Editor:

How come free speech isnt free for everyone?

How come the police cant use choke holds or excessive force, but criminals can?

How come flying a Confederate flag is seen as a problem, but burning an American flag is not?

How come some of our statues must be taken down, but not others?

How come burning, looting and rioting is regarded as peaceful protesting?

How come ordinary citizens go to jail when they commit a crime, but many politicians and celebrities dont?

How come news from conservative sources is scrutinized for accuracy, but news from the liberal side isnt?

And last but not least, I wonder why President Donald Trump is considered a racist but columnist Leonard Pitts is not.

Consider these questions food for thought. Wake up, America.

Keith Folk

Gilbertsville

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Letter: Why doesn't everyone have right to free speech? - Reading Eagle

Throughout capitalism's history, the big topic in economics was how far the government should intervene in the economy. Conservatives wanted minimum intervention while liberals and socialists wanted much more. In fact, government intervention mostly aimed at saving, protecting, supporting capitalism. The genuinely "great debate" could and should have been about the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism versus those of a real alternative system, socialism.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff takes complex economic issues and makes them understandable, empowering listeners with information to analyze not only their financial situation but the economy at large.

By focusing on the economic dimensions of everyday life - wages, jobs, taxes, debts, interest rates, prices, and profits - the program explores alternative ways to organize markets and government policies.

Missed an episode? Check out Economic Update on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

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Economic Update: The "Great Debate" That Wasn't - Free Speech TV

The letter in Harpers vaguely alludes to instances of alleged silencing that sparked complicated discussions, very often about institutional racism. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the letter concludes, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. (At least two of the signatories have since distanced themselves from the statement, and on Friday another group of writers and academics published a lengthy counterletter that originated in a Slack channel called Journalists of Color.)

That the signatories of a letter denouncing a perceived constriction of public speech are among their industries highest-paid and most widely published figures is a large and obvious irony. Many of the writers who signed their name have been employed or commissioned by outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vox, The Washington Post, and this magazine. Several have received lucrative book deals; otherslike Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and Wynton Marsalisare global icons. The educators on the list are affiliated with universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

Theres something darkly comical about the fretfulness of these elite petitioners. Its telling that the censoriousness they identify as a national plague isnt the racism that keeps Black journalists from reporting on political issues, or the transphobia that threatens their colleagues lives. The letter denounces the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, strategically blurring the line between these two forces. But the letters chief concern is not journalists living under hostile governments, despite the fact that countries around the world impose draconian limits on press freedom.

Across the globe, the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of Twitter scorn; the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 250 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting. In the U.S., the Trump administration continues to threaten reporters safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in a democracy. The country is moving deeper into an economic recession, decimating industries including journalism and academia. And yet the suddenly unemployed people the Harpers statement references clearly lost their jobs not because of a pandemic or government pressure, but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups. This small group includes James Bennet, the former editor of the New York Times editorial page (and a former editor in chief of this magazine), who was forced to resign after the op-ed page he supervised published an article by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that endorsed state violence.

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The Harpers Letter Is a Weak Defense of Free Speech - The ...

In one of the more awkward exchanges on television in recent memory, the stand-up comedian Bill Burr sat down with Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time. "I think we have something in common," said Maher. "We think political correctness may be ruining comedy." To Maher's surprise, a visibly irked Burr disagreed.

"It's a really weird time where people are bringing [PC outrage] up all the time like it's a major problem," said Burr. "Like usual, they're acting like the sky is falling. It isn't. It's a fun time." A flustered Maher turned ashen. He is among a growing class of punditscall them the Free Speech Grifterswho flog PC culture as a singularly eminent threat to the freedom of expression in America. And Burr, a decidedly un-PC comic, punctured the narrative.

After that 2015 interview, Burr never appeared on Real Time again. But Maher did find someone to be "on his side": New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.

In just the past month, Weiss has appeared on Real Time twice, most recently to discuss the dust-up over her identifying an American-born Asian as an immigrant. "I love immigrants," Weiss told Maher, despite the fact that no one accused her of the opposite. "Saying 'I am offended' is a way of making someone radioactive, a way of smearing their reputation."

Weiss sidestepped measured criticisms and mild mockery so that she could claim that she was crucified because she "departs from woke orthodoxy." It was a sleight of hand. And it wouldn't be the first time.

Two days prior, Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

Plenty of scholars and writers have challenged feminist talking points. The economist Claudia Goldin wasn't tossed out of Harvard for her work on the gender pay gap, pinpointing childcare, not gender directly, as the cause. Sommers likes to position herself as a Goldin, a noble academic who questions received wisdom to further a worthy cause. The difference between the two is that Goldin offers both better data and solutions to nuanced issues while Sommers only offers naysaying. In interviews and recorded talks, a soft-spoken Sommers emphasizes the importance of being reasonable and polite, tut-tutting meanness. But her stance toward those with whom she disagrees is mostly derisive, serving up red meat to a social-media following rabid for the denigration of feminist and minority causes.

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The Free Speech Grifters | GQ

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on July 13, 2020.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

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Re Civil Servants Testimony Fails To Clear Up All WE Charity Questions (July 17): From 1975 to 1995, my husband, the actor and writer George Robertson, and I were deeply involved with UNICEF Canada and UNICEF Ontario. Notable celebrities including Sir Peter Ustinov, Audrey Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, Maggie Smith, Sharon, Lois and Bram and many others joined us in giving countless hours of time to UNICEF. There were also television commercials where all creative work and time was donated.

Not a penny was ever paid for appearances. George went across Canada speaking to youth (his role in the Police Academy films made him quite popular with all age groups). It is a very sad day for me when notable figures cannot donate time and energy to charitable causes they believe deserve support.

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Adele Robertson Toronto

Re Parents. Trapped. (Report on Business, July 11): Lack of child care may both prevent women from going back to work and cripple our economy. But Ottawa says the solution might be expensive. Expenses be damned! Lets get more child-care spaces and give women the opportunity to get back to work.

My daughter-in-law is looking after three kids, ages 6, 3 and eight months, on her own. Her husband works from home but, because of firings at his company, has to attempt the work of three. He is on the computer day and night.

Its extremely stressful. And there are thousand of families in similar situations.

Fiona McCall Toronto

Re These Revolutionary Times Have A Downside (July 11): Racism, in its most common forms, means systems, policies and attitudes that create unfair disadvantages for people because of the colour of their skin. Cognitive studies of the brain and the way we think have demonstrated that every one of us white, Black, brown has unconscious biases based on our upbringings.

Science has proven that this affects the way we make decisions about hiring and promotion, entitlement to government or other benefits and arrests, charges and sentences in criminal cases. It also affects the way our fast brain reacts when we hear a particular accent or see a person of a particular race in the course of daily activities. It is a reality in Canada, where racialized people have lived these experiences since they were born or arrived in this country.

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Progress begins with the recognition and elimination of these everyday human reactions, so that life is more fair and equal for all of us. Frustration, fear and suspicion of motives arise when people are unable to reach this starting point.

Raj Anand Former chief commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission; Toronto

Re Whatever Happened To Nuanced Disagreement? (Opinion, July 11): Columnist Robyn Urback supports the claim by authors of an open letter in Harpers Magazine that cancel culture has gone too far. It could also be argued that this is exactly how the process of achieving equilibrium, or the middle ground, works.

When the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, it often needs to swing all the way back before coming to rest in the middle. We have tolerated hate speech, police brutality and racial discrimination for so long that we may need to allow a period of intolerance toward those things, before we can achieve the ideal of fair and open dialogue.

As I see it, the problem is not with the message of the letter, but with the timing.

Elizabeth Causton Victoria

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Who gets published and who does not is inherently political. For a movement to demand that some voices be elevated, and that others take a backseat, should not be seen as signs of the illiberalism of our times, but rather necessary correctives to the current forums of social debate.

