The Popehat Report Is Moving To Beehiiv
Popehat
by Ken White
2M ago
As I mentioned before, the Popehat Report is moving to Beehiiv, a different platform for blogs and newsletters. You can find it at www.popehat.com.   The next email you get from me should be from there.  Everyone's subscriptions should transfer over. The first time I sent an email from there, in a few minutes, it might go to your spam, so you may want to check that. I will be posting links to everything on Bluesky, Threads, and Facebook so you'll know if you're missing something.  You'll be able to subscribe (or unsubscribe, if your time of tolerating me is coming to a middle) j ..read more
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May A Public University Fire Its Chancellor For Appearing In Porn Videos On His Own Time?
Popehat
by Ken White
3M ago
First Amendment rights are constantly misunderstood by most Americans enjoying their protection. Were it not so, what would I have to gripe about?1 One of the most misunderstood questions in First Amendment law is whether government employers may fire government employees for their speech. As I explained at the beginning of this year, answering that question requires a complicated analysis of whether the speech is part of the employee's job, whether it's on a matter of public interest, and whether the government employer's interest in preventing disruption outweighs the employee's interest in ..read more
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Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity
Popehat
by Ken White
3M ago
Substack has Nazis, because of course it does. Substack is on the internet, Nazis are on the internet, and if Substack doesn’t want Nazis it has to take affirmative steps to get rid of them. Flies don’t stop coming into the house because you want them to; they stop because you get off the couch and close the screen door. Any social media or blogging platform faces this. Substack may attract more Nazis than average because Substack has a “okay you don’t agree with me now but what if I wrote another 8,000 words about it” vibe. 2023 Nazis have a very “I didn’t have this insight until I read The F ..read more
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Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions
Popehat
by Ken White
4M ago
This post may be less solicitous of your feelings than you may hope. America faces many problems. The easy ones we solve or ignore. We struggle with the hard ones. Hard problems raise complex questions that lack glib, one-word answers. The stubborn thirst for simple answers to hard questions is bad for America. It’s anti-intellectual, pro-ignorance, pro-stupidity, pro-bigotry, pro-reactionary, pro-totalitarianism, pro-tyranny, pro-mob. Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A gener ..read more
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Punishment Envy And The Perils Of Institutional Engagement
Popehat
by Ken White
4M ago
Every parent of multiple kids knows about punishment envy. You punished me for doing that, why aren’t you punishing him for it? Why does she get to do things I wasn’t allowed to do? It’s not fair. You love her more. You treat him better because he’s a boy. Parenting is absurdly difficult. “It sure would be helpful,” I sometimes proclaim, “to have a clinical child psychologist to deal with this situation.” I say this to my wife the clinical child psychologist, who does not tend to react with an attitude of solace. Life is complex. Every kid is different, every situation is different. Why did I ..read more
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In Which I Repent On Free Speech Culture
Popehat
by Ken White
4M ago
I confess! I have been wrong, and have wronged many. I have called false things true and have slandered the upstanding as evil. I have expressed prideful, stubborn resistance to the concept of free speech culture, and been an apologist for the rankest cancellation. I have indulged in snobbish skepticism of the comparative risks that sophomore comp lit majors pose to the very freedoms that better men than I have fought and died to protect. No more. Now I see the light. How could I not? Great beams of it have shone upon my eyes, cast by the best thinkers of our society. My inflexible dogmatism i ..read more
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My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Up
Popehat
by Ken White
4M ago
Elon Musk wants you to know that big advertisers hate free speech and want to suppress yours. Now, surely part of that is a pitch — Musk wants you to pay for Twitter Premium (sorry, X premium) so you don’t have to see ads while you consume X’s content. But there’s a big dollop of sincerity too. Elon Musk genuinely feels that advertisers are a threat to free speech. Why? Because many advertisers fled X after Musk eagerly endorsed a bigot’s articulation of anti-Semitic theories, including that Jews promote hatred of whites and that Jews are importing “hordes of minorities.” Unsurprisingly, ma ..read more
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Overt Acts and Predicate Acts, Explained
Popehat
by Ken White
8M ago
After months of anticipation, Donald Trump and 18 people who thought it was a good idea to trust Donald Trump have been indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — notoriously fearless, particularly of cameras — is prosecuting them on a 41-count trek through Georgia criminal law. But one law leads every story and falls from every lip — RICO. Yes, Ms. Willis has charged the defendants with conspiracy to violate Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, commonly known as RICO, modeled on the infamous federal statute. Georg ..read more
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The Weight Of The Unspoken Word
Popehat
by Ken White
8M ago
Well-chosen words can move me, but so can words left carefully unspoken. Too often, the news brings us stories of people who have died or gone missing. Some of these stories have missing words with their own gravity, like miniature linguistic black holes. When the news presents an adult gone missing from their family without an obvious explanation (like “hiking alone” or “nighttime swim”), I scan the article for words like “depression” and “troubled” or for other signs that the family’s fear is a very specific one about suicide. When an apparently physically healthy person dies without explana ..read more
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The National Review Is Still Lying To You About The Fraud Charge Against Trump
Popehat
by Ken White
8M ago
There are two ways to be a public legal commentator. One is to describe, to the best of your ability, what you believe the state of the law is, how and where courts might agree or disagree with you, and how your view of what the law should be differs from how courts currently interpret it. That’s what I aspire to. I fall short all the time, I’m sure. The other way to be a public legal commenter is to be an advocate pretending to be a fair reporter — to take what you think the law should be based on your sympathies or politics and present it deceitfully as what the law inarguably is. I’ve often ..read more
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