Category: reason

Should Businesses Focus Solely on Profits? Whole Foods’ John Mackey vs. Ayn Rand Institute’s Yaron Brook

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At each of Whole Foods Market’s more than 500 American stores, managers ask every team member—from the meat clerks to the baristas to the janitorial staff—to orient their work around a shared purpose, which is to make natural and healthy food widely available. This goal, according to Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey, is in no way inconsistent with maximizing shareholder value, often seen as the essential purpose of a corporation. 

As Mackey writes in his new book about leadership, “At the heart of Conscious Capitalism is a radical refutation of the negative perceptions of business, and a rejection of the split between purpose and profit.” Mackey believes that this is the key to defending capitalism against those who condemn it for having no inspiring ideals. 

At a Reason-sponsored Soho Forum debate held on February 18, 2020, Ayn Rand Institute Chairman of the Board Yaron Brook challenged this view. He believes that maximizing profit should always be the primary goal of companies, and it’s that focus which explains why capitalism has lifted the broad masses out of poverty. That’s the message businesses should be emphasizing, he said, and it’s inspiring enough.

The debate, which played out in front of 200 people in The Villages, Florida, was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein. It was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the winner is the person who moves the most people in his direction.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser and John Osterhoudt.

Photo: Whole Foods Market; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Event photos, Brett Raney

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Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending

scott-webb-KesWZ9GyJ5k-unsplash

Oh, the extreme places they’ll go. Last week, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would no longer publish six Seuss books said to contain racially offensive imagery, foes of cancel culture (this author among them) cried foul. Many others shrugged, noting correctly that this isn’t an issue of censorship: A book publisher is free to decide it wants to cease publishing a very old book.

But now those books are being pulled from the shelves of some public libraries as well. “We are part of the broader community who have identified these books as being harmful,” Manny Figueiredo, director of education for a school board in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. “The delivery of education must ensure that no child experiences harm from the resources that are shared.”

A journalist for the Toronto Star issued an impassioned plea for more libraries to take action—and for Dr. Seuss Enterprises to make amends for its historical failures.

It’s not just Canada: The Chicago Public Library system agreed to remove the six books in question—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer—pending an investigation.

Disappearing books from library shelves gets us closer to the classic example of censorship, though of course a physical library possesses a finite amount of space and thus has to consider certain priorities. What’s happening to Dr. Seuss is the result of a very specific kind of prioritization, however: One decided upon not by readers or the public at large, but by activist educators peddling a false narrative about the beloved child author’s books and characters.

This narrative—the result of a highly misleading 2019 report on “Orientalism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books”—has quickly become influential, motivating much of the recent shift away from Seuss among certain government officials, educators, libraries, and even private publishers. Learning for Justice, an outgrowth of the undeservedly well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center, cited the report as evidence that it had misjudged The Sneetches, a Seuss story about a group of birds—some with stars on their bellies, some without—who eventually come to realize that their superficial physical differences don’t matter at all:

At Teaching Tolerance, we’ve even featured anti-racist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches. But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as “anti-racist” as we once thought. …

The solution to the story’s conflict is that the Plain-Belly Sneetches and Star-Bellied Sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed. As a result, they accept one another. This message of “acceptance” does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn’t address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.

They actually had it right the first time. But nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue. The former is an egalitarian message at the heart of many Dr. Seuss books; the latter is a smokescreen for all sorts of policies that have very little to do with combating racism: like abolishing standardized tests or spending more time renaming schools than reopening them.

There is certainly no obligation to read or teach Dr. Seuss, nor should Seuss defenders feel some moral or practical imperative to gloss over his imperfections. The man did draw racist caricatures, and some of his work can be read as a defense of Japanese internment. He was a flawed genius—but a genius nonetheless, and a towering figure in the world of children’s literature. There is a disturbing trend among modern liberalism to seek to cast out all such flawed figures, which has the rest of us reasonably worried that no art or artist more than a few years old can possibly stand the test of time. (For another example of this, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently accused Pepe Le Pew, the lovesick skunk from Looney Tunes, of perpetuating rape culture.)

There’s not really a law or policy that could fix this problem—though Sonny Bunch’s proposal to release now unpublishable works into the public domain is an interesting one—and so much of the pro-Seuss grousing in nonliberal circles can feel as performative as the anti-Seuss extremism. Yet there’s good reason in this case to regard the slippery slope with suspicion. The report that led to the cancellation of the six books also stipulates that The Cat in the Hat embodies a “racist tradition” and that Horton Hears a Who! “reinforces themes of white supremacy.”