The real crisis of free speech can be found in the violent repression of protesters in the streets. Curfews and tear gas are censorship who cares what people are saying about J.K. Rowling on Twitter!

Ella Bedard Toronto

Theres a lot of wounded outrage in the air.

First there is the defensive reaction of senior Liberal officials to public scrutiny of family connections with WE Charity. Then there is the open letter to Harpers Magazine about the threat posed by so-called cancel culture to the free expression of ideas.

I believe the Liberals and the letters signatories share some things in common: one is the belief that they are decent, thoughtful people with virtuous motives. Such may be true, but it is complicated by a second thing: the possession of a kind of privilege that makes it possible to conflate your own beliefs and interests with the public good.

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Privilege also dampens the impulse to self-reflect, which might have prompted Justin Trudeau to wonder whether his personal connections constituted a conflict of interest, or the letter writers to think how far and to whom freedom of expression ever actually extended. I find these appeals to liberal values amount to self-defence: of an entitled world of mostly white privilege that is experiencing some ripples of resistance, and signs of radical change that are long overdue.

Susie OBrien Hamilton

Re Hidden Canada (Arts & Pursuits, July 11): The irony was not lost on this southern Alberta resident that Oldman River, one of the pristine areas in Canada highlighted by The Globe, is near the site of provincial plans for a major metallurgical coal-mining venture. Granted, the development will create much-needed employment and cash flow for Alberta but at what cost?

The sparkling waters of the river would be at risk of contamination; the richness of critical wildlife corridors at risk of increased vehicular traffic. Alberta seems to be misinformed and devoid of compassion for provincial wild-lands and the associated flora and fauna.

John Nightingale Lethbridge, Alta.

Re Getting The Fans Back In The Stands (Sports, July 11): On professional sports, Marshall McLuhan once said: In sport there is no game without an audience. The greatest game minus an audience is a rehearsal which is quite the opposite of a reply.

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In losing its live spectators, a game loses something essential to its nature, namely its dramatics, its back-and-forth hesitations and heated interactions with other fans. It would no longer be a game we know and love.

Notwithstanding the vast viewing audience, a game on television seems not so much a game as a show the two experiences are not the same. No matter how creative or involving a TV production, I do not believe it can make up for the experience of riding on the roar of the crowd.

Patrick ONeill Toronto

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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July 18: An entitled world of mostly white privilege. Readers debate WE Charity, free speech and systemic racism, plus other letters to the editor -...

Conservative: Will the Backlash Kill Joes Bid?

When the hard-left theorist Noam Chomsky thinks bedrock American principles like free speech are under threat, Matthew Continetti observes in The Washington Free Beacon, it is a sign that ... things have gotten out of control Joe Biden better be paying attention. The wokesters are going too far: Social media has become a system of surveillance, policing and stigma, news media the vehicle for an attack on the American Founding. This could all spell doom for Bidens presidential bid. There is only so much self-abasement a nation can take. And when the winds of woke start to blow, millions of Americans find that there is one way left for them to oppose political correctness: pulling the lever for the man in the White House.

As street violence spikes in big cities across America, writes The Chicago Tribunes John Koss, its becoming clear that Black Lives Matter is a mere political and fundraising arm of the Democratic Party, not the civil-rights movement it claims to be, and its largely young, white and woke supporters cant work up much concern about black children being slaughtered in big-city gang wars. Indeed, even while protesters are shouting loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police, they arent saying a word to pressure big-city Democratic mayors to do anything about the spiking urban violence probably because they live several degrees removed from the killings and see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to them. Thats not cynicism, sadly. Thats reality.

Much of modern social protest is psychological and spiritual need dressed up as revolution, Mark Judge argues at The Stream. Because many young people dont have a grounding principle like religious faith in their lives, theyre easy prey for toxic ideologies, such as Marxism. Thats nothing new: For many believers, Communism became like a father, providing both love and acceptance and a totalizing solution to all the worlds (and each persons) problems. And like their 1960s predecessors, many antifa rioters are really out there looking for their fathers after coming from broken homes. All of these broken souls share the same distant, soulless nihilism and rather than taking up the difficult task of making themselves more whole, they latch on to radical movements.

Kanye Wests recent pledge to remove extraneous chemicals from deodorant makes me like Americas last rock star even more than I did before he announced last Saturday that he was going ahead with his presidential campaign, half-jokes The Weeks Matthew Walther. Would anyone really expect, much less want, Kanye to run on lower taxes and block-granting Medicare to the states? Kudos, too, for his unabashed pro-life stance: At a time when social conservatism is mostly an unedifying series of non-debates about the flag and kneeling, the rapper sounds like Pat Buchanan in 1992, arguing for prayer in public schools and insisting that We have to stop doing things that make God mad. And he sounds more genuine than more conventional conservatives. Whats not to like?

With COVID resurging, warns Dr. Joel Zinberg at City Journal, we must acknowledge data showing that lockdowns themselves contributed to the death toll. If we dont learn from this, doctors will need a new cause of death on death certificates public policy. Economic recession led to increased drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic abuse and suicides. Meanwhile, inpatient admissions in Veterans Administration hospitals were down 42 percent for six emergency conditions, including stroke, heart failure and appendicitis, during one six-week period during the pandemic, a change not seen last year. These and deaths from chronic conditions increased because people had to shelter in place, were too scared to go to the doctor or were unable to obtain care. Bottom line: Public-health experts cant go on pretending lockdowns dont kill.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Free speech is under threat and other commentary - New York Post

Last week, an open letter appeared online under the auspices of Harpers Magazine. It was signed by more than 150 renowned authors and academics across the ideological spectrum and from a remarkable range of disciplines: novelists like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Khalifa and J.K. Rowling; historians like Sean Wilentz, David Blight and Mia Bay; philosophers and legal theorists like Samuel Moyn, Zephyr Teachout, Drucilla Cornell and Anthony Kronman; public intellectuals and activists like Noam Chomsky, David Frum and Gloria Steinem; political theorists and sociologists like Yascha Mounk, Melvin Rogers, Uday Mehta, Michael Ignatieff and Francis Fukuyama. Its a list that commands a degree of respect, but its immediately difficult to imagine what could get them all "on the same page" quite literally.

What they collectively raise their voices against is a prevailing "censoriousness", "an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty", which is constricting the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society."

While the open letter does not use the term, its signatories are opposing what is often (and derogatively) referred to as "cancel culture". Unsurprisingly, the letter has attracted considerable pushback, and has itself become the topic of vast disagreement. But this, in some ways, sharpens the questions at play: How does liberal democracy manage incommensurable disagreement? Do the moral and political demands for justice and inclusion trump the principles of free expression and open debate? What is the moral status of "opinion"?

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Is "cancel culture" really constricting free speech? - The Minefield - ABC News

A discussion is being had about the value of free speech, the parameters of acceptable discourse, and what some see as a necessary course-correction in social and professional norms.

Triggered by the so-called "Harper's Letter" defending "the free exchange of information and ideas" as "the lifeblood of a liberal society," much of the debate has focused on what level of "problematic" speech should be tolerated and what should be career-ending.

But there's a compelling and less-publicized conversation happening among leftist perspectives arguing that free speech is as vital a principle as ever, no matter which liberal, centrist, and even conservative voices agree.

Among the "Harper's letter"'s co-signers was the patron saint of anti-imperialist socialist academia, Noam Chomsky. He's as critical of American foreign and domestic policy as any living writer, and he continues to insist that the letter needed to be written.

When asked if he was surprised by the level of controversy the letter generated, Chomsky replied that he had received a "stream of letters from left academics and activists relating their experiences, but not wanting to be identified because of the toxic culture."

