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Rogue congressional staffers took $100,000 from an Iraqi politician while they had administrator-level access to the House of Representatives' computer network, according to court documents examine

CPAC canceled Milo Yiannopoulos’ speech today after a #NeverTrump group released audio of Milo allegedly promoting pedophilia. But it wasn?t ...

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To understand the core of the free-speech challenge in this country, consider the case of a hypothetical young woman named Sarah. In college, Sarah is a conservative activist. She’s pro-life, supports traditional marriage, and belongs to a Christian student club. Her free speech infuriates professors and other students, so the administration cracks down. It defunds her student club, forces her political activism into narrow, so-called free-speech zones, and reminds her to comply with the university’s tolerance policies. What does Sarah do? She sues the school, she wins, and the school pays her attorneys’ fees. The judge expands the free-speech zone to cover the whole campus and strikes down the tolerance policy. The First Amendment wins. Sarah graduates. A brilliant student, she gets a job at a Silicon Valley start-up and moves to California to start her new life. Just as they did in college, politics dominate her conversations, and within a week she gets into an argument with a colleague over whether Bruce Jenner is really a woman. The next morning, Sarah’s called into the HR department, given a stern warning for violating company policy, and told that if she can’t comply she’ll need to find another place to work. What does Sarah do? She shuts her mouth or she loses her job. Her employer isn’t the government; it’s a private company with its own free-speech rights, and it expects its employees to respect its “corporate values.” In a nutshell, this is America’s free-speech problem. The law is largely solid. Government entities that censor or silence citizens on the basis of their political, cultural, or religious viewpoint almost always lose in court. With some exceptions, the First Amendment remains robust. Yet the culture of free speech is eroding away, rapidly. The politicization of everything has combined with increasing levels of polarization and cocooning to create an atmosphere in which private citizens are increasingly weaponizing their expression — using their social and economic power not to engage in debate but to silence dissent. Corporate bullying, social-media shaming, and relentless peer pressure combine to place a high cost on any departure from the mandated norms. Even here in Middle Tennessee, I have friends who are afraid to post about their religious views online or express disagreements during mandatory corporate-diversity seminars, lest they lose their jobs. One side speaks freely. The other side speaks not at all. EDITORIAL: CPAC’s Milo Disgrace There is no government solution to this problem. The First Amendment prohibits the state from mandating openness to debate and dissent, and corporations aren’t designed to be debating societies. Nor can the government prevent (or even try to prevent) the kinds of social-media shaming campaigns and peer pressures that cause men and women to stay silent for fear of social exclusion. The solution is to persuade the powerful that free speech has value, that ideological monocultures are harmful, and that the great questions of life can’t and shouldn’t be settled through shaming, hectoring, or silencing. It is thus singularly unfortunate that the “conservative” poster boy for free speech is Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo, for those who don’t know, is a flamboyantly gay senior editor at Breitbart News, a provocateur who relishes leftist outrage and deliberately courts as much fury as he can. How? Please allow my friend Ben Shapiro to explain: Jews run the media; earlier this month he characterized a Jewish BuzzFeed writer as a “a typical example of a sort of thick-as-pig shit media Jew”; he justifies anti-Semitic memes as playful trollery and pats racist sites like American Renaissance on the head; he describes himself as a “chronicler of, and occasional fellow traveler with the alt-right” while simultaneously recognizing that their “dangerously bright” intellectuals believe that “culture is inseparable from race”; back in his days going under the name Milo Wagner, he reportedly posed with his hand atop a Hitler biography, posted a Hitler meme about killing 6 million Jews, and wore an Iron Cross; last week he berated a Muslim woman in the audience of one of his speeches for wearing a hijab in the United States; his alt-right followers routinely spammed my Twitter account with anti-Semitic propaganda he tut-tutted before his banning (the amount of anti-Semitism in my feed dropped by at least 70 percent after his ban, which I opposed); he personally Tweeted a picture of a black baby at me on the day of my son’s birth, because according to the alt-right I’m a “cuck” who wants to see the races mixed; he sees the Constitution as a hackneyed remnant of the past, to be replaced by a new right he leads. Oh, and this week recordings rocketed across Twitter that showed Milo apparently excusing pedophilia and expressing gratitude to a Catholic priest for teaching him how to perform oral sex. (Later, on Facebook, he vigorously denied that he supports pedophilia, saying he is “completely disgusted by the abuse of children.”) Milo is currently on what he calls his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of college campuses, which has followed a now-familiar pattern: A conservative group invites him to speak, leftists on campus freak out, and he thrives on the resulting controversy, casting himself as a hero of free expression. Lately, the leftist freakouts have grown violent, culminating in a scary riot at the University of California, Berkeley. Operating under the principle that “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend,” too many on the right have leapt to Milo’s defense, ensuring that his star just keeps rising. Every liberal conniption brings him new conservative credibility and fresh appearances on Fox News. Last week Bill Maher featured him as a defender of free speech, and – for a brief time — he had been expected to speak at the nation’s largest and arguably most important conservative gathering, CPAC. (CPAC rescinded its invitation today.) Let’s put this plainly: If Milo’s the poster boy for free speech, then free speech will lose. He’s the perfect foil for social-justice warriors, a living symbol of everything they fight against. His very existence and prominence feed the deception that modern political correctness is the firewall against the worst forms of bigotry. If Milo’s the poster boy for free speech, then free speech will lose. I’ve spent a career defending free speech in court, and I’ve never defended a “conservative” like Milo. His isn’t the true face of the battle for American free-speech rights. That face belongs to Barronelle Stutzman, the florist in Washington whom the Left is trying to financially ruin because she refused to use her artistic talents to celebrate a gay marriage. It belongs to Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief who was fired for publishing and sharing with a few colleagues a book he wrote that expressed orthodox Christian views of sex and marriage. Stutzman and Cochran demonstrate that intolerance and censorship strike not just at people on the fringe – people like Milo – but rather at the best and most reasonable citizens of these United States. They’re proof that social-justice warriors seek not equality and inclusion but control and domination. Milo has the same free-speech rights as any other American. He can and should be able to troll to his heart’s content without fear of government censorship or private riot. But by elevating him even higher, CPAC would have made a serious mistake. CPAC’s invitation told the world that supporting conservative free speech means supporting Milo. If there’s a more effective way to vindicate the social-justice Left, I can’t imagine it. — David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

