Op-Eds

Menthol Cigarette Ban: At Least This Time, Biden’s Racism Won’t Put His Victims in Cages

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The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reports that the Biden administration is poised to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes. The reason? Well, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 85 percent of black smokers choose the flavored cigarettes over “plain” tobacco, versus 29 percent of white smokers.

In the fantasy world that Joe Biden (and the anti-tobacco crusaders and fake civil rights advocates who have his ear) live in, a menthol cigarette ban will “protect” the black community from the effects of “aggressive marketing” by the tobacco industry, whether that community really wants to be “protected” or not.

In the real world, what Biden and company are saying is that black Americans are too stupid to make the “right” choices on their own and that government must therefore make those choices for them.

There’s a word for that kind of attitude toward people based on skin color.  The word is “racism.”

Not that Biden’s racism has ever been a secret. In 1986, he led the legislative fight to punish black cocaine users (who, on average, preferred their cocaine in “rock,” or “crack” form) more harshly than white cocaine users (who, on average, preferred their coke in powder form).

Oh, he apologized, sixteen years later, saying he’d made a “profound mistake.” But he obviously neither learned from that mistake nor reconsidered his racist attitudes. By 2020 he was claiming the expertise to evaluate the “blackness” of voters based on their choice of presidential candidate.

In addition to believing that black Americans are too stupid to be allowed to make their own choices on smoking, Biden apparently also believes they’re too stupid to figure out that they can “season” plain tobacco cigarettes with menthol flavoring from crushable capsules or eye-droppers.

A federal ban on menthol cigarettes will be even less effective as a way of reducing tobacco use among black Americans  than higher mandatory minimum sentences were as a way of reducing drug use among black Americans.

If there’s an up side to Biden’s continuing racism, it’s that he’s gone from harshly punitive to annoyingly paternalistic. Instead of throwing black Americans in prison cells for endless years to punish them for their choices, he just wants to inflict endless minutes of inconvenience on them in the name of “helping” them.

As a menthol smoker myself, I have to hope that “cancel culture” swings into action and de-platforms Biden over this racist silliness.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

SCOTUS Should Clarify Tinker in Favor of Free Speech, Not School Control

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In 1969, the US Supreme Court held, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”   Schools may only prohibit, censor, or punish student speech which would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.”

But what about speech that occurs outside the schoolhouse gate, and outside school hours? The Court is about to take on that issue in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.

In 2017, 14-year-old high school freshman Brandi Levy found herself suspended from her school’s cheerleading squad for a year over an intemperate Snapchat post published from off campus and over the weekend.

“F*** school f*** softball f*** cheer f*** everything,” Levy wrote, emphasizing her upset at not making the varsity cheer squad with a photo of herself and a friend raising their middle fingers.

Levy sued over the suspension and won.  Four years later, she studies accounting in college as she awaits a US Supreme Court ruling on her former school’s appeal.

The school district claims the power to regulate and punish “substantially disruptive” student speech, even when the student speaks off campus and outside school hours.

Brandi Levy says the district’s power over student speech ends at the campus property line and the end of the school day.

Even leaving aside the question of whether Levy’s rant was “substantially disruptive” (as a student, I heard much worse on campus and during school hours without any accompanying “disruptions”), it’s important to draw a bright line here: She’s right, they’re wrong, and it isn’t a close call.

Most state laws mandate attendance at government-operated schools for most minors (with some exceptions for private or home schooling).

The government gets substantial control of our kids for several hours a day, five days a week, not counting homework and extracurricular activities.

That substantial control must end at the schoolhouse door and at the final bell.

Apart from true threats of violence, which are actionable whether the perpetrator is a student or not,  what our kids say, how they say it, and who they say it to when they’re not at school is simply none of the school’s business.

In the age of social media, it’s more important than ever for the Supreme Court to protect students’ free speech rights off campus as well as on.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Police Violence: The Standards Are Topsy-Turvy

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Responding to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Libertarian National Committee Chair Joe Bishop-Henchman gets it exactly right: “Those who are given authority over others ought to be held to an even higher standard than what is expected of the general public.”

That seems obvious, but when it comes to police officers, the American justice system routinely gets it backward.

I’m not just talking about “qualified immunity,” a pernicious judicial doctrine that sets a higher bar for holding government employees accountable for criminal acts. That’s part of it, but not even close to the whole story.

All too often, police officers accused of unjustified killings successfully but unreasonably cite fear for their own lives as a defense. Chauvin’s unsuccessful invocation of George Floyd’s “superhuman strength” is the exception, not the rule.

Mesa, Arizona police officer Philip Mitchell Braisford executed Daniel Shaver without charge or trial as Shaver crawled — unarmed, following Braisford’s orders, and begging for his life — on a hotel hallway floor.  Braisford was acquitted after claiming he thought Shaver was reaching for a gun — then allowed to rejoin the police force for just long enough to retire, at the age of 28, with a guaranteed pension of $31,000 per year for life.

St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez executed motorist Philando Castile during a traffic stop, firing seven shots into a car which also held Castile’s girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. Castile’s crime? Informing Yanez that he was licensed to carry a firearm and that there was one in the car. Yanez, like Shaver, was acquitted after claiming fear for his own life.

Was Braisford’s fear reasonable?  Was Yanez’s?

Consider:

In 2019, there were 16,425 reported homicides in the US.

Of those, the Washington Post reports, 999 — 6%  — were police shootings, even though cops constitute only about 1/5th of 1% of the population.

To phrase it differently, a police officer was about 30 times as likely as the average American to commit a homicide in 2019. And a police officer on duty is almost certainly carrying a firearm.

Would civilians therefore be justified, based on reasonable fear for their own lives, in gunning down cops on sight, or at least under circumstances similar to the killings of Shaver and Castile?

I certainly don’t recommend it. Nor do I think it likely that a judge or jury would buy it as a defense.

But, unlike police officers, most civilians haven’t attended police academies, received extensive training in appropriate and acceptable uses of force, and been offered badges, government paychecks, and broad authorities over us mere civilians based on successfully completing that training.

In what universe, therefore, should cops be considered LESS responsible for their actions than the rest of us?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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