Chomsky added: "The nature and scale of the reaction reinforce the message of the letter."

Jeet Heer, a national correspondent for the venerable left of center magazine The Nation, defended co-signing the letter in a column titled, "The Left Needs to Reclaim Free Speech." In doing so, Heer called out some of his co-signatories as "the rankest of hypocrites when it comes to free speech," particularly when it comes to the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian voices.

Heer also took aim at "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling for comments that have been slammed as transphobic: "The only way to blunt the impact of someone like Rowling is with more speech with retort, argument, parody and derision."

And just as I noted in a recent column, Heer described free speech is the greatest tool available for minority voices to advocate for their rights against powerful people and institutions who could deny them.

"To secure themselves against the likes of Rowling, trans people have built a vigorous political movement, one that is itself shielded by norms of free speech. A robust culture of free speech serves the cause of trans activism, as it does other progressive causes," Heer wrote.

Another left of center co-signatory of "the letter," New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote of a complication with binary thinking about free speech.

Citing Nicholas Grossman's article for Arc Digital that credited "private sanction, social pressure and cultural change, driven by activists and younger generations" leading to the banishment of racist and homophobic speech from polite society, Goldberg noted, "when these changes were happening, the right denounced them as violations of free expression."

In an article for the socialist magazine Jacobin, the science writer Leigh Phillips rattled off a litany of free speech and civil liberties violations perpetrated against left voices by the US and other governments, as well as by tech companies. Given such assaults on leftist speech, Phillips wrote of a distressing and cross-partisan "attitude of censorship" that seeks to "abandon due process, presumption of innocence, and other core civil liberties."

"Too many modern progressives, particularly younger ones, have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression," Phillips adds. "This is a historic disaster."

Phillps warned: "If the liberal-left denies that illiberalism is occurring when we are the ones perpetrating it ... then we have no leg to stand on when it comes to all these other, innumerable examples. Civil liberties are for everyone, and above all for those we oppose."

The cultural commentator Ayishat Akanbi, in a recent internet video said, "We need to be able to discern between things that we find uncomfortable and things that are hateful, and we can only do that with some intellectual humility, with actually engaging with ideas and trying to see where people are coming from."

Akanbi added: "We need to be challenged otherwise we assume that we know everything, and there is nothing else to be said on something I would say that's the height of intellectual arrogance."

Citing "revolutionary types" who successfully fought for civil rights in the past, Akanbi argued that many of them would not be able to participate in mainstream discourse in today's conditions "because we are completely unforgiving" and unwilling to allow people to make mistakes, evolve, and sharpen their good ideas while getting rid of their bad ones. "You wouldn't want to be judged by your worst moment," Akanbi says.

This is a crucially important point.

We will never, ever get to a place of perfect justice. We will never be at a place where we no longer need to evolve. We will never have all the answers.

For that reason, we must maintain the basic liberal norm that people have the right to hold and express bad even wrong ideas. That doesn't mean speech shouldn't have consequences or that certain ideas shouldn't be considered beyond the pale.

What it means is that the principle of free speech itself can create sometimes infuriating conditions, but the right to free expression gives voice to the dissident. To willfully abandon it under the guise of "justice" is to be ignorant of history and presumptuous of the future.

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The leftist case for free speech as a tool for justice - Business Insider - Business Insider

Released by SC AG Wilson.

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilsontoday joined a 15-state legal brief filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, urging the court to allow the Department of Education to reaffirm Title IXs commitment to protecting students from actual harassment while respecting free speech and fair process.

The Department of Educations Final Rule bolsters the anti-discrimination purposes of Title IX without infringing free speech or due process rights.

We think that some colleges and the U.S. Department of Education have been so intent on getting rid of anything offensive from campus that theyve trampled on the rights of students to free speech and due process, Attorney General Wilson said. Schools dont have to make a choice between fighting sexual harassment and protecting constitutional rights; we think they can do both.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led the 15-state effort and said, Academic institutions cannot deprive students of their constitutional rights to free speech, due process, or fair trial. The Final Rule provides robust protection for individual rights where previous regulations and guidance failed. The Supreme Court has long recognized that students subject to disciplinary proceedings are entitled to due process, as is every American citizen.

Without safeguards, academic institutions can and have eschewed due process and imposed life-altering consequences on students without affording them the opportunity to defend themselves.

The vast majority of colleges and universities currently deny students the right to present evidence or cross-examine witnesses, and less than half require that fact-finders be impartial during investigations.

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Free Speech and Due Process | 106.3 WORD - 106.3 WORD

NEW YORKOn June 17, PEN America hosted Free Speech and Black Lives on Campus, a roundtable webinar organized in response to the recent protests that have galvanized a national call to conscience regarding the persistent challenges of racism and anti-Black violence in the United States. Panelists discussed how these events have reverberated throughout college and university communities, surfacing a series of urgent issues pertaining to racism in higher education and the actions university administrators must take to address these issues.

Moderated by PEN America Director of Campus Free Speech Jonathan Friedman, panelists included Neijma Celestine-Donnor (Director of Bias Incident Support Services, University of Maryland), Shard M. Davis (professor at the University of Connecticut, and cofounder of #BlackintheIvory), Jael Kerandi (Undergraduate Student Body President, University of Minnesota), Dinaw Mengestu (award-winning author and Professor of Written Arts, Bard College, and PEN America Trustee), and Joy Melody Woods (Ph.D. student, University of Texas at Austin, and cofounder of #BlackintheIvory). These excerpts from the conversation have been edited for clarity.

JONATHAN FRIEDMAN: The hashtag #BlackInTheIvory has released a floodgate of information. Can you talk us through some of the stories that youre hearingis it surprising? Is it not surprising? Is it what you expected?

SHARD M. DAVIS: The stories really run the gamut from physical assault against Black graduate studentsinvasion of their space, touching their hair without permissionto racial microaggressions, which are unfortunately very covert in nature. So, its really difficult for you to be able to identify and then articulate those microaggressions to an aggressor that what they are doing and saying is problematic. To be honest, Im not surprised. Just like many other #BlackInTheIvory truth-tellers, I see myself in almost every story.

JOY MELODY WOODS: My own experiences with higher education have not lived up to the expectations of an equitable, inclusive community. I think the equitable and inclusive things have been anomalies. This didnt go against my expectations. Ive been to multiple institutions, and Im not walking through the world with rose-colored glasses. I come into places with the thought process that this is possible; it could happen; it has happened before.

The stories really run the gamut from physical assault against Black graduate studentsinvasion of their space, touching their hair without permissionto racial microaggressions, which are unfortunately very covert in nature. . . Just like many other #BlackInTheIvory truth-tellers, I see myself in almost every story.Shard M. Davis

FRIEDMAN: People have conceived of higher education as a place that is apart from societya place for progress, openness, equity, offering an opportunity for people to get ahead in life. Have these institutions or schools in general gotten better at fighting racism since you were a child?

DINAW MENGESTU: I would say that the idea that these institutions are these seemingly idyllic bastions of liberal good values has been an idea that a lot of people are skeptical of if you were ever a minority college student. I dont think you ever forget those experiences. Faculty members arent able to convince you that the world is significantly better or has changed. So, Ive never had that delusional idea that entering academia would somehow wash away any racial problems. What is interesting, though, is how academic institutions see themselves as being forces for good or on the forefront of social change. However, this idea of what they are makes it that much harder for academic institutions to realize how far they fall short of living up to those ideals. So when youre inside of these institutions, to be able to sort of say, I know you may believe youre as good as you think you are, but in fact, theres this yawning or extremely wide gap between those ideas and whats actually practiced by the part of the faculty, the students, and all the people going into the maintenance of the institution.