I would not be surprised to find the entire Seuss canon under attack a few years from now. To quote the last lines of The Butter Battle Book, “Who’s gonna drop it? Will you or will he?” (To which the narrator’s grandpa replies: “Be patient. We’ll see. We will see.”)

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Even With a Good Excuse for Government Action, the State Bungled 12 Months of the Pandemic

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Let’s start with some standard classical liberal theory about public health. 

A contagious virus is a matter of public health in its narrower and better definition. It’s not about whether people eat well, exercise, avoid smoking, or otherwise pursue personal health. In a pandemic, our habits have spillover effects—externalities—that can bring catastrophic results for others.

Economists know that negative externalities often get discounted by people who inflict them but don’t suffer from them. That’s why, even for a classical liberal, public health might be a matter for state intervention: Individuals should internalize the costs they inflict on others, and if they don’t, it may be acceptable to compel them to.

Thus classical liberal accounts of state action have often supported the idea that the state should act to prevent contagious disease. And the details? These, purportedly, are a matter for medical science to figure out, and it should go without saying that balancing and judgment will be necessary along the way to preserve a decent quality of life. After all, we’re trying to minimize externalities in aggregate, not just trying to minimize the one externality that we’re newly worried about.

Unfortunately, much action has been well characterized by the old saw, “Something must be done. This is something. We must do it.” The Twitter account @YearCovid, which is doing a one-year retrospective of news about the pandemic, has just helpfully reminded me that at this time last year, the U.K. government was banning private advertisements that urged individuals to buy and use cloth face masks.

That was a terrible idea. But it was something, and something had to be done. The U.K. wasn’t alone; “don’t wear a mask” was also the government-issued message in the U.S., at least at first. And long after it ceased being the message, the fact that it had been the message continued to serve as an excuse to go about life as normal. Which, I hate to say it, was not a good idea either.

Yes, wearing masks became compulsory, and compulsion is bad. But wearing masks in a dangerous respiratory pandemic is good. It remains good even if the government is for it, and even if the government was against it before they were for it. (Libertarians: If the government prohibited farting in a crowded elevator, would you go out of your way to fart in a crowded elevator? To extol the virtues of the elevator fart? To insist on it as a First Amendment right?)

The bungling didn’t end there. The popularity of lockdowns in the West seems to have been inspired by China’s initial efforts to contain and eliminate the virus. Those efforts were futile, and we now know that they were almost certainly doomed to fail. The only countries that have kept the virus out have been islands—which China is not—and they’ve only been able to do so for a limited time.

The fallback strategy of “two weeks to flatten the curve” at best bought a little time while easing the public into lockdowns, and business and school closures, of indefinite length. We were told that a test-and-trace system was in the works, though I doubt it ever really had a chance either. Delays in supplying effective, government-approved tests hurt from the start, and frequent asymptomatic transmission made contact tracing a fool’s errand.

A lot of state action has had little or no net benefit. Some of it has made effective private action much harder; some, as we have seen, has put well-intentioned people in a really awkward dilemma: Do we prefer disease or servitude? And some of it has been deadly—including unconscionable foot-dragging on vaccine approval while over a thousand people a day were dying. Perhaps, in an even better world than ours, the government would just let people medicate as they think best.

From early in the spring of last year, I have held onto two basic ideas: First, the pandemic is real, and it calls for a real response. And second, the most important part of that response, the part that will matter when it’s all over, will be the part that we did voluntarily. I am both pleased and appalled to say I think those views held up pretty well, and next time I hope we can let the more successful part of society, the private sector, take the lead more often.

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Should Businesses Focus Solely on Profits? Whole Foods’ John Mackey vs. Ayn Rand Institute’s Yaron Brook

8107005_thumbnail 4

At each of Whole Foods Market’s more than 500 American stores, managers ask every team member—from the meat clerks to the baristas to the janitorial staff—to orient their work around a shared purpose, which is to make natural and healthy food widely available. This goal, according to Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey, is in no way inconsistent with maximizing shareholder value, often seen as the essential purpose of a corporation. 

