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The presidential election of 1920 seemed like a disaster for liberals. They had broken with their partys two-term president when he began to abridge civil liberties at home and abroad and he brought home a peace treaty from Paris that they could not accept. Then their internationalist ideals ran headlong into a pro-business Republican who campaigned on an America First message. When Warren G. Harding won the White House in a landslide, liberals, once ascendant, found themselves in the political wilderness.

Twelve years passed before Democrats reclaimed the White Housean agonizingly long time for liberals in 2017 who might be looking for historical parallelsbut during those 12 years, from 1920 to 1932, liberalism flourished as an opposition movement. Unbound from the obligations of governing, liberals embraced underdog causes free speech for antiwar radicals, freedom from unlawful searches and seizures during the postwar roundups of radical immigrants, and fair criminal trials for southern blacks causes that came to define American liberalism for decades. What at first looked like disaster was in fact the beginning of a renaissance.

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The roots of this liberal opposition movement began in a dilapidated, Dupont Circle row house known as the House of Truth.

For seven years, a whos who of politicians, judges, journalists, and artists turned the house into one of Washingtons most vibrant political salons. The lawyer Felix Frankfurter and journalist Walter Lippmann lived in the red brick, three-story house. Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis were regular guests at the carefree dinner parties where they discussed lifes verities, hence the houses playful name. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who befriended Frankfurter and Holmes and went on to create Mount Rushmore, was a regular too. In this intellectual hothouse, they conceived and launched a magazine, The New Republic, which became the voice of the liberal movement. They wrote New Republic editorials and articles advocating for minimum wage and maximum hour laws and the rights of organized labor and celebrating Holmess and Brandeiss dissents on freedom of speech.

How or why I cant recapture, Frankfurter recalled in his oral history, but almost everybody who was interesting in Washington sooner or later passed through that house.

The House of Truth got its start in 1912 when Frankfurter and two other disenchanted Taft administration officials transformed their bachelor pad into the de facto campaign headquarters for former president Theodore Roosevelt. They believed Roosevelt would prosecute more monopolies and promote their pro-labor agenda. With Roosevelt as president again, they hoped to empower organized labor to transform America into an industrial democracy. The houses owner and visionary, Tafts commissioner of Indian affairs, Robert G. Valentine, quit the administration to join Roosevelts third-party Bull Moose presidential campaign.

After Woodrow Wilson defeated Taft and Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential election, Frankfurter and other liberals in government continued to live in the house while working for the Wilson administration. In 1914, Herbert Croly, Lippmann, Frankfurter and several others founded The New Republic and soon broke with Roosevelt, who referred to the magazines editors as three anemic Gentiles and three international Jews. One of those Jews, Lippmann, lived at the House of Truth with Frankfurter in 1918 while they worked together in the war department. The former progressives Lippmann and Frankfurter rebranded themselves as liberals.

The word, liberalism, was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918, Lippmann wrote in 1919. They wished to distinguish their own general aspirations in politics from those of the chronic partisans and the social revolutionists. They had no other bond of unity. They were not a political movement. There was no established body of doctrine. American liberalism is a phase of the transition away from the old party system.

Lippmann, Frankfurter and other liberals soon became disenchanted with the Wilson administrations wartime abridgement of civil liberties the censorship of the journalists at home and abroad and the Espionage Act prosecutions of radical immigrants opposed to the war. They still believed in governments ability to regulate the economy during an age of increasing industrialization, but they became more attuned to governments excesses. In the process, they created a new liberal movement that stood up for the rights of societys underdogs.

In 1919, Justice Holmes replaced Theodore Roosevelt as the hero of the House of Truth. In November of that year, newly minted liberals praised Holmess dissent that defended the free speech rights of Communist Party leader Jacob Abrams. Holmes believed that Abrams and other Communists should be able to print leaflets criticizing the nations war effort without fear of criminal prosecution.

Earlier that year, Holmes had upheld the Espionage Act convictions of several other antiwar radicals, but he had become concerned about the mounting threat to free speech. During the summer of 1919, he had learned that the post-war Red Scare threatened the jobs of his friends Frankfurter and Roscoe Pound at Harvard Law School. The Justice wrote Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell emphasizing the importance of Frankfurter and Pound to the future of the school. Indeed, one of Frankfurter and Pounds liberal colleagues, Zechariah Chafee, almost lost his job after writing an article about the Abrams case.

