A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Brown’s misplaced
compassion
W
hatever good things Kyle Hedquist did before,
and whatever good things he will do in the fu-
ture, are eclipsed by the absolute finality of the
instant he pulled a trigger and fired a bullet into the back of
Nikki Thrasher’s head.
It happened in 1994 on a backroad in Douglas County, Or-
egon.
Hedquist was 17. He was convicted in 1995 of murdering
Thrasher, 19, and sentenced to life in prison without pa-
role. Hedquist admitted that he killed Thrasher because he
feared she could testify against him in a series of burglaries
he also committed.
Hedquist is no longer in prison. And he has Oregon Gov.
Kate Brown to thank for his freedom. Brown granted clem-
ency to Hedquist last month. He was released April 15.
Brown’s decision prompted predictable outrage from some
law enforcement officials, including Douglas County Sheriff
John Hanlin, and District Attorney Paige Clarkson and Sher-
iff Joe Kast in Marion County, where Hedquist was released to
live in the Salem home of a former prison chaplain.
But not all of the criticism comes from expected sources.
Brown’s fellow Democrat, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, described
Brown’s decision as “wrong on every level, starting with its
callousness toward the crime victim’s family and extending to
all Oregonians counting on public officials to make decisions
with public safety in mind.” Wyden also described Brown’s
commutation of Hedquist’s sentence as a “grossly irresponsi-
ble use of the clemency powers.”
Wyden’s comments are harsh — and rightfully so.
Brown’s defense of her decision, meanwhile, is the typical
mealymouthed claptrap of those who seem incapable of ac-
cepting that some people do things so heinous that no sub-
sequent acts, however admirable, offset the harm they have
caused or justify a reduction in their punishment.
“Teenagers, even those who have committed terrible
crimes, have a unique capacity for growth and change,” Brown
said in a social media post in which she also applauded Pres-
ident Biden’s granting of clemency to 78 people, all of whom,
unlike Hedquist, were guilty of nonviolent crimes.
This is ludicrous.
Teenagers may well be more likely than adults to recognize
their mistakes and become better people. But there’s nothing
unique about Hedquist. Would Brown have been as lenient if
he had been, say, 21 when he murdered Thrasher? What is the
age threshold? The very concept, of course, is inane.
The only unique aspect of this situation — the only one
that is irretrievable — is Thrasher’s life. Hedquist took it. And
Brown can never justify giving him, at age 45, freedom for the
rest of his own life.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
YOUR VIEWS
Voting for McQuisten will help
protect our rights
lockdowns and mandates? Do you be-
lieve in medical freedom? Are you irri-
tated by the rise in crime in our state?
Are you awake yet?
Do you go to bed anxious that your
Our freedoms are extremely fragile, property will be the next one burglar-
Oregon is in a state of disaster!
ized? Are you outraged that you live in
Are you fed up with your gun rights a state that does NOT “back the blue,”
being threatened? Are you tired of liv- but instead enables lawlessness? Are
ing in fear?
you as disgusted as I am, that we live
Do you worry that your timber will in a state that promotes the death of
needlessly burn? Does it concern you unborn children? Are you happy with
that our kids are being indoctrinated the state’s gross mismanagement and
with evil in public schools? Are you
the effects on your business?
disturbed by the possibility of more
Did you ever believe that you would
live in a state that would shut down
places of worship, but would still allow
for liquor stores and big box stores to
remain open?
If you answered YES to any of these
questions, then a vote for Kerry Mc-
Quisten is the only solution and the
only hope. I undoubtedly believe that
she has what it takes to save Oregon!
As for me and my family, locally and
across the state, it is a big YES for
Kerry McQuisten!!!
Thomas Hughes
Baker City
OTHER VIEWS
Learning from a fading pandemic
Editorial from the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
The pandemic is almost over
— we think. Not as a medical fact.
COVID-19 will be around forever,
just like the cold and the flu, but it
no longer dominates our daily lives
and politics. The Democrats’ mild
reaction to last week’s court decision
against mask mandates are among the
many signs the American people are
moving on.