As Mackey writes in his new book about leadership, “At the heart of Conscious Capitalism is a radical refutation of the negative perceptions of business, and a rejection of the split between purpose and profit.” Mackey believes that this is the key to defending capitalism against those who condemn it for having no inspiring ideals. 

At a Reason-sponsored Soho Forum debate held on February 18, 2020, Ayn Rand Institute Chairman of the Board Yaron Brook challenged this view. He believes that maximizing profit should always be the primary goal of companies, and it’s that focus which explains why capitalism has lifted the broad masses out of poverty. That’s the message businesses should be emphasizing, he said, and it’s inspiring enough.

The debate, which played out in front of 200 people in The Villages, Florida, was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein. It was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the winner is the person who moves the most people in his direction.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser and John Osterhoudt.

Photo: Whole Foods Market; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Event photos, Brett Raney

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Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending

scott-webb-KesWZ9GyJ5k-unsplash

Oh, the extreme places they’ll go. Last week, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would no longer publish six Seuss books said to contain racially offensive imagery, foes of cancel culture (this author among them) cried foul. Many others shrugged, noting correctly that this isn’t an issue of censorship: A book publisher is free to decide it wants to cease publishing a very old book.

But now those books are being pulled from the shelves of some public libraries as well. “We are part of the broader community who have identified these books as being harmful,” Manny Figueiredo, director of education for a school board in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. “The delivery of education must ensure that no child experiences harm from the resources that are shared.”

A journalist for the Toronto Star issued an impassioned plea for more libraries to take action—and for Dr. Seuss Enterprises to make amends for its historical failures.

It’s not just Canada: The Chicago Public Library system agreed to remove the six books in question—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer—pending an investigation.

Disappearing books from library shelves gets us closer to the classic example of censorship, though of course a physical library possesses a finite amount of space and thus has to consider certain priorities. What’s happening to Dr. Seuss is the result of a very specific kind of prioritization, however: One decided upon not by readers or the public at large, but by activist educators peddling a false narrative about the beloved child author’s books and characters.

This narrative—the result of a highly misleading 2019 report on “Orientalism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books”—has quickly become influential, motivating much of the recent shift away from Seuss among certain government officials, educators, libraries, and even private publishers. Learning for Justice, an outgrowth of the undeservedly well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center, cited the report as evidence that it had misjudged The Sneetches, a Seuss story about a group of birds—some with stars on their bellies, some without—who eventually come to realize that their superficial physical differences don’t matter at all:

At Teaching Tolerance, we’ve even featured anti-racist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches. But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as “anti-racist” as we once thought. …

The solution to the story’s conflict is that the Plain-Belly Sneetches and Star-Bellied Sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed. As a result, they accept one another. This message of “acceptance” does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn’t address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.

They actually had it right the first time. But nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue. The former is an egalitarian message at the heart of many Dr. Seuss books; the latter is a smokescreen for all sorts of policies that have very little to do with combating racism: like abolishing standardized tests or spending more time renaming schools than reopening them.

There is certainly no obligation to read or teach Dr. Seuss, nor should Seuss defenders feel some moral or practical imperative to gloss over his imperfections. The man did draw racist caricatures, and some of his work can be read as a defense of Japanese internment. He was a flawed genius—but a genius nonetheless, and a towering figure in the world of children’s literature. There is a disturbing trend among modern liberalism to seek to cast out all such flawed figures, which has the rest of us reasonably worried that no art or artist more than a few years old can possibly stand the test of time. (For another example of this, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently accused Pepe Le Pew, the lovesick skunk from Looney Tunes, of perpetuating rape culture.)

There’s not really a law or policy that could fix this problem—though Sonny Bunch’s proposal to release now unpublishable works into the public domain is an interesting one—and so much of the pro-Seuss grousing in nonliberal circles can feel as performative as the anti-Seuss extremism. Yet there’s good reason in this case to regard the slippery slope with suspicion. The report that led to the cancellation of the six books also stipulates that The Cat in the Hat embodies a “racist tradition” and that Horton Hears a Who! “reinforces themes of white supremacy.”

I would not be surprised to find the entire Seuss canon under attack a few years from now. To quote the last lines of The Butter Battle Book, “Who’s gonna drop it? Will you or will he?” (To which the narrator’s grandpa replies: “Be patient. We’ll see. We will see.”)

