Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition. These are the constitutional rights engraved on the entrance to the Overby Center for Southern Politics and Journalism.
This is a rather ironic inscription for a building which just last week prohibited Daily Wire contributor Elisha Krauss from speaking on behalf of a University chapter of Young America’s Foundation.
Blocking the event days before it was scheduled, the School of Journalism and New Media cited an unlisted regulation that prohibited “partisan” figures from speaking at the center.
Following an outcry by conservative student activists and an intervention by Chancellor Glenn Boyce to overrule the initial decision, Krauss will be making her debut on the Ole Miss campus tonight; this time at the newly renovated Student Union.
While the idea that censoring a career journalist who once served as a senior producer to The Sean Hannity Show and a co-host to the Ben Shapiro Show may feel antithetical to the mission of a journalism school; if you were to understand the current political climate at Ole Miss this would all seem as right as rain.
These days at Ole Miss, the academic class is evangelical in their pursuit of progressive values; seeking to censor, harass, and nullify the opinions of those students who still carry with them main street values.
While Boyce deserves credit for reversing the decision of the journalism school, there still is work to be done in promoting free speech on campus as well as addressing institutional biases in departments.
Maybe that will all start with Krauss reminding Ole Miss the meaning of those five words inscribed on the walls of the Overby Center.
A minor controversy erupted at Ole Miss last night when news began to spread that the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics had rescinded the invitation of Elisha Krauss. The administration then fired back saying this was a unilateral decision and welcomed Krauss to campus.
Krauss is a conservative commentator, writer, and podcaster. She is a host and contributor at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Krauss previously hosted a morning show in Los Angeles with Shapiro for four years and produced the syndicated Sean Hannity Radio Show for seven years. She has also worked with Truth Revolt, PragerU, and ran a congressional campaign. She certainly has a conservative background, but also someone who has spent considerable time in the larger world of journalism.
The event was hosted by Young America’s Foundation.
According to the Overby Center, they do not allow “ideological” speakers at the Overby Center. Without passing judgments, you can review their spring 2019 schedule and decide for yourself if you find any of those speakers to be ideological.
My guess is if there is someone you agree with, they are not ideological. If you don’t agree, they are definitely ideological. That is how our brains work. And why we shouldn’t have arbitrary rules, particularly unwritten rules.
But it’s more than just that. Why is a school that has journalism in its name rejecting any speaker based on ideology, even if it is true that they have also turned down liberals? Shouldn’t this be the one place, at a minimum, where free speech is encouraged and debate is welcomed? Is this not what we are teaching young journalism students?
Shouldn’t we want as many different opinions as we can find, even if we disagree with what the speaker is saying? Would that not be better for everyone?
We can go on forever about why we must defend free speech, something that has gone out of fashion with a large segment of our society. But when you do that, you also no longer have to make personal judgments on who is or isn’t ideological.
At the end of the day, Ole Miss made the right call in overruling the decision of a few. It just should have never come to that.
Note: The original story said the Ole Miss School of Journalism and New Media cancelled the event when it was the Overby Center.
In this episode of Unlicensed, we talk about the core principle of individual liberty, and why the state has an apparent interest in restricting our liberty so often.
We start with The Sandlot and then talk about eyebrow threading, abortion protests, “fake” meat, vaping, hemp, Airbnb, and more.
It is not the responsibility of the government to protect you from yourself. We as citizens have given government too much authority, and that isn’t a good thing.
Just look at the new meat-labeling regulations for unsuspecting consumers.
One of the two comments the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce received concerning the regulations was from a rancher in Starkville. They are worried people would be unable to read the labels of meatless products because they are too close to traditional meat products.
“Kroger has marketed and is labeling the product in a way that a consumer could be in a hurry, and grab that product since it is available in the meat department, where in fact, it is not real meat. They even went so far as to place (it) next to the other ground beef and prepattied hamburger products,” the comment noted.
It would take that busy person all of ten seconds to read the label.
Government is not here to read for you, and we shouldn’t expect it to. It is unfortunate than any citizen thinks this is the job of government.
While MDAC might be on the hunt for fake meat, the debate over the term “fake meat” and plant-based alternatives misses a crucial point. Plant-based companies want you to know what they are selling is not actually meat. Their consumers are specifically looking for this product and they generally pay more for it.
There is not some conspiracy at play here. This would actually be a terrible conspiracy, if that’s what marketers were trying to pull off.