On April 18, a judge in a federal
district court ruled the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) lacked the authority to impose
its travel mask mandate, which covers
planes, trains and mass transit. Most
airlines dropped their requirements
immediately. So did some govern-
ment agencies, including Amtrak. In
Pittsburgh, the Port Authority an-
nounced the end of masking only a
few hours after the decision.
Some commentators squawked, but
significantly, the Biden administra-
tion wavered. Even after announcing,
after a multiday delay, that the Justice
Department would appeal the rul-
ing, the administration has thus far
declined to seek a stay of the district
court decision, which would bring
back the mandate immediately. It’s
clear Biden’s team does not want to
resurrect it.
Some of that is politics. Democratic
candidates don’t want to run against
Republicans who can exploit voters’
mask-fatigue. That would not only
rouse the Republican base, but also
appeal to many centrist voters who
feel enough is enough. These are vot-
ers Democrats need.
The development of vaccines and
other medical treatments, and the
ability of people to calculate risks to
protect themselves and others, also
have undermined COVID-19’s domi-
nance in our public life.
So does the American people’s
craving for normality. An Axios/Ip-
sos poll released this month showed
only 1 in 11 Americans still believes
COVID-19 is a “serious crisis.” Al-
most twice as many don’t think it’s a
problem. Three of four Americans be-
lieve COVID-19 remains a problem,
but one the nation can manage. More
and more Americans are starting to
live as they did before COVID-19.
Barring a new and very dangerous
variant, the pandemic is no longer an
overriding crisis. This gives us time
to think about the ways we can pro-
tect the public against disease without
weakening or even destroying crucial
aspects of American life. Americans
have experienced the destructive cost
and the inequity of lockdowns, for
example. They have witnessed small
businesses lost forever because the
state forced them to close, while al-
lowing big chains to stay open.
They have also witnessed the dan-
gerous limitations of the creed of go-
it-alone individualism.
The government — and the peo-
ple themselves — made many mis-
takes that need to be acknowledged,
and not repeated, when the next pan-
demic hits.
COLUMN
Twitter, Musk and the real version of free speech
I
find it depressing that many
Americans seem to gauge our
country’s commitment to free
speech based on whether a billion-
aire buys a social media platform that
treats its users as if they’re incapable
of processing more than 280 charac-
ters all at once.
Most three-year-olds can spit out
sentences with more heft.
Although based on my occasional
excursions into Twitter it seems that
the three-year-olds have been let
loose there already, with similar re-
sults as when toddlers have the run of
the kitchen.
I have nothing against brevity, to
be sure.
The federal tax code, among much
else that the government expecto-
rates, could benefit greatly if it were
subjected to a Twitter-style diet.
But the dramatic distillation that
Twitter requires encourages people,
or so it seems to me, not to sharpen
their minds and hone their messages
but rather to spew the first thought
that comes to mind. This is rarely a
thought of which we’re later proud.
Spontaneity has its place — deciding
where to have dinner in a city with
a wealth of restaurants, for instance.
But engaging in a respectful discus-
sion requires a certain amount of con-
templation. There’s a reason the con-
versations we enjoy most tend to be
punctuated with extended moments
of silence. Twitter is more akin to
someone standing on the porch and
screaming at the dog that just took a
dump on his freshly mowed grass.
Even a model of rhetorical re-
straint such as Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg address would have had
to be broken into a gaggle of tweets.
(And speaking of that era, let’s not
even ponder Facebook groups pit-
ting the rebels against the Yanks.)
But it’s not the nature of Twit-
ter, with its near insistence that so-
ber consideration of complex topics
be squeezed into a bumper sticker
slogan, that bothers me about the
recent hysteria surrounding Elon
Musk’s purchase of the platform.
What chafes me is what seems to
be a widespread belief that on Twit-
ter rests the sanctity of the First
Amendment, one of the fundamen-
tal, and foundational, principles that
are integral to the enduring great-
ness of America.
This strikes me as not just a great
exaggeration, but also as downright
daft.
