Looking at yesterday’s post on Harvard University being ranked last on freedom of speech for the first time ever in the FIRE survey, and observing the general clampdown on speech in our universities and society in general, it can all get a little depressing.

So here’s some good news with The Ballad of the Gadsden Kid:

Earlier Tuesday I reported about a kid named Jaiden from Colorado Springs who had his school’s staff at The Vanguard School up in arms over a patch on his backpack displaying the Gadsden flag. 

What’s wrong with the Gadsden flag, you ask? According to school staff, it has its roots in slavery and the slave trade, a claim Jaiden was obviously highly amused by and whose facial expression is becoming an internet meme at the time of this writing. 

How ignorant of American history do you have to be nowadays to teach it? I guess they just have “ways of knowing” that the rest of us, who have to resort to reading to get our history, just don’t have access to.

The school has suddenly canceled its “Back-to-School Night” due to “unforeseen circumstances.”:

What would happen is that parents would arrive at the school and instead of being a meet and greet, it would turn into a town hall filled with angry parents demanding to know why the school is teaching them a false anti-American history and why patriotic students are being discriminated against. It’s also a very scary prospect considering Colorado Springs is a military town with quite a few military bases around the city. 

The Vanguard School’s strategy seems to be to hunker down, avoid the parents, and come up with something that might assuage the nation’s anger, but the likelihood that parents are just going to let this go isn’t high. 

But he’s not the only kid with free speech problems at school:

Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again

They went to court but amazingly the judge – one Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) – ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”

That’s the now-standard academic argument against free speech, where your hurt feelings from hurty words have now been elevated to the level of safety and security, which makes the hurty words so much more dangerous. The term “safe space” has been converted from being a place where you were physically safe to one where you’re safe from hearing things that upset you, which then justifies making other people shut up.

That case has begun it’s slow climb up the American legal ladder. I’d like to think it won’t have to make it all the way to the Supreme Court but given the increasing number of “judges” like Ms Talwani I have to grant that sad possibility.

Still, there’s always the possibility that a backlash will create more lawyers, and thus judges, who don’t accept all this Post-Modern, Orwellian bullshit. Perhaps that will include young Mr Morrison, who puts up a damned good legal argument in front of his school board (video is 2 hours but starts at 9:40 and his bit is just 3 minutes long).