After the election of Donald Trump as president, a professor at Orange Coast College in California, Olga Perez Stable Cox, went into an extended hate rant against the president-elect. Among other things, she described Trump’s election as an “act of terrorism,” labeled him a white supremacist, and called Vice President–elect Mike Pence “one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.” And this wasn’t even a political-science class, in which one might expect political talk, no matter how irresponsible. Cox is a professor of human sexuality. When a student who recorded the diatribe posted the recording on social media, the professor’s union, the Coast Federation of Educators, AFT local chapter 1911, said on Facebook: “This is an illegal recording without the permission of the instructor. The student will be identified and may be facing legal action.” According to the union, the recording “violated the professor’s course syllabus, the Coast Community College District Code of Student Conduct, and the California Educational Code (sic), section 78907, which (exists) to provide a robust, learning environment for all students irrespective of their opinions.” The aforementioned California Education Code section states, “The use by any person, including a student, of any electronic listening or recording device in any classroom without the prior consent of the instructor is prohibited.” The American Association of University Professors has long opposed unauthorized recording and public posting of what professors say in classrooms. As it happens, I taught for two years at Brooklyn College. I recall students asking me whether they could record my lectures. And I remember thinking, “Why on earth would I say no?” I wanted whatever I said in a classroom to be heard by more than 50 people. “Who wouldn’t?” I wondered. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists. Here, then, is my theory as to why most professors who object to their class lectures’ being recorded do so: They fear having what they say exposed to the general public. Our colleges and universities (and an increasing number of high schools and elementary schools) have been transformed from educational institutions into indoctrination institutions. With the left-wing takeover of universities, their primary aim has become graduating as many leftists as possible. The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists. Aside from the Christian–leftism difference, universities differ in only one respect from Christian seminaries: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs. Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicized their classroom lectures are. But there is another reason. Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights. Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.” All rules governing the recording of conversations without permission should apply to a professor meeting privately with a student. But when professors stand in front of a class, they are in the public domain. Moreover, the public pays at least part of these professors’ salaries at virtually every university. We therefore have a right, and even a duty, to know what professors say publicly in classrooms. In fact, I would encourage every student who cares about truth and intellectual honesty to record what their professors say in class. I would also encourage every parent to find out for what they are paying. And I would encourage professors to record themselves in order to protect themselves against doctored material. Any professor who is not ashamed of what he or she is saying in class should welcome being recorded. And any student taking a class with a professor who objects to being recorded should know that this objection is almost always equivalent to the professor saying: “I want you to hear what I say in class because I’m quite confident that you can’t differentiate between instruction and indoctrination. But if what I say goes public, people who do know the difference will expose me as a propagandist.” — Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com. © 2017 Creators.com

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