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Among the many terrifying questions that Donald Trumps presidency poses is this: How do you oppose an indecent leader while still behaving decently yourself?

When it comes to the habits of deference extended to previous presidents, Im fine with breaking the rules. If Democrats want to oppose all of Trumps nominees on the basis that he himself is dangerous and illegitimate, that strikes me as fine. If performers who have traditionally performed at governmental functions want to boycott his, Im fine with that, too. Trump practices demagoguery, bigotry, and cruelty. He does not deserve the deference granted a normal president.

Trump Begins to Chip Away at Banking Regulations

But when Trumps opponents use the danger he and his supporters pose to restrict basic freedoms, theres a problem. Which is what happened earlier this week at the University of California, Berkeley, when a violent protest prevented Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart News writer who has made his name by viciously mocking women, trans people, and African Americans, from speaking on campus.

Judging from my Twitter feed, not many progressives defend the violence, which appears to have been carried out by masked hoodlums who arrived from off-campus. But vast numbers said Berkeley should have peacefully denied Yiannopoulos an opportunity to speak on campus. In the words of one Twitter user, Free speech every college has an obligation to give you an official platform for your speech.

The problem with this argument is that it was not Berkeley itself that invited Yiannopoulos. It was the Berkeley College Republicans, who are legally a separate entity. And as Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks explained, long-standing campus policy permits registered student organizations to invite speakers to campus and to make free use of meeting space in the Student Union for that purpose. So the issue is not whether Berkeley should have given Yiannopoulos a platform. It is whether Berkeley should have denied some of its students the ability to give him a platform. And consistent with the dictates of the First Amendment as uniformly and decisively interpreted by the courts, Dirks argued, the university cannot censor or prohibit events, or charge differential fees.

That strikes me as a strong argument. Universities should establish rules for how they treat speakers that student organizations invite. And they should not alter those rules depending on the ideas those speakers espouse, even if their ideas are hateful. (And yes, Id apply that not merely to Milo but to a neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer). At Berkeley, the rules say that student organizations get to host their speakers at the Student Union for free. If Berkeley changes that because Yiannopoulos is a misogynist, what happens if a Palestinian group invites a speaker that conservatives call anti-Semitic?

Of course, Berkeley students also have the right to protest Yiannopoulos. But the university has an obligation to ensure that their right to protest does not prevent the College Republicans from hearing their invited guest. Is the university obligated to spend extra money, which it would not expend for a normal speaker, because Yiannopouloss speech requires extra security? Im not sure. But in any case, Berkeley did not spend extra money. It required the College Republicans to come up with funds for additional security themselves; an anonymous patron contributed $6,000 to help them.

The second argument for preventing Yiannopoulos from speaking is that his ideas are more than merely offensive. His conduct at public events has constituted harassment. As a group of Berkeley professors detailed in a letter, Yiannopoulos, projected a picture of a trans student onto a screen during his speech at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, last Decemberan event that was also live-streamed on Breitbart News. He continued to ridicule and vilify her in front of the live campus audience and the online audience. The student was so disturbed by this experience that she withdrew from the university.

But this argument is weak, too. Yiannopouloss behavior at the Milwaukee campus sounds disgusting. But as Dirks wrote in response, critical statements and even the demeaning ridicule of individuals are largely protected by the Constitution. If they were not, a lot of comedians would have trouble performing live. And even if the targeted UWM student has grounds to sue, Berkeley cannot prevent the College Republicans from hosting Yiannopoulos because of the possibility that he might do something like that again.

Politically, the problem with shutting Yiannopoulos down is obvious. The reason the College Republicans invited him in the first place was because we believe there exists a dearth of intellectual diversity on this campus, and conservative thought is actively repressed. Not letting him speak on campus just makes their point. It lets Yiannopoulos depict himself as a victim of political correctness. Which is the grievance that fuels his ugly persona in the first place.

But the argument for letting Yiannopoulos speak is more than tactical. Its a matter of principle. Conservative students have the right to bring obnoxious bigots to speak on campus and other students have a right to protest. But universities should not let the protesters shut them down. That was hard for many leftists to accept even before Trumps election. Now that an obnoxious bigot occupies the White House, its even harder. But Trumps presidency is, in part, a test of whether ordinary Americans can avoid sinking to his level, whether a citizenry can respect the principles that its leaders do not. What happened to Milo Yiannopoulos this week is part of that test. Its important that progressives at Berkeley, and around the country, do not fail.

