UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh.
Guns dot com
The Washington Post has gone “gun nut” recently by partnering with the Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog that via its brilliant contributors, fact-based research and critical analysis has been a stalwart defender of 2nd Amendment rights for law-abiding citizens.
From now on, VC content, which is not exclusive to Second Amendment issues but covers a wide variety of constitutional, cultural and legal topics, will appear on the Post’s website, under a joint WashPo/VC banner.
As one might imagine, the announcement, made last week, was met with praise from conservative-leaning publications and pundits who identify with the VC’s latent libertarian bent, while also being derided by those institutions and individuals on the left.The right-wing American Spector, for example, applauded Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who made a cash purchase of WashPo for $250 million back in August 2013, for the VC addition because it exposes the newspaper’s readership to a variety of different voices, many of whom are experts, scholars and luminaries in their respective fields. “I’m impressed by this decision,” wrote Reid Smith of The American Spectator. “Perhaps it should stand to reason that a man who made a fortune offering people choices, should offer the same alternatives to his readership,” he continued. “What a novel concept in today’s news atmosphere.” Meanwhile, ThinkProgress.org was quick to lament the merger because of the VC’s past coverage of climate change, which has erred on the side of skepticism as opposed to dogmatically accepting the notion that humans are creating a dangerously warm planet. “It is alarming that the Volokh Conspiracy doesn’t seem to understand the basis for the overwhelming scientific judgment that we are warming and will keep doing so absent sharp cuts in GHG emissions,” wrote Joe Romim of ThinkProgress. “It is even more alarming that Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post would think such uninformed conspiracy mongering belongs at the Post.”
