Donald Trump claimed: “Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” In fact, he has no power to pardon Tina Peters, since she was convicted under state law. His claim is an illegal usurpation of power.
The news media have a long tradition of yielding to sitting presidents, and they’re doing it again.
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For many years, schools have used “censorware” to suppress dirty words, threats, and other undesirable communication on their data networks. The results have sometimes been comical and usually bad. In some versions it’s known as the “Scunthorpe problem,” referring to software that finds dirty words in substrings of harmless ones, such as “Matsushita” and “cockle.”
As technology advances, these tools don’t get better, only more intrusive. A lawsuit filed by students in Lawrence, Kansas has brought one of them to public attention. It’s called “Gaggle,” perhaps a portmanteau word for “gag Google.” An attorney representing the students says, “Students’ journalism drafts were intercepted before publication, mental health emails to trusted teachers disappeared, and original artwork was seized from school accounts without warning or explanation.”
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Sometimes there is so much idiocy in the news that you have to unpack it layer by layer. This is the case with a statement which Florida governor DeSantis made and the way some people have described it.
In an interview, DeSantis said: “We also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety. … You drive off and hit one of these people — that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and parade you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”
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A Washington Post article header has drawn outrage on Bluesky. Here it is:
How Trump is blasting through norms and testing limits of his power
Experts say President Donald Trump’s actions have pushed the country into fraught territory. They are divided on whether he has breached constitutional guardrails.
That implies that a significant number of experts think Trump hasn’t “breached constitutional guardrails.” Who are these experts? The one person they cite is Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and co-chair of the Federalist Society. The article says:
He praised Trump’s embrace of a concept called the “unitary executive theory,” which posits that the president has supreme power over the executive branch, including the ability to remove officials.
In particular, Calabresi said, he was pleased with Trump’s moves to dismiss members of the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.
The situation with harassment of Jewish students and the Trump administration’s actions is a mess where serious wrongs turn up on all sides. It’s vital, and difficult, to evaluate actions on principles rather than on tribal criteria. On the one hand, there is harassment and intimidation that hides under the innocent name of “protest.” On the other, there’s the improper invocation of laws and denial of due process against people accused of doing that.
Governmental overreach is the bigger concern, especially when the current executive branch is aggressively expanding its power. At the same time, intimidation on campus is a serious concern, and downplaying it as mere “protest” only gives the administration’s actions a facade of credibility. An example is a Washington Post article with the headline “New Trump demand to colleges: Name protesters — and their nationalities.”
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