Though the House of Truth broke up as an active political salon in 1919, the houses friends and former residents continued to expand their liberal network and began to challenge what they saw as the Wilson administrations constitutional excesses.

In early 1920, Frankfurter and Chafee represented 20 radical immigrants rounded up during the Palmer Raids and scheduled for deportation. Frankfurter and Chafees investigation revealed unconstitutional searches and seizures by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his men, who included a young J. Edgar Hoover. As a result of their investigation, the two Harvard law professors saved 16 immigrants from deportation. Frankfurter and Chafee signed a report challenging Palmer about his unconstitutional conduct. In February 1920, Frankfurter became a founding member of the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

During the 1920 presidential election, the Democratic Party had lost its standard bearer in Wilson, who had suffered an incapacitating stroke in October 1919, and both the stricken president and his party largely faded from view. With his Return to Normalcy campaign and America First slogan, Harding crushed Ohio Governor James M. Cox, winning 404 electoral votes and 37 states. The House of Truths residents and frequent guests had gone their separate ways Frankfurter returned to teaching at Harvard Law School; Lippmann briefly rejoined The New Republic before leaving for the editorial page of the New York World and writing his groundbreaking book, Public Opinion; Borglum made his first trip to South Dakotas Black Hills in 1924 and began working a project, Mount Rushmore, which consumed the rest of his life; Holmes and Brandeis soldiered on as the Supreme Courts liberal wing.

Liberals turned to the Court to protect basic civil rights and civil liberties. In 1923, Justice Holmes wrote a groundbreaking opinion that the mob-dominated criminal trials of black Arkansas sharecroppers violated the due process clause. His opinion in Moore v. Dempsey marked the first time that the Supreme Court had reversed a state criminal conviction on due process grounds. In his later years, Holmes repeatedly stood up for the right to fair criminal trials for southern blacks and, together with Brandeis, for free speech of unpopular radicals.

During the 1924 presidential election, many liberals supported third-party candidate Robert La Follette not because they thought that La Follette would win but because they were thinking about the future of the countryin 1944, not 1924. You see, Frankfurter wrote Lippmann, Im incorrigibly academic, and, therefore, the immediate results of the 1924 election do not appear very important. The directions which we further or retard for 1944 are tremendously important. An increasingly conservative Lippmann refused to support La Follette or other liberal causes. During the early to mid-1920s, Frankfurter, but not Lippmann, opposed a 15-percent quota on Jewish students at Harvard College and championed the academic freedom of fired Amherst College president Alexander Meiklejohn.

In 1927, Frankfurter and other liberals called for a new trial for Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Six years earlier, Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted of robbery and murder before a prejudiced Massachusetts judge and with almost no appellate review of the fairness of the proceedings. Frankfurter wrote a groundbreaking book that became a bible for Sacco-Vanzetti partisans. He also enlisted an ambivalent Lippmann to make the New York World a leading voice about the case. Liberal lawyers and journalists championed the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti until the final hours of August 23, 1927, when the two men were executed.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, liberals lost a lot of battles, but they won some, too.

They did not give up when their preferred candidate, Democratic nominee Al Smith, lost the 1928 presidential election to Herbert Hoover. Instead, they defeated one of Hoovers Supreme Court nominees, Judge John J. Parker, and succeeded in lobbying Hoover in January 1932 to replace the retired Justice Holmes with a legal giant of equal stature, Benjamin Cardozo (whom Frankfurter succeeded on the Court in 1939). And in November 1932, they ousted Hoover and elected New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House.

And once they had it back, Democrats wouldnt give up control of the White House for another 20 years.

Read more from the original source:
The Washington Salon That Saved Liberalism - POLITICO Magazine

Whoever is in power is going to be the target: fake news that was once anti-Clinton is now shifting with Trump as president. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo / Photomontage by GNM imaging

While stories of police violence at Standing Rock have become commonplace, the account that spread last week was particularly shocking. An article from AlternativeMediaSyndicate.com said officers had burned the camps of indigenous activists fighting the Dakota Access pipeline and destroyed their tipis.