Rather, consumer habits are shifting. If consumers were not interested in plant-based alternatives, these options would not be on our shelves. Because private companies – whether it’s Kroger, Walmart, Whole Foods, or any other grocery store – need to do one thing above all to stay in business: sell products that consumers want, at a profit.
If there wasn’t interest, a Whole Foods would not have opened in Jackson. Plant-based options would not be available at Kroger. Subway would not have chosen Mississippi as one of a handful of states for a vegan meatball test. Burger King would not have launched the Impossible Burger.
This debate might be over veggie burgers, but this is just one example of the government in Mississippi trying to make decisions for individuals. And at the end of the day, it will just be one of 117,000 regulations on the books in Mississippi. Can’t we just try to be more free and let the voluntary exchange between consumers and producers happen without the government trying to intervene?
This is symbolic of a larger problem we have here in the Magnolia State. We don’t trust the free market and consumer choice. The sooner we do, the better off we’ll all be.
America has a poor record of accomplishment when it comes to blanket government prohibitions, yet that doesn’t mean lawmakers will use history as a guide in future decisions. The latest example: vaping.
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order banning e-cigarettes. Michigan residents will have a similar ban in a couple weeks courtesy of executive action. And in Mississippi, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim Hood has called for a ban on vaping devices after reports that a woman’s death in Monroe county may have been linked to vaping.
According to a Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, 530 people have been hospitalized with what is now known as Vaping Associated Pulmonary Illness, or VAPI. Three cases have been reported in Mississippi. Sadly, nine deaths have been reported nationally.
Therefore, we are told we must ban vaping and e-cigarettes. This would just be another example of unintended consequences due to the need to “do something” rather than looking at the entirety of the situation.
First, the potential bans ignore the fact that e-cigarettes have proven to help tobacco smokers quit. Since 2007, these products have helped an estimated three million Americans quit smoking and a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that e-cigarettes and vaping devices were “twice as effective as nicotine replacement at helping smokers quit.”
The Royal College of Physicians proclaimed in 2016, “in the interests of public health it is important to promote the use of e-cigarettes, NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy), and other non-tobacco nicotine products as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking in the UK.” We can presume that would apply in the United States as well.
And there is a cost savings benefit from current smokers switching to the replacement devices. A 2017 study by R Street Institute found that taxpayers could save $2.8 billion in Medicaid costs per one percent of enrollees over 25 years if users switched from combustible cigarettes.
A ban also ignores the question of where current users, particularly the teen vapers lawmakers are particularly interested in saving, would turn. After all, teen vaping is surging.
Yet, sales of e-cigarettes have been prohibited to those under 18 since 2016, so minors are already turning to the black-market. That should be our first clue that bans don’t work. Because the black market is the problem, as it usually is. So far, the overwhelming evidence is the deaths and illnesses related to vaping were the result of black-market substances, such as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, cannabis wax and oil, and bootlegged cartridges using vitamin E. Not the products adults are legally purchasing today.
So, because teens, who are already prohibited from purchasing these products, have resorted to the black market, we must ban adults from being able to purchase these products, at least when it comes to the fruit and candy flavors that most prefer (whether we are talking about teens or adults trying to kick the cigarette habit). This will only lead to a larger black market, and more illnesses, and more deaths. All the things those in favor of banning the products seemingly are trying to prevent. Or maybe it will just push more users back to tobacco products, which, coincidently, are at an all-time low among minors.
We’ve played the prohibition game before. It doesn’t end well. During alcohol prohibition, individuals made their own liquor that was often much more dangerous than what you could legally buy prior to prohibition. Today, many people roll their own cigarettes in locales that have absurdly high taxes. Again, these are often more dangerous as you can get more nicotine by leaving out a filter.
And when it comes to vaping, teens can turn to YouTube for do-it-yourself videos on raising nicotine levels. This won’t change if and when any of these proposals to regulate or eliminate vaping or e-cigarettes becomes law.
The bans won’t provide an alternative to current cigarette smokers, nor will they stop teens from vaping. Instead, they will only increase lawlessness. Hopefully policymakers will review the full situation before making hasty decisions that sound good to their political ears.
A former Jones County Junior College student is suing the school for twice infringing his First Amendment rights to free speech.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed a complaint in U.S. District Court Tuesday on behalf of J. Michael Brown, a former student at the school who is now at the University of Southern Mississippi.