Its my everyday life. Its walking down the street. Its going to the store. . . It is those instances that perpetuate this idea that everything is okay, or that we are operating in this normative that is appropriate or fair to Black students.Jael Kerandi

FRIEDMAN: One of the biggest issues is the way speech and hateful speech can have significant harms. Overtly racist and hateful acts really do disrupt and destabilize Black students lives. Could you speak to your own views of that and how youve tried to address it?

NEIJMA CELESTINE-DONNOR: My literal job is to respond to hate/bias incidents on campus. What I see that a lot of people dont always see is the impact, and the significant harm that it causes to students of color and other marginalized folks. We see that even in instances where something may happen to the person who did the particular action or caused the particular harm, theres lifelong harm that continues to sit with the people who have been impacted. Harm from slurs, harm from all of these microaggressions. . . and what were doing is trying to support folks putting their lives back together. One of the things we try to preach and emphasize is that the legality of an action has nothing to do with its harm.

JAEL KERANDI: Its my everyday life. Its walking down the street. Its going to the store. Its taking a walk. Its going on a run. Its making sure my brother gets home. Its making sure that when my dad leaves in the middle of the night, that he makes it back home. It is those instances that perpetuate this idea that everything is okay, or that we are operating in this normative that is appropriate or fair to Black students. At the end of the day, we are tuition-paying students. Education is a service. We are paying money into these institutions, and we deserve to hold them accountable to the values that they say on their websites.

Until we look at the foundations of these institutions that kept us out, and we had to fight to be here to get an education, we are going to keep having these conversations.Joy Melody Woods

FRIEDMAN: When we rewind the clock and we think about how society visualizes discrimination in, lets say, the 1950s, its very clear there is discriminationthe horrific videos and efforts to desegregate schools was very visceral and visible. However, racism that manifests today can be more invisible, so theres a disconnect between what we think of as racismsomething left in the pastand everyday racism now.

WOODS: Thinking of the 1950sand for some reason, people have this disconnect in thinking that it was so long agosome of these people who have these visceral, vile reactions to desegregation are parents and professors. Sure, we arent blocking Black and Brown bodies from coming into the institution, but those people are still in power and have created these systems. Until we look at the foundations of these institutions that kept us out, and we had to fight to be here to get an education, we are going to keep having these conversations. We need to look at the names of thingsbuildings, stadiums, benches, scholarshipsnames mean things. Until we look at that, we are going to continue around that mountain of how this invisibility is happening. Its very visible, but the system is set up to make it seem invisible.

KERANDI: I think people have thought that the blatant segregation has lost its effect or our schools are integrated and now were okay. In reality, when we look back at the 1930s when redlining was birthed by President Roosevelt and look at how it put students into different neighborhoods, we see that those families stayed in those neighborhoods and built communities, but the schools that were built around these communities were not ready to prepare these students for college or not given the resources to provide a good education. This perpetuates, and those students go to these high schools and middle schools that are underfunded, under-resourced weve been defunding education for yearsand they go on to college and dont feel as career-ready. Its cyclical. Segregation and redlining, we still see them having an effect on our communities todaytheyre still present. That impact is still very heavy today. Theyre very systemic things in our cities and states and local officials are still doing to perpetuate this forward. I think we also have to recognize that its still very inherent in our systems. You can still find deeds that still say white-only. People need to recognize that its everywhere, and it moves and it pushes unless we say right now that were going to pivot history. It cannot just be Black people saying, This is what we feel. Weve gone far beyond acknowledgements. If you refuse to acknowledge, you are simply choosing to ignore facts at this point. And thats when telling institutions that acknowledgement statements are not actions. . . We need to move beyond that. Action has to be made.

You cannot have a discussion on free speech without a discussion about power. The way free speech works on campus is that those that hold power have more access to free speech and more resources to engage in free speech.Neijma Celestine-Donnor

FRIEDMAN: What does it mean in even the ivory towers of forethought and social progress that these vestiges of racism could be so deeply visible?

WOODS: I think of the names of some of the buildings on campus here. Theyre there because someone gave them money, and if we change that name, are we losing money? Were looking at people afraid to lose money, which they have shown us that they are more afraid to lose money than they do our bodies. That was seen with the Ohio State football players today signing theyre accepting any risk of getting COVID so they can play. I dont know those players, but its really scary that were asking people to even sign something like that, and it all goes down to money. Until we have an ethical and moral repositioning which goes to getting people out of power, we will still be looking at these things that are so visible.

CELESTINE-DONNOR: I feel like these folks putting out statements and changing their products are very performative. I dont know if these people care about our lives and our bodies. Weve been talking about these things being problematic for years and for months, so for people to be doing it at this timein this moment where all eyes are on youmakes me think that this is very performative. I wonder what is going to happen moving forward, when the eyes are no longer on you.

DAVIS: It is absolutely performative. In this day and age, in the era of cancel culture, no one wants to be deemed as the racist or to lose dollars or endorsements or sponsors by having racist symbols that are attached to their company. No president wants their university in the national news because they didnt make a statement or acknowledge anti-Blackness rhetoric or they didnt acknowledge some racist event that happened on campus, so it is performative. I think that it is a performance because people want to make sure that they keep their pockets lined. They can still move forward in whatever business that they have.

Oftentimes, when youre being critical of the way that free speech is employed. . . that isnt because youre trying to necessarily take away free speech, but youre acknowledging an inherent power difference. Were not coming to free speech with a level playing field. We need a representation of values on campusthe values of Black academics and Black studentsand ensure that those ideas and those experiences are valued to the same degree.Dinaw Mengestu

FRIEDMAN: As Black members of academic communities on campus, do you feel that free speech as a concept has been something that has been an ally to this cause? Has it been equitably upheld?

CELESTINE-DONNOR: You cannot have a discussion on free speech without a discussion about power. The way free speech works on campus is that those that hold power have more access to free speech and more resources to engage in free speech. I think that, while free speech can be an ally to marginalized folks, when marginalized folks engage in counter-speech, they arent seen as exercising their own free speech. Instead, they are seen as attacking free speech. I think the ways we see free speech are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy. If it wasnt, free speech could be an ally, and when marginalized folks use their voices, it would not be seen as an attack on free speech. When the First Amendment was created, it was not created for people who look like us.

MENGESTU: Oftentimes, when youre being critical of the way that free speech is employed or say that youre using free speech in order to attack or threaten or minimize somebodys existence, is to acknowledge that isnt because youre trying to necessarily take away from free speech, but youre acknowledging an inherent power difference. Were not coming to free speech with a level playing field. We need a representation of values on campusthe values of Black academics and Black studentsand ensure that those ideas and those experiences are valued to the same degree. When we get to that point, then we can argue more about what free speech can actually look like.

FRIEDMAN: When so much hateful and denigrating expression is protected speech by the First Amendment, particularly at a public university, how can universities confront it in ways that dont infringe on peoples right to free speech but also acknowledge the harm that speech has on other students?

CELESTINE-DONNOR: You can acknowledge someone has the right to free speech but engage in moral leadership and denounce the concepts. What I see happening is that there is this fear that if I speak out against this hateful action, then Im speaking out against this persons right of free speech, and I actually think that is sort of cowardly. I want leaders of our institutions to engage in moral leadership and stop acting as though there are two sides. When we consider both sides, we are saying that these ideas can be equal on their merits. But theres no two sides when it comes to murder, or anti-Black racism.

MENGESTU: One of the challenges to how we respond to hateful speech is that it constantly evolves. Sometimes, hate speech announces itself very clearly, but other times it will happen in quiet ways. The question isnt to restrict speech, but how you make sure that people that are actually affected by it actually can acknowledge it and address it and speak to it in a way that doesnt actually leave them silent. My recognition and anger at hateful speech should not be seen as a threat to speech, but as a rightful and righteous response to that type of language. Im exercising my same right.