The piece, which included an image of multiple large tipis engulfed in flames, was shared more than 270,000 times on Facebook. But the photo was from a 2007 HBO film, and a key premise of the story was fake.

Its absolutely frustrating, said Dallas Goldtooth, an indigenous leader at Standing Rock who warned his followers on Facebook that the article was false. There is so much misinformation.

The 2016 presidential election led to international debates about filter bubbles and the spread of misinformation, with many analyzing how the proliferation of fabricated content may have helped Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

But Trumps chaotic first weeks in office filled with a steady stream of astonishing news developments that have rattled progressives has laid the groundwork for what could be a significant uptick in fake news, misleading articles and propaganda with a distinctly liberal bent.

Whoever is in power is going to be the target [of fake news], said Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.org, which is partnering with Facebook to help identify false news stories.

Research has suggested that there was a huge volume of fake news across the political spectrum during the election, but that pro-Trump false stories were much more widespread than pro-Clinton ones. Some of the most high-profile examples, such as the conspiracy theory that Clinton was tied to a child sex ring, fed rightwing narratives.

Media and communications experts suspect those dynamics could shift under Trump. In an interview with the Atlantic, Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of fact-checking site Snopes, said she has seen a spike in the amount and popularity of fake news directed toward liberal audiences.

On the left, there are numerous styles of misinformation that appear to be gaining traction. In addition to blatantly fabricated stories, there have been increasing concerns about articles featuring deceitful and hyperbolic headlines, viral memes that have a very tenuous connection to the truth and poorly sourced articles that use inaccurate visuals to draw readers.

At Standing Rock, for example, progressive sites have published random photos of massive buffalo herds suggesting they were at the demonstrations. One Facebook page posted footage of Trump talking to tech leaders in a highly misleading video about tribal leaders meeting with the presidents transition team.

A recent countercurrentnews.com article falsely declared: State Gives Cops the Green Light To Shoot DAPL Protesters On Sight.

In the case of the fake tipi-burning story, Linda Black Elk, who was present during last weeks confrontation with law enforcement, told the Guardian that police did force them out of their camps, but that no tipis were torched or destroyed.

In an email, a writer with Alternative Media Syndicate defended the post, saying the photo was a stock image meant to draw a connection to the HBO film and that the site removed it once there was confusion.

Goldtooth said its been a constant struggle to stop the spread of false news about Standing Rock. Folks feel like they need to sensationalize something to get attention and get awareness. You dont need to do that. Tell the story as it is.

Other recent fake or misleading stories catered to progressive audiences include a LearnProgress.org piece that falsely said Melania Trump was selling jewelry on the White House website; a viral story about a boy handcuffed at an airport due to Trumps immigration ban, which used a photo from 2015; and a Politicot.com story with a fabricated Mike Pence quote about abortion and rape.

Progressives have also widely shared tweets from a number of accounts claiming to be rogue government officials speaking out against Trump, even though theres no evidence that theyre run by public servants.

Liberal anxieties about Trump have created an appetite for false news, and social psychology dictates that fearful people may be more gullible, said Claire Wardle, research director with First Draft News.

Its unsurprising to me that were seeing a growth of disinformation on the left People want information that makes them feel better, she said. Were living in a time where there is so much fear and concern mapped onto social technology.

Users are especially susceptible when stories and images appear directly in their social feeds, she added. If one of your peers sends something, you already trust them. So you are much less likely to be critical.

There may appear to be a spike in false liberal articles, because progressives are simply consuming higher quantities of news due to Trump angst, said Judith Donath, with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

On the left, however, readers tend to be better at debunking fake news and more responsive to fact-checking, she added. On the right, theres less concern of whether its real or fake as much as whether it fits into the narrative.

Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College, who created a viral list of untrustworthy news sites, said it was unclear how the frequently shocking real news of the Trump era would impact the fake news ecosystem. Because many mainstream headlines have been consistently alarming to progressives, she said its possible that the content from viral left-leaning sites that promote exaggerated or manipulative clickbait might not actually spread as much anymore.

But outrage at Trump ultimately makes users vulnerable to false stories, said Fil Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University. And if progressive do start reading higher quantities of fake news, he said the country would likely become even more divided. It means more polarization, more segregation and stronger echo chambers.

