Killer’s freedom
Gov. Hochul has shown her contempt and disregard for murder victims and their families by granting clemency to Bruce Bryant, convicted killer of 11-year-old Travis Lilley (“Kat gives a break to boy’s killer,” Dec. 24).
Travis was a child who was robbed of his life by Bryant. This is an injustice to the Lilley family.
I do not care how many college degrees Bryant earned in jail at taxpayer’s expense or the so-called charity work he did in jail. These acts cannot atone for taking a human life.
What he did to get to prison should be the focus, not his activities while locked up in a jail cell for 30 years. Travis Lilley can never go home. Bryant should never go home either.
Gary Acella
Staten Island
Stifling speech
Free speech is under challenge here in the United States, especially on our college campuses, where free speech was carved out through protest, agitation and court decisions (“Preyed on by thought police,” Jonathan Turley, Dec. 27).
Today, fickle and cowardly academic leaders and trustees cower behind “political correctness” and fault (and seek to punish) free-thinkers for supposed “heresy” and other affronts to “civility.”
Except for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — which has replaced the ACLU as the standard-bearer for free speech in America — the numbers are dwindling in terms of those fighting back on behalf of students and faculty accused of political incorrectness.
Free-speech advocates like Turley are few and far between. Today’s academy prides itself on speech suppression and on stamping out contentious, unpopular opinions among students and faculty.
On too many campuses today, few remember (much less follow) the tenets of the radical free-thought and free-speech advocates of the 1960s and 1970s. Wimpy college presidents are paralyzed by campus mobs that seek to censor and silence those who disagree with them.
Michael Meyers
President, New York Civil Rights Coalition
Manhattan
No hate for heroes
Thank you, Douglas Murray, for your article about our American heroes (“Re-‘righting’ history for USA’s heroes,” Dec. 23).
I have been terribly upset about the degrading of these amazing people. No human is perfect. No era in human history is perfect. However, to tear down such heroes despite all the good they did because of the flaws they held (which were also flaws of the human era in which they lived) is an outright disgrace.
How anyone can degrade Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abe Lincoln (and the list goes on and on) is beyond decency and intelligence.
Teaching citizens to hate everything about this amazing (in spite of its faults) country is outrageous. Doing so is a huge threat to democracy and progress.
Judy Krasnow
Jackson, Mich.
Social villains
The Post’s coverage of US government interactions with social-media companies tells a story we needed to hear (“Feds ‘social’ize,” Dec. 23).
But please don’t leave out the fact that Russia and China run very large influence operations seeking to use social media to poison our citizens’ minds and make the United States impossible to govern.
Russia and China have information-warfare staffs that dwarf the modest content monitoring and moderation efforts of the social-media companies.
As long as Russia and China try to spoil our peace, the US government’s awareness of the threat will be necessary.
David Donoho
Setauket
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