Freedom of Expression and the Duty to STFU.

Curmie has written a lot of late about matters relating in one way or another to the notion of freedom of expression. We had the art history professor punished for doing her job (and for going out of her way not to offend or embarrass students), the cancellation of high school plays in Florida and in Ohio, the Associated Press’s ridiculous campaign against “the” and the University of Southern California’s Social Work Department’s even sillier skittishness at the word “field,” Stanford’s administration’s getting all in a tizzy that someone would actually read Mein Kampf, and a Broadway star’s narcissistic inability to take a joke. You could probably include the insistence that the globe immediately stop rotating because a football player suffered a medical emergency. 

All of these episodes at least appear to have originated on the left, where hypersensitivity, virtue signaling, and garden variety silliness are regarded as exemplary characteristics. The right, not wishing to be left out, exercises its desire to squelch voices other than their own by governmental action, packing the board of a state university with True Believers, reacting to “threats” they know damned well to be imaginary, and seeking to de facto eliminate the protections of tenure. 

There are plenty of similar stories out there now. The lead has to be that FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has now released its list of the 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech. Curmie wrote about the case at Hamline (linked above), the Georgetown case, and, over a year ago, about part of the debacle at Collin College. A couple others prompted links on Curmie’s Facebook page, but he never wrote about them here. And a couple escaped his attention altogether. Curmie did write about cases that didn’t make the Top-10 cut at FIRE here and here. The goal is to cover over half of next year’s FIRE Top-10 while the stories are still news. We shall see. 

Also in the news of late is the case of Jeff Gray, who has filed suit against a pair of small-town southern police departments for arresting him, thereby depriving him of his 1st amendment rights. His alleged crime: holding a man-made sign reading “God bless the homeless vets” on public property. Is Gray (and FIRE) grandstanding? Of course, if for no other reason than you can pretty much count on cops to do something stupid if given the opportunity. He dangled the bait, but they took it. 

Not all of these cases are on this side of the big pond, of course. The Welsh Rugby Union has banned the Tom Jones classic “Delilah” from the Principality Stadium choirs’ song list because of the WRU is “respectfully aware [whatever the hell that means] that it is problematic and upsetting to some supporters because of its subject matter.” 

OK, a couple of things. First, it is indeed a song about a man stabbing his unfaithful lover in a fit of jealous rage. There aren’t a lot of other ways to interpret “She stood there laughing / I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.” That’s not a healthy respect for women we’re talking about. Still, it would seem that the authorities might have noticed that previously in the over half-century since the song’s release. (To be fair, the song was dropped from halftime playlists in 2015.) 

Curmie does admit, however, that he’s heard the song dozens of times and never paid much attention to those lyrics, concentrating on the famous chorus, which is also the part spectators want to sing along to at rugby matches. Of course, it’s not the only song with similar lyrics—“Hey Joe,” best known in the rendition by Jimi Hendrix, comes to mind immediately—and one would have thought that if the song is so problematic, it wouldn’t have been featured at the Diamond Jubilee concert. 

Curmie has no difficulty understanding why some people would not want to hear the song featured at a rugby match, especially at the forthcoming Six Nations competition. And Welsh rugby has apparently come under scrutiny for racism, sexism, and homophobia of late. So the move has merit, even if it does seem to substitute for actually doing something about actual substantive problems. 

But Curmie also has a little experience of such things. He entered Dartmouth College shortly after the unofficial “Indian symbol” was officially discontinued. The urge to append a chant—“Dart-mouth! Indians! Scalp ‘em!”—after the sort of unofficial football fight song was overwhelming among the upperclassmen, mostly, no doubt, as a display of post-adolescent defiance and bravado. By the time Curmie was a senior, the chant had pretty much disappeared. 

But undergraduates tend to leave after four years; rugby fans are likely to be around a lot longer. Curmie predicts a variation on the Streisand Effect, with the song being sung louder and more often by fans, who are not subject to the ban, as they don’t represent the WRU. As “Durham Steel” tweeted, “You do realise the first song Welsh rugby fans will sing, after the national anthem, will be Delilah & they'll sing it non stop i reckon just to prove a point, just like the English did when tried to ban Swing Low.” (There was an attempt a few years ago to ban “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the unofficial anthem of English rugby, for being culturally appropriative.) 

But this post isn’t really about any of these attempts to limit free expression. It’s about when someone in a position of authority is too stupid to shut up. In Providence, Rhode Island, assistant principal at Mount Pleasant High School Stefani Harvey sent out an email from her school account, reading,

Hello team:

Please see the message below regarding your consideration for an urgent matter to support one of our own students here at Mount.

We have a student who came to America with “Coyote”, which is a group that helps people. This group gives you a time frame to make a payment of $5000 to those, who bring them into the states.

Our student needs our urgent support to raise another $2000 to meet his goal of $5000 by February 1, 2023.

Please considering helping if you can by donating on Friday. Melanea will be around to collect money between 8:00-8:45am.

And yes, it hurt Curmie to reproduce that email’s manifold errors. One thing four decades in the classroom teaches you is how to distinguish between the inevitable typos we all commit and the inability to write at the 6th grade level. This is the latter. 

No, not these guys...

Even more problematic than an assistant principal who ought to be in middle school, however, is one who ought to be in federal prison. Can it be possible that she doesn’t know that “coyotes” are human traffickers? Even if that were the case, how is it “helping people” to charge them $5000 to get into the country? 

More to the point, as Jonathan Turley points out, “Harvey was trying to help the student pay off the coyote fee, but there is a little problem with this fundraiser: transporting aliens is a federal crime. Even worse, these ‘contracts’ for human smuggling often become human trafficking enterprises where those who cannot pay are used in prostitution or the drug trade.” No one wants the student to become victimized further than has already happened, but (quoting Turley again):

It is not known the status of the student beyond the illegal entry. It is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(i) and 1324(a)(2) to knowingly bring or attempt to bring into the United States an alien into the country illegally. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(ii) makes it a crime for any person, with knowledge or reckless disregard of the alien’s illegal immigrations status, to transport an alien within the United States by any means of transportation.

It is also a crime to harbor an illegal immigrant or shield the alien from detection. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii). It is also a crime under Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) to encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States as well as conspiring or aiding or abetting in any of these crime. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(v). This is a direct campaign to raise money for an unlawful payment to a human trafficker.

That’s not good, right? The principal, Tiffany Delaney, did what damage control she could early on, but Harvey is now on paid leave. PAID LEAVE? For committing a federal crime that it’s obvious she committed? What the hell would it take to get fired? 

Curmie’s more conservative friends suggest that the answer to that question is to be other than a black lesbian who, in their view, was hired to begin with to fulfill a DEI quota rather than for any actual credentials. Problem is, in this case, they’re probably right.