Category: reason

Veronique de Rugy takes on Trump’s trade war in her latest column for Reason:

“We’re putting the trade war on hold,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced on Sunday. “It’s about structural changes. It’s about lowering tariffs. China has committed to lower tariffs on many things and made structural changes to protect our technology.”

Alas, that didn’t settle the issue. Several hours later, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer reaffirmed his belief that tariffs remained an important tool to “protect our technology.” Finally, on Wednesday, the president tweeted that “Our Trade Deal with China is moving along nicely, but in the end we will probably have to use a different structure in that this will be too hard to get done and to verify results after completion.”

I am not sure what Trump means by “a different structure.” Nor am I sure what a new framework would require. And I’m certainly not sure there’s any upside to trying to make sense of all these conflicting statements.

View this article.

Trump won’t talk ’til learning more about “Spygate” briefing. Rudy Giuliani told HuffPost yesterday that “we could probably decide by June 12 whether [President Donald Trump will] testify” before federal prosecutors about potential “collusion” between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The decision, said Giuliani, hangs on how much is revealed to Trump about the Justice Department’s probe into what Trump is determined to call “Spygate,” involving the FBI’s use of a confidential informant to talk to people within Trump’s orbit as part of the bureau’s Russian-influence investigation.

Giuliani also told HuffPost that if he had his druthers, the president would keep quiet. “I would not like to talk to Mueller at all. I don’t see what you gain from that.” However, Trump “has a strong view that he should testify,” Giuliani added. “He believes he’s telling the truth: He didn’t collude with the Russians and he didn’t obstruct justice.”

Eight lawmakers from both parties met yesterday with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for a classified briefing on the FBI informant used to monitor the Trump campaign. Their meeting followed a Justice Department briefing for House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R–S.C.), and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Also in the room: Trump’s lawyer, Emmet T. Flood, and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. Their presence raised immediate suspicions and outrage from Democrats, but Flood and Kelly left the room before the confidential part of the meeting began, according to a White House statement.

Emmet Flood’s presence and statement at the outset of both meetings today was completely inappropriate, and I told him so. It only underscores what Rudy Giuliani said: the President’s legal team expects to improperly obtain and use such information for their defense.

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 24, 2018

Democrats were unimpressed by the briefing. “Nothing we heard today has changed our view that there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump Campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols,” Schiff tweeted after the briefing.

RUDY tells @dsamuelsohn that today’s briefing will inform Trump’s legal defense:

“We want to see how the briefing went to today and how much we learned from it. If we learned a good deal from it, it will shorten that whole process considerably.”

Exactly what Dems feared.

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 24, 2018

Giuliani told Politico yesterday that if “we learned a good deal from [the briefings], it will shorten that whole process considerably.” As for the fact that the briefings were classified, Giuliani seemed unconcerned. “I don’t want the guy’s identity,” he said. “I don’t want classified information. What I need to know is, ‘What’s the basis for their doing it?’ Most important, ‘What did the informant produce?'”

FREE MINDS

Feds monitor social media, and the ACLU wants answers. The American Civil Liberties Union wants to know why federal authorities have been doing so much social-media surveillance. On Tuesday, the group submitted a Freedom of Information Act request “for records pertaining to social media surveillance, including the monitoring and retention of immigrants’ and visa applicants’ social media information for the purpose of conducting ‘extreme vetting.'” The group seeks information on social-media monitoring by the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

“Multiple federal agencies are increasingly relying on social media surveillance to monitor the speech, activities, and associations of U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike,” says the request:

Government surveillance of social media raises serious constitutional and privacy concerns. Most online speech reflects no wrongdoing whatsoever and is fully protected by the First Amendment. Protected speech and beliefs—particularly expression or association of a political, cultural, or religious nature—should not serve as the sole or predominant basis for surveillance, investigation, or watchlisting.

