William Saletan does a close reading of Barr’s letter:

The letter says the Justice Department won’t prosecute Trump, but it reaches that conclusion by tailoring legal standards to protect the president. Here’s a list of Barr’s weasel words and what they’re hiding.

“The Russian government.” The letter quotes a sentence from Mueller’s report. In that sentence, Mueller says his investigation didn’t prove that members of the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The sentence specifies Russia’s government. It says nothing about coordination with other Russians.

Like for instance Kilimnik and Veselnitskaya.

“In its election interference activities.” This phrase is included in the same excerpt.
It reflects the structure of the investigation. Mueller started with a counterintelligence probe of two specific Russian government operations: the production of online propaganda to influence the 2016 U.S. election, and the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. These are the two operations Mueller targeted in his indictments of Russians last year.

But there are others. Mueller may have confined his investigation that way but it doesn’t follow that that’s all there is.

“Agreement—tacit or express.” A footnote in Barr’s letter says the special counsel defined coordination as “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.” The letter doesn’t clarify whether this definition originally came from Mueller or from the Justice Department. This, too, limits the range of prosecutable collusion. We know, for example, that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email that “the Crown prosecutor of Russia” had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary … and would be very useful to your father.” The email said the offer was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. wrote back: “If it’s what you say I love it.” Apparently, by the standards asserted in the letter, this doesn’t count as even “tacit agreement … on election interference.”

Barr has narrowed things down to a point and Trump-Fox are claiming he’s included the whole universe.

Barr’s letter mixes two different authors. On questions of conspiracy and coordination, Barr summarizes Mueller’s findings. But on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice, Barr draws his own conclusion: “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” That’s Barr’s opinion, not Mueller’s. As the letter concedes, Mueller “did not draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.” That’s for the rest of us to decide.

But is it? Morally, yes, but actionably? Barr has the power, and he can just block us from deciding in such a way that consequences result.

One reason to be suspicious of Barr’s conclusions is that in the course of the letter, he tweaks Mueller’s opinion to look more like his own. Mueller’s report, as excerpted by Barr, says “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” Barr quotes that line and then, in the same sentence, concludes that “the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.” But the excerpt from Mueller’s report doesn’t refer to an absence of evidence. It refers to a presence of evidence, and it says this evidence isn’t enough to prove a crime. Throughout the investigation, this has been a standard Republican maneuver: misrepresenting an absence of proof as an absence of evidence. Barr’s use of this maneuver in his letter is a red flag that he’s writing partisan spin.

All together now: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We all learned that song in the cradle.

There’s more; it’s all interesting.

And a third:

A father dedicated to helping prevent mass shootings after his daughter was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre has died of an apparent suicide.

The body of Jeremy Richman was found in his Connecticut office building Monday morning, Newtown police said.

His death is the third suicide in the past week related to school massacres.

Richman, 49, was the father of 6-year-old Avielle Richman, who was among 20 children and six adults killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

You know…Sandy Hook was the one and only time Obama asked Michelle to come back to the White House from an engagement because he couldn’t deal.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, Richman tried to help make sure shootings like the one that killed his daughter wouldn’t happen again.

The neuroscientist co-founded the The Avielle Foundation, which calls attention to mental health issues through research and community engagement.

“The Avielle Foundation’s mission is two-sided. On the one side we have research. We are funding neuroscience research aimed at understanding the brain’s chemistry, structure, and circuits that lead to violence and compassion,” the foundation’s website states.

The other side is “focused on community education and engagement.”

It’s a strange and sad and puzzling thing that the US is so big on violence and so weak on compassion.

Walter Shaub says yes but we already know he’s a criminal.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906362664972288

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906366628548608

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906370839658497

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906373075222528

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906375352700928

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906378045489155

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906379677093890

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906381732282368

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1109906383426719744

Put like that it all seems a bit damning, doesn’t it.

Word is the Mueller report says they didn’t find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia but they’re not exonerating him either. Naturally Trump interpreted that as “Complete and Total EXONERATION,” because in Trumpland “not exonerating=TOTAL EXONERATION.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find Donald Trump’s campaign or associates conspired with Russia, Attorney General William Barr said Sunday.

