pjmedia.com By Josh Hammer
On Wednesday evening, I attended the third annual RealClearMedia Samizdat Prize Gala in Palm Beach, Florida. RealClear, whose brands include its flagship RealClearPolitics website, is best known as a content and polling aggregator, and as an advocate of political and ideological diversity. Pursuant to that mission, the Samizdat Prize recognizes and honors leading champions of free speech from across the ideological spectrum. This year, the prize was given to longtime Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Irish-born comedy writer Graham Linehan and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. (Kirk’s award was, of course, posthumous.)
I am grateful to RealClear for their regular publishing of my weekly column and appreciated the spirit of the event. Still, I was troubled by some of the rhetoric that I heard throughout the evening when it comes to the issue we had all congregated to celebrate: free speech.
In his introductory remarks, my friend David DesRosiers, the publisher of RealClearMedia, criticized the Trump administration’s prosecution of former CNN personality Don Lemon for his much-covered recent storming of a Sunday church service in Minnesota, framing it as a journalism and free speech issue. Later in the evening, Dershowitz stridently defended the fundamental transgender claim that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man; when booed for suggesting as much, he said it was OK to disagree on this because we all have our free speech — as if that is the single highest and most important value upholding American society…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (pjmedia.com)
Be First to Comment