SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

DO THESE LIVES MATTER? – FROM DAILY MAIL:   Policemen in South Africa have been caught looting goods as the ransacking of stores and warehouses continued into a fifth day - with huge queues forming outside supermarkets amid fears of food shortages caused by the rioting.  Footage showed people accosting a man wearing a police jacket beside a hatchback filled with household supplies, including bread, milk and cooking oil. The woman filming says: 'This is a police officer, in uniform, looting ... This is our SAPS (South African Police Service), guys.'  A second video from the same woman showed another purported officer in plain clothes trying to hide his face from the camera after he was hauled out of his car by locals. His vehicle was laden with allegedly looted products, including a flat-screen television.  'He has looted, he has threatened our lives with firearms, and this is all coming out of his Polo,' the woman says as she films objects on the ground beside the open car boot.   The raging unrest first erupted last Friday after former president Jacob Zuma started serving a 15-month term for contempt, having snubbed a probe into the corruption that stained his nine years in power.  But the wanton lawlessness has lost any political motivation, with gang shoot-outs in the streets, people queuing up in their cars to loot warehouses and malls, and white farmers forming militias to defend their properties.  Wasn't South Africa a big deal once?  Oh, I guess I'm just so yesterday. Please tell me who I'm supposed to root for today.  It's so confusing.  I just want to be sure I know who to cheer for should I be invited to a Manhattan party (some chance). 

BLESS THEM – FROM COLLEGE FIX:    A group of politically moderate students have become targets for name-calling and threats for writing a pro-free speech “UConn Statement” and bringing it before the student government.  The statement reads in part that “Members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus. … To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”  Its authors have been accused of white supremacy and one of them even received an ISIS beheading video.  After tempers flared within the student government over the effort, it was shelved during the spring semester, but the student authors said they plan to bring it forth again come fall semester.  “If not us, then who? We’re the last hold,” said co-author John Ross, a senior and one of the few conservative senators in UConn’s student government. “This is going on nationwide. … It has to start with us.”  Fellow co-author, economics and political science major Isadore Johnson, said bringing the statement to the student government illustrated just how opposed students are to free speech.  Johnson, a regional coordinator for Students For Liberty, said that while most of the campus is moderately left, there are activist wings that are “really left and exclusionary,” and some have weaponized UConn’s bias reporting system against people they labeled “dissidents.”  The college campuses are a prime battlefield in the fight to preserve American freedoms.  We've got support the brave students who are fighting the good fight.  They get very little help from faculties.

July 14, 2021