Professors at Georgetown University Law Center, impressed by NFL athletes popularizing the idea of taking a knee to register protest, and desirous of limning the Trump Administration as inhibitors of free speech, are planning to take a knee outside an auditorium where Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to speak about free speech on Tuesday. They will be joined by student protesters at noon, when Sessions is planning to speak.
Over 30 members of the faculty have signed a statement condemning the Trump Administration in which they targeted Sessions’ speech as “hypocritical” and “troubling.”
The statement buttresses its claim by referencing three instances, but elides crucial information in order to make it appear the DOJ has quashed free speech.
The first instance cited is President Trump’s denunciation of protests by NFL players; the statement avers that the players were kneeling in silent protest, but never mentions it was during the playing of the national anthem.
The statement also refers to the DOJ’s prosecution of Desiree Fairooz for unlawful conduct after she was “laughing for a few seconds during Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing last January and then loudly protesting her unlawful arrest.” But as Daniel Payne noted at The Federalist:
The foreman of the jury that convicted the woman pointed out that the woman “did not get convicted for laughing. It was her actions as she was being asked to leave. [The woman’s] comments as she was being escorted out caused the session to stop. It disrupted the session.” Indeed, the protestor herself, Desiree Fairooz, wrote an article for Vox in which she pointed out that other people had laughed at the hearing yet hadn’t been arrested—a strong indication that Fairooz’s crime was disruptive behavior, not simply “laughing.”
The third instance the letter referenced was the DOJ issuing a warrant to a “web hosting company called Dream Host to obtain the identifying and contact information of subscribers organizing an online protest of the Trump inauguration.” The letter does not mention that the DOJ narrowed its request and last month a Washington D.C. Superior Court judge ordered DreamHost to comply with the amended warrant.
The letter continues: “These are just three examples of governmental action antithetical to freedom of speech and association for which Attorney General Sessions is either closely affiliated or directly responsible. This kind of government chilling of speech is precisely what the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is meant to prevent. A man who fails to recognize paradigmatic violations of the First Amendment is a poor choice to speak about free speech on campuses.”
Alicia Plerhoples, one of the Georgetown Law professors who signed the letter of protest, told BuzzFeed News, “We are not protesting his free speech; our colleague had every right to invite him to speak. We are protesting against his and the Trump Administration’s views on free speech.”
A DOJ spokesman said, “The Attorney General fully supports the right of faculty members to express their views, even when, as here, the assumptions underlying their viewpoints are based on false premises and inaccurate information.”