The Morning Dispatch: Hong Kong Loses an Important Voice for Democracy

Happy Thursday! The Dispatch’s softball team won again last night. We cannot be stopped.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled 8-1 in favor of the First Amendment rights of a high school cheerleader from Pennsylvania. The decision restricts the ability of schools to punish students for speech outside of school and school activities, but did not establish an absolute prohibition against regulation.

• The Supreme Court also ruled Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, that a California law allowing union organizers to enter the property of agricultural businesses to drum up support for a union is unconstitutional. “Unlike a law enforcement search, no traditional background principle of property law requires the growers to admit union organizers onto their premises,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “And unlike standard health and safety inspections, the access regulation is not germane to any benefit provided to agricultural employers or any risk posed to the public.”

• The pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily announced on Wednesday that it is closing under intense pressure from the Chinese government, which has frozen its financial accounts and arrested several editors. Reporters for Apple Daily told the New York Times they were planning a final “obituary issue” to be published Thursday.

• Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the president has the authority to remove the director of the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), the Biden administration announced it was moving forward with plans to replace the current Trump-appointed director. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the FHFA has overseen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that sell mortgage-backed securities.

• Gov. Gavin Newsom is officially facing a recall election after the California secretary of state’s office confirmed organizers of the recall push had collected more than the 1.5 million signatures necessary to kick off the process. A vote on whether to keep Newsom in office must now take place within 90 days.

• The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met yesterday to discuss rare reports (0.00126 percent likelihood overall) of young men experiencing temporary inflammation of the heart muscle and surrounding tissue after receiving a second mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, determining there is a “likely association” between the two. “This is an extremely rare side effect, and only an exceedingly small number of people will experience it after vaccination,” the committee wrote. “Importantly, for the young people who do, most cases are mild, and individuals recover often on their own or with minimal treatment. In addition, we know that myocarditis and pericarditis are much more common if you get COVID-19, and the risks to the heart from COVID-19 infection can be more severe.”

• The United States confirmed 12,825 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 2.7 percent of the 469,261 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 378 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 602,833. According to the CDC, 12,402 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 648,209 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 177,948,892 Americans having now received at least one dose.

An Apple a Day Keeps Totalitarianism Away

Longtime Morning Dispatch readers might remember our coverage last year of the Chinese government’s imposition of a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong, which experts warned signaled Beijing’s further encroachment on the special administrative region’s state of semiautonomy.

The law paves the way for Beijing’s intrusion into Hong Kong’s long history of judicial independence, allowing for the introduction of China’s repressive legal practices. It sets up extensive administrative networks to investigate and prosecute various vague offenses thought to undermine the Chinese government.

“China is criminalizing what, in places like the United States, and most countries in the world, would be considered normal discourse,” Fred Rocafort, a legal expert on China and former diplomat, told The Dispatch.

As Hong Kong opens its first proceedings under the controversial legislation—trying motorcyclist Tong Ying-kit without a jury for his involvement in July 2020’s pro-democracy protests—the world anxiously awaits a verdict to gauge the scope and severity of the law in action. 

The city’s judicial system also turned against its free press this week. After a 26-year run covering everything from local celebrity gossip to American politics to human rights abuses and corruption in the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hong Kong’s last pro-democracy print newspaper, Apple Daily, published its final edition today. 

The shutdown follows a June 17 raid on the publication’s headquarters, during which officers arrested its chief editor and five executives on suspicion of national security law violations. Authorities also seized the newspaper’s equipment and froze its assets. In an announcement Wednesday, Apple Daily’s publisher noted that “current circumstances prevailing in Hong Kong” rendered it unable to operate any longer.

As one of the city’s most widely read papers and one of its last editorially independent publications, Apple Daily has long acted as a barometer of Hong Kong’s press freedom amid the CCP’s multiyear crackdown on opposition. 

Its reporters and readers saw signs of coming trouble long before last week’s police raid. Jimmy Lai, the publication’s founder and a textile tycoon turned dissident, was arrested last August for his participation in widespread protests opposing the passage of the national security law. Lai has since been hit with a hodgepodge of charges and convictions, landing him a cumulative 2o months in prison. 

“Apple Daily provided news coverage that was critical of the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities (as well as the Hong Kong establishment more broadly), in a direct way that was simply not present in any other Chinese-language Hong Kong media,” Rocafort said. “The importance of Jimmy Lai’s ownership cannot be overstated. The fact that a figure as outspoken and controversial as Lai published a newspaper was a powerful indicator—in happier times—of Hong Kong’s autonomy and stark contrast with the Mainland. Now, in turn, Lai and his paper’s legal troubles signal a new, increasingly less free Hong Kong.”

As night fell Wednesday, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the newsroom and held up their phone flashlights in a show of support for the departing journalists. On Thursday morning, the paper’s final edition sold out across the city—despite its publisher printing 1 million copies, well above its typical 80,000. 