FREE MARKETS

Federal agents nix “Toke Back Mountain.” The feds are cracking down on cannabis-infused brews again. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is going after San Francisco Black Hammer Brewing, ordering the small brewery to stop selling its “Toke Back Mountain” beer.

Launched last year, Toke Back Mountain is made with cannabidiol (CBD) extract derived from hemp plants. CBD is prized more for potential health benefits than giving uses a high. Alas, the beer still runs afoul of federal law.

In a bittersweet way, the alcohol agency’s cease-and-desist here represents an improvement in our country’s insane drug policies. Black Hammer Brewing isn’t in trouble for running afoul of the federal government’s persistant ban on marijuana and its non-psychoactive cousin hemp. It ran afoul of a more mundane regulation: foregoing special approval to add a “non-standard beer ingredient” to their brew.

Black Hammer Brewing says it will now apply for approval to legally sell the CBD beer.

QUICK HITS

• Harvey Weinstein has turned himself over to the New York City Police Department.
• Elon Musk is entirely wrong about how news works, writes Justin Fox at Bloomberg.
• Pacific Northwest mussels are testing positive for the opioid painkiller oxycodone.
• Ireland votes today on whether to legalize abortion.
• Sweden says sex without affirmative consent is rape.

San Francisco is famously America’s most expensive city. That means there’s all kinds of political agitation for rent regulations and other affordable housing mandates. But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the city’s rent control laws help a certain set of haves while costing a larger set of have-nots.

In 1994, the City by the Bay imposed rent regulations via ballot initiative on “small multifamily housing built prior to 1980.” This allowed Stanford researchers to compare units constructed before and after that year. As might be expected, rent control helped keep people where they already were, with “the beneficiaries of rent control…between 10 and 20 [percent] more likely to remain at their 1994 address relative to the control group.” The longer you’ve been stationary and the older you are, the stronger that effect, writes Brian Doherty in the latest edition of Reason.

View this article.

Is it still possible to get worked up about a Star Wars movie? Three of them have been released in just the last two and a half years, and now—on the 41^st anniversary of the very first film’s debut—comes Solo: A Star Wars Story. I don’t think many people are likely to see this picture as a cultural event, or were even hankering for it to be made. It’s basically an old-school Saturday-serial b-movie—which of course is exactly the sort of picture that inspired the whole Star Wars project.

It’s a pretty good b-movie, too. The story is silly, but it’s fun, and so are the effects, especially the ones used to create the several new creatures we see, who are replete with nose hoses and eyeball stalks and all manner of other exotic whatnot. There’s also a really big caterpillar thingy called Lady Proxima, who’s much less gracious than her name might suggest; and lots of galactic action too, naturally, writes Kurt Loder in his review of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

View this article.

Sudanese security forces shut down a press conference planned by the attorney of a teen who was sentenced to death for killing a man she was forced to marry. Noura Hussein says the man raped her as his relatives held her down. Human rights activists say shutting down the press conference was just the latest move by the government to keep media from reporting on the case, which has drawn attention to the problem of forced marriage in the country.

President Donald Trump’s decision to take the first step toward imposing tariffs on imported cars and trucks is probably best understood as a bargaining chip in his administration’s ongoing efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the official rationale for the tariffs makes zero sense.

On Wednesday, Trump told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to begin an investigation into whether the U.S. should slap new tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs unilaterally for “national security” reasons. It’s the same process Trump used to craft the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports he announced in early March.

“There is evidence suggesting that, for decades, imports from abroad have eroded our domestic auto industry,” Ross said in a press release. The Commerce Department’s investigation, he said, will determine if “such imports are weakening our internal economy and may impair the national security.”

When Trump sought to impose the steel and aluminum tariffs, the Commerce Department conducted a similar investigation and determined that importing those commodities was indeed a national security threat. Because American weapons of war depend on steel and aluminum supplies, the department concluded, domestic producers must be protected from international supplies that could be cut off in the event of a conflict.