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Elite Media Run Press Releases for Biden’s COVID Bill

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No, the COVID bill won’t end poverty or “snuff out the pandemic.” With a $1.9 trillion spending package passed by the Senate over the weekend—bringing (among many other things) a round of $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans—right-leaning media outlets have been taking heat for focusing on the royal family, on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s creepiness, on China, on random outrage bait… basically, anything else. You can see it on their front pages yesterday afternoon and again this morning. Since there’s a lot to criticize in the recent spending package, it’s strange that instead of taking this opportunity to actually engage in a little conservative analysis, conservative media outlets would rather serve up fluff and manufactured scandals. But whatever—these are explicitly ideological publications, and I have a hard time getting worked up about how they choose to spin.

Much more disturbing is fawning coverage of the COVID-19 relief bill from ostensibly neutral news outlets.

The bill does a whole lot more than extend federal unemployment benefits and send Americans money, and only about 5 percent of the spending is actually going toward pandemic-related public health efforts, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). But you wouldn’t know this from reading most mainstream coverage, which merely describes the coronavirus relief parts in glowingly positive terms and gives Biden credit for all of it.

The Washington Post headline and tweet about the bill passing read more like propaganda from an authoritarian country than the kind of thing we should be seeing in a free press, saying that the bill “showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency.”

While previous rounds of stimulus checks were treated as a nice but stopgap gesture (“The $1,200 stimulus checks are arriving. People are mostly spending them on food“), this time sending American families one-time payments will sharply cut poverty?

Not to be outdone, Bloomberg credits the spending package with having the ability to “snuff out the pandemic” entirely.

Bloomberg also lauds Biden’s “quiet style” that “belies a deep agenda for reshaping the U.S.” One might expect Bloomberg to at least lay out some pros and cons of reshaping the country, but the article presents Biden proposals exactly as they’re described in Democratic press releases. It offers no hint of awareness that the Biden administration saying something targets (insert bad thing here) doesn’t always mean it lives up to the hype. It touts the number of executive orders Biden has signed without detailing the content of those orders, without mentioning that former President Donald Trump took a lot of flack for wielding executive power in this way, and without questioning whether executive governance by fiat is really the best thing. The only thing the article really faults Biden for is not reshaping the country more quickly.

In a piece purporting to be a simple explainer about what the COVID-19 package will do, The New York Times celebrates “President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus plan” for the $1,400 checks, unemployment benefits extension, child tax credit, Affordable Care Act subsidies, and sending money to local governments and schools. It faults the package only for not including a federal minimum wage hike.

The Times explainer does not note that state and local governments are actually doing pretty well during the pandemic and don’t need a federal cash infusion. It does not note that most of the money for schools won’t actually go toward helping them reopen. (As Reason‘s Eric Boehm notes, “the bill spends $129 billion on K-12 education” but most of it won’t be distributed until after 2021 and some not until 2024.)

It does not say anything about the massive tax hike on businesses like Airbnb and Etsy, nor the new privacy concerns it will raise for people who use these websites.

It does not mention the massive bailout for failing pensions (that’s tucked away in a separate article on the Times business page), nor note that roughly 95 percent of the spending has nothing to do with public health and the pandemic.

FREE MINDS

Virginia vote on Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) doesn’t count, says judge. A group of Democratic attorneys general sued to try and force the feds to recognize Virginia’s vote to ratify the ERA, even though the deadline for ratification came and went decades ago. From the Associated Press:

The lawsuit dismissed by a federal judge Friday sought to add the amendment to the Constitution.

After Virginia became the 38th to ratify the amendment that supporters say will guarantee women equal rights under the law, the archivist of the United States declared he would take no step to certify the amendment’s adoption….

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring says he’s considering an appeal.

FREE MARKETS

South Carolina considers making it easier for women to buy birth control. “A bill that would allow pharmacists to directly give birth control to women in South Carolina without a prescription is heading to the Senate floor,” reports A.P.

The Senate Medical Affairs Committee approved the bill Thursday.

Senators said they expect to discuss a few changes to the bill on the floor, including whether pharmacists will be required to discuss birth control directly with women before handing it over or if the information can be in written form.

QUICK HITS

• Biden is gearing up to roll back Trump administration changes to Title IX (the law governing campus sex discrimination and rape) that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put in place to help ensure some due process for those accused. He’s also creating a Gender Policy Council.

