Two pieces on former Vice President Mike Pence making news of the right sort. (To read the whole columns, please click on the links embedded in the headlines.)
Pence’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ is admirably specific and thoughtful (April 1):
As former Vice President Mike Pence positions himself for a possible presidential race, he is setting a great example of substance of the sort that the public should demand from all White House aspirants.
On Thursday, Pence’s Advancing American Freedom organization launched a “Freedom Agenda” featuring what, by modern standards, is a remarkable amount of depth and specificity. Readers may also be struck by how much its tone sounds Reaganesque, more focused on what the group (and thus Pence) is for than what it opposes.
The agenda is divided into three sections: American culture, American opportunity, and American leadership….
Pence teaches caterwauling U.-Va. students what freedom and public decency mean (April 14): Former Vice President Mike Pence’s hugely successful speech at the University of Virginia this week isn’t just a rebuke to school newspaper editors who wanted Pence stifled. It’s a lesson to overwrought collegians in general.
Free speech is a blessing, not a threat.
Exposure to other points of view spurs understanding, not “violence.” And for those fortunate enough to be in college, which, by the way, is a remarkably coddled existence, especially at “elite” schools, your job is to learn by listening and discussing, not to act as arbiters of what others can hear.
In an astonishingly juvenile and myopic editorial, the Cavalier Daily had argued that Pence should not be allowed to speak on campus because he allegedly traffics in “rhetoric that directly threatens the presence and lives of our community members.”
The editorial used ironic quotation marks around the phrase “diversity of thought,” as if to question the validity of the very idea. It repeatedly mischaracterized Pence’s statements and called him “racist” without the slightest reasonable justification. The editorial also bristled at the very idea that a speaker would “take a stand for America’s founding.”…