It was not a good argument, but it was supported by the American steel producers who stood to benefit from the tariffs, and it made some sense if you ignored basic facts. For instance, the largest exporter of aluminum to the United States is Canada, a nation that also happens to be one of America’s closest allies. Any scenario where Canada restricts aluminum exports to weaken U.S. national security is a future where Washington has much bigger problems than aluminum imports.

The argument for car tariffs is even weaker. “This isn’t about national security,” Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. The American automobile industry employs 50 percent more people than it did in 2011, Donohue noted, and domestic production has doubled in the last decade.

Those indicators do not suggest an industry in need of protection. Nor do they suggest anything that can accurately be described as a threat to national security. What the White House is really trying to do is apply pressure on Canada and Mexico ahead of an expected effort to renegotiate NAFTA later this year. “The president’s Section 232 authorities should not be abused in this way,” Donohue said, and “doing so only encourages other nations to do the same.”

The possible tariff also drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

“The Honda Accord is not a threat to our national security. However, taxing it with trade tariffs is a threat to the economic security of millions of hardworking American families,” Hensarling said. “Trade laws designed to uphold critical national security measures should never be used as an excuse for raw protectionism.”

Trump’s willingness to use bullshit arguments for unnecessary economic protectionism does seem to have made an impression on America’s top trading partners. “I have the growing impression that the U.S. no longer believes in the competition of ideas, but only the law of power,” Eric Schweitzer, president of the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told Bloomberg News. “It fills me with grave concern.”

As it probably should. If the Commerce Department concludes that Trump can use the “national security” rationale to slap tariffs on automotive imports, the definition of that phrase will have been stretched so far that it is effectively meaningless. The same argument could be used for tariffs on literally anything.

As with all tariffs, consumers stand to lose again. “To our knowledge, no one is asking for this protection,” John Bozzella, CEO of Global Automakers, a trade group, said in a statement. “This path leads inevitably to fewer choices and higher prices for cars and trucks in America.”

After months of debate, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that will allow patients with life-threatening diseases to use experimental treatments without the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. The Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act of 2017, which the Senate approved in August 2017, now heads to President Trump, who has promised to sign it.

To be covered by the bill, treatments have to complete Phase 1 of the clinical trial process, which is the most basic safety assessment. The bill does not compel doctors to participate in Right to Try treatment protocols. Nor does it require pharmaceutical companies to provide experimental treatments to patients who request them.

An earlier House version of the bill was restricted to patients who had reached “a stage of a disease or condition in which there is reasonable likelihood that death will occur within a matter of months,” or who were suffering from a disease “that would result in significant irreversible morbidity that is likely to lead to severely premature death.” The version approved this week, by contrast, covers anyone with a “life-threatening disease.”

The bill provides some legal protection for both doctors and drug companies in the event that an experimental treatment hastens a patient’s death or causes some other undesirable side effect. The bill also requires drug companies to report any adverse effects to the FDA. Right to Try proponents say reporting such outcomes will not affect the approval process for the drug unless an adverse reaction reveals a fundamental danger.

Whether passage of this bill is a good news for patients depends on whom you ask. Medscape has rounded up reactions from various corners of the health care world. The conventional wisdom says no one should consume anything that has not completed all three phases of FDA clinical trials and been approved by the agency. A sample reaction:

The legislation “opens the gate to a dangerous, uncharted pathway for accessing experimental medications that have not been shown to be safe or effective,” said Michael A. Carome, MD, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, in a statement. “The bill passed today will expose vulnerable patients to risks of serious harm, including dying earlier and more painfully than they otherwise would have, without appropriate safeguards.”

Carome and other opponents of the bill argue that the FDA’s “expanded access” program (a.k.a. “compassionate use”) does everything Right to Try would while providing an additional layer of patient protection. Other critics have argued that Right to Try will divert patients from clinical trials. These talking points are at odds with each other: If patients don’t need Right to Try because they can already obtain unapproved treatments through expanded access, but expanded access is not draining the pool of clinical trial participants, why would Right to Try?

