Tim’s ‘fundamental’ free-speech fail, the West can win and other commentary

Legal beat: Tim’s ‘Fundamental’ Free-Speech Fail

In the veep debate, Gov. Tim Walz pulled the proverbial “fire alarm” on free speech, warns Jonathan Turley at USA Today: He cited the 1919 decision in Schenck v. United States “in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater.” But that “favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement” is “fundamentally wrong,” as Schneck was “effectively overturned in 1969.” Not just Walz, but “other Democratic leaders” all “need a class in First Amendment law.” Indeed, Biden-Harris “has proved to be the most anti-free speech administration in two centuries,” and free-speech advocates fear Harris-Walz would be worse. Fact is, “we are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history.”

Foreign desk: The West Can Win

“We should not be ashamed to use and defend words and concepts like nation and patriotism, because they mean more than a physical place,” thunders Italian PM Giorgia Meloni at The Free Press — and “for me, the West is more than a physical place.” It means “a system of values in which the person is central” and “men and women are equal and free.” Yes, “the idea of the inevitable decline of the West” delights tyrants, since “our freedom and our values, and the pride we feel for them, are the weapons our adversaries fear the most.” So “we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say” or fight “to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”

Security beat: Joe Punts on Iran’s Nuke Threat

“Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel . . . foreshadowed how Iranian nuclear or chemical strikes against Tel Aviv or Jerusalem could be delivered in the not-so-distant future,” warn Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet at The Hill. To end Iran’s nuclear threat, “Jerusalem needs President Biden and his national security team’s full strategic and tactical support,” but “Biden’s call on Wednesday for Israel to conduct a ‘proportional response’ is strategically far short of where he needs to be,” and “is further proof that he fails to yet grasp that Iran is playing for time in the Mideast to win its nuclear endgame against Washington and Israel.” “Preventing nuclear Armageddon means defeating [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei inside of Iran and ultimately with regime change as the desired end-state.”

Eye on housing: AOC’s ‘Bad Deal’ Plan

In a New York Times op-ed, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) propose a European-style “social housing” model that’s “just a rebottled version of America’s failed experiment in public housing,” grumbles City Journal’s Howard Husock. Pushing new “government-financed and managed housing” ignores “the failure in her own front yard: the New York City Housing Authority.” AOC would cap rents at 25% of household income — a policy that left NYCHA “starved of maintenance monies.” AOC and Smith rightly note that “restrictive zoning and rising construction costs” have hindered housing production, but (says Husock) the answer “is not to get government to replace the private housing market” but to get “government to stand aside and let the private market work.”

Conservative: FEMA Put ‘Equity’ Before Relief

“The Biden-Harris administration took more than a billion tax dollars that had been allocated to the agency responsible for American disaster relief and used it to offer services for illegal immigrants,” thunders the Federalist’s Tristan Justice. Why? Per FEMA’s website, its priorities are “first, instilling ‘equity as a foundation of emergency management,’ and second, ‘lead[ing] whole of community in climate resilience.’ The goal to ‘promote and sustain a ready FEMA and prepared nation’ ranks third.” “Now, residents across the southeastern United States are suffering from the administration’s misplaced priorities, which place ‘equity’ and ‘climate resilience’ ahead of emergency preparedness.”

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board