 “than any sitting president in history. Now we may just have to do it again. Stay tuned.”

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Biden Makes Surprising, Garbled Deficit Reduction Claim

President Joe Biden is being mocked after he made a garbled claim that he is reducing the deficit this year by one trillion, five hundred thousand dollars, with the number being especially awkward given the vast difference between trillions and hundreds of thousands.

“You know how much, how much I’m reducivethedefcit this year? One trillion, five hundred thousand!” Biden said during a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, Wisc. It appears the president was attempting to say he’s “reducing the deficit this year.”

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Trump Levels Blistering Attack on Democrats, and Biden’s Supreme Court Nominee

Donald Trump speaking

Sounding ever more a candidate seeking the White House again, former President Donald Trump on Saturday night attacked Democrats as a party of “socialists and communists” so extreme that they chose a Supreme Court nominee who “can’t even say what a woman is.”

“A party that’s unwilling to admit that men and women are biologically different in defiance of all scientific and human history is a party that should not be anywhere near the levers of power in the United States,” Trump told a raucous rally in rural Georgia.

In a 90-minute speech, Trump also rallied Republicans to get behind gubernatorial candidate David Perdue and football star-turned-Senate candidate Herschel Walker and to defeat incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.

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Commentary: Seven Major Failures of the Biden Presidency

Joe Biden

With President Joe Biden set to deliver his first State of the Union address on Tuesday night, it’s a good time to ask: How has Biden done as president and what is the actual state of our union?

According to the American people, things aren’t going great.

A CNN poll in early February asked Americans what they thought of Biden’s presidency and what he’s done right since entering office Jan. 20, 2021.

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House Physician Lifts COVID Mask Mandate in Chamber Ahead of Biden’s State of Union Speech

The House over the weekend lifted its COVID-19 mask mandate, ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union on Tuesday night in House chambers before a joint session of Congress.

The change, which makes masks optional, was announced Sunday by Capitol Physician Brian Monahan.

“Individuals may choose to mask at any time, but it is no longer a requirement,” he said in a letter to lawmakers, who are returning Monday to Capitol Hill.

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Commentary: They Can’t Make Trump Go Away

Donald Trump

In the election of 2016, Donald Trump appealed to citizenship, sovereignty, and borders. This was a direct entreaty to the people as the ultimate source of sovereign authority, bypassing the ruling-class elites that dominate the media and the universities; his appeal also ignored political experts, pollsters, and government bureaucracy. In the postmodern world, the nation-state is under attack everywhere as the source of all evil, the cause of war, selfishness, racism, white privilege, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the other irrational phobias that make up the universe of political correctness. The idea of the nation-state itself is said to be irrational and arbitrary.

All of this overwrought criticism of nationalism and the nation-state overlooks a very significant point developed in my new book, The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State: the nation-state is the only form of political organization that can sustain constitutional government and the rule of law.

No empire has ever been a constitutional democracy or republic, nor will constitutional government exist in global government. If, as is widely alleged, the dialectic of History is inevitably tending toward global governance and universal citizenship, then it is also tending toward tyranny.

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University of Minnesota Beats First Amendment Challenge to ‘Heckler’s Veto’ Against Ben Shapiro Event

Ben Shapiro speaking

Sixteen minutes after learning that a University of Minnesota student group booked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak at its main campus in Minneapolis, then-president Eric Kaler declared, “I do not want this in the middle of campus.”

All he knew at that point, four months before the February 2018 event, was that Shapiro was “a right wing speaker and he made some appearances on other campuses.”

Citing security needs, the university ended up putting Shapiro in a venue on its St. Paul campus, far from student housing. Demand far exceeded capacity, and a regent accused the university of passing over a larger venue on the main campus that was easier to secure.

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Commentary: Refugee Plans Repeat the Mistakes of the Afghanistan Campaign

The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has produced moving scenes of disorder and desperation. Some see American fecklessness. Others, the rancid fruit of attempting to cultivate Afghanistan in our image. Finally, others see the Biden Administration making a hash of what was fundamentally a good policy of planned withdrawal. Even for those who supported withdrawal—as I did—the events of the last week undeniably were emblematic of the ongoing humiliation of the United States and its military. 

Defending his decisions, Joe Biden gave a surprisingly good speech, which could have just as easily come from Donald Trump or Ron Paul. But considering the circumstances, the tone was off. The speech only justified the withdrawal in general and avoided taking responsibility for its particulars, including the grim scene at the Kabul airport, for which Biden and his administration bear some responsibility. Biden defied credulity when he said, “We planned for every contingency.”

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Mom Says School Board Threatened to Sue Her for Seeking Public Information on Critical Race Theory in Curriculum

Nicole Solas was surprised to find her name listed on the meeting agenda of her local school board, especially since it said the board was considering taking legal action against her in response to her many requests for public records.

The Rhode Island mother of two began filing records requests with the South Kingstown School District several months ago, when she learned that teachers were incorporating critical race theory and gender ideology in the curriculum.

But she didn’t expect the school board to talk about suing her.

“I was shocked,” Solas, 37, told The Daily Signal in a recent phone interview. The school board, she said, “did not tell me that [the requests were] a problem.”

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Biden Claims Mandate in First Address to America Since Declaring Victory

Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden Saturday night said he was given a mandate by voters to restore unity and civility after what he called four years of divisiveness under President Donald Trump.

Addressing America from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, hours after claiming victory over Trump, Biden said he would lead by example and be the president of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

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Commentary: We Know Why Donald Trump Wins Re-Election

Donald Trump wins reelection because his supporters enjoy but one means of political expression: the ballot box. Donald Trump loses reelection because his supporters enjoy but one means of political expression: the ballot box.
We do not know who claims victory for another two months but we already know why it happened.

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Roger Kimball Commentary: Burying the Dead With Bile-Filled Histrionics

by Roger Kimball   The big news last week revolved around the funerals of a 1960s pop singer and an unreliable Republican senator with a cult following among masochistic conservatives and cynical leftists eager to capitalize on his capacity to spread dissension among his nominal allies. I suppose the exploitation…

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