What Happened Today: March 22, 2022
Jackson’s confirmation; Wages can’t keep up; Free speech freakout
The Big Story
Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson defended her record on sentencing guidelines in child pornography cases Tuesday as that and other criminal justice issues dominated the second day of her confirmation hearing. Overall, Jackson delivered a measured performance. “Judges should not be speaking to political issues, and certainly not a nominee for a position on the Supreme Court,” she said in response to questions about whether she would support expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court beyond the current nine, as a number of prominent Democrats have advocated. She parried questions from Republican senators who suggested that her commitment to progressive ideas about criminal justice reform led her to give light sentences in child pornography cases, saying that her judgments reflected the need to keep up with the internet. According to Jackson, “because it’s so easy for people to get volumes of this kind of material now” using the internet, sentencing guidelines designed for the pre-internet era are “leading to extreme disparities in the system.” Prior to the confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley led the charge against Jackson, accusing her of “letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker,” an approach he said went back to Jackson’s days in law school. As proof, Hawley pointed to the fact that Jackson had sentenced seven child pornography offenders to “less time in prison than these sentencing guidelines recommend.” But in Monday’s hearings, Hawley had positive things to say about speaking with the “enormously thoughtful” and “enormously accomplished” Jackson. If her nomination is confirmed, Jackson will become the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, fulfilling a vow made by President Biden, who specifically identified race and gender as being essential characteristics of the nominee he would pick to fill the vacancy left by retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Read it here: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/democrats-ketanji-brown-jackson-confirmation-00019063
In The Back Pages: The Phony Liberal Free Speech Freakout
The Rest
→ New York City’s Police Department has been unconstitutionally collecting the DNA of New Yorkers without their consent, a new class-action lawsuit brought by The Legal Aid Society alleges. The NYPD would offer sodas or cigarettes to suspects in custody and then, after the suspect was escorted out, would have medical examiners collect DNA samples from the soda can or cigarette butt. The DNA sample would then be stored in a “Suspect Index” database that officers could search freely in later investigations. Phil Desgranges, Legal Aid’s supervising attorney, argued that this practice turned innocent people into permanent suspects. “If the NYPD wanted to search someone’s cell phone, if they wanted to search your home, they would have to get a warrant or court order to do so,” Desgranges said. “But here, they’re getting this ability to effectively search your genetic material perpetually without any authorization from a court, and without any knowledge of the person whose DNA is being taken.”
→ The United States is secretly sending Soviet-made air defense systems to Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. These decades-old defense systems, originally acquired so that U.S. intelligence analysts could study Soviet technology, are similar to those that Ukraine inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed, making them easier for Ukrainian soldiers to use. Complicating NATO’s efforts to equip Ukrainian forces is the fact that operators of advanced weapons systems like the Patriot air defense system, which the United States sent to Poland in early March to ward off any Russian attacks, require months of training. Further complicating the effort is that the United States is technically a nonbelligerent in the war but has been offering material support to both sides. The sanctions on Moscow and shipments of SA-8s and other systems intended to boost Kyiv’s air defenses clearly illustrate Washington’s pro-Ukraine policy, but at the same time they are happening, Washington has been quietly providing written guarantees of sanction relief to Russia to secure its support for a new Iran deal.
→ Four people were killed Tuesday and several more injured in an apparent terrorist attack in the Israeli city of Beersheba, roughly 60 miles south of Jerusalem. The alleged attacker, Muhammad Alab Ahmed abu Alkiyan, has a criminal record, including a 2015 arrest for supporting the Islamic State and promoting the organization to students at the school where he taught. In between stabbing random civilians, Alkiyan ran multiple people over with his car before he was confronted by two Israeli civilians carrying guns and shot when he lunged at one of them. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
→ The rate of inflation is outpacing wage growth in the United States––a fact that most people who buy gas and groceries have probably already deduced for themselves but was confirmed by a recent analysis from the Urban Institute. The study found that since inflation hit a 40-year high in February at 7.9%, the biggest squeeze has been felt in housing and transportation costs, which are “the two largest expenditures for most households, often accounting for 50 percent or more of families’ overall spending.” While gas prices have gone up by roughly 40% over the past year and housing prices have gone up by 15%, average hourly wages have only increased by roughly 5% over the same period.
→ No survivors are expected after a Boeing 737-800 crashed in the mountains of southern China on Monday with 132 people on board. There is no confirmation yet of what caused the China Eastern Airlines flight to plummet shortly before its scheduled landing. The airline has grounded all of its remaining Boeing 737-800s pending more information.
→ “In the past five years, a cadre of fact-checkers has marched through the institutions of journalism and installed itself in the U.S. media as a privatized, quasi-governmental regulatory agency. What’s wrong with facts, you say? Fueled by a panic over misinformation, the fact-checking industry is shifting the media’s primary obligation away from pursuing the truth and toward upholding vague notions of public safety, which it gets to define. In the course of this transformation, journalists are being turned into rent-a-cops whose job is to enforce an official consensus that is treated as a civic good by those who benefit from—and pay for—its protection.”