What began as a tabloid grew into one of the loudest voices in Hong Kong’s 25-year push for democracy, earning it the reverence of readers and the ire of the CCP. “No one should have any doubts that Hong Kong is now a functioning police state. In addition to the obvious consequences for Apple Daily and its community, its misfortunes are bound to have a chilling effect across Hong Kong, and not just in its media,” Rocafort said. “And this is of course the desired effect.”

A Win for an Angry Cheerleader

In an 8-1 ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court expanded the scope of students’ free speech rights on social media, ruling in favor of an “angry cheerleader” who was suspended from her team after posting a profanity-laden video on Snapchat.

Brandy Levy (B. L.), a 14-year-old high school student from central Pennsylvania, became the center of a free speech controversy after her post—a video of her holding up her middle finger while exclaiming “F— school, f— softball, f— cheer, f— everything!”—was screenshotted by another student and sent to school administrators in the Mahanoy District. While B.L. was off campus when she recorded the video, her school claimed that her outburst was “directly related to the school district” and “harm[ed] the school.”

After both the district court and the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of B. L., her school district appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Much of the case centered around the seminal 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District decision, and whether it was applicable to speech outside of school and school activities. Tinker held that students don’t shed their free speech rights at the schoolhouse gate, but a school can regulate speech that “materially and substantially interferes” with the operation of the school. In the current case, school administrators claimed they needed similar power over off-campus speech—in part to prevent cyberbullying and other forms of online harassment.

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday did not jettison the Tinker framework entirely, but it did hold that school officials have “diminished” leeway to regulate off-campus speech. Applying this diminished leeway to the school’s punishment of B.L., the court held that the school’s interest in prohibiting students from using vulgar language outside of school to criticize its teams or coaches was not enough to justify the punishment it had imposed. 

“It might be tempting to dismiss B.L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority. “But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous. ’”

Yesterday’s ruling, however, was narrower than that of the 3rd Circuit, which claimed schools had no authority to regulate or discipline students’ off-campus speech. Justice Breyer noted that certain forms of off-campus behavior—including bullying and harassment, threats against students and teachers, and breaches of school security devices—might merit additional regulation. But in this case, the court ruled that B.L.’s Snapchat post did not fall under any of those categories.

“Putting aside the vulgar language, the listener would hear criticism, of the team, the team’s coaches, and the school—in a word or two, criticism of the rules of a community of which B. L. forms a part,” Breyer continued. “This criticism did not involve features that would place it outside the First Amendment’s ordinary protection.”

The one dissenting opinion came from Justice Clarence Thomas, whose views on First Amendment protections have repeatedly diverged from Supreme Court consensus. He argued that Breyer’s opinion broke from precedent, claiming “schools historically could discipline students in circumstances like those presented here.” In addition, Thomas maintained that since B.L.’s outburst was on social media, it might have a “greater proximate tendency to harm the school environment than … an off-campus in-person conversation.”

The Mahanoy Area School District said it was “pleased with and vindicated by today’s Supreme Court decision” in a statement sent to The Dispatch. “The School District unanimously won the issue upon which it sought Supreme Court review: all 9 Justices rejected the Third Circuit’s conclusion that school districts lack authority to regulate off-campus speech.”

But Will Creeley, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), saw things in a different light.

“We’ve long argued that for students to appreciate and practice the First Amendment when they grow up to take leadership roles in our society, they have to understand its value as students,” he told The Dispatch. “And today, the court explicitly recognized that schools cannot police students, no matter where they are and no matter what time it is. The court also recognized that the school itself has an interest in protecting dissenting, unpopular ideas—that it’s part of how we learn, and that our democracy and our school system rely on exposure to ideas we disagree with.”

Biden on Crime

President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered remarks on Wednesday afternoon unveiling the administration’s plan to combat surging rates of violent crime nationwide by cracking down on illegal gun sales, supporting violence prevention programs, and providing resources to local police departments.

“Crime historically rises during the summer,” Biden said. “As we emerge from this pandemic, with the country opening back up again, the traditional summer spike may be more pronounced than it usually would be.”

Preliminary data from the FBI and local police departments suggest the homicide rate rose by at least 25 percent in 2020. If that figure holds, the United States eclipsed 20,000 murders in a single year for the first time since 1995. And the phenomenon didn’t stop when the calendar turned, either; the number of homicides in the first few months of 2021 is 20 percent higher than the same time period in 2020, and 49 percent higher than 2019.

Although the recent crime spike is afflicting both red and blue states—and its causes are both complicated and multifaceted—Biden and Garland’s remarks yesterday focused largely on gun control, with the president once again calling on Congress to act.

“I’ve been at this a long time, and there are things we know that work to reduce gun violence and violent crime,” Biden said. “Background checks for purchasing a firearm are important; a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines—no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something—community policing and programs that keep neighborhoods safe and keep folks out of trouble.”

The administration’s “Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety” authorizes communities experiencing a surge in violence to use state and local funding from the American Rescue Plan to hire additional law enforcement officials and invest in new technology. It also encourages localities to invest in Community Violence Intervention programs.

“These are local programs that utilize trusted messengers and community members and leaders to work directly with people who are most likely to commit gun crimes or become victims of gun crimes,” Biden said. “We know who they are. They intervene before it’s too late. … turn down the temperature, halt the cycle of retaliation, connect people to social services. And it works.”

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced it would send special strike forces to San Francisco, Washington,  New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to combat illegal firearms sales. “Our firearms trafficking strike forces will investigate and disrupt the networks that channel crime guns into our communities with tragic consequences,” Garland said in a press release.

Gun ownership surged during the pandemic as crime did, but Rafael Mangual—a senior fellow and deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute—argued it’s too simplistic to tie those two trends together.

“We didn’t see gun regulations change in any material way prior to 2020 such that we would have expected a spike in violent crime,” Mangual told The Dispatch. “We saw gun rights expand tremendously between 1990 and 2010—which is a time when we saw a consistent decline in violent crime.”

Mangual believes the most important thing the Biden administration can do is fund local police departments so they can add more police officers to the streets. “The reduction of police officers is an extremely concerning trend,” he said. “It’s a trend that precedes the 2020 crime spike and has been accelerated since the murder of George Floyd.”

On this point, Biden seems to agree. “The American Rescue Plan,” he said yesterday, “means more police officers, more nurses, more counselors, more social workers, more community violence interrupters to help resolve issues before they escalate into crimes.”

Worth Your Time

• On this week’s episode of The Argument podcast, Jane Coaston speaks with two demographers—AEI adjunct fellow Lyman Stone and Caroline Harnett of the University of South Carolina—about the United States’ falling birth rate and how concerned we should be. “I do think there’s a crisis here,” Stone says. “I do think that the current decline in birth rates we see in a lot of countries, rich countries, but also a lot of low-income countries where fertility is considerably below what women say they want, that this is a crisis.” The trio discuss how and whether public policy should attempt to boost these figures, population growth’s tenuous connection to climate change, and much more.

• Writing for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers a libertarian critique of the antitrust approach to Big Tech championed by Biden administration adviser Tim Wu. “In Wu’s worldview, individuals and markets can’t be trusted,” she writes. “Only the government knows what’s good for you. In the name of some nebulous promotion of competition, Wu’s policies would let politicians decide which businesses succeed and on what terms. And in the process, they could end up allowing Facebook and today’s other big players to capture their marketplaces via favorable regulation—creating exactly the sort of stultified, startup-hostile environment Wu claims to be worried about. If nothing else—by his own admission—Wu’s policies would likely lead to higher prices for consumers. It’s a bad bargain no matter what technopanic it’s sold under.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• This week’s Dispatch Podcast features the gang discussing the United States’ troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s predictable offensive, the smattering of recent Supreme Court’s rulings, early takeaways from the Democratic NYC mayoral primary, and the very online controversy surrounding In the Heights.

• David’s Wednesday French Press (🔒) focuses on Twitter, and why it holds such power. “It’s all transparently and incandescently silly, but what renders it toxic is the key fact that starts this piece,” he writes. “Twitter is the platform where the elite speaks to the elite. So the folks who are squabbling like children (and often deeply wounded and hurt in real life) are people with real power and influence. That’s why companies move so quickly to respond to Twitter mobs. That’s why politicians (and their staffs) often waste taxpayer time by diving down deep Twitter rabbit holes. It’s also why elites consistently seem to misjudge public opinion. They’re distracted by their own arguments, deceived by their online strength, and misunderstand the world around them.”

• In the midweek G-File (🔒), Jonah points to the progressives nagging Lin-Manuel Miranda for not including enough Afro Latinos in the cast of In the Heights—an almost entirely Latino movie—as an example of letting the perfect be the enemy of good. Miranda’s success “doesn’t mean he’s immune to criticism,” Jonah writes. “But my God, do you think this backlash is going to generate more movies like In the Heights or fewer?”

• Why have some former industrial cities thrived while others have floundered? In this week’s Capitolism (🔒), Scott Lincicome examines this question by contrasting Greenville, South Carolina and Youngstown, Ohio. Among the cities that have done well, “the overarching themes for all of them remain the same: adjustment, flexibility, and diversification beyond the industry or company that once defined them in the supposed ‘Good Ol’ Days.’” Although politicians from both parties might wish otherwise, federal assistance and “nostalgianomics” simply aren’t very effective at reviving manufacturing.

• On the website today: Price digs into why the mail is (still) so slow and Ali Noorani argues that by helping to fight corruption in Central America, the United States can help its own battle against illegal immigration.

Let Us Know

What do you think you would have gotten in trouble for doing/saying if social media was around when you were in high school? If it was around, do you remember any particularly cringey posts you wish you could permanently wipe from the internet?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), Tripp Grebe (@tripper_grebe), Emma Rogers (@emw_96), Price St. Clair (@PriceStClair1), Jonathan Chew (@JonathanChew19), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).