Continued here:

[RECAP] Free Speech and Black Lives on Campus - PEN America

In this clip, Randi discusses Trump's latest "press conference" from the Rose Garden.

The Randi Rhodes Show delivers smart, forward, free-thinking, entertaining, liberal news and opinion that challenge the status quo and amplifies free speech.

Dedicated to social justice, Randi puts her reputation on the line for the truth. Committed to the journalistic standards that corporate media often ignores, The Randi Rhodes Show takes enormous pride in bringing the power of knowledge to her viewers.

Watch The Randi Rhodes Show every weekday at 3 pm ET on Free Speech TV & catch up with clips from the program down below!

Missed an episode? Check out The Randi Rhodes Show on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

#FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling and online at freespeech.org

Randi Rhodes Rose garden Social Justice The Randi Rhodes Show Trump press conference

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Was Trump Campaigning In The Rose Garden? - Free Speech TV

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.

Trump is the foremost proponent of silencinghis critics.

Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

A specter is haunting Western democracies. No, it is not the surging pandemic, mass death or catastrophic unemployment. It is, if you believe Donald Trump and some of his critics, the end of free speech and the advent of cancel culture.

Trump defined the new menace to civilization in his speech at Mount Rushmore, claiming that far-left fascists were driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demandingtotal submission from anyone who disagrees.

Days later,a group of well-known writers including Salman Rushdie and J.K. Rowlingpublished an open letter in Harpers magazine agreeing that the forces of illiberalism were rampant on the left as well as the right, and that the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

Given the bizarre timing and nature of the complaint, it does not feel rude to ask: What are they on about?

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Institutions and businesses have long been able to fire employees at will. A few may have acted even more hastily in recent months out of fear of being publicly shamed, or the desire to appear in tune with the anti-racist zeitgeist.

But the handful of firings on political grounds, which neither Trump nor his critics care to specify, are dwarfed by the immense human tragedy unfolding before our eyes: hundreds of millions of people losing their jobs and dignity for no fault of their own.

Moreover, free speech has never been more widely available than it is today. So much so that the cacophony of voices liberated by digital media too frequently drowns out well-informed and sensible opinion. Trump, who blurts out several hot takes every day, is himself an example of the verbal incontinence enabled by Twitter in recent years.

It is also true that historians, economists and sociologists are able to hold Twitter discussions of a quality that shames much of what appears in the pages of major newspapers and magazines.

This is not to say that speech has become restricted in the traditional media. After nearly 25 years of publishing in a broad ideological range of mainstream journals and specialist periodicals, I can attest that conversations about almost everything, from political economy and international relations to literature and gender relations, have never been more vibrant. Nor have they featured such a wide range of voices, from the East and South as well as the West and North.

Back in the 1990s, when I started out, African-American writers and thinkers were hard to find in mainstream periodicals and there were hardly any voices from India, let alone the non-Anglophone parts of Asia. One or two writers resident in the West were tasked with articulating the experiences of whole nations, even continents (as in the New York Times praise for Rushdie: a continent finding its voice).

Today, conservative as well as liberal and left-wing outlets feature a multiplicityof opinion and analysis. Much more variety is still needed human experience is always growing and many book and magazine publishers are sincerely trying to achieve it.

Given this necessary progress, the picture that Trump and highly prominent writers draw of narrowed and darkened intellectual horizons seems wholly unrecognizable, even paranoid.

Could it be that increasingly diverse voices and rich conversations are a threat to their free speech more accurately, the prerogative of famous and powerful people to speak at length on all sorts of things without interruption or disagreement? For instance, Rowling seems intent on tweeting her disapproval of transgender people. Certainly, a closer examination of the critics of cancel culture confirms the suspicion that many of these self-appointed defenders of free speech prefer monologue over dialogue.

Trump, who routinely advocates sackings and boycotts of his detractors, is the worlds leading exponent of the very thing he attacks.But commitment to liberal values is also not widely upheld among the anti-Trump signatories of the Harpers letter.

They include writers who have campaigned against academics on political grounds (Bari Weiss, Cary Nelson), a human-rights professor (Michael Ignatieff) who outlined permissible forms of torture, journalists (Paul Berman, David Frum, Anne Applebaum) who championed the illegal war on Iraq, a political scientist (Yascha Mounk) who hailed the recent military coup in Bolivia as a triumph of democracy and a novelist (Martin Amis) who proposed a Muslim ban (including strip searches and mass deportations) much harsher than the one enforced by Trump.

If those culpable for todays abysmal moral and political climate sense anger and frustration against them among younger people, it is because they have never been held accountable. Nor are they likely to face any professional consequences in the future, notwithstanding their overheated claims that cancel culture is another pandemic.

Trump might be voted out in November. The writers, journalists and academics guilty of cruel blunders and terrible misjudgments will remain as entrenched as ever.

No doubt this networked minority will continue to protect its privileges by invoking various dangers to free speech.But no one should mistake its fear of obsolescence and irrelevance for any kind of liberalism.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.

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No, Cancel Culture Isn't a Threat to Civilization - Bloomberg

In late June, two days after Twitter put a fifth warning label on one of President Donald Trumps tweets, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted that he was joining Parler, calling it a platform [that] gets what free speech is all about.

The social media site, which has been described as a conservative Twitter, is on a tear with people who say Twitter and Facebook are silencing conservative voices. In one week, it gained 1 million users, bringing its total to 2.8 million by early July.

Some of its most prominent users are part of the conservative establishment. Trump campaign director Brad Parscale is on Parler, as is Eric Trump, the presidents son, and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino announced in mid-June that he had taken an ownership stake in the company.

A crackdown by Twitter and, more reluctantly, Facebook, against messages from President Trump that the companies said violate their policies is fueling Parlers rise. Parler bills itself as a place for free expression without violence and a lack of censorship, key words that many conservatives have picked up as a rallying cry to promote the app online.

Parler chief executive and co-founder John Matze said the app welcomes all voices. But the company appears to cater to a right-wing base fed up with what they view as censorship on traditional social media sites.

We initially attracted conservative users because they felt disenfranchised by other social media platforms, Matze said in an email sent through a spokesperson.

But Parler is quickly discovering the limits of free expression. On June 30, Matze took to Parler to explain its house rules, apparently frustrated with some of Parlers new users testing the limits of its free-expression motto by posting pornographic images and obscenities.

Parler is facing the same evolution that bigger social media companies have confronted for years balancing free expression with creating safe and inviting online communities. Twitter early on referred to itself as the free-speech wing of the free-speech party. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg maintained through the companys early years that it is not a publisher, but a neutral platform. Facebook is still a place for free expression, Zuckerberg said in a speech last year, but he acknowledged that some speech that is harmful and infringes on others rights should not be allowed.

Online conversations are complicated. Facebook has a six-part document outlining its community standards. Twitter has eight sections under its set of rules that just oversee safety. Facebook and Google-owned YouTube pay tens of thousands of content moderators to review material on their sites and enforce their policies.

Sites that have operated on the fringe with lax rules and a strong stance that people should be able to say just about anything they want have often become platforms for hate, violence and vitriol, such as 8chan and Gab. Those sites are more susceptible to being shut down when their back-end providers decide not to support them. Last year, 8chan was knocked offline for three months by a server hardware provider after the site was condemned for allowing manifestos and live streams of deadly shootings to spread.

Henderson, Nev.-based Parler launched nearly two years ago with a private investment group that has grown over time to include Bongino and early bitcoin advocate Jeffrey Wernick, who wrote a Fox News opinion piece in support of Parler last week, saying that Twitter and Facebook are using technology intended to liberate, instead to subjugate.