Mueller’s investigation of whether the President committed obstruction of justice did not conclude the President committed a crime, but it also “does not exonerate him,” Barr quoted from Mueller’s report.

Not proven but not disproven. Not the same as totally exonerated.

Trump and his allies charged that Mueller’s report fully vindicated the President, while Democrats were already raising questions about Barr making the decision on obstruction, a signal that the fight and the fallout from Mueller’s investigation is far from over.

Mueller did not make the decision himself on whether to prosecute the President on obstruction. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the determination the evidence was “not sufficient” to support prosecution.

But Barr is dirty. Barr wrote that memo, on his own initiative, for free.

Meanwhile we watch Trump obstructing justice every day right in front of us, but whatever.

Oh no no no no no.

#BREAKING: Second Parkland shooting survivor commits suicide, police confirm https://t.co/kjLOKi37zT Via @MoniqueOMadan pic.twitter.com/M2am516uU0

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) March 24, 2019

The Miami Herald:

A second Parkland shooting survivor has killed himself, Coral Springs police confirmed on Sunday.

Investigators told the Miami Herald that a current Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student died in “an apparent suicide” on Saturday night.

…

The death comes just about a week after a recent Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School graduate, Sydney Aiello, took her own life after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office told NBC News that Aiello died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Ryan Petty, father of Alaina Petty, a 14-year-old freshman who was one of 17 people murdered on Feb. 14. 2018, told the Miami Herald the student who died Saturday also died from a gunshot wound to the head.

As if compelled to do the murderer’s work for him.

Petty founded a suicide prevention foundation called the Walk Up Foundation after his daughter’s death. He said “the issue of suicide needs to be talked about.”

“This is another tragic example,” Petty said, who has partnered with Columbia University for his Foundation.

“When you look at Columbine as an example, almost just as many students killed themselves after the fact than in the actual shooting. That needs to change,” he said. “We need to get them the help they need.”

I didn’t know that. It’s horrifying.

If you want to get people’s attention to a safety campaign, there’s only one way to do it: dangle a woman in underwear in front of them. That works, and nothing else does.

An advertising campaign by Germany’s transport ministry to persuade cyclists to wear helmets has sparked accusations of sexism, as it features a model wearing just a helmet and underwear.

With the slogan: “Looks like shit. But saves my life,” the advert features a profile-shot of Alicija Köhler, a competitor in the gameshow Germany’s Next Topmodel, sporting a violet coloured helmet and a lacy bra.

Women pointed out that it’s possible to advertise things without waving stripped women around like sparklers.

Defending the advert, a transport ministry spokesman said: “A successful road safety campaign should jolt people and can be polarising.”

Well a road safety campaign could always jolt people by staging a fatal encounter between a cyclist and a car.

Survivors’ Network proudly announces it is throwing women to the wolves:

We have recently received a huge increase in attention and interest in our inclusion of trans women in our women-only services. We are happy to make it explicitly clear: Survivors’ Network recognises trans women as women, and we welcome them to use all of our services.

You might as well say you recognize wolves as daffodils. Trans women are men, and they don’t belong in women-only services, especially those for survivors.

We know, through groundbreaking research, that trans people are disproportionately impacted by sexual violence, and we consider a trans inclusive feminism to be key to our values and central to our service as the Rape Crisis Centre for Sussex.

They “know” something that isn’t true (and what is this “groundbreaking research”?): women are the people most affected by sexual violence, not trans people.

Our policies will not be changed by who shouts the loudest.

Shouts the loudest? Really? Louder than Morgan Oger, louder than Rachel McKinnon, louder than the Degenderettes with their axes and threats?

So women in Brighton won’t be able to go there for help.

I’m curious about the “Morgane Oger Foundation” now, so looking into it. Pretty funny so far.

It has its very own Facebook page!

Which of course Morgane Oger could have set up all by xirself.

It sure does look as if Oger is providing all the content. It shares articles from…the Morgane Oger Foundation. For instance, it shares one with the stirring headline “Morgane Oger Foundation Applauds City of Vancouver Putting Inclusion First.” What does Oger mean by that? You already know.