The libertarian Goldwater Institute, a leader in the contemporary Right to Try movement, is very pleased:

“Today’s vote is a win for patients. Millions of Americans who have been told they are out of options and it’s time to get their affairs in order, are closer to having the opportunity for one last treatment, without having to get permission from the federal government first,” said Victor Riches, president & CEO of the Goldwater Institute. “Members of Congress came together to put patients first and we’re grateful for their support for this bipartisan, grassroots movement powered by real patients in all 50 states.”

The free market Heartland Institute also supports the bill. “Now, at long last, American patients and their families can have hope that a life-saving drug will no longer be denied to them because of bureaucratic barriers,” Heartland President Tim Huelskamp said in a statement emailed to reporters. “They will no longer be barred from trying to save their lives.”

I think Robert Graboyes at the Mercatus Center has the most concise summary, contained in an email from Mercatus, of what’s at stake:

Effectively, the law grants patients, doctors, and drug manufacturers greater decision-making authority and greater capacity to assume risks. The practical importance of the law remains to be seen. Opponents of the new law argue that the FDA’s compassionate use waivers already get investigational drugs into patients’ hands early on; supporters argue that the administrative burdens of the waiver program discourage its use. Now, we’ll get a better idea of who is correct.

Results will be interesting. The FDA has always had a seen-and-unseen problem in its incentives. Patients who suffer adverse outcomes from using experimental drugs are relatively easy to identify, while those who suffer for lack of experimental drugs are largely unidentified and unseen. In more concrete terms, it’s easier to point a TV camera at the first group than it is at the second group. That asymmetry could still frustrate the intent of the new law. Time and experience will tell.

Earlier this year, I dug a little deeper into why a federal Right to Try bill might not move the needle much. The short version is that incentives are aligned for pretty much everyone except the drug companies. Some patients might get to try treatments that could extend their lives, and their doctors would get to bypass insurance companies (because no insurer is going to touch a Right to Try treatment) and forgo the FDA’s paperwork.

But I’m not sure what’s in it for drug companies. Right to Try data won’t be randomly controlled, which means they won’t help make the case for FDA approval. An adverse outcome, meanwhile, could hurt a drug’s chances of approval even if its role in that outcome is hard to measure in an uncontrolled treatment setting. As Graboyes says, the only thing we can do now is wait for the market to react and hope for the best.

Improperly stacked wood. A cracked driveway. Chipped paint on a porch.

These are the kinds of offenses the government of Doraville, Georgia, is using to fine residents and threaten them with jail, all in an explicit attempt to balance the budget of the 8,000-person Atlanta suburb. Now people hit by some of those fines are suing the city in federal court, arguing that its direct financial interest in convicting people tried by its municipal court violates the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee.

The lawsuit, filed by the Institute for Justice, “seeks to stop municipalities from budgeting to receive fines and fees,” says I.J. attorney Josh House. “Where you have a city that uses these numbers to balance its budget, you are creating an unconstitutional incentive to use the municipal court to balance this budget.”

From 2016 to 2017, Doraville pulled in about $3.5 million in fines, accounting for a quarter of the city’s budget. A 2017 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found that the town ranked sixth in the nation in the percentage of its budget coming from fines.

As Reason has covered extensively, the use of fines and penalties as a source of revenue, and cops and code enforcers as shadow tax collectors, is not limited to Doraville. But House says Doraville is unusually brazen. “This is a city that is unapologetic about its use of ticketing to raise money,” he says, pointing to this boast in a 2015 city government newsletter: “Averaging 15,000 cases and bringing in over $3 million annually, the court system contributes heavily to the city’s bottom line.”

The four plaintiffs in the case against Doraville include Hilda Brucker, who was summoned to municipal court in October 2016 by a court employee who said she had failed to appear for a hearing about code violations on her property. Brucker says she never received a warning or court summons and was never given a chance to correct the violations. She was nevertheless forced to defend herself against a city prosecutor who claimed she was guilty of three unabated violations, including a cracked driveway, overgrown weeds in her backyard, and a front porch with rotted boards and chipped paint.