• Guess who admitted that Vice President Kamala Harris and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra violated the First Amendment?

• Steve Chapman on why decriminalizing prostitution is an idea whose time has come.

• Gun background check bills are coming to Congress once again.

• Biden’s new antitrust advisor is bad news for tech companies.

• Republicans don’t understand the First Amendment, part 8 million.

• Switzerland now mandates covering your face in public…but not too much of it.

• Are millennials to blame for the weird housing market of 2020 and 2021?

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Introducing the Academic Freedom Alliance

Today the Academic Freedom Alliance goes public. I am honored to serve as the inaugural chair of the AFA’s Academic Committee, and the founding members include some of my Volokh Conspiracy co-bloggers. The group boasts a broad and diverse coalition of over 200 academics from across the country who are committed to upholding the principles of free speech in academia. I am particularly pleased that we were able to pull together faculty from across the political spectrum who recognize a common threat to scholarly inquiry and robust debate on college campuses and who are willing to defend those principles whether individual professors are targeted from the left or the right, from forces on campus or off.

From the mission statement:

The Academic Freedom Alliance is an alliance of college and university faculty members who are dedicated to upholding the principle of academic freedom. This principle is central to the mission of our institutions for the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Our members from across the political spectrum recognize that an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere.

The AFA commits to two means of protecting academic freedom. First, our members will defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens, within established ethical and legal bounds; freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment; and freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.

Second, the AFA will aid in providing legal support to faculty whose academic freedom is threatened by institutions’ or officials’ violations of constitutional, statutory, contractual, or school-based rights.

The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities. Recognizing the array of political viewpoints in a college or university that respects academic freedom, the AFA’s defense of faculty members’ academic freedom does not depend on viewpoint, nor does it endorse the content of what they express. What we defend is members’ right of expression.

You can see more information about the AFA at its website. You can follow the AFA on Twitter at @AFA_Alliance.

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Elite Media Run Press Releases for Biden’s COVID Bill

spnphotosten183817(1)(1)

No, the COVID bill won’t end poverty or “snuff out the pandemic.” With a $1.9 trillion spending package passed by the Senate over the weekend—bringing (among many other things) a round of $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans—right-leaning media outlets have been taking heat for focusing on the royal family, on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s creepiness, on China, on random outrage bait… basically, anything else. You can see it on their front pages yesterday afternoon and again this morning. Since there’s a lot to criticize in the recent spending package, it’s strange that instead of taking this opportunity to actually engage in a little conservative analysis, conservative media outlets would rather serve up fluff and manufactured scandals. But whatever—these are explicitly ideological publications, and I have a hard time getting worked up about how they choose to spin.

Much more disturbing is fawning coverage of the COVID-19 relief bill from ostensibly neutral news outlets.

The bill does a whole lot more than extend federal unemployment benefits and send Americans money, and only about 5 percent of the spending is actually going toward pandemic-related public health efforts, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). But you wouldn’t know this from reading most mainstream coverage, which merely describes the coronavirus relief parts in glowingly positive terms and gives Biden credit for all of it.

The Washington Post headline and tweet about the bill passing read more like propaganda from an authoritarian country than the kind of thing we should be seeing in a free press, saying that the bill “showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency.”

While previous rounds of stimulus checks were treated as a nice but stopgap gesture (“The $1,200 stimulus checks are arriving. People are mostly spending them on food“), this time sending American families one-time payments will sharply cut poverty?

Not to be outdone, Bloomberg credits the spending package with having the ability to “snuff out the pandemic” entirely.

Bloomberg also lauds Biden’s “quiet style” that “belies a deep agenda for reshaping the U.S.” One might expect Bloomberg to at least lay out some pros and cons of reshaping the country, but the article presents Biden proposals exactly as they’re described in Democratic press releases. It offers no hint of awareness that the Biden administration saying something targets (insert bad thing here) doesn’t always mean it lives up to the hype. It touts the number of executive orders Biden has signed without detailing the content of those orders, without mentioning that former President Donald Trump took a lot of flack for wielding executive power in this way, and without questioning whether executive governance by fiat is really the best thing. The only thing the article really faults Biden for is not reshaping the country more quickly.

In a piece purporting to be a simple explainer about what the COVID-19 package will do, The New York Times celebrates “President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus plan” for the $1,400 checks, unemployment benefits extension, child tax credit, Affordable Care Act subsidies, and sending money to local governments and schools. It faults the package only for not including a federal minimum wage hike.