Read this article:
Milo Yiannopoulos Tested Progressivesand They Failed - The Atlantic

To the editor:

In his Jan. 26th opinion piece, self-proclaimed "progressive" Dr. Wayne-Daniel Berard attempted to find some common ground with conservatives. Condescendingly, he concluded that the point of contact is that "what they want, what they've wanted all along, is for we progressives to include them, too, among those we want to lift up." It was good to read his acknowledgment of the fact that many progressives have marginalized those "who have no college degrees or do manual labor," or those labeled as a "stupider-than-us conservative Christian."

Additionally, Dr. Berard proudly wrote of progressive achievements including, "We have fought for the freedom of all to live their core beliefs, popular or un." However, he could not resist writing, "I will confess, I do not understand how many of these deal with LGBTQ folk or woman's reproductive freedom. But my progressivism includes the right of religions to set their own course, in house." And with only two words, "in house", he exposed what he really means by religious freedom. Those of faith should be free to practice their beliefs, but their expressions of it should be confined to their places of worship and the home. Clearly, Dr. Berard would like us to shut up in the public square.

As a Christian, I and others of like faith will continue to live out, speak out, private and public, for what we believe is God's created order regarding sexuality and against the horrific and unconscionable wrongs of abortion, which is pathetically whitewashed with its dismal depiction as "reproductive health."

No, Dr. Berard, we are not just like you. The only real ultimate point of contact with all of us is that we, as we read in the Bible, are sinners who have offended our creator, and we all are in dire need of a savior. That savior is Jesus Christ for all who embrace and follow him in faith.

Rev. Paul Wanamaker

Norton

The left must stop obstructing Trump

To the editor:

I read the newspaper, watch the TV news and listen to America, and I am utterly disgusted.

In 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president, I, and many of my conservative friends, were very disappointed. But we didn't need a "safe place" to go to. We didn't protest in the streets and destroy the property of others. We were willing to give him an opportunity to succeed or fail knowing we could vote him out in four years.

President Trump has been in office slightly more then a week. He has a very few members of his cabinet confirmed due to unprecedented Democrat obstructionism. He issues an executive order that puts a 180-day hold on accepting any persons from seven countries that Obama said were war sites because we don't know if ISIS is sending people over here. The order doesn't say a hold on Muslims, it says a hold on anyone and allows Homeland Security an opportunity to make exceptions.

Yet the left portrays this as a ban on Muslims despite the fact that there is no hold on the 99 percent of Muslims living in any country other then these seven countries. And the left, in the person of the mainstream media and the Hollywood crowd, spreads the lies as if they were the truth

A man with a highly-qualified status from the left of center American Bar Association, Neil Gorsuch, was nominated to the Supreme Court. The protesters were on the Supreme Court steps with "fill in the blank" signs where the wrote in the justice's name and the libs began the fight before having asked the man a single question. And you can already see the left salivating at the thought of what kind of hell they can put this man and his family through.

This all must stop. These people need to get a grip. We have elections in this country and those elections have consequences. If you don't like the results then do something about it in the next election.

We conservatives endured eight years of a failed presidency without obstructing every nomination (Obama's cabinets were in place within a week of his inaugurations). It's time the left did the same thing.

Joseph Chabot

North Attleboro

Editor's note: Tuesday is the deadline to receive endorsement letters for the Feb. 14 preliminary election in North Attleboro. Send to opinion@thesunchronicle.com or to Voice of the Public. PO Box 600, Attleboro, MA 02703.

On to Super Bowl

Goodell tried to hamper

the Pats on their quest,

but... in the end,

he just gave Tom some rest.

They won with Garoppolo,

J. Brissett, too;

with only two bumps,

through the schedule they flew!

Unlike the year last,

they locked up home field;

and with the bye week,

the players, they healed.

The game against Houston,

did not play their best;

it sharpened their focus,

to play with more zest.

TB had his game face

against the poor Steelers;

the Patriots rocked,

Ben and Co. were The Reelers.

Ten zip after one,

Pats got a great start;

Do Your Job! Do Your Job!

Each did their own part.

Mistakes Pitt' did make,

they started to bicker -

wouldn't you after seeing

that Hogan flea flicker?

How 'bout power, too?

That Blount rugby scrum

showed that Tom just might get

that "One For The Thumb."

