Thinking It Through: Traffic in political commodities runs broad and deep vvdailypress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vvdailypress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Thinking It Through: Getting back to normal, or turning back the clock?
By Richard Reeb
For the Victorville Daily Press
As the pandemic shutdown shows signs of being lifted altogether, the Biden administration is indicating that it would like to see the country get back to normal. But signs and indications aren’t the same as actual progress on this front.
Although a number of state governors have actually lifted most or even all restrictions, there is resistance in that part of the “scientific community” which has, from the beginning, taken its bearings less from “the data” than from the presently dominant national political party’s agenda.
Thinking It Through: Defending the nation of free speech (part II) vvdailypress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vvdailypress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Thinking It Through: Why we must always defend the nation of free speech
By Richard Reeb
For the Victorville Daily Press
It may strike some as odd, if not perverse, to make the case for the nation of free speech rather than simply for free speech itself. But as I will argue, we enjoy free speech’s benefits because of our Constitution rather than the other way around. No right can be secure in the absence of protection, which reminds us what freedom of speech is for. It is not an end in itself.
In the latest issue of National Review, a conservative publication to which I have subscribed since my college days, Charles C.W. Cooke rightly deplores the Left’s increasing hostility to free speech, reminding us that it was not always this way. For most of the last century, liberalism’s hallmark was its ringing defense of the right of all and sundry to express their opinions, provided they were not accompanied by violence or marked by slander.