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Fake news for liberals: misinformation starts to lean left under Trump - The Guardian

The behavior of many liberals since Donald Trumps election has been appallingnot to mention, in some cases, criminal. It is also, in some respects, puzzling. A case in point was a town meeting conducted last night by Congressman Tom McClintock in Roseville, California. Liberal activists attended the meeting and behaved so boorishly and so threateningly that the Congressman had to be escorted from the hall by armed policemen.

Another disgusting moment in the history of liberalism, but this is what I find mystifying:

I can no longer just sit back. I believe in the Constitution. I was an infantryman in Vietnam. I fought for this. These people need to understand, we want them out, said Vietnam War veteran Lon Varvel, referring to Trump and McClintock.

We want them out? There is a mechanism for that. It is called an election. In fact, McClintock is just two weeks into his current term. He was re-elected in November, with more than double the vote total of his nearest Democratic challenger. Obviously, a majority of McClintocks constituents dont want him out.

Likewise with Donald Trump. He is a mere two weeks into his four-year term. They need to understand we want them out? No. The Democrats need to understand that when you lose an election, the other guys get to take office. You dont stamp your feet and demand that they quit.

Two weeks into Barack Obamas first term, I wanted him out, too. But so what? He won the election, and he served his term in office. Do Democrats seriously not understand this? Or is the problem that they reject the most basic principles of democracy?

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What Part Of You Lost Don't Liberals Understand? - Power Line (blog)

Recently at University of California-Berkeley, Milo Yiannopoulos was set to give a talk about cultural appropriation and he had to be evacuated by his security detail and police, who feared that he was in danger because of protests that broke out on the campus. Since this event took place, I have heard many liberals argue that Yiannopoulos should not be afforded the right to speak on Berkeleys campus, or any campus. As a liberal I find this to be a shocking response and an absolute betrayal of the liberal principles that I believe in. Despite the fact that I am a liberal and I disagree with much of Yiannopoulos thoughts on a variety of issues, I think it is fundamentally important that his right to say what he thinks is protected.

I am certainly sympathetic to the protesters who find Yiannopoulos presence inappropriate. At this time, possibly more than any other time in my life I think it is reasonable for liberals to be on their guard and maybe even to feel sensitive. However, the idea that I would feel it necessary to defend free speech is pretty surprising to me. I dont find it necessary to point out why free speech is inherently a good thing. I think most people know its benefits. I dont think liberals are reacting so strongly to Yiannopoulos speech because they dont see the merit in free speech, but rather because they are scared of his ideas. They shouldnt be. So instead of listing the benefits of free speech we all already know, I would put forward this question: If you think that your ideas are better, or even the correct ones, then why are you afraid of having a debate? I think it may be reasonable to say that if you want to stand behind a liberal idea, lets say in this case the idea of cultural appropriation, then stand behind it. If you really think that it will fail when challenged by a conservatives viewpoint, then why do you support it in the first place?

One thing that I have heard liberals say about this issue that I find particularly concerning is this idea of normalizing hate speech as free speech. I am not taking sides on whether what Yiannopoulos says is hate speech or not, as that is not the point I am interested in making. The idea that something can be normalized as free speech is an oxymoron, necessarily. This statement implies that there is something that can be said that also does not fall under the category of free speech. This obviously would not be any serious kind of free speech. A freedom to say anything you want except for a few things is but a mockery of free speech and should be seen for the farce it is.

Now, if liberals are not concerned with maintaining free speech because of its merits alone and if they want to limit access to free speech in an effort to protect the marginalized minorities, then they are still making a mistake. If ignoring the benefits of free speech, it may seem like a good idea to limit the speech of someone like Yiannopoulos, who argues for the conservatives because you want to protect those groups that lack power in our society. Thats a laudable goal if there ever was one, but unfortunately I think even that fails to provide justification for limiting Yiannopoulos free speech. This is because as soon as we put limiting free speech on the table, it is not the groups out of power who will be able to use it generally; it is those groups that already have power who can use it to maintain that power. History is riddled with examples of power groups limiting the civil rights of others, including free speech, to maintain their dominance. Unless you want to return to a time like the Red Scare, where the spreading of communist literature can be compared to yelling Fire! in a crowded theatre, then it may be a better idea to not let the idea of removing free speech ever to be seen as legitimate, even if it helps those who are marginalized at first glance.