Here in New England,

or so I've been told,

these trips to the Big Dance

just never get old.

And talk about dances,

of this, have no qualms:

M. Bennett is surely

the King of pom poms!

So bring on Atlanta

and all their offense.

Matt Ryan just might make

this game a bit tense.

But at the game's end,

when all's said and done,

expect Pats to win

SB Fifty One!

Don't know about you,

but I think you'll agree:

can't wait to see Roger

hand Tom ... MVP!

Allan Fournier

North Attleboro

View original post here:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: No, conservatives are not like progressives - The Sun Chronicle

Its not surprising that a lot of good and progressive people are inclined to cave in on the nomination of Donald Trumps nomination of a hard right-wing judge named Neil Gorsuch to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Especially for non-lawyers, Gorsuch can look and sound smart and respectable and, especially compared to the buffoon of a president who nominated him, even impressive. Add to this the fact that so many progressives dont really enjoy fighting with the Right and its understandable that folks are looking for excuses to duck this battle.

Youve heard some of the excuses. Theres Lets save our energy for the next fight and Kennedy will calm him down and Justices tend to get more moderate as they age. And then theres the tried and true We have to be better than the Republicans and not sink to their level.

Well, heres how all of those sentiments really and practically translate: We dont care enough about our country and its future to fight for whats right.

The simple truth is that Neil Gorsuch and the people behind him represent everything thats wrong with modern America. They (and he) are a threat to freedom, to progress, to diversity and equality and, ultimately when it comes to protection of the natural environment, the long-term survival of life on the planet as we know it.

Gorsuch may be a nice and handsome guy who loves his family and like to ski, but, in the end, that doesnt count for squat. The simple truth is that on vital matter after vital matter over the next severaldecades, a Justice Gorsuch will simply be another friend and ally to the dreadful Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Rather than helping to move our country forward, he will take it dramatically backwards.

Now add to this the utterly outrageous fact that Gorsuch is being allowed to glide into a seat that was out and out stolen from President Obama. This is just wrong and something that cant be allowed to take place without a knock-down, drag-out fight even if its an uphill battle.

As the excellent Eugene Robinson notes in the conclusion to a column in this mornings Washington Post:

The way McConnell, et al. treated the Garland nomination was indeed unforgivable. Senators who fail to remember that will get an earful from their constituents and, potentially, a challenge in the next primary. More importantly, those senators will be passing up a rare political opportunity.

With just 48 votes, all Senate Democrats can do is filibuster, denying McConnell the 60 votes he needs for a final vote on the nomination. In response, McConnell could employ the nuclear option changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations. In the end, Gorsuch would be approved anyway.

But I believe Democrats should wage, and lose, this fight. The 60-vote standard looks more and more like an anachronistic holdover from the time when senators prided themselves on putting the nation ahead of ideology. These days, so many votes hew strictly to party lines that it is difficult to get anything done. The Senate is supposed to be deliberative, not paralyzed.

And I cant help thinking back to 2009. Republicans made an all-out effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their motives were purely political; some GOP senators railed against policies they had favored in the past. Ultimately, they failed. Obamacare became law.

But this losing battle gave tremendous energy and passion to the tea party movement which propelled Republicans to a sweeping victory in the 2010 midterm election. It is hard not to see an analogous situation on the Democratic side right now.

Democrats cannot stop Gorsuch from being confirmed. But they can hearten and animate the partys base by fighting this nomination tooth and nail, even if it means giving up some of the backslapping comity of the Senate cloakroom. They can inspire grass-roots activists to fight just as hard to win back state legislatures and governorships. They can help make 2018 a Democratic year.

In other words: In this absurd new political world we inhabit, the old rules of comity and cooperation are gone. Whats more, they aint coming back until progressives learn to fight back relentlessly against the bullies who are responsible for their demise.

More here:
Why progressives must play hardball and not cave on the Gorsuch nomination - The Progressive Pulse

Race. Gender. Language. Religion. Politics.

Those are the subjects most worth talking about if you are looking to discuss something substantive and intellectual. They are the basis for our civics, our identities, and even our passions. Hot-button topics are supposed to be uncomfortable, the rising tensions emblematic of the magnitude these subjects carry.

A strange phenomenon has been happening over the past decade or so that has stifled great debates, great conversation. I did not truly understand the magnitude of the problem until I began receiving messages from people on Facebook after getting into debates with strangers about one of those hot-button topics. The messages are almost always identical; 'Hey James, just wanted to let you know that I agree with a lot of the points you made today. But I can't jump in because I don't want to get fired from my job.'

They sometimes don't want their families to give them a hard time, or they are afraid they will lose friends over their opinions. This is the aftermath of a recently polarized society where you must wave a flag for one side or the other, and by doing so you are required to parrot certain viewpoints or they will pull your card, no questions asked.

I know about this first hand. Most of my friends lean left on nearly everything. And that's fine, but many of them have opinions that are not in line with hard left ideology, and they are far too afraid to talk about those positions in public. Things like gender politics, for example. I would estimate that at least 80% of my female friends over the age of 30 refuse to call themselves feminists.

They feel infantilized by modern feminists, embarrassed that they are being told to constantly place themselves in the role of a victim. And just as an aside, I am fully aware that my last sentence has enraged many people reading this, and that is precisely the problem.

I don't know one person who doesn't believe in equality among the sexes. Not even one. But, for example, if you believe that there is more to the wage gap than basic misogyny, hardline progressives would rather try to reprogram you or place you into a box than politely discuss the issue like adults.

They feel that by denying the notion that there might be other reasons why women do not get paid as much as men you are denying something as ironclad as the colour of the sky, or where babies come from. This is not an exaggeration, it is the exact climate we are living in within our own discourse, and the lack of intellectual curiosity is dampening our ability to have real, robust discussions on issues vital to a modern society.

Deeply embedded in this ultra-progressive ideology is a profound hypocrisy, a sort of convenience lever that is pulled whenever the movement is being threatened. Hillary Clinton's candidacy is the easiest, most recent example. Many of her supporters were identity politics stalwarts who championed ideas like #believeallwomen, a slogan that supports the notion that every woman who accuses a man of assault or rape should be believed, no questions asked.

Obviously this idea is wrought with potential pitfalls, but activists who support the notion are unapologetically rigid in their stance. However, if you had rightfully reminded them that Bill Clinton had been accused of rape by more than one woman, your reminder was deflected as they pivoted to a lecture about how Hillary's husband was not running for office, or how Hillary was the victim of her own husband's philandering.

Consistently, almost pathologically, these activists would completely ignore the actual alleged victims of Bill Clinton, betraying their own philosophy of believing all women as they worked to get the first woman elected as president. And let's not even bother pondering what they would have said if Todd Palin was an accused rapist.

You will find the same rigidness inside every hardline movement, a kind of stubbornness that probably prevents certain causes from gaining wider appeal from rationalists and moderates alike. Like hardline conservatives and their cult-like faith in free market capitalism, there is no room for negotiation.

Both sides engage like this, by the way. It's a type of echo chamber activism born out of polarization that defines the other side as the enemy while branding their own side as unerring. There is never any compromising, never any debate to water down the dogma. Facts that undermine the radical positions of either side are off-limits, viewed through a lens tinted with the notion that the ends always justify the means, especially when those ends are all about justice.

So if both sides do it, why am I mostly focusing on the progressive side? Well, it's because up until a few years ago, I considered myself a true progressive. I am on the left side of every issue I can think of...except for one: political correctness. I know, even that term carries with it a meaning that causes both sides to roll their eyes. The left believe the right uses the term to scoff at basic politeness and civility, and the right believes the term is the label the left uses to police people's thoughts and words.

Both sides have it wrong, in my view. Political correctness is a required practice for certain things like not using the N word, or not engaging in threatening speech. It becomes problematic when comedians are being sued for jokes, or when college campuses force the cafeteria to change their menus due to alleged cultural appropriation.

We are coddling the new generation of progressives, enabling them and propping up ideas that are not sustainable in the real world. Things like trigger warnings and safe spaces might seem like examples of sensitivity and understanding, but often these ideas are associated with listening to different political views or hearing keywords that remind people of a bad memory.

Not to say that hearing certain speech isn't sometimes annoying or even upsetting, but an entire generation is being taught that coddling a hypersensitive reaction to certain speech is not just a new way of dealing with problems, but also the only ethical or moral way.

This righteous indignation is self-defeating, however, as it works to alienate people who do not subscribe to the rigid ideology of radical progressives, leaving rational progressives unwilling to join the fight.