Get the full story here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers
→ Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the charismatic leader of France’s Socialist party, is making a strong showing ahead of April’s presidential election. On Monday, at a rally in Paris that drew tens of thousands of supporters, Mélenchon—whose dynamic appearances have come to be called the “Mélen-show”—ran through his raft of proposals, including guaranteed jobs for all, the cancelation of public sector debt, the decrease of the age of retirement by two years (from 62 to 60, in stark contrast to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to raise it by three), and a drastic increase in taxes. He is also calling for France’s withdrawal from NATO—a policy position shared by the two presidential candidates running on the far-right, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. The elections will be held on April 10, and though Macron remains in the lead, with 29% of a fractured field, the latest polls show Le Pen and Mélenchon gaining momentum, with 18% and 13%, respectively.
→ Alcohol-related deaths in the United States rose by 25.5% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a difference of more than 20,000 deaths in one year, according to a new study. “Increased drinking to cope with pandemic-related stressors, shifting alcohol policies, and disrupted access to treatment are all possible contributing factors,” per the report.
Scroll columnist James Kirchick on the New York Times Inspired Fake Liberal Free Speech Freakout
According to a national poll commissioned by The New York Times, 84% of Americans believe it’s a problem that some of their fellow citizens refrain from expressing opinions in “everyday situations out of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.” Overwhelming majorities of the young and old, Democrats and Republicans, and men and women agree that self-censorship—an inherently hidden and therefore hard-to-quantify consequence of “cancel culture”—is a real and important dilemma.
Included among that majority is the Times editorial board, which made the findings of the poll the centerpiece of an anodyne 2,500-word editorial last week entitled “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” Criticizing both progressives who “refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all” and conservatives who promote “laws that would ban books, stifle teachers, and discourage open discussion in classrooms,” the editorial decried “this social silencing, this depluralizing of America.”
Only 5% of Americans in the national poll believe that the new wave of censoriousness sweeping the country is “not at all serious,” a small faction that, judging by the overheated reaction to the editorial, seems to consist almost exclusively of elite journalists. Usually a fringe viewpoint mustering such negligible support—like, say, the belief that Earth is flat, or that the movie musical Cats was a good idea—merits little more than ridicule from the mainstream media. But when it comes to the minoritarian contention that the very existence of cancel culture is a hoax, that there is, contra the Times, no free speech crisis in the United States, it’s bleated loudly and widely by the people with the largest microphones.
“If I still worked for the NYT, I would seriously think about quitting today,” one former Timesman declared in a missive retweeted more than 3,000 times and representative of the Eighth Avenue Freak Out. “There is no such things [sic] as cancel culture,” announced Jeff Jarvis, who somehow parlayed writing capsule reviews for TV Guide 30 years ago into a well-remunerated gig dispensing pablum as the self-appointed guru of internet journalism. With its scandalous editorial, Jarvis said, the Times has proven its “sympathy with the white-right.” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy blogger turned senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, chimed in with an observation apparently intended to imply hypocrisy on the part of the paper. “For example, try searching for ‘Amnesty International report, apartheid’ on the @nytimes website,” he wrote. Not that he’s obsessed with Jews or anything.
To be sure, the writers of the Times editorial did not help their case by warning in its opening sentence that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” There is no legal protection from being “shamed or shunned,” nor should there be. But in attacking this witless conflation of the First Amendment with a nonexistent right not to be criticized, the critics of the Times editorial are ravaging a straw man. The free speech crisis in the United States today is not primarily governmental but social, as the culture of free speech that once prevailed in our leading institutions—from the academy to the Times itself—is under threat.
For a vivid example of just how much this once-robust culture has degenerated, witness the appalling episode that transpired at Yale Law School just a week before the Times published its editorial. On March 10, Yale’s Federalist Society chapter hosted a bipartisan free speech event featuring a progressive speaker and a conservative speaker. Taking hysterical umbrage at the mere presence of someone with whom they disagree, more than 100 students invaded the room where the event was taking place and noisily disrupted the proceedings. One protestor told a fellow student, a Federalist Society member, that she would “literally fight you, bitch.” The mob’s chanting was sufficiently loud to be heard on different floors of the building.
Thus far, nearly two-thirds of YLS students have signed an open letter in support of the “peaceful student protestors,” a depressing testament to just how prevalent the abandonment of basic free speech principles has become among our nation’s future leaders. The antics in New Haven prompted U.S. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman to circulate an email among his colleagues on the federal bench urging them to “carefully consider whether any student” who participated in the mob “should be disqualified for potential clerkships.”
Elsewhere in the Times, I found an even better rebuke to these conquistadors of cancel culture. “The most right-wing—I don’t get why they aren’t allowed to come to colleges. Where does it stop? People don’t like what I say? So what. I’m allowed to say it, and I live in the greatest country,” John Waters tells the Times Magazine. If he had not earned stardom as the “Pope of Trash,” Waters says his dream job would be working as a criminal defense lawyer for “the worst people in the world,” a noble if unpopular vocation among our rising legal eagles, who brook no moral distinction between criminal defendants and their counsel. “The right used to be my censors,” Waters adds. “They aren’t anymore. I don’t have any. If I did, it would be young woke liberals.”
Unsurprisingly, the events at Yale went unremarked upon by the journalistic elites who deny the very existence of cancel culture. To condemn the students would hit too close to home. As their reaction to last week’s Times editorial demonstrates, mob-like behavior is a tactic they have perfected.
James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.