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Free Speech
Ireland Goes Fascist
An Irish author has just won the Booker prize: Irish author Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize on Sunday. His novel, Prophet Song, imagines an Ireland that has fallen under Right-wing totalitarian control, and begins with members of the new secret police rapping on the door of a union leader to interrogate him for “sowing discord and unrest” against the government. The reality, of course, is precisely the opposite: The »
New Low in Liberal Ignorance
Behold our current secretary of education, who couldn’t get anything more backward if he took LSD and tried really hard: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona: "I think it was President Reagan who said, 'We're from the government. We're here to help!'" Here's the actual quote: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." pic.twitter.com/Hgxpt2Xdoh — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 27, 2023 »
Hope against hope
As I have mentioned a time or two before, the cultural left exerts a tyrannical force policing our speech. Witness the case of Elon Musk and X/Twitter. The cases can be multiplied endlessly. You don’t need my help on this score. The cause of free speech threatens to become the exclusive property of conservatives. Wherever the left holds sway, free speech is a dying or dead letter. The utopia implicit »
Calls For Genocide Banned From Twitter
Controversy has been swirling around Elon Musk and Twitter. Musk issued a tweet that was at best stupid and at worst anti-Semitic: You have said the actual truth — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2023 Musk’s tweet apparently was part of his running battle with the Anti-Defamation League, which you can read about here. A number of companies, including IBM and Apple, have suspended advertising on Twitter, and the Biden »
Thought for the day
John Tierney is the former long-time New York Times reporter and columnist. He is now a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and can therefore say things like this: Harvard’s abysmal [FIRE free-speech ranking] is based partly on a series of censorship incidents at the school and partly on its students’ answers to questions in a national survey of 55,000 students. At Harvard, three-quarters of students didn’t feel »
“Why should I ever vote for a Democrat again?”
Matt Taibbi is one of a group of honest liberals who are not blind to the contemporary Left’s faults. At Racket News, he writes about his testimony before Jim Jordan’s House Weaponization of Government Committee, which apparently prompted a visit to his home by the IRS. Jordan’s House committee investigated, with the result that the IRS has announced a new policy on home visits. The substance of the investigation is »
Mark Steyn Goes to Trial [Updated]
After more than 11 long years, jury selection in Michael Mann’s defamation case against Mark Steyn and others begins on Monday. I had lost track of this case as it wended its tortuous way through the courts, and tried to catch up with it by watching Mark’s deposition, the two short halves of which you can see here and here. The deposition does not lack for entertainment value, but as »
Amy Klobuchar, Censor
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has an undistinguished legislative record. She has been a master of small-ball politics, sponsoring unimportant but superficially appealing bills while excelling at constituent service. But now, Klobuchar has stepped out as an advocate for censorship, a key Democratic Party priority. On October 19, she wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos, complaining that when Amazon’s Alexa, which “relies on a variety of sources to answer questions,” responds »
The Rise of Censorship and the Death of Journalism
Matt Taibbi was the principal reporter who broke the Twitter Files story, one of the major news events not just of the past year, but of the past decade. The fact that federal agencies leaned on, and collaborated with, tech companies to suppress Americans’ freedom of speech and dictate the limits of public debate on several critical issues, is the most important scandal of our time. And the fact that »
Harvard Sticks Up For Free Speech
Harvard’s President Claudine Gay has rejected calls to name the university’s pro-terrorism students: Harvard president Claudine Gay pushed back on attempts to name students who signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacres committed by Hamas amid mounting criticism of her handling of the crisis. Gay said the Ivy League school “embraces a commitment to free expression” in a video released Thursday night — her latest attempt to quell outrage »
Trump the Authoritarian
Democrats like to label Donald Trump an authoritarian. This is why he supposedly is a threat to “our democracy.” The charge is generally groundless. Trump was president for four years, so he has a track record as the least authoritarian president of recent years. But Trump, being Trump, can’t get out of his own way. So earlier this week, on Truth Social, he handed the Democrats all the ammunition they »
The Twitter Files, Live and In Person
This Real Clear Opinion Research survey has disquieting news about Americans’ tolerance of censorship. Carl Cannon comments on the results, including the partisan breakdown. Suffice it to say that not many Democrats are going to the wall for free speech these days. But I want to comment on just one aspect of that survey: It is remarkable that the number of people who think the government should censor “hateful posts »
A Huge Win For Free Speech
Perhaps the most important case now wending its way through the federal courts is State of Missouri v. Biden. In that case, the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with individuals including Jay Bhattacharya and Jim Hoft, allege that various federal agencies violated their First Amendment rights by leaning on social media platforms to censor their speech. Yesterday, in a 3-0 decision, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of »
Night Falls On Free Speech
In Europe in general, and Denmark in particular. Mark Steyn recalls the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2005 and the sequels that have played out over the ensuing years: In 2005 Jyllands-Posten, one of the biggest-selling newspapers in Denmark, as part of an exploration of the state of free speech, was willing to publish a dozen cartoons of Mohammed by prominent cartoonists. In 2010, on the fifth anniversary, I was given »
The Censorship Continues
We now know that the federal government, led by the FBI, has engaged in a prolonged program of censorship that focused on social media. It began, as far as we know, during the Trump administration, and at that time was directed largely against the President. It has flourished during the Biden administration, in which the FBI and other agencies have acted as enforcers, suppressing dissent from the Biden administration’s line, »
Elon Puts His Money Where His Platform Is
This is truly extraordinary: Twitter (or whatever it is called now) will pay the legal fees of anyone who gets fired because of something he or she did on that platform: If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2023 Will such people »
Thought for the day
Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger and his New Civil Liberties Alliance colleague Jenin Younes write in their column “The Biden Administration’s Assault on Free Speech” in today’s Wall Street Journal: [T]he nation needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional »