Texas Bill Models How To Stop Dems' Exploitation Of Colleges For Partisan Get-Out-The-Vote Ops

[Karl Schabrod]

Biden is a piece of shit and Kamala is a filthy whore.

Introduced by Republican Rep. Carrie Isaac, HB 2390 would bar Texas
counties from operating polling places on college campuses.

Recently drafted legislation in Texas may be the key to stymieing
Democrats’ exploitative use of taxpayer-funded colleges to run partisan
get-out-the-vote operations.

Introduced in February by Republican Rep. Carrie Isaac, HB 2390 stipulates
that counties “may not designate as a polling place a location on the
campus of an institution of higher education located within the county.”
If passed by the GOP-controlled legislature and signed by Gov. Greg
Abbott, the law would take effect on Sept. 1.

In a February statement, Isaac cited school safety as the primary reason
for introducing the measure, pointing to the 2017 stabbing death of a
University of Texas student and the recent Uvalde school shooting as
examples of why places of education should be off-limits for elections.

“As a mom with one child on a college campus, and one on a public school
campus, I think about the safety of my sons and their classmates
regularly,” Isaac said. “We must do everything we can to make our school
campuses as safe as possible; they should not serve as a target-rich
environment for those that wish to harm children. I have experienced
firsthand the heightened emotions that often occur at polling locations
and I will not wait for more violence to act.”

Isaac has also introduced separate legislation to prohibit public primary
and secondary schools from operating as polling places for elections.

How the Left Uses Colleges to Benefit Democrats
While not the primary reason for its introduction, HB 2390 has the
potential to curb Democrats’ efforts to employ college campuses as
vehicles for conducting partisan get-out-the-vote campaigns.

As The Federalist previously reported, the Biden administration told
public universities last year that they could begin using work-study funds
— which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with
tuition costs — to pay students to “support voter registration
activities.” While the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires colleges to
“make a good faith effort” to make mail voter registration forms “widely
available” to students, having taxpayers fund get-out-the-vote activities
in this way had previously not been allowed.

The directive came in relation to President Joe Biden’s March 2021
executive order requiring federal agencies to interfere in state election
processes. Despite legal efforts by government watchdog groups to uncover
how federal departments intended to implement the order in the lead-up to
the 2022 elections, the Biden administration has continued to conceal
nearly all related documents.

It’s not just the federal government attempting to use universities to
register likely-Democrat voters, however. Notable left-wing nonprofit
groups are also engaging in similar activities on college campuses across
the country.

One of these groups is Civic Nation, a nonprofit headed by Valerie
Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. According to
its website, Civic Nation aims “to create a more inclusive, equitable
America” through the use of multiple “national initiatives” that seek to
“take on the biggest issues of our time,” such as “fighting for gender
equity [and] racial justice.” Among the group’s initiatives is the “ALL IN
Campus Democracy Challenge,” which was established in 2016 to encourage
colleges to increase voter participation among students. To date, nearly
1,000 universities across 50 states and the District of Columbia
participate in the initiative.

While ALL IN claims to be nonpartisan, a deeper dive into the venture
reveals a different story. Among the notable signs of the group’s left-
wing partisanship is its parroting of Democrat Party talking points. Ahead
of the 2022 midterms, for instance, ALL IN released a fact sheet asserting
that “strict voter ID requirements” are “barriers” that make it more
difficult for college students to vote.

ALL IN’s founding advisory board is also stacked with Democrat partisans,
including former Clinton and Obama administration officials.

HB 2390 Should Become the Norm for All States
The notion that colleges act as a nonpartisan venue to conduct voter
registration and host elections is simply untrue. During the 2022
midterms, young voters (18-29) broke for Democrat candidates over
Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

While speaking with The Federalist, Hayden Ludwig, the director of policy
research at Restoration of America, elaborated on how “there’s no such
thing as ‘nonpartisan’ get-out-the-vote campaigns because voting is
inherently political.”

“Leftists lie when they pretend that their get-out-the-vote machines are
about helping everyone vote. In reality, Democratic operatives want to
ensure that only their preferred voters cast a ballot, so each election
cycle they spend a fortune juicing turnout in Democrat hotspots like
college campuses,” Ludwig said. “The left wants college students,
millennials, single women, and minorities to vote because they’re likely
to support Democrats, so political nonprofits run biased campaigns to get
these individuals on the voter rolls while ignoring likely Republican
voters.”

Ludwig added that while he believes banning polling places from college
campuses is a good start, he’d like to see lawmakers “go even further and
ban nonprofits from running voter registration drives altogether so they
can go back to genuine charity instead of politics.”

[READ: Report: Democrats Are Weaponizing Nonprofits To Run Partisan Voter
Registration Drives]

Allowing polling places to operate on college campuses would essentially
give Democrats home field advantage on Election Day. It’s the equivalent
of setting up polling places at gun shows or evangelical churches to
benefit Republicans. The Texas Legislature’s passage of HB 2390 would go a
long way in restoring trust and integrity in our elections.

<https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/04/texas-bill-models-how-to-stop-dems-
exploitation-of-colleges-for-partisan-get-out-the-vote-ops/>

[Karl Schabrod]

Kill every one of the snotty little bastards.

The Stanford disruptors’ objective was to destroy American civil society
and replace it with leftist authoritarianism, preventing dissent.

The culture of free speech that for so long characterized American
academia is dead. Increasingly, struggle sessions and violent eruptions
are how the nation’s best and brightest choose to handle the ideas,
individuals, and situations that make them uncomfortable.

