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OPINION
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gainesvilletimes.com
Friday, December 28, 2018
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com
The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
LETTER
Where is the justice
when claiming
victimhood, bending
rules for elite?
What is spiritual grace? “Unmerited favor”?
Is it a package — forgiveness, mercy, empower
ment, counsel, or guidance and even more?
Jesus gave grace, forgiving and admonishing,
when he reconciled with betraying Peter and
spared the unnamed adulterous woman from
stoning. But not always. He powerfully rebuked
the hypocritical religious leaders and ran the
corrupt merchants out of the temple. He was
also, and very much, about truth and justice.
What is societal grace? Could it simply be
equal justice under our law? Or, the assurance
of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for
everyone in our country?
Today, relativism excuses injustice by claim
ing the right of any group, or group identity, to
act according to its standards, no matter that
those standards are counter to our constitu
tional and legislative Rule of Law.
Examples: 1) a group holding its law, such as
sharia, above our law, 2) sanctioning the vio
lence of Antifa, and 3) academia giving prefer
ence to one ideology over another and denying
freedom of speech.
Individuals committing criminal and soci-
etally destructive acts are excused, not held
accountable, by claiming some version of
victimhood, such as member of a “disenfran
chised” group, special status group, persecuted
group, historically oppressed group and other
post-modern suppositions.
Further, individuals are excused by claiming
victimhood due to race, heritage, nature and
functionality of their family of origin, early
living conditions and other creative reasons to
avoid accountability for choices made.
Finally, some are excused due to their status,
power and influence — a two-tier form of appli
cation of our law. The little people, the masses,
are held accountable and prosecuted “to the full
est extent of the law.” Certain elites are granted
special dispensations by other elites, by corrupt
elected and appointed officials, and by the deep
state (bureaucrats exercising their own agenda);
i.e. these elites are not held accountable for their
actions and unconstitutional governance.
What’s the message — the bottom line, the
crux of this matter, the takeaway? Without
truth and justice, we’re sunk!
Gary Hulsey
Dahlonega
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An easy answer to hateful speech
My New Year’s resolution:
Make a careful distinction
between speech and violence.
America’s First Amend
ment says “yes” to most
speech, including speech
that criticizes, insults — even
speech that promotes hate.
But the law applies only to
government.
Private organizations
can ban hate speech if they
choose.
I can write columns saying nasty things
about you — if newspapers, websites and
my distributor are willing to run them. But
the law says I can’t tell people to go beat
you up. At the point that speech becomes a
direct incitement to violence, the law says
“no.”
That’s pretty clear.
Then there’s Gavin Mclnnes.
Mclnnes is a political commentator who
takes pride in provoking the politically
correct.
He makes nasty jokes that I wish no one
would make, like, “Mexico sucks ’cause of
Mexicans.”
At Stossel TV, we posted a video about
him.
A few months ago, Mclnnes was invited
to speak at a New York City Republican
club. Before he even spoke, protesters
vandalized the building.
In the speech, he held up a sword and
told the audience to respect the example
set by a Japanese 17-year-old, Otoya
Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi had stabbed a
socialist politician while he was giving a
speech.
After Mclnnes’s speech, Antifa protest
ers confronted his followers, who call
themselves the Proud Boys.
Some Proud Boys looked
eager to fight and brutally beat
several Antifa protesters.
So is Mclnnes to blame? Did
he incite violence by bringing
up Yamaguchi? By saying
“Western culture is the best”?
By praising “violence in self-
defense”? Or is he just a proud
American urging his followers
to defend themselves?
Should he be banned from the airwaves
and social media?
Mclnnes renounced the Proud Boys
after the street fight and says he won’t be
their leader.
Nevertheless, CRTV dropped Mclnnes’s
show “Get Off My Lawn.”
Facebook banned many Proud Boys
accounts and eventually Mclnnes him
self. He was also banned by PayPal and
Amazon.
Before the fight, he’d been banned by
Twitter. He was temporarily kicked off
YouTube, supposedly for copyright viola
tion, though critics say YouTube is more
aggressive about enforcing copyright
rules if people posting the material are
controversial.
I understand the censors’ impulse to
clamp down on speech that could lead
to violence. But here’s why I think that
approach is backward.