Brucker was convicted of a misdemeanor and sentenced to a $100 fine and sixth months of probation. As conditions of her probation, Brucker was forced to report to a parole officer, avoid “alcoholic intoxication,” and cooperate with code enforcement on request. Failure to do any of these things could result in jail time. “It’s so ridiculous and ludicrous,” Brucker says in an Institute for Justice video. “No one asked me to fix the driveway. This is a neighborhood of very old driveways.”

Brucker’s neighbor Jeff Thorton was called before Doraville’s municipal court in July 2016 after being notified that an arrest warrant had been issued for a missed court date he claims he was never told about. Thornton’s crime was keeping a pile of wood in his backyard that did not conform to the city’s exacting requirement that logs be cut into squared segments four inches wide and eight inches long. He also was accused of having “boards, buckets, and trimmings” stacked against the side of his house.

In October 2016, Thornton was fined $1,000 for his wood pile. When Thornton protested that he could not afford the fine, his punishment was reduced to a $300 fine and 12 months of probation. When he claimed the $300 fine was still too steep, the charge was dropped entirely. “Doraville ceased its ticketing and collection efforts once it was clear that Jeff could not pay,” the Institute for Justice complaint says. “Public health or safety was never the point of its enforcement action against Jeff.”

The other two plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice are Janice Craig and Byron Billingsley, nonresidents who were stopped for traffic violations while driving through Doraville. Craig was charged with changing lanes “in a way that held up traffic,” while Billingsley was accused of changing lanes without signaling.

Doraville has a reputation as a speed trap, using its location on the Atlanta beltway to ticket freeway commuters for traffic offenses. A 2014 Atlanta Constitution-Journal investigation found that Doraville was raking in the same amount from traffic fines as nearby Roswell, which had a population nearly 10 times as large. Of the $3.4 million in fines that Doraville collected from August 2016 through August 2017, the complaint notes, nearly $1 million came from citations for driving without a valid license or valid registration.

House says Doraville’s ability to squeeze drivers helps explain why it relies on fines rather than tax revenue to fund basic municipal operations. “Most of the people ticketed are drivers,” he says. “They’re not actually residents. That means you can raise money on the backs of people who don’t live in your city and don’t vote for you.”

The Institute for Justice argues that Doraville’s practice of building ticket revenue into its budget, which encourages enforcement efforts aimed at meeting the target, violates the due process rights of the people the city fines . “When you go to court, you expect your judge to be neutral,” he says. “You expect your prosecutor to not be paid as a direct consequence of convicting and fining people. That is fundamentally a due process problem.”

The idea that you have a First Amendment right to follow the president on Twitter, as a federal judge affirmed yesterday, may seem fanciful at first glance. But as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh noted here yesterday, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald’s reasoning is plausible in the context of the Supreme Court’s rulings on designated public forums, which cannot constitutionally exclude people based on their viewpoints. Public officials with social media accounts who don’t want to be sued for violating that rule can glean useful tips from Buchwald’s ruling:

It is still OK to ignore constituents who annoy you. Buchwald did not say the First Amendment requires that Donald Trump pay attention to his critics on Twitter. In fact, she said it would be constitutional for him to mute the accounts of users who irk him, meaning he need not even see their replies to his tweets. But she ruled that blocking their accounts went too far because it prevented them from directly participating in the “interactive space” associated with his tweets: the replies, the replies to replies, etc., which constitute a vigorous public debate about the president and his policies.

Keep it personal. If you don’t want to be sued for blocking nudniks on Twitter or Facebook, don’t present your account as the voice of your government office or agency. Buchwald notes that the @realDonaldTrump account, although created in 2009, currently is “registered to Donald J. Trump, ’45th President of the United States of America, Washington, D.C.'”; that Trump’s tweets have been deemed official records that must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act; that Daniel Scavino, the White House social media director, exercises control over the account, composing some of the tweets and posting others dictated by the president; and that Scavino has described @realDonaldTrump as a channel “through which ‘President Donald J. Trump…[c]ommunicat[es] directly with you, the American people!'”