Earlier this month, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan was
invited by the Stanford Federalist Society to their law school to give a
talk titled “Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” What ensued is what has become the
norm. A coalition of the dysgenic and well-dressed filled a lecture hall
to shout down and demean a federal judge while a school diversity
administrator chastised him with prepared remarks.


Disagreement is OK and clearly would have been welcomed by Duncan, but
when students feel emboldened to tell a federal judge, “We hope your
daughters get raped,” as one individual allegedly did, a course correction
is desperately needed.

On Friday, Duncan addressed this very topic in a talk titled “Free Speech
and Legal Education In Our Liberal Democracy” at the University of Notre
Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government.

“This is a talk about another talk,” Duncan quipped to inform those in the
audience who were unaware that he would be, in part, discussing the
incident at Stanford.

In a general defense of student protests, Duncan stated, “It’s a great
country where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad
will happen to you. … The students at Stanford and other elite law schools
swim in an ocean of free speech. … Has any group of people ever been so
privileged?”

Continuing, the judge referenced a memo published on March 22 by the dean
of Stanford Law, Jenny Martinez, in which she condemned the disruptions
and “threatening messages directed at members of [the Stanford Law]
community” and pledged to adopt stricter policies regarding event
disruption.

Martinez’s memo specifically contrasts student protests with malicious
disruptions, noting that universities, as institutions, have unique
obligations to curtail the latter in the pursuit of academic freedom
through the enforcement of conduct codes and administrative policies. And
as Duncan noted, a rigid commitment to the cause of academic freedom is
absolutely vital to both the preservation of the university system and
American society.

The universities that, at one point in time, were renowned for their
unyielding commitment to free speech and the relentless pursuit of
excellence in all things, to this day — despite the diminishing quality of
graduates — still churn out leaders in every single sector.

Noting the undeniable trend of woke radicalization among young people in
elite universities and the threat it poses to the maintenance of civil
order and liberal democracy, Duncan asked, “What would happen if the cast
of mind in that Stanford classroom becomes the norm in legislatures, in
courts, in universities, in boardrooms, in business, in churches?”

“We must resist this at all costs,” Duncan continued. “Otherwise, we will
cease to have [the] rule of law.”

Toward the end of her memo, Martinez also ruled out disciplining the
individuals who disrupted Duncan’s lecture at Stanford Law, as it would be
onerous to discern which students “crossed the line into disruptive
heckling while others engaged in constitutionally protected non-disruptive
protest” and that university administrators sent “conflicting signals
about whether what was happening was acceptable or not.”

Instead, the offending students — along with the rest of the law school’s
student body — will be required to attend a “mandatory half-day session in
spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the
norms of the legal profession.”

In the final moments of his speech at Notre Dame, Duncan mentioned he was
“cautiously encouraged” by this measure as it indicated Stanford Law’s
leadership was in some form committed to fighting for the foundational
principles of American academia. He also noted that the point of the
struggle session wasn’t purely to intimidate or dissuade him. After all,
he’s a federal judge — he has life tenure; his future is secure.

The point of heckling Duncan, denying him a chance to make his case, and
even wishing rape upon his children was to make an example out of him and
to intimidate the students who invited him to speak. The disruptors want
to destroy what is left of American civil society and replace it with an
even more omnipresent woke authoritarianism, further preventing the
dissemination of dissent. In order to accomplish this, they need future
generations of leaders — their classmates — to be afraid, so they jeer and
they threaten.

This ethos, one that is undeniably a well-established, if not the
dominant, worldview on American campuses, cannot be remedied through
scolding. Half-day sessions “on the topic of freedom of speech and the
norms of the legal profession” might knock some sense into a couple of
dozen Stanford Law students, but what about every other campus in the
U.S.?

Days after the incident at Stanford Law, militant Antifa groups descended
upon the University of California, Davis, in an attempt to prevent Charlie
Kirk, founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA,
from speaking on campus. Prior to the event, Gary May, the chancellor of
UC Davis, circulated a video claiming Kirk “advocated for violence against
transgender individuals.” Ultimately, the militants were unsuccessful in
their attempts, but unlike at Stanford, the disruptors attempted violence
and destroyed public property in the pursuit of denying an individual’s
right to free speech.


How much longer can we continue to delude ourselves about free speech?
There are, to be sure, legal protections for speech, but the leftists who
control the institutions where these protections are most needed
(academia, Big Tech, et al.) actively eschew and chip away at them in
collaboration with the federal government.

A more muscular approach to protect the speech of Americans is needed.

In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring
American universities “to foster environments that promote open,
intellectually engaging, and diverse debate [ ] through compliance with
the First Amendment” in order to access specific federal funds.

But even this, as we can see, didn’t — rather, it couldn’t — address the
underlying ideological issues at play.

Sure, threatening to cut off federal grants might encourage university
administrators to be more vigilant in their defense of (or less hostile in
their attacks on) free speech. But, at the end of the day, the left
controls these institutions and interprets “free speech” in a way that is
fundamentally at odds with the American founding and the First Amendment;
speech must be contained within their preferred paradigm, or else it and
anything descending from it is an affront to their very existence and must
be eradicated.

Back at Stanford Law, Tirien Steinbach, the diversity administrator who
chastised Duncan, has been put on leave, and per Martinez’s memo, an
explicit role of other Stanford Law administrators moving forward “will be
to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed,
and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.”

So perhaps Duncan is right to be somewhat optimistic.

<https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/27/judge-duncans-struggle-session-
shows-why-we-need-fiercer-protection-of-free-speech/>