Month: September 2020

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“Silence is violence” has everything that you want in a slogan: Alliteration. Brevity. Simplicity. It also can be chilling for some in the academic and free-speech communities.

On one level, it conveys a powerful message that people of good faith should not remain silent about great injustices. However, it can have a more menacing meaning to “prove the negative” – demanding that people prove they are not racist.

In a prior column, I warned of the thin line between speech codes and speech commands, as people move from compelling silence to compelling speech:

 “Once all the offending statues are down, and all the offending professors are culled, the appetite for collective suppression will become a demand for collective expression.”

The line between punishing speech and compelling speech is easily crossed when free speech itself is viewed as a threat. It is not just the many cases of journalists, academics and others fired for expressing dissenting views. Even expressing support in the wrong way can be a terminal offense, like declaring “all lives matter” rather than “Black Lives Matter,” as in the firing of University of Massachusetts-Lowell Dean of Nursing Leslie Neal-Boylan or Vermont principal Tiffany Riley. While most of us support Black Lives Matter, it has become an official position of many schools — and variations are not tolerated. The concern is not only the establishment of orthodox values but the forced recitation of those values.

We are now seeing that fear realized.

This week, a mob surrounded diners outside several Washington restaurants, shouting “White silence is violence!” and demanding that diners raise a fist to support Black Lives Matter. Various diners dutifully complied as protesters screamed inches from their faces. One did not — Lauren Victor, who later said she has marched in protests for weeks but refused to be bullied. The mob surrounded her, and Washington Post reporter Fredrick Kunkle identified a freelance journalist as one of the people yelling at Victor and demanding: “What was in you, you couldn’t do this?”

It is the very mantra of orthodoxy: Failing to utter certain words, prayers or pledges is deemed a confession of complicity or guilt.

That demand for public affirmation was on display again Thursday when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife were threatened by a mob after leaving the final event of the Republican National Convention. The couple was ordered to “Say Her Name,” referring to Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician shot by police in Louisville, Ky. Notably, some media suggested the mob did not know who Paul was; they just demanded that he say the name if he wanted to pass.

Forced speech can occur in a variety of direct and indirect ways. The University of Southern Maine’s president, Glenn Cummings, proclaimed “we must never tire of declaring that Black Lives Matter” and asked students and faculty to add their names to a public anti-racism pledge. After objections, the school said it would keep the list non-public. The concern was that some faculty and students may not support Black Lives Matters as an organization, or have other disagreements with the pledge — yet, failure to be on the list would indicate they are racist, or at least not sufficiently anti-racist.

The University of California issued a “guidance document” requiring students to reject racism, sexism, xenophobia and all hateful or intolerant speech, including a mandate that students stop others from referring to the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus.” While the use of those terms is controversial, it also is heavily laden with political meaning for people on both sides of the debate over the pandemic.

Syracuse University moved more directly not just to bar but to require some forms of speech. Professor Keith Alford, the university’s diversity and inclusion officer, declared students would be punished for simply witnessing “bias-motivated” incidents and “acts of hate.” That was a response to a student group’s demand for expulsion of “individuals who witnessed the event or were present, but did not take part.”

The transition from speech codes to commands is based on the same notion of “speech as harm.” Just as speech is deemed harmful (and thus subject to regulation), silence is now deemed harmful. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski, executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, wrote that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” It is certainly not unreasonable to call out others for not supporting important causes. Indeed, I have criticized faculty for remaining silent as colleagues were attacked or fired for voicing dissent about systemic racism, police abuse or other subjects. However, once both speech and silence are deemed as equally harmful, individuals are subject to public demonstrations of faith and fealty.

Even being insufficiently alert can result in demands for termination. Nearly 2,000 people signed a petition to fire Marymount Manhattan theater arts associate professor Patricia Simon after she appeared to fall asleep briefly during an anti-racist meeting held on Zoom. Student Caitlin Gagnon started a petition which accused Simon of “ignoring … racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.” The message seems clear: You cannot be woke if you are not awake.

The concern over speech codes becoming speech commands would have been viewed as utterly absurd just a few years ago. Now, even calls for civility in dialogue have been denounced as racist dog whistles. Trinity College professor Johnny Williams condemned those who call for civility as “uphold[ing] white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist power.” When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough criticized those confronting people at restaurants and called for civility, University of Mississippi Professor James Thomas denounced civility and declared: “Don’t just interrupt a senator’s meal, y’all. Put your whole damn fingers in their salads.”

It is the ultimate expression of entitlement: People either must conform to your values or face public condemnation and threats.

Your salad is no more inviolate than your speech. 

In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.

For better or worse, the market continues to be defined by AAPL, which today crossed a historic threshold when thanks to its latest 4% ramp, it surpassed the entire market cap of the Russell 2000.

This is how AAPL now looks compared to all the public small cap companies:

As discussed earlier, the chief reason for the relentless AAPL surge in recent weeks has been the so-called “option insanity” as the company’s implied vol has been rising alongside the stock.