The Times explainer does not note that state and local governments are actually doing pretty well during the pandemic and don’t need a federal cash infusion. It does not note that most of the money for schools won’t actually go toward helping them reopen. (As Reason‘s Eric Boehm notes, “the bill spends $129 billion on K-12 education” but most of it won’t be distributed until after 2021 and some not until 2024.)

It does not say anything about the massive tax hike on businesses like Airbnb and Etsy, nor the new privacy concerns it will raise for people who use these websites.

It does not mention the massive bailout for failing pensions (that’s tucked away in a separate article on the Times business page), nor note that roughly 95 percent of the spending has nothing to do with public health and the pandemic.

FREE MINDS

Virginia vote on Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) doesn’t count, says judge. A group of Democratic attorneys general sued to try and force the feds to recognize Virginia’s vote to ratify the ERA, even though the deadline for ratification came and went decades ago. From the Associated Press:

The lawsuit dismissed by a federal judge Friday sought to add the amendment to the Constitution.

After Virginia became the 38th to ratify the amendment that supporters say will guarantee women equal rights under the law, the archivist of the United States declared he would take no step to certify the amendment’s adoption….

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring says he’s considering an appeal.

FREE MARKETS

South Carolina considers making it easier for women to buy birth control. “A bill that would allow pharmacists to directly give birth control to women in South Carolina without a prescription is heading to the Senate floor,” reports A.P.

The Senate Medical Affairs Committee approved the bill Thursday.

Senators said they expect to discuss a few changes to the bill on the floor, including whether pharmacists will be required to discuss birth control directly with women before handing it over or if the information can be in written form.

QUICK HITS

• Biden is gearing up to roll back Trump administration changes to Title IX (the law governing campus sex discrimination and rape) that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put in place to help ensure some due process for those accused. He’s also creating a Gender Policy Council.

• Guess who admitted that Vice President Kamala Harris and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra violated the First Amendment?

• Steve Chapman on why decriminalizing prostitution is an idea whose time has come.

• Gun background check bills are coming to Congress once again.

• Biden’s new antitrust advisor is bad news for tech companies.

• Republicans don’t understand the First Amendment, part 8 million.

• Switzerland now mandates covering your face in public…but not too much of it.

• Are millennials to blame for the weird housing market of 2020 and 2021?

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Introducing the Academic Freedom Alliance

Today the Academic Freedom Alliance goes public. I am honored to serve as the inaugural chair of the AFA’s Academic Committee, and the founding members include some of my Volokh Conspiracy co-bloggers. The group boasts a broad and diverse coalition of over 200 academics from across the country who are committed to upholding the principles of free speech in academia. I am particularly pleased that we were able to pull together faculty from across the political spectrum who recognize a common threat to scholarly inquiry and robust debate on college campuses and who are willing to defend those principles whether individual professors are targeted from the left or the right, from forces on campus or off.

From the mission statement:

The Academic Freedom Alliance is an alliance of college and university faculty members who are dedicated to upholding the principle of academic freedom. This principle is central to the mission of our institutions for the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Our members from across the political spectrum recognize that an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere.

The AFA commits to two means of protecting academic freedom. First, our members will defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens, within established ethical and legal bounds; freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment; and freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.

Second, the AFA will aid in providing legal support to faculty whose academic freedom is threatened by institutions’ or officials’ violations of constitutional, statutory, contractual, or school-based rights.

The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities. Recognizing the array of political viewpoints in a college or university that respects academic freedom, the AFA’s defense of faculty members’ academic freedom does not depend on viewpoint, nor does it endorse the content of what they express. What we defend is members’ right of expression.

You can see more information about the AFA at its website. You can follow the AFA on Twitter at @AFA_Alliance.

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City Council Member’s Harassment Restraining Order Against Critics Reversed

Carlsbad City Council member Cori Schumacher got a temporary civil harassment restraining order against Carlsbad resident Tony Bona and former resident Noel Breen over their speech, essentially claiming their speech about her was threatening; they moved to dismiss under the California anti-SLAPP statute, and on Thursday, Superior Court Judge Cynthia Freeland granted the defendants’ motion (filed by lawyer Erik Jenkins). A bit of factual background, from The Coast News (Steve Puterski):

Court documents show Bona’s posts centered on rumors Schumacher didn’t actually live in the district she represented and should be disqualified from holding public office.