The complaint says that Brown was stopped twice by campus police for trying to inform students about the political club he was involved, Young Americans for Liberty, without prior authorization from the school’s administration.
Brown was stopped by campus officials twice, once in February about an inflatable beach ball, known as a “free speech ball,” upon which students could write messages of their choice and the second in April for polling students about marijuana legalization.
An administrator told YAL that they weren’t permitted on campus since they hadn’t sought permission from the college.
According to Brown, he and another student held up a sign polling students on recreational marijuana. Campus police took him and another student to their office after telling a friend who wasn’t a student to leave and escorted off campus.
“Some people get in trouble for smoking weed, but at Jones College, I got in trouble just for trying to talk about it,” Brown said in a statement. “College is for cultivating thought and learning and encouraging civil discourse with your peers. That's not what's happening at Jones College.”
The lawsuit seeks declaratory judgement to strike the free speech restraints from the student handbook, a permanent injunction against the school to restrain their enforcement of unconstitutional policies and practices, monetary damages and attorneys’ fees.
The school’s student handbook requires at least three days’ notice to administrators before “gathering for any purpose.” The student handbook also puts even more restrictions on college-connected student organizations, which must schedule their events through the vice president of student affairs. The school administration also reserves the right, according to the handbook, to not schedule a speaker or an activity.
In May, FIRE wrote a letter to Jones Count Junior College President Jesse Smith offering to help the community college bring its policies into compliance with the First Amendment. The school didn’t respond to the letter.
Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon, FIRE’s director of litigation, said in a statement that the school had a chance to do the right thing.
“Instead, its leaders ignored their responsibility to uphold the First Amendment,” Beck-Coon said. “Now the college has to answer for its censorship in federal court.”
Cody Gibson of Gibson & Mullennix is assisting FIRE with the case as local co-counsel.
No sane person would argue that Mississippi is not a place with a strong sense of tradition. Mississippi literally drips with the fine traditions of family loyalty, religious liberty, community charity, and the value of life.
Some would also refer to a place like this as being “conservative.” From a social perspective, I would agree. However, when we look at the Magnolia State through the lens of public policy and political philosophy, the word “conservative” does not apply.
Though Mississippi has been governed mostly by Republicans, that does not make it a conservative state. We can’t measure our conservatism by our political affiliation or social conscience alone.
We must look deeper into the meaning of conservatism. Being conservative in America means, by definition, you favor constitutionally limited government, the mechanism of free markets, and the personal liberty and responsibility we have as individuals.
A conservative is willing to stand up to encroaching power of all forms of government (city, county, state and federal), to the growing corporatism that seeks to govern us from the boardroom, and to the menace to our society that is a progressive culture. Being a conservative means holding your representatives to account for fiscal discipline, for reducing our regulatory burdens, and for keeping our taxes low so that every Mississippian keeps more of his or her own money and freedom.
The recent gubernatorial race was particularly instructive. A candidate for governor, who constantly referred to himself as a conservative, ran on a plank of raising the gas tax and expanding Medicaid.
Distinguished, non-partisan organizations all across the country have provided empirical evidence and shared instructive data on the imprudence of states expanding Medicaid, like this one from my counterpart at the conservative Pelican Institute in Louisiana. The conservative and libertarian think tanks all over the nation are opposed to the expansion of Medicaid by states. Yet, a candidate for the highest office in the state supported the policy of expansion while referring to himself as a conservative.
That’s a head-scratcher for me.
On the issue of the gas tax, the current governor called a special session last year and passed what was then called “landmark” legislation to address the infrastructure issues of our state’s highways and bridges. Through a combination of an internet sales tax, sports gambling taxes, lottery revenues, and bonding, it was announced that government found a way to commit over a billion dollars to infrastructure projects over the next five years. Full-page ads were taken out by trade groups and chamber of commerce-type organizations to “recognize the historic achievement.”
Less than a year later, a candidate for governor was claiming we needed to “do something to address our crumbling roads and bridges.” This is despite the fact that our state roads and bridges are ranked as the 11th best in the nation by Reason Magazine in their 23rd Annual Highway Report. I’ve driven most of the roads in the Southeast; our state roads are just fine. The crumbling streets, roads, and bridges are found mostly in a few of the cities and counties of Mississippi. Jackson/Hinds being the worst example and the one most of the political class has to contend with on a daily basis. As a Jackson resident, I agree. Our roads are among the worst in the country, but that’s not a state issue. That issue is one of municipal funding and management. We provided an analysis on this earlier this year.