The social media site did not burst into the spotlight until June, after Twitter had labeled five of the presidents tweets with warnings. Trump retaliated by signing an executive order that opened the door for an Internet shield law to be reconsidered. Facebook announced that it would start labeling posts from politicians who violate its policies. Republican politicians and pundits called the companies out, saying they were biased against conservatives.

Two Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee asked Parler last week to meet with the panel to discuss social media competition.

Parler differentiates itself on the quality and features of its platform namely, its commitment to not censor or editorialize, share or sell user data, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wrote. This commitment positions Parler in stark contrast to Twitter, which has made increasingly clear in recent weeks and months that only users who refrain from expressing certain unfavored political beliefs are welcome to fully participate on its platform.

Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough reiterated what the company has insisted for years, that it is not biased against any group.

Twitter enforces the Twitter rules impartially for everyone on our service around the world, regardless of their background or political affiliation, she said.

Facebook has gone out of its way to accommodate conservative voices, notably Trumps, The Washington Post found. Facebook left Trumps May and June posts unlabeled including one that said when the looting starts, the shooting starts in reference to protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd. But after criticism from civil rights advocates and its own employees, the company announced an updated policy that will allow it to label posts from public figures that violate its policies but that it deems newsworthy.

Facebook declined to comment. The company has previously maintained that it is not biased against any group. Our policies, and how we apply them, can have a huge impact, so we have a responsibility to apply them evenly, without favoring one side or another and without devaluing the principle of free expression, Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, wrote in a blog post about alleged bias last year.

Social media experts point out that many conservative politicians, notably Trump, perform well on Twitter because the company rewards posts that get more attention. Trumps account is among the most popular on Twitter, with more than 83 million followers.

Some users, including Matze, are calling for people to exit Twitter altogether, using the hashtag #Twexit on Parler. But it seems unlikely that a sizable number of people will leave Twitter. Even the politicians promoting Parler online still have active Twitter accounts. And Parler has a long way to go if it wants to appeal to the masses across a broad political spectrum.

Twitter has 166 million monthly average users, and Facebook has 2.6 billion each month. Parler says it has a total audience of 2.8 million users.

Im a big Twitter fan, but Twitter censors a lot, said Christina Herrera, an antiabortion advocate and new Parler user who lives in Hayward, Calif. Whatever they define as hate speech goes.

She said she is watching Parler closely to see how it holds up its free-expression mantra, but is hopeful. Still, she doesnt plan to leave Twitter, where most of the online conversation around her advocacy takes place. And shes hoping more-diverse voices join Parler.

I would rather there be a mix, she said. No one wants just an echo chamber.

Parlers app and website mimics Twitter in some ways a news feed shows recent updates from accounts that users follow, and much of it includes links to news articles or political statements. It has fewer personal updates or pictures than Facebook or Instagram. Users can make new posts, or parleys, or echo others posts, which works like a retweet on Twitter.

On Parler, new users are prompted to follow popular accounts, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and far-right commentator Laura Loomer. People share news articles from right-leaning organizations including Breitbart News and the Daily Caller. Some decry rules for mandatory mask-wearing. There is a fair amount of discussion around calls to support the police and encouraging people to buy Goya products after its chief executive supported Trump.

Parleyers, as the company calls its users, also have more casual conversations; they discuss Bible verses, share recipes or devise ways to persuade Trump to join the app. (Trumps campaign has a Parler account, but the president does not.)

Parlers Matze said the app has broad ideological diversity and recently gained some members of Generation Z and Black Lives Matter supporters.

You know @parler has been a success when you see how many liberal snowflakes have come here to reply to every parley Nazi & Racist, a fan account for Trump posted on the site recently.

Although it has become the poster child for free expression online, Parler since its inception has had a long list of community guidelines that outline what it wont allow, including obscenity, terrorist content and fighting words, or calls to incite violence.

Those standards were tested in late June when Matze, apparently frustrated with some of the companys new customers, posted a response to complaints on Twitter from people who said they were banned on Parler.

Here are a few basic rules we need you to follow on Parler, he wrote. He added bullet points building off the companys existing guidelines, with more specificity, including, When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

Some of Parlers new users are testing the bounds of its free-speech doctrine. Beth Bourdon, a public defense attorney in Orlando, Fla., who says she has leftist political views, joined along with a couple of friends to show them what free speech is.

Bourdon said she was banned from Parler without notice after she and some friends spoke up against many of the viewpoints on the site and she posted a photo that some could consider explicit.

Parler said it has brought on 200 volunteer content moderators. The companys support team posted on Parler that it needed volunteers because it is experiencing a high number of brigading attacks from individuals who wish to see us fail!

Matze said he does not see any conflict between the companys guidelines and promoting free speech.

The purpose of the restrictions is to create a proper town square without people ruining it by violating it with speech not protected by the First Amendment or FCC guidelines, while still allowing everyone to illustrate their point without experiencing any ideological censorship, he said in an email.

Parlers guidelines attribute many of its rules to Federal Communications Commission regulations and Supreme Court decisions, but social media companies are subject to very few laws when it comes to material posted on their sites. A law called Section 230 shields them from liability for nearly everything their users post online. Trump and his supporters including Cruz have criticized that law recently, saying it gives social media companies too much power.

Thats the irony content moderation is always necessary, said Daniel Kreiss, a media professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Just depends where you draw the line.

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The conservative alternative to Twitter wants to be a place for free speech for all. It turns out, rules still apply. - Boston.com

Released by SC AG Wilson.

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilsontoday joined a 15-state legal brief filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, urging the court to allow the Department of Education to reaffirm Title IXs commitment to protecting students from actual harassment while respecting free speech and fair process.

The Department of Educations Final Rule bolsters the anti-discrimination purposes of Title IX without infringing free speech or due process rights.

We think that some colleges and the U.S. Department of Education have been so intent on getting rid of anything offensive from campus that theyve trampled on the rights of students to free speech and due process, Attorney General Wilson said. Schools dont have to make a choice between fighting sexual harassment and protecting constitutional rights; we think they can do both.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led the 15-state effort and said, Academic institutions cannot deprive students of their constitutional rights to free speech, due process, or fair trial. The Final Rule provides robust protection for individual rights where previous regulations and guidance failed. The Supreme Court has long recognized that students subject to disciplinary proceedings are entitled to due process, as is every American citizen.

Without safeguards, academic institutions can and have eschewed due process and imposed life-altering consequences on students without affording them the opportunity to defend themselves.

The vast majority of colleges and universities currently deny students the right to present evidence or cross-examine witnesses, and less than half require that fact-finders be impartial during investigations.

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Free Speech and Due Process - 106.3 WORD

The letter in Harpers vaguely alludes to instances of alleged silencing that sparked complicated discussions, very often about institutional racism. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the letter concludes, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. (At least two of the signatories have since distanced themselves from the statement, and on Friday another group of writers and academics published a lengthy counterletter that originated in a Slack channel called Journalists of Color.)

That the signatories of a letter denouncing a perceived constriction of public speech are among their industries highest-paid and most widely published figures is a large and obvious irony. Many of the writers who signed their name have been employed or commissioned by outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vox, The Washington Post, and this magazine. Several have received lucrative book deals; otherslike Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and Wynton Marsalisare global icons. The educators on the list are affiliated with universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

Theres something darkly comical about the fretfulness of these elite petitioners. Its telling that the censoriousness they identify as a national plague isnt the racism that keeps Black journalists from reporting on political issues, or the transphobia that threatens their colleagues lives. The letter denounces the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, strategically blurring the line between these two forces. But the letters chief concern is not journalists living under hostile governments, despite the fact that countries around the world impose draconian limits on press freedom.