In relation to the rumor, Bona shared an image of a cartoon character from the children’s book “Where’s Waldo,” writing that instead of finding Waldo, residents should join him in playing a game of “Where’s Cori?”  The rumors about Schumacher’s residence have since been debunked….

Schumacher also claimed a YouTube video on Bona’s channel “Regular Guy in Carlsbad” constituted harassment. The video in question featured a clown face superimposed over Schumacher’s head during a Carlsbad City Council meeting and later exploded from “apparent confusion,” per Freeland’s ruling.

Here’s an excerpt from the tentative order, which Judge Freeland adopted as her final order:

[T]o obtain a CHRO [civil harassment restraining order], Schumacher must prove through clear and convincing evidence that she suffered … “unlawful violence, a credible threat of violence, or a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously annoys, or harasses the person, and that serves no legitimate purpose.” A “credible threat of violence” is a “knowing and willful statement or course of conduct that would place a reasonable person in fear for the person’s safety or the safety of the person’s immediate family, and that serves no legitimate purpose.” “Constitutionally protected activity is not included within the meaning of ‘course of conduct.”‘ …

{Schumacher [argues] that the request for a civil harassment restraining order “only arises from specific threats that were made to (a) force Petitioner to move out of her home, (b) surveil and stalk Petitioner using ‘high tech surveillance,’ and (c) threatening to blow Petitioner up with a bomb by posting a video of an explosion superimposed over her speaking.”} [But the speech here is not punishable threats.] Bona commented on a Facebook post about a council meeting after previously asking Schumacher to step down that she should get ready to “move” out of the city…. Bona posted about neighbors surveilling her [apparently in relation to the rumors that she didn’t actually live in the city -EV] alongside a picture of Waldo and the words “Where’s Cory?” … Bona added a brief animated explosion similar to a comic book (along with various other animations added to the video) over Schumacher’s face in the middle of a council meeting that appears to reference Schumacher’s head exploding from confusion.

Neither Bona’s “non-neighborly” comments on Nextdoor, his [California Public Records Act] request, nor his threat to sue over unanswered questions about COVID during a Facebook Live event provide context that would lead a reasonable person to believe that he intended to physically force Schumacher from her home, join forces with the neighborhood to unlawfully stalk her through high tech surveillance at the expense of her safety, or build a bomb. Simply calling these posts threats is not enough; some modicum of clear and convincing evidence is required to establish a prima facie case….

The result is the same as to Breen. Merely comparing Schumacher’s leadership to that of East Germany is not a threat to her safety, but rather pure political criticism. Although many people may disagree, or find such a comparison to be crude and offensive method of stating his opposition, even unpopular opinions are entitled to protection. Nothing in the August 9, 2020 blog post Schumacher submitted can reasonably be construed as a threat to her safety or other unconstitutional activity.

The same is true of the September 7, 2020 blog post Schumacher submits that repeatedly includes the term “GTFO.” … [T]he blog post itself notes it is “borrow[ing] a line from the Councilwoman” that she had put “squarely in the public domain”—an apparent reference to Schumacher’s August 21, 2020 Twitter post telling [Tony Krvaric (chairman of the San Diego Republican Party)] to take his “brand of white nationalist, regressive, traditionalist/authoritarian toxic & destructive politics” and “GTFO of North County.” Breen’s blog post thereafter uses GTFO not as a threat to Schumacher, but as a mantra with phrases like “Never again will ‘guilt by association’ carry the day GTFO” and “Never again will you be bullied into silence GTFO.”

[T]he Court does not consider whether Breen’s unpled conduct cornering Schumacher and monopolizing her time at political events in years past would independently entitle her to a CHRO. But even if the Court considers the evidence for the purpose of putting the pleaded allegations (Breen’s blog) in context, this evidence simply does not color these posts from a year later as threats that Breen would physically force Schumacher from her home or otherwise put her in physical danger. The only reasonable interpretation of these posts is political commentary, not personal threats….

A hearing is scheduled for next month on Bona’s and Breen’s motions seeking attorneys’ fees (which are allowed to defendants who are sued based on their speech and then prevail on an anti-SLAPP motion).

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qrHvVs
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