The concept of “free speech” is,
naturally, closely associated with the
First Amendment to the U.S. Con-
stitution. But the First Amendment,
which uses the term “freedom of
speech,” doesn’t deal with citizens’
right to express themselves in any
privately owned forum they choose.
Rather, the amendment prefaces all
the things it protects in addition to
freedom of speech — free exercise
of religion, freedom of the press, the
right to peaceably assemble and to
redress the government for griev-
ances — by stating that Congress
shall make no law restricting any of
those rights.
And although the crafters of that
wondrous document could not have
Jayson
Jacoby
foreseen Twitter (or, perhaps, Elon
Musk) they were quite explicit in
confining their concerns about re-
pression to ensuring Congress wasn’t
the outfit doing the muzzling. They
weren’t worried about some colonial
version of social media.
The point is that although the de-
bate over Twitter, and the nature of
its censorship, involves free speech
in a general sense, it has nothing to
do with the First Amendment.
I’ve read and listened to Musk’s
ideas on the matter and, if he is sin-
cere, then I can’t help but agree with
him. He is advocating for the tol-
erance of all viewpoints as against
the suppression of those which
some people deem offensive. This,
it seems to me, is the proper way to
think about free expression, on Twit-
ter or anywhere else, simply because
the notion that we ought to defer to
any person’s, or group’s, definition
of what’s offensive is antithetical to
the very concept of free speech. The
previous owners of Twitter were on
solid enough legal ground in mak-
ing such determinations — they’re
not Congress, after all. But morally
speaking they waded into quicksand
— and Musk says he wants to yank
Twitter loose from the morass.
For all that, I can’t muster any
great amount of angst about how
Twitter, or any other social media
platform, stifles its users.
The reason is simple: volume.
I’m talking about terabytes, not
decibels.
Twitter and Facebook can fairly
be called 21st century versions of the
public square, I suppose, solely due
to their popularity.
But I think it’s ludicrous to con-
tend, as some people have, that the
censorship which certainly exists
on those platforms, no matter how
ubiquitous they are, poses any sig-
nificant threat to our ability to ex-
press ourselves, or for other people
to find our viewpoints and embrace
or impugn them at their leisure.
Twitter, massive though it is, still
represents, in one sense, a drop in
the vast online sea. The notion that a
person can’t make available his every
harebrained idea to everybody with
a cellphone (which IS everybody, es-
sentially) is laughable.
When somebody claims that Big
Tech is severely suppressing free ex-
pression, ponder this question — is
it easier today than it has ever been
to avail yourself of the dizzyingly
vast array of crackpot theories of
which the human mind is capable?
The answer, as any sensible person
must agree, is yes.
And nothing — including
whether or not Elon Musk owns
Twitter — can possibly change that
reality.
Having earned a paycheck for
three decades thanks to the perpet-
ual gift that is the First Amendment,
I instinctively abhor censorship.
And it troubles me that so many
Americans, under the guise of pro-
tecting people from the terrible ex-
perience of reading something that
they find reprehensible, would so
readily conclude that such opinions
ought to be excluded from public
discourse.
But I also trust the free market.
Plenty of people have complained
about censorship on social media.
But perhaps only Musk has the fi-
nancial clout to do something about
it in a prominent way.
His takeover of Twitter quickly
prompted a parade of stories about
how many people have vowed to
quit Twitter — those, it seems to me,
whose dedication to free expression
seems to falter when they encounter
opinions that might make them, or
others, feel bad.
No doubt that will happen.
And it might well be that more
people drop Twitter than flock to it,
the latter group attracted by Musk’s
apparent commitment to the sort of
rhetorical smorgasbord that the in-
ternet made possible.
But at least all those people will be
choosing for themselves.
And as obnoxious as people can be
— and frequently are, on Twitter and
other social media platforms — I still
subscribe to the notion that freedom,
and I mean the genuine article and
not the ersatz version determined by
the easily offended, requires that we
sometimes trudge through the sludge
as we wade about, searching for inspi-
ration and wisdom.
█
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City
Herald.