If we want to succeed and get ourselves out of last place, it’s not going to happen by deepening our dependence on government solutions. Every tax is a decision to give more power and responsibility to the state. There is no evidence that government will spend that money more effectively than we would spend it ourselves.
We already have far too many Mississippians who seek to petition government to solve problems we’re better off solving through the private institutions of free enterprise, churches, nonprofits, communities, and families. Too many individuals and companies are looking to the government for a contract, a job, a partner, or protection from competition.
When we allow government to wield this much power, we weaken the free market. We create a disincentive to the formation and deployment of capital. We thwart the opportunity for all Mississippians to prosper. What’s more, such reliance on government ensures only those with power have significant influence on Mississippi, including determining who represents us in the legislative and executive branches of our government.
What makes a “conservative” is not a party or allegiance to a particular leader or political campaign, but the power of ideas. As conservatives, our ideas are based on bedrock values and fundamental truths. Freedom is a policy that works. A limited and restrained government is the essence of our system. And the principle of ordered liberty holds it all together.
Our goal at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy is to play a leadership role in building a Mississippi where individual liberty, opportunity, and responsibility reign because government is limited. We believe this is the only way nations, states, and cities have ever enjoyed durable prosperity.
If we remain committed to these ideas and work hard to convince others of their value, we can all experience a magnolia renaissance. And we can say conservatism made it possible. Real conservatism. The kind of which Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and Milton Friedman spoke. The kind where we are free to pursue our individual liberty and speak our minds. The kind where we encourage people to take action and take risks in pursuit of their happiness. The kind where we take personal responsibility for our futures and stop looking for government to solve all of our problems.
There is an important role for government but it must be limited. Government functions best when it is closest to the people and when it is open and transparent.
Although our national government continues to grow into an unwieldy and bureaucratic swamp, our country is still federalist. We are a collection of semi-sovereign states. Federalism is a conservative idea. As Reagan stated in his first inaugural address, “The federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”
Thanks to our founding fathers, the real political and policy power is supposed to belong to the states. Therefore, we hold the key to our own future. Our future does not belong to the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington.
Let’s remember who we are...and vote accordingly.
Only devout progressives could be foolish enough to order the destruction of a gigantic work of art that was actually critical to the establishment’s history of George Washington and our nation’s founding and not see the irony.
In the rush to take any measure to prevent students from the unbearable experience of contemplating complex and thorny issues, the art must go. The statues of Confederates must come down. The annual birthday celebration of the founding father and architect of the University of Virginia must end.
According to these dilettantes, modern education is no longer about developing the intellectual muscles; it is about preventing any encounter with resistance. It’s like trying to get in shape without breaking a sweat, trying to sharpen a blade without removing metal, or trying to prune a tree without cutting the dying wood.
The result of such protectionist idiocy is that we are producing students with weaker constitutions and duller minds – unable to grow into robust adults. By giving into a belief that students are unable to confront opposing thoughts, ideas, or history, and thus must be protected from such challenges, we are preventing them from becoming fully formed citizens. And we do so at our own peril.
As Jefferson wrote, “an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic.” What the founder, formerly known as Thomas Jefferson, was writing about is critical to our future. The nation’s future requires citizens who thirst for knowledge, possess discernment, and can courageously articulate an idea.
Whether at the University of North Carolina, the San Francisco Board of Education, or in Charlottesville, it is the progressive edutocracy, in lock step with postmodernists, who are failing the republic and setting us on a dangerous path.
If our student citizens are unable to go out into the nation and contend with diverse opinions, whether they be in the form of a monument, a mural, or a speaker, how then do we expect them to contend with a malignant threat to the West and the nation one day?
Even a cursory review of history informs us that evil and malevolent ideas will gain momentum and challenge our way of life at some point. If the 20thCentury proved nothing else, it proved that. According to R. J. Rummel’s book Death by Government, roughly 110 million people were killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987.
Rather than possessing faith in strong ideas and having the courage to oppose their government, citizens in these nations turned on friends and families and allowed evil, false, deadly regimes to bring hell to earth. In short, the citizens chose a naïve approach to these genocidal nightmares.