We are concerned that public-funding organizations are closing their eyes to discrimination they enable by funding programs delivered by service providers which do not live up to the funding organization’s expectations. We urge all funders to address this through language in grant contracts with service providers and other funding recipients. On 13 March 2019, Morgane Oger addressed the City of Vancouver for our organization asking that the city enforce its own rules on inclusion and discrimination.

“Permission to discriminate on prohibited grounds is given to some non-profits by the competent agency and should never be assumed to be in place. Charities and non-profit organizations with one exception from a prohibition to discriminate do not automatically have any right to discriminate on any other explicitly prohibited grounds”, said Oger.

The Morgane Oger Foundation applauds the City of Vancouver for its decision to grant Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) the requested 2019 Direct Social Services Grant funding as a non-extensible or renewable termination grant and for requiring that VRR meet the inclusion criteria set out in City of Vancouver policy before it can be funded again.

Vancouver Rape Relief has a long-documented history of excluding, and advocating for the exclusion from women’s spaces, of Transgender women and other persons who are not what they deem to be born women.

It’s not about their “deeming” anything, it’s about reality. Women are women, and men are not women, however uncomfortable they may feel about being men. Men don’t get to use their discomfort with being men as a battering ram to smash women’s rights to bits.

The “Foundation” is funny; what Oger says is not.

I wouldn’t want a punch from those hands.

And here’s a bad idea in the making:

An advocacy organization says it wants to map hatred and discrimination across Canada in a move that is prompting warnings of caution from one civil liberties group.

The Vancouver-based Morgane Oger Foundation has issued a call for volunteers to help build the Canadian Atlas of Populist Extremism, to be known as CAPE.

Founder Morgane Oger said the mapping tool would tie together extremist groups and people regularly associated with them, and also map incidents involving hate across Canada.

Is it actually an organization, or is it just Morgane Oger?

The idea is to shed light on how hatred is propagated, she said, while being mindful that allegations can’t be tossed out willy-nilly.

“We can’t say someone is a murderer unless they are in fact a murderer, but maybe it would be interesting to see it’s always the same dozen people who are doing anti-trans advocacy in the (B.C.) Interior or the white supremacy groups are working with each other,” said Oger, a former provincial NDP candidate and a member of the party’s executive.

Oooh nice poisoning of the well, although I have to say it’s a little too obvious. “Let’s talk about murderers, wouldn’t it be interesting to see who is doing “anti-trans advocacy” and by the way aren’t they exactly like white supremacists?”

What Oger means is “let’s make it even more impossible for women to defend their own rights by covertly calling them murderers and white supremacists.”

Oger said the project is in its infancy and the foundation has not yet determined exactly what types of actions, groups or individuals would be documented, but it believes the data could be useful to academics, law enforcement and others.

It could include a rating system to categorize incidents by severity, she said, giving hate-motivated murders and discriminatory graffiti as examples that would receive different grades.

How very scrupulous.

I think Morgane Oger is pretty much the last person in the world who should be doing this.

The SPLC is back in the news, and not in a good way. Its president Richard Cohen resigned yesterday. The New Yorker has a bandaid-rippingoff article on the truth behind the myth by Bob Moser, who was a staffer there from 2001 to 2004.

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.”

In short: the SPLC is extremely rich, and a lot of that wealth goes to the top staff, who are almost all white men.

Moser was surprised first of all by the headquarters, a new, vast, modernist glass-and-steel fortress.

The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

He forgot something. He forgot women. It’s strange how regularly people forget that. He gets to it later in the piece but it’s odd to leave it out at the beginning. The professional staff were almost exclusively white and male.

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

It’s not that they don’t do any good work, but it is that the people at the top got rich doing it, which donors probably don’t realize.

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed.

Now he’s remembered about the women; good.

“I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

Then Morris Dees was fired.

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

Emperors tend to expect access to the females of their choice, without any backtalk.

Read on.

Here’s a thought: how about nobody recommends anybody gets killed? Radical, I know, but worth a try?