When I was a kid, homophobia was
normal. Not only was gay marriage forbid
den, gay sex was sometimes illegal. Police
would even beat gay men for sport.
Today, most Americans’ attitudes are
very different. What made that happen
was open speech.
People watched gay characters on TV
and came to like some of them. Bigots
expressed hate, but people who heard
them thought about what they said, and
most rejected it.
Life changed dramatically for gays
in America in a relatively short time.
Free and open debate helped make that
happen.
Speech can provoke violence, yes, but
the greater danger is people losing inter
est in talking — giving up on arguments
altogether. Then people often go “settle
this outside.”
So while social media platforms can
exclude Mclnnes if they want to, it’s better
if they don’t.
The more we get accustomed to set
tling our disagreements with words, even
offensive words, the less we need to settle
disputes with fists and swords.
Will Americans become nicer now that
people like Mclnnes are banned by Twit
ter? I doubt it.
To avoid political censors, some right
wingers fled recently to a Twitter-like plat
form called Gab. Gab prides itself on letting
people say whatever they like. A company
that hosted Gab on its servers banned Gab,
so Gab relocated to another host.
Around the same time, one Gab execu
tive says someone tried to blow up his par
ents’ propane grill, probably to punish him
for permitting “hate speech” on Gab.
I don’t know where to draw the line on
what speech is inappropriate for a given
private venue.
But I know that the answer to hateful
speech is more speech.
John Stossel is author of “No They
Can’t! Why Government Fails — But
Individuals Succeed.”
JOHN STOSSEL
www.johnstossel.com
'BrartiialTis
STILL
A BELIEVER
IN SANTA?
BECAUSE AT
TO IT'S
MARGINAL,
RIGHT?
BILL BRAMHALL I Tribune News Service
Encouraging free markets and US energy independence
By The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board
“Energy resources are so limited that not only can’t the
present living standard of the United States be available
to all mankind, it is not likely to continue in this country
beyond the present decade. ”
—Lawrence Rocks and Richard P. Runyon, “The
Energy Crisis, ” 1972
“The U.S. Just Became a Net Oil Exporter for the First
Time in 75 Years — Shale Boom Has Boosted U.S. Crude Oil
Shipments to Record"
—Bloomberg News headline, Dec. 6,2018
The stunning turn of fortunes was overlooked in a whirlwind
of other Washington news this month: Nearly half a century of
free-market initiatives and government encouragement has
turned what looked like American weakness into a strength.
“We’re becoming the dominant energy power in the world,”
Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic
Research, told Bloomberg. The United States is now the
world’s biggest petroleum producer, ahead of Russia, Saudi
Arabia, Venezuela and all the others.
That’s remarkable news for Americans with capacious
memories. In the early 1970s, energy shortages pounded the
American psyche and drove several of the world’s supposedly
robust industrial economies into recessions. Arab members of
OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries,
retaliated for U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur
War by placing an embargo on oil shipments to this country.
Humbled by the sudden realization that fickle Mideast
regimes held so much clout over them, Americans sat in long
lines to buy increasingly expensive motor fuels.
On Nov. 7,1973, Richard M. Nixon became the first of
several U.S. presidents to declare the goal of U.S. energy inde
pendence, a mission that at the time seemed almost as crucial
as the Manhattan Project, the quest to develop atomic bombs
before Germany did, had been during World War II.
Authors Rocks and Runyon, two of their generation’s most
respected prophets of doom, warned Americans about the lim
ited capacities of hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and wind gener
ation to offset reductions in petroleum-based energy: “Despite
obvious drawbacks, we can see that only coal holds prospects
for saving the nation from an immediate energy shortage. ”
Such jeremiads seemed sensible at the time. But the pes
simism discounted four factors that have radically improved
the U.S. energy picture and delivered the nation to the role of
net oil exporter. That distinction may be more temporary than
enduring; the U.S. is likely to be a minor net importer for some
time. Yet the net export of 211,000 barrels a day of crude oil
and refined products is a stark contrast to the reliance on other
countries at the peak of U.S. dependency. That came in 2005,
when this country imported a net 12 million barrels every day
— 60 percent of the nation’s crude oil consumption.