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OPINION: Liberals need to let conservatives talk - N.C. State University Technician Online

Its become almost as common a Jewish refrain as Mazal tov or Shabbat shalom. Liberal Jews are falling over one another to label President Trump the latest incarnation of Jew-haters from Pharaoh to Haman to Hitler.

These attacks have ranged from the exaggerated to the absurd. And while these inflated diatribes are concerning enough, a new theme has developed that is as baffling as it is destructive: Jew-shaming.

There has long been an expectation in Jewish circles that members of the tribe should support leftist policies and candidates. The thinking is that the Jews centuries-long persecution compels them to support the party that professes to protect persecuted minorities. Like women and African Americans, leftists are often shocked to stumble across the existence of conservatives who are Jewish, female, or black.

As a member of this endangered species, Im familiar with this phenomenon. As a Jewish, female political conservative, I am often met with bewilderment. I am also sensitive to the history of persecution. I lost too many relatives in the Holocaust. This persecution is undeniable and unforgettable. Whats baffling is why people think they can decide for me, for Jared Kushner, and for any other Jew what Judaism means to us or how we should vote as Jews.

Over the past couple of months, a parade of liberals has argued that Jewish values are antithetical to supporting Trump or any of his policies. Award-winning reporter Jonathan Freedland recently opined in the Jewish Chronicle, Put simply, Jews should want nothing to do with Trumpism. In November, the Israeli left-wing paper Haaretz published an opinion piece by Ann Toback, the Workmens Circle executive director, which laid out her version of the Eleventh Commandment: that Jews shouldnt legitimize hate by attending a Hanukkah party at Trump Tower.

This is a new form of liberal audacity that seeks to tell Jews what to believe and how to practice their faith. It is not just a moral imperative to raise taxes, support gay marriage, and legalize abortion. It is now a religious imperative, as if God Himself descended on the National Mall and decreed it so.

This audacity came to a head this week after the presidents executive order on refugees. Suddenly, every Jewish group and activist appointed itself the moral authority on Jewish values. And even worse, some writers used their perverse versions of Judaism to shame Jews with whom they disagree.

The worst of the worst came from the Forward, where senior columnist Peter Beinart sought to indict Kushners moral identity as a Jew. After declaring that the challenge for our extraordinarily privileged generation is to remember our ancestors pain, Beinart wrote:

How could Kushner a Modern Orthodox golden boy fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trumps Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-laws executive order banning refugees from entering the United States?

Beinarts argument reeks of intellectual laziness and rank arrogance. There are plenty of substantial arguments one can make against the executive order, and Beinart is as free as anyone to throw his hat in the ring. But Beinart goes straight for the jugular, declaring Kushner a failure of Modern Orthodoxy.

Last I checked, Beinart is neither God nor prophet. Hes no Moses or Joshua. He and his cohorts dont get to decide who is a good Jew and who is not. Their attempt to do so is a disservice to America and to Judaism.

American democracy and Jewish tradition share a common appreciation for the power of debate. Not only is debate sanctioned, it is encouraged. Disagreement and challenge help us achieve greater understanding and clarity, provided we do it respectfully and constructively. When leftists exploit Judaism as a political weapon, they discredit their own position as well as the religion they claim to uphold.

Theres a word in Biblical Hebrew that means disgrace: bizayon. In Jewish tradition, it is prohibited to make a bizayon out of sacred objects, such as the Torah or the religion itself. I cannot think of a greater disgrace than to manipulate Judaism for political purposes to attack other peoples Jewish faith.

If Beinart and others want to turn to the sacred Torah for guidance, they should learn from Moses, who asked God in a recent Torah portion, in the third chapter in Exodus, Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should take the Children of Israel out of Egypt? When it comes to judging other peoples religiosity, Beinart and his friends would do well to take their cue from Mosess humility.

And in this era of vicious political attacks spread on social media, wed all do well to take a moment and ask ourselves, Who are we, that we should issue religious indictments on our fellow Jews? One thing is for sure, that will get us all a lot further than remaking Judaism in our own political image.

Nachama Soloveichik is vice president at Cold Spark Media.

Read more:
Stop the Jew-Shaming - National Review