Ahmadi Muslims for instance: let’s nobody recommend they be executed for apostasy.

A [London] mosque has received an official warning after leaflets calling for the killing of a sect of Muslims were found on display.

Piles of the flyers, which say Ahmadis should face death if they refuse to convert to mainstream Islam, were found in Stockwell Green mosque.

…

A BBC investigation found the leaflets were authored by an ex-head of Khatme Nabuwwat, a group based in Pakistan which lists the mosque as its “overseas office”.

Previously a mosque trustee said he had never seen the leaflets before and suggested they were fakes or had been left there maliciously.

Islamic missionary group Khatme Nabuwwat believes Ahmadis are apostates, commonly defined as people who have abandoned their religion.

The leaflets said those who refuse to convert to mainstream Islam within three days should face a “capital sentence” – or death penalty.

Well that’s not just an “Islamic missionary group” then, is it. It’s something more extreme, aka murderous, than that. Missionary work is inherently…what to call it, imperialist or colonialist or we know better than you-ist, but it’s not all murderous. A “missionary” group that says convert or die is pushing the missionary envelope too hard.

Stockwell Green mosque claims there is no connection with Khatme Nabuwwat, despite sharing the same name and evidence suggesting the Pakistani organisation had control over its Imam.

The mosque was unable to disprove its links to the Pakistani organisation, according to the Charity Commission.

In short, the mosque is lying (that is, the people running the mosque are lying).

So, that’s eccentric.

President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday with a sudden announcement that he had rolled back newly imposed sanctions on North Korea, appearing to overrule national security experts as a favor to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension in the Trump administration and was a striking case of a White House intervening to reverse a major national security decision made only hours earlier by the president’s own officials.

He really did.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

The Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Friday against Iran and Venezuela, but not against North Korea.

However, economic penalties were imposed on Thursday on two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade international sanctions. Those penalties, announced with news releases and a White House briefing, were the first imposed against North Korea since late last year and came less than a month after a summit meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim collapsed in Hanoi, Vietnam, without a deal.

Yebbut Trump doesn’t want to hurt Kim’s feelings.

Current and former Treasury Department officials were stunned by Mr. Trump’s decision on Friday. Some said they wondered if the move was planned in advance, as a gesture to Mr. Kim. Others feared that the United States’ vaunted sanctions regime had been compromised.

“For an administration that continues to surprise, this is another first — the president of the United States undercutting his own sanctions agency for imposing sanctions on Chinese actors supporting North Korea,” said John E. Smith, the former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, who left the department last year. “It’s a win for North Korea and China and a loss for U.S. credibility.”

But at least Donnie still has his buddy in North Korea. Or, you know, maybe not, but he thinks he does, and that’s what counts.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Yet again I can’t find enough swears.

Sorry there are so many repetitions, the threading was messed up. Or Thread Reader App is easier, I’ll put that tweet at the end.

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109089766082052097

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109091720891940865

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109094962531102720

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109092243946827782

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109094962531102720

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109096602185150465

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1109097658155569152

Hola you can read it here: Thread by @turnthetide2018: "Thread: A selection of images of a book distributed to all Grade 7 classrooms in Nova Scotia, Canada. These students are […]" https://t.co/SmmecePwou
Enjoy :) 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) March 22, 2019

Remember the charming Peyton Rose, who wants to see “TERFs” punched in the throat? Trans Pride Scotland issued a statement on Rose’s ugly threats:

We at Trans Pride Scotland were today asked to comment on the activity surrounding a tweet made by one of our performers, Payton Rose. In our statement, we made clear that we have a policy against violence and harassment at our events, and while that remains true, we feel some clarity is needed after today’s press releases.

We believe that Payton has been unfairly represented by her detractors and the press, especially those who have a history of transphobic activity. While her tweet was certainly inflammatory and may have caused concern for many people, we stand by her response that is was a “tongue in cheek” comment, made in a state of vulnerability and stress and in self defence.