Don’t conduct official business on your “personal” account. Buchwald notes that Trump, with Scavino’s help, uses the @realDonaldTrump account “to announce, describe, and defend his policies; to promote his Administration’s legislative agenda; to announce official decisions; to engage with foreign political leaders; to publicize state visits; to challenge media organizations whose coverage of his Administration he believes to be unfair; and for other statements, including on occasion statements unrelated to official government business.” Sometimes Trump announces a decision on Twitter before it is revealed in other forums, as he did when he nominated Christopher Wray to replace James Comey as FBI director, when he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, and when he declared that transgender people would be excluded from the military. “The @realDonaldTrump account,” Buchwald writes, “has been used in the course of the appointment of officers (including cabinet secretaries), the removal of officers, and the conduct of foreign policy—all of which are squarely executive functions.”

Don’t exclude people whose opinions offend you from a public discussion that is otherwise open to everyone. Quoting from facts stipulated by both sides in this case, Buchwald notes that “the @realDonaldTrump account is generally accessible to the public at large without regard to political affiliation or any other limiting criteria”; that “any member of the public can view [Trump’s] tweets”; and that “anyone [with a Twitter account] who wants to follow the account [on Twitter] can do so” unless he has been blocked. “Similarly,” she adds, “anyone with a Twitter account who has not been blocked may participate in the interactive space by replying or retweeting the President’s tweets.” Trump does not dispute that he blocked the seven Twitter users who brought this lawsuit because they said things that offended him.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who recently settled a lawsuit challenging censorship of public comments on his Facebook page, did not follow these guidelines. The page, which is presented as the voice of the governor’s office, features much the same material as you would expect on a government-run website, including announcements of new policies, praise of local heroes, and safety advisories. While generally allowing visitors to post comments, Hogan’s office warned that “comments may be removed or access may be restricted at any time without prior notice or without providing justification.” The governor’s staff deleted messages urging Hogan, a Republican, to condemn Trump’s ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. The people who wrote those messages were blocked from posting further comments.

Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudon County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors, made a similar mistake when she banned a local gadfly from her Facebook page after he posted a comment suggesting that members of the Loudon County School Board had taken official actions that benefited their relatives. Like Trump and Hogan, Randall presented her Facebook page, identified as that of “Chair Phyllis J. Randall,” as a function of her office and a conduit for communicating with her constituents.

“If the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence makes anything clear, it is that speech may not be disfavored by the government simply because it offends,” wrote U.S. District Judge James Cacheris when he ruled against Randall last year. “The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards. By prohibiting Plaintiff from participating in her online forum because she took offense at his claim that her colleagues in the County government had acted unethically, Defendant committed a cardinal sin under the First Amendment.”

Such decisions are misguided, National Review‘s David French suggests, because social media accounts are ultimately controlled by the companies that offer them. “Did Donald Trump create a forum ‘owned or controlled by the government’ when he decided to use his personal Twitter account for official purposes?” French asks. “The judge says yes. I disagree. In reality, the forum is owned entirely by Twitter, and it’s controlled entirely by Twitter.” French thinks Twitter’s terms of service, which warn that “we may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason,” mean that “using Twitter isn’t like renting out a concert hall.”

That’s true in a sense, of course, but it seems to me the relevant question is whether Trump in practice controls access to the forum created by his Twitter account. If a city rented a concert hall for a town meeting that was open to the general public, ejecting or excluding people based on their opinions would be clearly unconstitutional, even if the rental agreement included boilerplate stipulating that the landlord reserved the right to evacuate the hall “at any time for any or no reason.” By contrast, a mayor who rented the same space on his own dime for his daughter’s wedding would be free to choose the guests based on whatever criteria he liked. The social media accounts that got Trump, Hogan, and Randall into legal trouble seem a lot more like the town meeting than the wedding.