The fracking revolution’s bonanza of energy production
was mostly unanticipated. In 2008, the International Energy
Agency estimated that U.S. oil and gas production would be
flat to declining until about 2030. Instead, by 2013, U.S. crude
production had leaped by 49 percent.
And U.S. production continues to surge. The Wall Street
Journal says America’s wells are expected to produce 28 per
cent more crude in 2019 than they did in 2017.
The big four factors
The energy crisis of the 1970s awoke consumers and
the breadth of American industry, not just automakers, to
the nation’s reckless squandering of petroleum and other
resources. Government agencies encouraged and demanded
conservation measures across society. But the private sector
supplied most of the initiative and the resulting innovations.
Customer demand for more efficient automotive engines
and other types of motors drove engineers and manufacturers
to develop more efficient machines — many fueled by elec
tricity, natural gas and hybrid combinations. The upshot: less
reliance on petroleum fuels.
Market forces and market freedoms birthed fracking and
related extraction technologies that have vastly increased the
potential supply of oil and natural gas. These techniques create
their own environmental risks, and we won’t diminish or ignore
them. That said, no incentive has been integral to U.S. energy
domination in recent years as the ability of wildcat drillers and
other entrepreneurs to win returns on investments.
To see how industry employment has grown, visit three
regions: the Marcellus pumping fields of Pennsylvania, the
Permian Basin of Texas and the Williston Basin, the rock for
mations that hold rich deposits of oil and gas beneath 140,000
square miles of high plains and rumpled valleys in the two
Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
In this country, governments let market pricing drive refin
ers’ decisions on how to align supplies with demands. The
journal National Affairs has reported that of the world’s key
petroleum-producing countries, only the U.S. allows private
entities to control large-scale oil and gas reserves. When the
federal government has tried to pick energy winners and
losers via subsidies or taxation, its record is, as you’d expect,
mixed: Ethanol mandates have done little more than prop
up that industry, and tax breaks for the purchase of certain
vehicles have won limited numbers of converts.
So the move toward energy independence—with enhance
ment of affluence at home and U.S. influence overseas—has
come more despite than because of government interventions.
Not that Washington doesn’t benefit from the private sector’s
risk-taking. America’s energy strength is a bulwark to the
nation’s foreign policy. The U.S. is less hostage than before to
geopolitical disputes or domestic unrest in dangerous neighbor
hoods of Africa, South America and, of course, the Middle East.
Producing goods the world wants to buy is an expression of
America’s economic strength. Each barrel of American oil
shipped overseas helps offset purchases here of foreign-made
electronics and other goods. And imagine how the notion of
growing U.S. independence from global oil markets frustrates
the leaders of Russia, Iran and other countries whose energy
exports largely drive their economies.
By contrast, the frustration for many Americans is that the
phrase “energy independence” keeps the policy and produc
tion focus primarily on petroleum products — and on the two-
thirds of those products used by the transportation sector.
Fossil fuels contribute to global warming. We empathize
with environmental and clean-energy advocates in hoping
that the practicalities and economics of wind, solar and other
renewables free America and the world from reliance on
petroleum and coal.
America rode energy technologies and supplies to become
the world’s leading nation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe breakthroughs in energy storage, hydrogen, fusion or
other fields we can’t today envision will revolutionize how we
power, heat, cool, move and carry.
Remember, coal is in decline largely because this century’s
fracking advances freed up great quantities of relatively
cheap and clean-burning natural gas. That market-driven
transformation at power plants, coupled with slow growth in
demand for electricity and the rise of the renewable fuels, are
why U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have been declining.
Based on the last two centuries of American history and the
evidence now on (and under) the ground, the research and
development that yield those breakthroughs are likeliest to
occur if a free-market U.S. economy continues to grow and
prosper. That economic expansion funds and incentivizes the
risk-taking that has produced our greatest energy innovations.
The startling rise of the U.S. energy outlook, including this
month’s news about oil exports, once again reminds us:
Prophets of doom tend to underestimate the power of lib
erated initiative — this ability of their fellow Americans to
invent solutions that the prophets, blinded by their certitude,
cannot see.
STk (Times
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