E-Pluribus | Apr. 14, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Tyler Martinez: Elites Will Rule If Sheldon Whitehouse Gets His Wish
While disclosure of donor lists for organizations filing friend of the court briefs in federal courts may seem like an obscure issue, Tyler Martinez at RealClear Policy makes the case that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s legislation, innocuously named the AMICUS Act is anything but. Rather than increasing transparency, the purported object of the bill, the AMICUS Act is likely to limit these briefs to an elite class that can afford to file them without outside financial backing, limiting the ability of others to influence cases under adjudication.
But Senator Whitehouse’s Amicus Act would demand even more information — namely, the donor list of the organization filing an amicus brief. Few, if any, organizations on either the left or right will risk giving up their donor lists for the sake of one of their policy experts to write an amicus brief. It essentially shuts down amicus work to only those who can pay a lawyer the thousands of dollars such briefs cost to produce — in other words, the rich and elite — like Senator Whitehouse himself.
Senator Whitehouse’s idea goes against decades of case law protecting private association under the First Amendment. This right was hard won by the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. Back then, Southern states sought to use similar disclosure laws to get the donor lists of the NAACP and other groups to harass and intimidate the people into not supporting the Civil Right movement. The Supreme Court intervened and held that the First Amendment protects the right of private association, particularly for controversial opinions.
Read the whole thing.
Paul Rossi: I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
At the risk of his job and possibly his career, teacher Paul Rossi writes at Bari Weiss‘s Common Sense that his school, like many others, is doing students a great disservice with so-called “antiracist” training. Rather than helping to increase understanding and promote unity, the programs promote guilt and fear and foster distrust among both faculty and students.
My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”
All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.
Read it all here.
Matt Taibbi: Due Process Is Good, He Said Controversially
Matt Taibbi has written much about inaccurate, sloppy or even malicious media stories that are often used to find the targets guilty in the court of public opinion, or at least support a narrative. In a recent post, Taibbi focuses on stories more narrowly focused on allegations of sexual misconduct and how, despite (or perhaps because of) the increased level of damage to reputations and careers that such accusations can provoke, the standards seem even lower in such cases, and neither the left nor right are exempt.
The only protection most have against accusations is in the law, and in whatever meager level of general respect the public maintains for it. In the Trump years, belief in concepts like the presumption of innocence started to erode among those who once believed most in them. Do people like Carter Page need reporters to weep for them? No, but there was never any evidence that Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” In fact, it turned out there was quite specific evidence that he worked with the C.I.A. against Russia. It should have been a basic issue of media propriety to be publicly sorry about that, even in brief, but it wasn’t.
[…]
That doesn’t mean running around proclaiming that O.J. didn’t do it or that such-and-such a politician isn’t an awful person who should probably be voted out of office. It doesn’t mean you can’t say something like, “Matt Gaetz should probably be jailed for his haircut alone.” It does mean distinctions exist and it’s good to know what you’re dealing with before strapping people in the dunking chair. This is particularly true in accusations of sex crime, where the public can quickly lose interest in rights, something organizations like the ACLU used to understand after watching debacles like the Wee Care and McMartin preschool cases.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter
The R Street Institute tries to correct some misinformation about… misinformation:
“Freedom of speech is a dangerous job,” especially in Hong Kong these days:
CNN’s Sara Sidner reports police in Brooklyn Center threatened to arrest journalists Tuesday night:
Due Process Is Good, He Said Controversially, Part II:
