August 2016

It’s a time-honored tactic – when attacked, change the subject. For generations, politicians of all stripes and parties have tried to change the topic of public discussion whenever their foibles and failings become the target of media attention. And, so it goes with Hillary Clinton.

The beleaguered Democratic presidential nominee has clumsily attempted one verbal sleight of hand after another, in an effort to avoid being held accountable for the highly questionable – if not unlawful — shenanigans between the Department of State during her tenure as Secretary and her family’s cash cow, the Clinton Foundation. Hillary’s efforts should not be permitted to shield her from answering to a Special Prosecutor.

The most recent – but probably not the final – factor that has caused Mrs. Clinton to sweat, is the revelation that the 15,000 e-mails discovered by the FBI not to have been previously turned over to the State Department as Clinton claimed, raise questions anew about whether donations to the Clinton Foundation were tied to contacts those donors had with the State Department.

At the juncture where Mrs. Clinton now finds herself, there are two very distinct choices open to her. Most public officials and candidates, when facing damaging but false allegations of wrongdoing, understand that taking the high road and demanding, or at least “welcoming,” an open and objective investigation, puts them in the strongest political posture to survive the attacks.

The other path – more often taken by those being hounded by damaging charges that probably are not false, hunker down, bluster, and change the subject. Here is where we find Hillary Clinton — hurling mud at the GOP standard bearer, Donald Trump.

In a feat of impressive imagination, Clinton responded to the latest evidence of wrongdoing that has surfaced against her, by charging her opponent with every false invective she could conjure, including racism, bigotry and misogyny. At the end of the day, however, when the dust of her ridiculous claims settled, questions about her integrity and truthfulness were what remained.

The evidence of an improper relationship between then-Secretary of State Clinton and the cash inflow into the Clinton Foundation, is today stronger than ever. The latest revelation, courtesy of the Associated Press, shows that at least 85 of the 154 people from private interests who met or had phone calls scheduled with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton, had donated or pledged money to the Clinton Foundation. And the sums are hardly de minimus. Those donors alone dropped as much as $156 million combined into the Foundation; potentially taking pay-to-play to a whole new level.

Despite assertions by some pundits that the best place to resolve those questions is the political arena, the appointment of a Special Prosecutor affords the only effective vehicle with which to drill down and get to the bottom of the mess candidate Clinton has left in her wake.

There is an urgency to initiating such an impartial investigation. Americans are slightly more than two months away from going to the polls to select a new president. They are entitled to have far more facts about Mrs. Clinton before making their choice than either the candidate or the current Administration has been willing to provide. And, despite the fact that a Special Prosecutor appointed now would very likely not conclude his or her investigation into this matter by November 8th, simply appointing such a person would give the voters the assurance that an impartial investigation will take place and ultimately result in the truth coming out.

In a sense, directing the Attorney General to appoint a Special Prosecutor would be a win for President Obama as well. Such a move would afford him a legacy he does not now appear destined to enjoy – that he is a President who cares more about impartial justice than protecting a political ally. The added benefit to Obama would be that he would then have washed his hands of the mess, and could no longer be pressed to discuss it since it would be in the hands of an independent, Special Prosecutor.

Allowing this scandal to fester will only further damage the credibility of our legal and political system. Just last week, a new word entered American’s vernacular: “Bleachbit,” meaning a service that prevents recovery of computer files. With trust in our Political Class at an all-time low, can we really afford further dissolution of the bond of trust between citizens and public officials that is essential to the proper functioning of our representative democracy?

Hillary may or may not stand to gain from a Special Prosecutor investigation, but America most definitely will.

In today’s public policy arena, winning ideas rarely are decided by sound logic, accurate facts, or even by the most votes. Instead, content filters and algorithms, meticulously engineered by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, intentionally steer public debate in the direction of their owners’ personal politics; and, not coincidentally, toward the politics of their liberal friends in Washington and Sacramento.

For starters, consider Facebook – the Big Daddy of social media. There have been numerous reports of Facebook’s algorithm taking down popular pages of pro-gun organizations. But even this example of the “new censorship” pales when viewed in the context of the company’s “aggregators of trending topics” – faceless individuals who decide what news content to list in a high visibility section of the site, and who intentionally suppress conservative news and sites.

Facebook’s co-conspirator Twitter is no better; having permanently banned popular Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos, under dubious circumstances. Twitter then was accused in July of removing the #DNCLeaks hashtag from its trending topics; effectively stifling discussion of the evidence of corruption uncovered in the Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails.

Such sneaky practices are growing as social media sites assume a more aggressive approach to posts and content they determine to be “problematic” — a liberal catchall term used to describe any free expression contrary to their personal perspective. This helps to explain why these social media platforms almost exclusively censor conservative news, topics, and users.

Rather than foster open debate, free expression, and deeper intellectual inquiry – actions at one time considered among the goals of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — these companies have instead taken to creating “safe spaces” for users by banning objectionable content and offensive users. Thus, rather than a place where individuals of varied political backgrounds can openly and intelligently discuss issues important to the future of our nation and our society, social media users consciously or unwittingly become participants in a dumbed-down and tightly constrained public policy arena. This is the price paid for being able to instantly and regularly communicate with fellow users about what they had for dinner or the latest concert they attended.

On college campuses, the consequences are even more profound and negative; as fringe Marxist movements push school administrations to take punitive actions against students who use social media for “hate speech” – that is, intellectually challenging ideas. Others, like the See The Stripes group at Clemson University, have gone so far as to call for “criminalizing” offensive speech by students and faculty – a ludicrous and legally ignorant position, but one illustrative of the growing anti-free speech environment driving censorship both online and offline.

As private entities, the censorship policies of social media companies do not equate to violations of the First Amendment per se; but this does not mean such policies do not contribute to the overall chilling of free speech. Regardless of its legality, the practice of censorship in both public and private environments reinforces the notion that disagreeable or offensive speech is best addressed by eliminating it altogether, rather than through debate, rebuttable, or simply more speech. And, with each occurrence, the notion grows that articulating any idea not part of the liberal agenda is objectionable and subject to removal.

Our Founding Fathers recognized the importance that free speech and expression plays in securing individual liberty. Benjamin Franklin called freedom of speech “a principal pillar of a free government,” and noted that “without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom.”

It is curious indeed to consider how America’s Founding Fathers would have been treated were they to argue in support of American independence in today’s society and using contemporary means of communication. Would Thomas Jefferson have been “no platformed” as he toured American universities with his metaphors about refreshing the Tree of Liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants? Would Patrick Henry be permanently banned from Twitter for extremist comments like, “Give me liberty, or give me death”? Would George Washington’s posts about organizing militias be stripped from Facebook because they contained imagery of guns?

The late 18th-Century world in which our Founders articulated, debated, and implemented the flourishing, freedom-based country that defeated the greatest military power in the world at the time, was anything but a “safe space;” but if the liberal puppeteers fashioning 21st-Century social media had been running things back then, history would have turned out quite different. And not for the better.

The “October Surprise” this election cycle may come not from one of the presidential candidates, but from an unlikely source – the Internal Revenue Service. The ramifications of such a move are all bad, especially for conservative-oriented groups, and will reverberate far beyond any one candidate or political party. Whether the Congress has the backbone to head off this IRS attack on free speech is very much an open question; a spending restriction placed earlier on IRS funding is set to expire at the end of this Fiscal Year – September 30th – just in time for an October Surprise.

It is well-known that the IRS has long sought to silence or intimidate conservative-oriented organizations. Its effort in this regard is institutional and goes back several years, and was not shut down with the forced 2013 resignation of disgraced IRS director Lois Lerner. In fact, the powerful tax- and information-collecting agency now has its gunsights set not on a particular individual or organization, such as Citizens United, but rather on free speech as a whole.

According to the Tax Revolution Institute, a government watchdog organization that has been keeping a close eye on these First Amendment-violating efforts by the IRS, a proposed rule change to how certain non-profit organizations are classified, may very well be in the works for implementation this October.

The problematic rule, REG–134417–13, was first presented in 2013 and set parameters on how and when 501(c)(4) and other non-profit organizations could lawfully engage in election-related, informational and educational communications. The publication of the regulation came on the heels of the highly-publicized IRS scandal targeting conservative organizations, and faced strong and immediate pushback, including by the Congress. Now, three years later, and perhaps concluding that such focus on the IRS has diminished or will be overshadowed by presidential politics, the Service appears ready to strike again.

Should the new rule look anything like what has been proposed previously, with one stroke of the pen the IRS would be able to reclassify heretofore clearly protected political speech as prohibited “electioneering.” A communication doing nothing more than mentioning the name of or position sought by a candidate – or simply showing their picture — before a primary or general election, would be sufficient to bring the power of the IRS down on that offending organization. Also at stake is the donor privacy of those organizations.

In typical government Double Speak, the IRS justifies the rule change as necessary to help protect the “sanctity of elections.” In reality, and based on the past history of not just the IRS but other federal agencies as well, including the Federal Election Commission, it is easy to discern the true motive of such a proposal: silencing conservative critics of incumbent office holders and candidates.

Furthermore, it is no coincidence that the possible rule-change comes while Democrats on the Federal Election Commission attempt to silence conservative websites like the Drudge Report; and as Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders continue to campaign vocally on overturning Citizens United. It is all a part of the Left’s proxy war on conservative speech, which has flourished with the rise of New Media. The Left cheers when liberal non-profit and for-profit entities pillory Republicans on issues such as gay rights and gun control. However, when it comes to conservative organizations doing the same to individuals supported by the Left, it becomes an issue about the “corrupting influence” of money in politics; which makes the motivations for the IRS rule changes so transparent.

In recent years, the Right has dominated when it comes to establishing effective 501(c)(4) organizations, and the Left will stop at nothing to see such conservative audacity silenced. But, rather than having to admit their true intentions during debate in Congress, Democrats hope to sidestep this nuisance by employing the same regulatory schemes long-favored by President Obama to undermine gun rights, which in their view do not require congressional approval.

Make no mistake – this constitutes a battle for the soul of the First Amendment to our Constitution. Congress has it within its power to once again stymie this move by the IRS, through an appropriations “rider” as it did previously, or by defining “political advocacy” in a common-sense way so that the IRS is no longer able to undercut this most cherished and constitutionally protected right. We can only hope congressional Republican leaders will find the backbone to head off this devastating October Surprise.