Also on HuffPost:

More here:
North America And The Decline Of Rational Progressives - Huffington Post Canada

(Photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA via AP)

People attend the opening of the "We the People" exhibit hosted by Wieden Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, on February 2, 2017. The exhibit features protest signs from recent social justice marches.

When youre in the midst of multiple constitutional crises, its hard to focus on the future. But without that focus on the part of progressives and liberals, the fate of the republic looks bleak.

Donald Trump may not have been the dream candidate of right-wing leaders, but in the end, they deemed him close enough. For that, theyre being richly rewarded. In the course of a week, the religious right has gotten nearly everything its leaders ever longed for, short of overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. But they seem confident, given the presidents pick of Neil Gorsuch to the high court bench, that its just a matter of timefour, maybe eight, years before that aim is achieved.

The people around Trump know that the reality stars ascent to the highest office in the land could not have happened without the political infrastructure built by the right over the course of the last 40 years. The Tea Party movement was subsumed and partly driven by Americans for Prosperity, a ground-organizing operation funded by the Koch brothers. The churches of the religious right have been networked for years by right-wing leaders to effect significant voter-turnout efforts. These two strains of the right enjoy significant overlap.

Much discussion is now taking place in liberal and progressive circles about the need for a liberal/progressive infrastructure thats comparable in strength to the that of the right. Youll get no argument from me there. But when I hear people enthusiastically cheering models that simply replicate those on the right, I see a flow of donor cash going to efforts that will ultimately fail, while progressive media starve and the work of existing grassroots organizations are never leveraged at the national level.

Our people are not their people. Our movement is a coalition of many partsdifferent kinds of people with a range of concerns and policy priorities. You cannot create a structure built on that of the rights and expect progressives to sign up for whatever youve built. We dont roll like that.

What we need is a structure based on needs identified by real activists, not people who barely venture outside the Beltway, or people who want to build a Breitbart of the left. And we need spacesphysical spaces.

Im no expert on political strategy, but I have spent much of my career reporting on the right as it built its infrastructure. While the shape of the rights political infrastructure is not amenable to the needs of the left, one important characteristic of right-wing infrastructure that is transportableand necessaryto liberal and progressive organizing is that of interlocking parts. Look at the Koch network: Its parts are entirely interlockingthe get-out-the-vote groups, the think tanks, the events. For progressives, interlocking might yield to something less rigid, given the nature of the base. We need physical spaces designed to encourage cross-pollination between the constituencies of the left. To achieve that, the kind of donor cash that flooded certain election-based efforts could, when redirected at building progressive spaces in the cities where theyre needed, help locally based organizations amp up their efforts while encouraging interaction and collaboration between the various constituencies that form the progressive coalition.

If donors would fund strategically placed facilities for use by progressive groupsfacilities that included meeting and event spaces, and were each staffed with a full-time manager and scheduler, you might greatly increase collaborative work among various groups. With collaboration, creativity is catalyzed. And right now, we need all the creativity we can muster.

In an interview with Michael Tomasky in Democracy, Theda Skocpol, a scholar of right-wing movements, introduces a promising idea that could be turbo-charged through the use of shared spaces. Working from the sister city model used in the 1980s to establish partnerships with the besieged towns of Latin America, she suggests forming partnerships with the progressive elements of cities in purple statesthose that have populations that are a mix of left and right, but that went red in the 2016 Electoral College vote.

Id like to add a thought to that idea for donors looking to invest in something innovative. It wont be cheap, but if it worked, it would be awesome. Why not seed some of those purple-state cities with progressive young people by creating incentives for them to move there? Silicon Valley is reportedly finding itself frightened by Trump. Maybe they could plunk down some offshoot of their businesses in these places and attract talent, but do so with a plan for integrating into the surrounding community. Yes, theres a gentrification risk. But for some of these cities, theres also a death risk in allowing things to drift as they are.

The left doesnt need its own version of Breitbart News. It has no shortage of pugilistic political websites that present the news through a progressive lens. It doesnt need another organization focused solely on the election cycle. What the hundreds of thousands of engaged progressives throughout America really need are ways to connect and incubate place-based communities. An influx of cash to build a structure that will support and encourage community would be extraordinarily helpful in this moment of great consequence.

In the meantime, we cant wait for the money. As shown by the success of the Womens March, progressives know how to marshal scarce resources to launch an opposition. Its time for an epic barn-raising.

See more here:
How to Build a Winning Progressive Infrastructure - The American Prospect