Across the globe, the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of Twitter scorn; the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 250 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting. In the U.S., the Trump administration continues to threaten reporters safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in a democracy. The country is moving deeper into an economic recession, decimating industries including journalism and academia. And yet the suddenly unemployed people the Harpers statement references clearly lost their jobs not because of a pandemic or government pressure, but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups. This small group includes James Bennet, the former opinions editor of The New York Times (and a former editor in chief of this magazine), who was forced to resign after the op-ed page he supervised published an article by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that endorsed state violence.

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A Deeply Provincial View of Free Speech - The Atlantic

LONDON (AP) Dozens of artists, writers and academics have signed an open letter decrying the weakening of public debate and warning that the free exchange of information and ideas is in jeopardy amid a rise in what they call illiberalism.

J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among dozens of writers, artists and academics to argue against ideological conformity in an open letter in Harpers Magazine. The letter comes amid a debate over so-called cancel culture where prominent people face attack for sharing controversial opinions.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy, the letter said. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercionwhich right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

Rowling, for example, has attracted criticism over her views on transgender issues, which have angered many activists. In a series of tweets, Rowling said she supported transgender rights but did not believe in erasing the concept of biological sex.

The comments prompted Daniel Radcliffe and other cast members of the Potter films to publicly disagree with her. Rowling was unmoved, but was attacked for weeks online.

The letter criticized the state of public debate and the swift and severe retribution dealt out to any perceived wrongs. It decried an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away, the letter said. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

Other signatories included Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem and Malcolm Gladwell.

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Writers warn in open letter against threat to free speech - The Associated Press

On Tuesday, Harper's published what has become known as "the letter," a document cosigned by more than 150 artists, writers, and academics defending the broad principle of "the free exchange of information and ideas," which they refer to as "the lifeblood of a liberal society." It has sparked both praise and ridicule.

But more than anything, it's demonstrated why an honest debate, even a fight, over the value of free speech needs to be had.

The letter, a vaguely written, even anodyne statement that reads as if it's been stepped on by too many writers, opens with a message of support for the recent protests and "wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society." It then laments the "swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought" that the cosigners argue is taking place in institutions ranging from academia to media to everyday workplaces. Its main thesis appears to be "We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences."

There are those who see free speech as a concept that benefits only the powerful, and then there are those staunch free-speech advocates myself among them who view free speech as the most effective tool available for marginalized voices; no meaningful positive social change could occur without it.

It took millennia to establish the norm that you can piss people off, especially the powerful, with your speech and it should generally be tolerated. If it's jettisoned in the name of a certain definition of justice, what happens at the next injustice? You can't use free speech to fight it anymore.

For some critics, the focus was on the letter's signatories who included the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the socialist academic Noam Chomsky, and the jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and was spearheaded by the Black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. Despite being cosigned by people who are diverse in race, gender, religion, sexuality, age, and politics, the number of wealthy, older, white cosigners nullified the letter's message for many.

Others pointed to certain signatories such as JK Rowling, the "Harry Potter" author who has recently made polarizing statements about transgender people, and the writer Jesse Singal, whose choice to write about people who stopped identifying as trans was vilified by some on the left. For some critics, the inclusion of such people automatically rendered the letter a moot point.

One signatory, the writer Jenny Boylan, apologized for having her name listed beside certain people (though she didn't name anyone). The Black writer Malcolm Gladwell tweeted in response: "I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter."

The most interesting criticism I came across was from Ken White, the civil-libertarian lawyer who also blogs and tweets as "Popehat." White is often my go-to legal-splainer on First Amendment issues, so when he criticized the letter, my ears perked up.

I spoke with White about the concept of the "preferred first speaker" conundrum. Put simply, it's the idea that there should be few limits on speech but substantial limits on the response to such speech.

"Sometimes I feel that criticisms of 'cancel culture' amount to an attempt to impose civility codes on the marketplace of ideas, sometimes by the same people who otherwise would be objecting to such civility codes applied to the first speaker," White told me.

He added: "Calling a group of people a 'mob' is a way to avoid addressing their argument. It deprives them of agency, assumes they are taking their position out of groupthink or rage rather than because of values, and implicitly suggests that their proposition is less credible because too many people are sharing it."

The socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote Tuesday of some of the progressive responses to the letter: "You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that."

I'd agree. If you think that free speech has lost its value and we've reached the pinnacle of all human understanding and that the correct parameters of what may be said are now perfectly understood and must be locked in place for all time let's have that argument.

And for those who are free-speech absolutists, the right of free association remains a tenet of the value. That's a sometimes difficult circle to square, so specificity is necessary. Perhaps the argument is of course you CAN fire someone because they said something that offended a colleague, but don't make that an action of first resort or treat every instance of offense the same. After all, there are certainly people in workplaces offended by progressive speech, and no progressive would argue that the reflexive response should be that their job must be placed in jeopardy.

Take one the thorniest of political issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On one side a person can claim to feel unsafe by a colleague's support of a brutal occupier state. On the other, a person can claim to feel unsafe by a colleague's support of the anti-Semitic theocracy Hamas.

If this seems ridiculous, it's not.

Just last month, David Shor, a progressive election data analyst, tweeted a link to a Black Princeton University professor's study that theorized rioting helped Republicans win elections. Shor was promptly dismissed from his job at Civis Analytics after colleagues expressed their offense at the tweet.

The company has every right to fire an at-will employee, especially if they'd rather not deal with the hassle. But what justice was served by Shor's firing? The only lesson to be gleaned is that data analysts need to be very careful about what data they tweet. Incidents like this are part of what inspired the Harper's letter.

To those who presume that denying a culture of open debate and free expression will lead to a permanent entrenchment of correct ideas, I'd like to know who sets the rules. Who is pure enough to have lived a life with no problematic associations or regrettable past expressions of speech?

Because if you want to make the case that free speech has outlived its use, let's be clear about the society you envision after it's been done away with.

For many of the letter's signatories, the concept of censorship is not in the abstract.

Steinem spent her life protesting and agitating in the fight for women's rights. She knows what it is to express deeply unpopular speech and to have it censored by authorities. Chomsky, whose left-wing social-justice credibility is hard to seriously challenge, is a longtime critic of both government and corporate censorship, and he's been a victim of both.

Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Russian dissident, offended the political orthodoxy of his country and now lives under permanent threat of assassination. So does the celebrated author Salman Rushdie, because he wrote a book that angered a theocracy over three decades ago.

Jonathan Rauch, a gay writer who was a signatory of the letter, wrote in 2014 of a US Army Map Service astronomer named Frank Kameny, who was fired from his government job in the 1950s explicitly because he was gay.

Raugh wrote: "As of 1954, homosexuals not only lived in constant fear of being fired, shamed, and beaten or killed; we were also prevented by our government from making our case. To practice same-sex love was a crime; but even to praise it was 'cheap pornography.' Something else I often find called on to emphasize to young people, at a time when college speech codes are usually justified as protecting minority rights, is that turnabout is not fair play. The problem is not that the bad guys were in charge of the speech rules in 1954, whereas the good guys are in charge now. The problem is that majorities, politicians and bureaucrats are very unreliable judges of minorities' interests."

Kameny fought the government over his firing all the way to the Supreme Court, and ultimately lost. But beginning a decade before the Stonewall riots and for the rest of his life, he challenged the government through his writing and activism, which was possible only because of the First Amendment, and the right to cause offense through speech. In 2009, late in his life, the Obama administration officially apologized for his firing. Four years after his death, same-sex marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court.

If the presidency of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it's that certain liberal norms must be defended, if only to keep people with tyrannical instincts like him from determining what should and shouldn't be acceptable forms of expression. If the worst could happen and it always could the right to express unpopular opinions is the best weapon available to beat back the tyrant.

This doesn't mean speech shouldn't come without consequences, or that criticism is necessarily "censorship," or that anyone is entitled to a job even if they've become more trouble to their employer than they are worth.