Donald Trump, who won the presidency in part by promising voters he would stand against the oppression of political correctness, is now taking a victory lap after successfully pressuring the National Football League to protect the delicate feelings of its snowflake audience.

The NFL announced yesterday that all players on the field during the singing of the national anthem would be forbidden to kneel, sit, or show any disrespect whatsoever. Teams that allow players to publicly protest racism and police brutality will be subject to fines. Players will be expected to confine their dissent to the locker room, concealing it from easily offended consumers of sports entertainment. GOP spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany summarized the new policy thusly during an appearance on Kennedy last night:

Players will respect our military, they will respect what our flag stands for and the unity of what our national anthem stands for, and if they don’t want to respect it, they can take a hike and go to the locker room. Now everyone has to respect our military, including multimillion-dollar football players.

The new policy is undoubtedly crafted to appease not just some viewers but Trump, who has repeatedly attacked the NFL for failing to punish the defiant players. “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms, but still, I think it’s good,” Trump said on Fox and Friends this morning. “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem, or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.” Vice President Mike Pence tweeted the news, adding a single remark: “#WINNING.”

Sadly, the NFL’s bowing to Trump’s whims may indeed be a win of sorts for this administration. It will please the many conservatives who routinely complain that the campus left is hypersensitive but embrace the victim role when the shoe is on the other foot. Just take a look at the Twitter feed of Turning Points USA Director Charlie Kirk, a well-known critic of political correctness on campus.

Kirk’s pinned tweet is video footage of him discussing campus culture with Sean Hannity, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. “College campuses have become a place where the administrators and the elites want everybody to look different but think the same,” Kirk explains. “And it’s all about conformity. If you have any point of dissension from the status quo of liberal orthodoxy, you will be punished.” Just under the pinned tweet is Kirk’s most recent tweet: “Stand for the national anthem!” Talk about conformity.

The NFL is of course a private entity, and requiring players to stand for the anthem isn’t a First Amendment violation. But as National Review‘s David French points out in a terrific New York Times op-ed piece, Google, Mozilla, and Yale are all private too. Yet conservatives see nothing wrong with bemoaning these entities’ internal crackdowns on speech. Indeed, concern that social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are censoring conservatives is now a major concern for the right. There was even a panel discussion about it at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Middlebury College shouldn’t sit idly by while students literally attack Charles Murray, and Twitter shouldn’t scrub all non-leftist views from its platform. They shouldn’t do those things because they have made commitments to the spirit of the First Amendment. They say free speech matters to them, and it is perfectly fair for conservatives to hold their feet to the fire when they fall short of those commitments.

But conservatives are being brazenly hypocritical when they celebrate the NFL’s decision to muzzle its players. The NFL might not have made any commitment to free expression, but its players were engaged in one of the most civil and least disruptive forms of protest imaginable. Saying that simply kneeling for the national anthem is so offensive that it must be confined to the locker room or banned outright reflects the same hypersensitivity that plagues the social justice left.

Ironically, the best defense of the NFL’s new protest ban is an argument most often put forward by leftists who defend disinvitations and shut-downs of offensive speakers on campus. I have frequently seen the following XKCD cartoon posted in response to such incidents:

Guys. The NFL ban on kneeling is absolutely awful and I hate it. It is anti free speech.
It is also 100% in line with the “showing you the door” attitude on free speech you’ve been pushing the last several years.
Please think hard about that. pic.twitter.com/M8tr47xTnK

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) May 24, 2018

The government was partly involved in the NFL case, since Trump’s displeasure was a motivating factor. But there’s little doubt the league was also trying to appease some viewers who were uncomfortable with the players’ protests. This is what comes from defending a safe-space mentality: more safe spaces, and not just on the campus quad but in football stadiums as well.