They chose temporary safety – unable to understand that they were sewing the long-term seeds of their own destruction. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a painfully detailed account of the Russian forced labor camp system, is now available in an abridged version. If you want to understand the potential depths to which a nation and its citizen can fall, read it or listen to an audio version.
Whether a George Washington mural painted by the Russian artist Victor Arnatauff or a nameless Confederate soldier statue standing on the campus in Chapel Hill, many on the left have determined the next generation is not able to contend with it. Therefore, progressives are now marching swiftly with their majoritarian mobs to dutifully purge public spaces of symbols they find offensive. This sort of mob censorship of historic symbols is a not-too-distant relative of censoring speech and burning books.
At UNC, students and activists tore down the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam, which had stood on the north end of campus for a century. The administration and board at the school have yet to decide the appropriate next step.
Perhaps there is hope here in Mississippi? This past March, the University of Mississippi student government voted unanimously to remove the Confederate statue from its current location atop the center circle of campus and relocate it to a cemetery on school grounds. To their credit, the students have not engaged in the destruction of property in their quest to remove the statue, which has stood since its erection in 1906.
Instead, the students have engaged in a public and democratic process and taken the time to offer a proposed solution. While I may disagree with the solution they propose, they should be commended for engaging in the debate and for not cowering in the corner out of the imagined oppression by an ancient statue. It remains to be seen how this plays out in Oxford. The IHL is searching for the next leader at Ole Miss. You can bet this is one of the interview questions.
The message of the progressive movement in other places in our nation is clear, however. If you are not on board with immediately removing such symbols, you will be accused of racial animus or xenophobia.
The hard left leaves no room for complexity, context, or individual opinion. We are in a new world where the individual must, through definitions ascribed by the progressives, belong to a group.
When the collective's viewpoint must be given preference over the individual’s perspective, we have lost what it means to have individual liberty and agency. In such a world, it is easy to see how woke progressives could be so foolish as to convince themselves to spend over $600,000 to paint over a mural of George Washington.
Such is the result of groupthink. Unfortunately, our students are the ones who suffer from such arrested development.
This column appeared in the Clarion Ledger on August 8, 2019.
Mississippi State University has been making headlines in recent weeks not only for their outstanding performance on the baseball diamond, but for the actions of one of their professors who some claim pushed blatantly leftist views on graded assignments.
Professor Michael Clifford was identified by academic watchdog group Campus Reform for providing questions on a Business Ethics exam which asserted moral judgements regarding CEO pay and suggested that Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby practiced employment discrimination against LGBT applicants, without providing evidence to support the suggestion.
Clifford is also accused of ideological favoritism with the distribution of lower marks to those who disagreed with the premise of affirmative action or the data supporting the wage gap theory. One of Clifford’s former students told Campus Reform that he felt afraid to offer an opposing viewpoint in his classroom. “Shortly after I started the course in January, I heard from other students that he was very liberal and graded people based on whether they agreed with him or not,” Mississippi State student Adam Sabes, who is also a Campus Reform correspondent, said.
“Personally, this discouraged me from answering a question based on how I really feel and led me to answer tests or discussion board questions based on what the professor would like best as I needed a good grade in this class,” Sabes added.
This professorial behavior, while appearing unethical (which is rather ironic in a class on ethics), may not seem shocking to the average American if we were talking about Boulder or Berkeley. But this is a largely conservative university in an overwhelmingly conservative state, showing that the problems of bias in academia are not isolated to our nation’s coastal communities or famously liberal college towns.
Academia has become a complex game of inside baseball in recent decades where groups of ideologically aligned and motivated academics provide cover for one another as they actively pursue leftist or progressive viewpoints.
The evidence for this bias comes from Clifford himself. In response to Campus Reform’s reporting, he said that while he included the aforementioned questions that he also included others to choose from. This assertion isn’t a denial. It’s a premeditated cop out for any criticism of his bias.
Could you imagine what news outlets like CNN or MSNBC would say about a conservative professor who made statements offensive to the sensibility of the progressive academic class? Safe to say that they would be looking at some very tough days in the university faculty lounge.
It has unfortunately become the norm that we accept the liberal doctrine in our nation’s universities. Until we start calling out the bias, we’re going to continue to see colleges and universities remain the academic left’s own Animal House – without Dean Wormer to shut down their party.
In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy a delicious chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, while there is still time