See this is, among other things, one of the ways the conditioning comes into play. We see all those “hers” and we are conditioned into thinking of Peyton Rose (of the pretty flower name) as vulnerable in the sense women are vulnerable. But Peyton Rose is a trans woman and so doesn’t have a vulnerable female body. Peyton Rose has the kind of body that is a threat to people who do have vulnerable female bodies…but the wording has done its bit to erase that from our unconscious minds.

The world is not kind to trans people, especially trans women.

Same again. Really? The world is more unkind to trans women than to trans men?

Groups like For Women Scotland and A Women’s Place and activists who share their values consider themselves allies to the trans community, but nothing could be further from the truth. These groups continue to spread the rhetoric that we are nothing more than dangerous men, that trans kids don’t exist, and that our rights to legal recognition should be undone.

But it’s not rhetoric. Trans women are men and as such have the potential to be dangerous to women, which is not something women should be bullied into forgetting or trying to ignore. When a man talks about throat punching women, it’s not fair to tell women to shrug it off or even feel guilty over it. But Trans Pride Scotland does just that.

Payton has not been removed from Trans Pride Scotland. After lengthy discussion with our committee, she has taken the decision to withdraw for her own safety, as we were becoming concerned at the level of harassment she was recieving on and offline. This includes some anti-trans activists finding her address, her deadname and pictures of her pre-transition. This is transphobic abuse and is a clear indicator that these people do not care about her wellbeing or her comments, but instead have used her in an attempt to discredit and undermine our movement as a whole, and we now believe that we have a duty as a community to come together at this time in solidarity, and protect one of our own from ongoing hate.

Our march and event is continuing. We invite all trans people and true allies to attend and join with us in protest and celebration of 50 years of activism since the Stonewall riots, where trans women of colour were at the vanguard of the movement that brought us here today. We hope to see you in Dundee on the 30th.

In love and solidarity,

Trans Pride Scotland

Never mind Peyton Rose’s fantasy about throat punching women, because those women deserve it. In love and solidarity, Trans Pride Scotland.

More on Prince Jared’s casual entitled disregard for all the rules and laws and restrictions:

According to a Feb. 22, 2017, directive from the White House Counsel’s Office, all White House personnel are required to “conduct all work related communications on your official EOP email account” except under “emergency circumstances.”

Early last year, White House lawyers warned West Wing staffers in mandatory ethics training sessions not to use encrypted messaging apps. Kushner attended one of the sessions, The Washington Post reported at the time.

But hey, they all of them were indifferent enough to ethics and laws that barred them from working for Daddy’s administration to work in it anyway, so how much attention are they going to pay to some weird ethics training session?

Questions about Kushner’s use of WhatsApp come in the wake of the revelation that Trump last year directed that his son-in-law receive a top-secret security clearance, despite objections by career intelligence officials.

What I’m saying. Kushner shouldn’t be part of the administration at all; he shouldn’t have a security clearance at all, let alone a top-secret one; he is and he has; they don’t care about any of it.

In his letter Thursday, which was first reported by Politico, Cummings said Lowell also told him in their December meeting that Kushner’s wife, presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, was continuing to receive emails related to White House business on her private email account and did not always forward them to her White House account.

The Post reported in November that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.

In his letter Thursday, Lowell said he was referring to Ivanka Trump’s email practices before September 2017, when White House lawyers discovered the extent of her personal email use.

A White House review found that Ivanka Trump used personal email at a particularly high rate, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the situation.

The president was angry with both Kushner and Ivanka Trump over using private emails in the fall of 2017 when it was first reported, the officials said.

It was too soon after But Her Emails.

Today for the second day Charlottesville public (state) schools are closed because of threats.

Police said in a statement that the online threat was directed at Charlottesville High School .

Authorities declined to further describe the threat, but images circulating on Reddit and other social media sites referred to a post on 4chan, an anonymous online messaging board. The post included a racist meme, used slurs for blacks and Latinos, and threatened to attack students of color at Charlottesville High.

…

The threat was another jolt to a community still strained by the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 that turned Charlottesville into the site of America’s largest white-supremacy gathering in decades.