And while the AAPL ramp accelerated, in no small part thanks to another price target increase this time from BofA, the other stock that has come to define market euphoria, Tesla, saw its rally halted after the company announced a $5BN “At the market” equity offering.

Yet even with today’s 4.5% drop, TSLA is now back to levels last seen… yesterday.

Meanwhile, due to the outsized impact of AAPL on the Nasdaq, the tech index was up more than 1% even with a second consecutive day in which decliners far outpaced advancing stocks.

Predictably, Nasdaq breadth continued to sink, with the number of tech companies trading below their 200DMA dropping below 50%, and just over half trading above their 50DMA.

One more chart showing what Michael Krause called the biggest bubble in history: on a dollar basis, the turnover in tech names as retail investors and delta-(un)hedged dealers flood in, is simply stunning.

To be sure, it wasn’t just tech names with Walmart’s 7% surge boosting the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is also rapidly approaching its all time high thanks…

… to a large extent stellar Markit and ISM manufacturing PMI readings which saw the New Orders surge to the highest level since 2004 (even as employment remains deep in contraction)…

… this failed to spark a broad reflation wave, with yields on the 10Y Treasury sliding 3bps and declining for the 3rd day in a row.

And since breakevens actually dropped today despite the strong eco data, this means that real rates also slumped back to their post-crisis lows of -1.08%, hardly the stuff the Fed’s AIT mandate wants to see.

Yet while real rates slumped to new cycle lows, gold – which has tracked real rates very closely for much of the past decade – failed to make a new high above $2,000.

How come? Perhaps due to expectations that the dollar is oversold and will squeeze higher, a glimpse of which we caught today when after sliding to fresh 2 year lows, the Bloomberg dollar index jumped back to green on the day shortly after the EURUSD briefly rose above 1.20

Unfortunately, one can look at the macro until one is blue in the fact in hopes of deciphering the market, the sad reality is that for all intent and purposes, only Apple and Tesla continue to matter, and until there is a decisive breach in the upward trajectory of both, the melt up will only accelerate as we are now well in the blow off top phase, as the action in the EMini in the last minute of trading showed so clear, when the S&P future surged by 10 points in seconds despite a $1.3 billion MOC imbalance for sale, just so the ES could hit a new record high on the back of another massive gamma squeeze.

The US State Department illegally monitored the social media accounts of 13 conservative Americans, including Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs and Jack Posobiec, according to Just The News, citing memos scheduled to be turned over to Judicial Watch. 

The surveillance operation, which began in March 2019, was run out of the US Embassy in Kiev while under the command of then-Ambassador (and impeachment witness) Marie Yovanovitch, after journalist John Solomon began publishing stories about the embassy’s activities at The Hill and on Fox News, according to Solomon.

When the embassy sought help from the State Department in Washington to use a contractor called Crowd Tangle to continue the social media monitoring, it was advised the activities were “barred by federal law,” an official familiar with the documents told Just the News. The embassy ceased the activities and asked for training about the issue, the official said.

While the released documents will have some information redacted, they will identify the 13 Americans whose accounts were targeted and confirm that some officials were aware of the monitoring, the officials said.

Those monitored also include Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, Sebatstion Gorka, and Fox News personalities Sara Carter and Dan Bongino, according to the report.

Right there with you, Lou.

Hope they like all the truth they had to read. https://t.co/0udoyhJvk9

— Illegally Monitored Poso 🎧 (@JackPosobiec) September 1, 2020

Whatever is left of the FDA’s credibility after director Dr. Stephen Hahn claimed that the agency would happily approve a COVID-19 vaccine before Phase 3 trials are finished if it felt “appropriate”, a panel of experts at the National Institutes of Health, another agency in America’s immense public health bureaucracy, have directly repudiated one of the FDA’s most “controversial” findings.

In an analysis of an FDA decision calling for emergency authorization of convalescent plasma as a means of treating COVID-19, the panel of experts convened by the NIH ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to back up the FDA’s claims.

Of course, Dr. Hahn has already apologized for his decision to fast-track approvals for convalescent plasma, saying it was wrong to cave to political pressures, and that the FDA must remain outside of political influence. Dr. Hahn granted his emergency approval of the medication on Aug. 23, the Sunday before the start of the Republican National Convention.

Then again, the experts didn’t rule against plasma as a potential treatment, they simply argued that what little data has been collected so far is hardly conclusive.

“There are currently no data from well-controlled, adequately powered randomized clinical trials that demonstrate the efficacy and safety of convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19,” the NIH group said in a statement.

“There are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19.”

As more states mull the possibility of insisting on mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for students and workers – Joe Biden is already vehemently in favor of mandatory mask laws, and attacked vaccine skeptics as “anti-science” – this is just the latest chilling reminder that “science” doesn’t always speak with one voice, and that when it comes to experimental treatments, there are many factors that must be weighed.