For those of you blessed enough not to recognize the Barnett reference, he was the most notorious governor Mississippi ever had. And that's saying at lot! This 1959 campaign song of his gives a flavor, Roll With Ross:
Yes, you may wonder why "he's his own boss" would be considered a desirable qualification for an elected public servant. One of the many eldritch mysteries of Segregation 1.0.
JBS III was talking about free speech on college campuses. Two things to understand about this. One is that JBS III is a straight-up segregationist. He could have stepped into a time warp at the 1948 Dixiecrat convention and emerged this past Sunday, just in time to be briefed on the latest white supremacist phraseology.
When I was in college in Mississippi, I heard Ross Barnett speak to a small group of student in a classroom. This was 1974, as I recall, well after defending de jure segregation was consider pointless (for the time being). Rolling Ross came off just like he sounded when inciting a treasonous uprising at Ole Miss in 1963. A blithering bigot, in other words. I remember thinking at the time that it was a momentary dose of something preserved from 10 years ago. Which seemed then a much longer time than it does now.
Watching JBS III is a similar kind of thing. Although he's part of a full-blown segregation-restorationist movement that currently controls the White House. Their predecessors of the 1870s liked to call themselves Redeemers.
The other thing is that this speech is an example of what Alex Pareene in another context has cleverly is called a “the greatest threat to free speech in the nation today is college students heckling an asshole” presentation. (You Are Jonathan Chait's Enemy Splinter 09/26/2017) This is also part of a long-standing authoritarian-conservative obsession, the idea that colleges are dominated by Jew-Commie-Mean Libruls who look down their noses at Real Americans.
Sinclair Lewis created a minor character that embodied this attitude, the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery, in the 1943 novel Gideon Planish. The Rev. Bittery had been discovered by some leftie newspaper who reported he was preaching hellfire sermons about the virtues of Jesus and fascism. After a while, a regional newspaper picked up the story. Finally, it made its way to a major metropolitan daily. Eventually Congress and others make formal investigations, and there is considerable hand-wringing about this exotic development in the heartland:
And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.JBS III's speech was stock whining about the Mean Libruls being mean to nice Christian white folks, based on generalizing from marginal cases for the most part. There are a number of Christian Right legal groups who present themselves as civil rights advocates but actually are more interested in trying to get courts to ratify a theocratic political agenda. The American Center for Law and Justice, Liberty Counsel and the Alliance Defending Freedom are some of the better known of these groups. See: Daniel Bennett, The Rise of Christian Conservative Legal Organizations Religion & Politics 06/10/2015. Bennett also reports on a current case being pursued by the latter group, Masterpiece Cakeshop: Meet the Christian Legal Group Behind the High-Profile Court Case Religion & Politics 07/19/2017.
JBS III was vague on Tuesday about just what cases he was referring to. But they sound like the sort of thing such conservative groups pursue. They sometimes have good grounds to pursue them, and more legitimate civil liberties groups like the ACLU are sometimes on the same side. But often they are fairly marginal cases, like overzealous school administrators not allowing Christmas carols to be sung in school assemblies. And the AG made it clear that the Justice Department was prioritizing Christian nationalist sort of cases going forward.
JBS III's case might sound convincing if you don't know anything about what happens on college campuses and don't want to know. One "tell" was that he even mocked UC-Berkeley for bending over backwards just this month to allow a couple of obnoxious white nationalists to speak on campus. And somehow even this is a sign of how Berkeley is run by Mean Liburuls who hate free speech. Emily Deruy reports on some of this week's events there in Milo Yiannopoulos’ 15 minutes in Berkeley cost university $800,000 East Bay Times 09/24/2017. To those not washed in the blood of white nationalism, this looks like a university being very serious about protecting free speech, even though everyone involved knows that the rightwing provocateurs holding the event were hoping for disruptions that would give them more excuse for their WATB stock whining about Mean Libruls pickin' on them.
JBS III of course tossed in a lot of standard general quotes about why freedom of speech is a good thing, so there's that.
Another real "tell" came in the brief questioning period afterward, when the AG is asked about the President's tirade against black football players over "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem at football games. JBS III responded, "The President has free speech rights, too."
This is a mirror-image redefining of free speech not as protection of free speech against existing authorities into the defense of declarations for the highest governmental executive authority. This is rightwing victimization taken to an insane extreme. Of all people in the country, the President is the least in danger of having his free speech restricted. As he illustrates daily in his tweets and speeches.
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