This week’s online episode did not surprise members of Charlottesville High’s Black Student Union, who say it is symptomatic of persistent issues in Charlottesville City Schools, including excessive police presence in schools and a lack of black students in advanced classes.

There’s not much to say, is there. This stinks.

Yesterday Trump signed an executive order to do with free inquiry at universities.

At a signing ceremony at the White House, Mr. Trump said he wanted to give notice to “professors and power structures” seeking to prevent conservatives “from challenging rigid, far-left ideology.”

In a background briefing call with reporters on Thursday morning, a senior administration official said grant-making agencies would work with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that institutions receiving funding promote free speech rights within applicable law. The issue has become a cause célèbre among conservatives, who argue that their voices are being silenced on liberal campuses.

While their voices are being very loudened in government and on Fox News.

Mr. Trump was not much more specific in his own remarks. He said agencies would use their control over grants “to ensure that public universities protect, cherish, protect the First Amendment, First Amendment rights of their students or risk losing billions and billions of dollars of federal taxpayer dollars.”

It’s so cruel of them to quote him verbatim. Let’s look at that again, with the repetitions highlighted.

He said agencies would use their control over grants “to ensure that public universities protect, cherish, protect the First Amendment, First Amendment rights of their students or risk losing billions and billions of dollars of federal taxpayer dollars.”

Ouch. The aphasia is progressing rapidly rapidly.

PEN America has some concerns.

The directive that federal agency heads, in coordination with the federal Office of Management and Budget, take “appropriate steps” to ensure that institutions receiving such funds “promote free inquiry” and comply with federal law and policy is vague and overbroad. Neither “appropriate steps” nor “free inquiry” are defined, opening the door to interpretations that could impinge upon academic freedom or insert the government into decisions that are properly made by faculty and university leadership. “Free inquiry” must not mean that discredited theories or pseudoscience need to be given a forum on campus.

All U.S. academic institutions are required to uphold the law, and oversight and enforcement mechanisms already exist to ensure such compliance. It is not clear that any additional steps would be appropriate for the federal government to guarantee that an individual university promote the White House’s concept of “free inquiry.” The idea that scientific research or educational grants could be tied to prevailing political winds is anathema to the academic enterprise.

In other words, “free inquiry” means different things to researchers as opposed to political people. That’s the thing about electoral (aka democratic) politics: the people in charge are inevitably political, because they have to get elected before they can be in charge. That makes them accountable, good, but it also means they have to keep one eye on public sentiment at all times, not always so good. Researchers often have to be somewhat political too, because of the struggle to get funding, but as a class their motivations and scruples tend in another direction. To put it crudely, the two sets have a different orientation toward truth.

Truth and free speech aren’t always fighting on the same side. Free speech and inquiry can mean free for cranks, frauds, liars, trolls, bots, hacks, marketers. There’s a cherished liberal piety that says free inquiry always gets to the truth, sometimes with the qualifier “eventually” or “ultimately” – which is meaningless, because there is no “eventually” or “ultimately,” there’s only this moment then this one then this one. The cherished liberal piety is wrong.

And back to the specific, PEN points out that Trump is no friend of free speech and inquiry in any case.

The First Amendment protects all speech regardless of political party or ideological leanings. Yet this Administration has a pronounced pattern of using its muscle to protect certain viewpoints, while either encouraging or even exacting reprisals against speech it finds objectionable or critical. Whether it is in response to protesters at a campaign rally, NFL or college football players taking a knee on the field, or journalists asking tough questions, the Administration has resorted to taunts and intimidation in order to suppress the speech of those with whom it disagrees. The President has even crossed the line into threats and acts of retaliation against journalists whose news coverage he disapproves of, violating the First Amendment (see PEN America v Trump). The President’s decision to announce this Executive Order at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee underscores the concern that it represents an effort to put an ideological thumb on the scale of federal free speech protections.

Remember when they took Jim Acosta’s press pass away? Remember how Trump simply stopped doing press conferences? And Sarah Sanders has mostly stopped doing press briefings? Remember Trump’s calling the news media “the enemy of the people” repeatedly? Yeah, Trump as guardian of free inquiry is laughable.