But for the unconvinced, I would ask for some consideration that the principles of open debate and free expression are not outdated reactionary platitudes.

And for those who believe free speech has outlived its purpose, I would ask for an upfront conversation about what comes next.

Read the original here:

The Harper's 'letter' proves we need to have a serious talk about free speech - Business Insider - Business Insider

We are living through a summer of madness. I cannot recall a time of greater rage, unhingement, outbursting, cruelty, silliness, and above all, humourlessness.

Truly, this pitchfork summer has been ruled by the narcissism of small differences. Never have I seen people so unwilling to let things go, especially when the confluence of horrors is so intense. We are all a lit match.

I find it calming to think of Greenland sharks, the longest-living creatures on Earth, some of them 500 years old, moving through deep Arctic waters while far away and above, hot little humans squabbled and slaughtered each other and Shakespeare wrote his plays. Take the long view. The Greenland shark certainly does.

The first prong in the pitchfork: we are enduring the hottest year in history. Thats a grand claim that morally condemns us as a species, yes, but what it really boils down to is this. In June, Calgary was hammered by hail the size of canned hams. This week, a sudden huge rainstorm killed power across much of Toronto, which killed air conditioning which kills sanity.

It only takes one more thing could be stink bugs, could be a Harpers.org letter defending American free speech and suddenly everyones hair is in flames. Opponents want free speech for themselves, not for those who signed the letter, and now everyone has third-degree burns.

I just watched Jaws I sense a mordant fish theme here which holds up remarkably well, and it strikes me that on social media, everyone thinks theyre Chief Brody and regards everyone else as the great white shark. But the shark is the only blameless creature on the boat, doing what sharks do.

Take the most recent Ottawa scandal failing to grip the nation. Reporters tell us with glee that aside from paid work by the PMs brother and long-famous mother, the WE charity the one no longer running a hasty cross-country student COVID jobs plan had paid Sophie Grgoire Trudeau $1,400 for a speech in 2012.

My reaction was anguished. Why are Canadian scandals always so quaint? Why cant we do big shameless American crimes? Crime better, Canada.

Second prong: we are in early- or mid-pandemic. Although people are carefully trying to edge back into work with its lovely pay, few jobs are worth the risk of painful death alone in a hospital room, spatchcocked by a tube. So were at home, which breeds paranoia. We love our co-workers, who are probably out to get us.

The third prong is destitution, and if not that, heart-clutching financial worry. Pinned to the wall this summer, good people have gone off their nut.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said that a white gunmans failed invasion of Rideau Hall proved that the RCMP was racist, since a mentally ill Mississauga man of colour, Ejaz Choudry, and others, had been shot to death by police recently.

This person showed up with weapons, publicly, at the residence of the prime minister of Canada and was arrested without being killed, Singh said. So hes saying a nonracist RCMP would have shot Corey Hurren out of a sense of fairness. Singh did not regard the gunmans survival as a police success, which it is.

He then said Trump had done more to check police violence than had Trudeau. Sound of Canadians dropping their groceries.

If Singh has a point, and I dont think he has, its in questionable taste. But public discourse is like that now, weird, self-centred, hurtful. The Conservatives wanted Parliament reopened and then had the worst attendance record of any party at COVID-19 committee meetings.

Conservative party house-sitter Andrew Scheer, seen maskless and smirking in Pearson airport, was talking to Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister, who later apologized for having briefly de-masked. (Another dollar-store scandal.) Scheer didnt apologize, taking his cue from Donald Trump, who now says he wants to build a monument to statues.

The Liberals face no credible opposition in Parliament, not by design but by opposition panic and confusion. Right now the Conservative party emblem is the bright little face of Erin OToole, an ex-soldier who wants to send every Canadian to basic training.

He wants us shipshape and military-style, hes talking gun rights and bouncing loonies off our beds. We dont need this level of strange right now.

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In a pitchfork summer, back to those Greenland sharks swimming quietly, their massive cartilaginous bodies bending in black water. I find it comforting that the shark has always been there, while humans were crabs, pairs of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, temporary scavengers out of our collective minds in 2020.

Emulate the shark. Move slowly. Think before you attack. Let nothing faze you. Try not to take offence at small things, just as the shark doesnt mind the long dangling parasites attached to its corneas.

We will all be judged on how we behaved in the summer of the pitchfork.

Link:

Free-speech hypocrites, unscandalous scandals, and endless heat got you down? Here's how to survive the summer of madness - Toronto Star

Thank you for publishing Its time to start resisting the crusade to erase history.

This column by Christine Flowers reflects the opinion of many, and it comes at a time when many in positions of influence are afraid to express it.

Were told that violence is peaceful, the flag is racist, our anthem is racist, everything must be erased from history, police deliberately look to kill blacks, politicians suck up to thugs and vandals and the list of absurdities goes on. And politicians and people with influence embrace it. The media reports all this in a favorable light, so it is refreshing to see an article with some sanity.

I am grateful to Flowers for writing it, and I urge her to continue to write on the anti-Orwellian philosophy she expressed. I hope we see more of this.

Joe Kolenda,

Amity Township

Go here to read the rest:

Readers' Views: Column a refreshing take on issue of free speech - The Mercury

A pro-democracy group involved in selecting candidates for upcoming local elections was raided by police just hours after it published a poll showing that over 60% of residents no longer believe Hong Kong is a free city.

The offices of the Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) in Wong Chuk Hang were raided on Friday night, hours before pro-democracy primaries are scheduled to take place and which PORI is helping to organize.

A live stream of the incident showed police officers entering the offices with a warrant and after searching the office and seizing computers. No arrests were made.

However, the organization was charged with the dishonest use of a computer, a piece of legislation that was originally conceived to apply to cyber fraud and hacking but has been broadened by the Hong Kong government to become a catchall.

It carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The police told reporters that the raid was sparked by a complaint from a member of the public who claimed PORI was the source of a recent leak of personal information relating to police officers, Stand New reported.

But many pro-democracy activists on social media linked the raid to the draconian national security law that came into force last week and which gives the police sweeping new powers to crack down on those who undermine Beijings rule.

Hours before the raid, PORI had published a survey on peoples opinions of Hong Kong since the new law came into force. The results show that 61% of residents believe Hong Kong is no longer a free city, while just 32% believe it still is.

The raid also comes 24-hours after Hong Kongs constitutional affairs minister warned that the upcoming primary election may violate the new national security law. Those who have organized, planned, or participated in the primary election should be wary and avoid carelessly violating the law, Erick Tsang said.

PORI is set to be a co-organizer of this weekends primaries which are designed to select pro-democracy candidates to run in Septembers legislative election.

Following the raid, PORI's deputy head emphasizes that the pro-democracy primary will still go ahead as planned and the police raid should not affect PORI's technical ability to carry out the vote.

Beijing has repeatedly warned about the threat posed by pro-democracy candidates winning over 50% of the seats in Septembers elections, a warning given added impetus when pro-democracy candidates won over 80% of seats in last Novembers District Council elections.

Following the raid, another organizer of this weekends ballot, Benny Tai, said that Friday nights incidents show that the primaries were now more important than ever.

In a time when people are accused of violating the national security law for holding blank pieces of paper, we must not be intimidated but insist on living in reality, Tai said in a statement on Facebook according to a translation from activist Kong Tsung Gan As long as there are many people who are not intimidated and insist on using the referendum to refute lies, we can still see a little light in this dark age and continue the spirit of resistance.

Cover: Police officers walk past a plaque outside the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People's Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region after its official inauguration on July 8, 2020 in Hong Kong, China. China opened their new office to supervise and guide the local government's enforcement of the new national security law. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

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Police Raids Against Free Speech in Hong Kong Have Already Begun - VICE