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Posted: Jul 24, 2017 12:01 AM

Hate speech is not free speech, the Left increasingly insists particularly on college and university campuses. In my new book The Complete Infidels Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), I show why the very concept of hate speech is a scam. Here are the top seven:

1. Twitter decides who has the right to hate speech

Consider, for example, what Twitter does not consider to be hate speech. A Muslim named Obaid Karki, @stsheetrock on Twitter, runs a website headed Obaid Karki St.Sheetrocks Painfulpolitics Offensive Comedy Hepcat and another called Suicide Bombers Magazine. He posted this on one of them in late May 2016, just before the European Union and the social media sites announced their new agreement: Robert Spencer mustnt [be] featured but lynched

Karkis posted this call for me to be lynched on Twitter. But Twitter refused to delete his account or even remove the threatening tweets.

2. Social Media blocks the truth by deeming it hate speech

Videogame developer Mark Kern was suspended from Twitter for writing, I dont see why mosques with radical leanings should be excluded from surveillance when the rest of us get our emails collected by the NSA. The administrator of a proDonald Trump Facebook group was banned for arguing that Trump was not anti-Muslim but anti-ISIS.

In early February 2017, they came for me.

On February 7, 2017, referrals to my website, Jihad Watch, from Facebook numbered 23,783, and from Twitter, 1,718. These numbers were generally representative: referrals from Facebook for several years up to that point had averaged between 15,000 and 20,000 a day, and 1,500 to 2,000 a day from Twitter. But on February 10, 2017, those numbers dropped suddenly and precipitously, with only 2,923 referrals from Facebook and 295 from Twitter. Thats around where they have held since then: on March 20, 2017, there were 1,954 referrals from Facebook and 241 from Twitter.

Did thousands of people who used to click through to Jihad Watch articles from Facebook and Twitter suddenly lose interest on February 10, 2017? Of course not. What happened on that day was that Facebook and Twitter began to censor Jihad Watch as hate speech, in accordance with the assurances they had given to the European Union.

Blocking the Truth

Facebook, immediately after concluding an agreement with the European Union, began moving aggressively against foes of jihad terror and mass Muslim migration in the West. Nina Rosenwald, the president and founder of the conservative think tank Gatestone Institute, on June 2, 2016 recorded Facebooks haste to implement the new speech regulations: On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestones Swedish expert.

Carlqvists crime, according to Rosenwald, was to take note of real crimes by Muslim migrants: Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feedcalled Swedens Migrant Rape Epidemic. In that video, said Rosenwald, Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched. Rosenwald added that the video was adapted from a research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viralracking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days. But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship....

Facebook banning anti-jihad opinions

Facebook banned the page of a gay magazine, Gaystream, after it published an article by David Berger, its editor-in-chief, criticizing German gay activists and leftists for ignoring the Islamic root causes of the Orlando jihad massacre. Berger wrote, Whoever had thought the culmination of masochism and Islam-appeasement by left-green professional homosexuals was already achieved, will now be mistaken: it becomes even more masochistic and perverse.

5. Deleting jihad awareness

In July 2016, YouTube also invoked hate speech criteria, which supposedly it had developed as a tool to use against jihad recruiting videos, to delete a video critical of non-violent Muslim Brotherhood efforts to advance Sharia in the West.

6. The immunity of the censorship of certain social media groups explain a lot

On July 13, 2016, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on behalf of Pamela Gellers American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), of which I am vice president, challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which grants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube immunity from lawsuits, and thus makes it impossible to challenge their consistent bias against foes of jihad terror and tolerance of jihad terror activity.

Section 230 of the CDA explicitly immunizes Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from challenges to anything they do to restrict access to or availability of material that that they deem obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

David Yerushalmi, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, added, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have notoriously censored speech that they deem critical of Islam, thereby effectively enforcing blasphemy laws here in the United States with the assistance of the federal government. It has been the top agenda item of Islamic supremacists to impose such standards on the West.... Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are falling in line, and we seek to stop this assault on our First Amendment freedoms.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watchand author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidels Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Read more from the original source:

6 Incidents Unmasking Social Media Giants as Enemies of Free Speech - Townhall

On June 27, University of California at Los Angeles Professor Keith Fink was told that his 10-year teaching career in the Department of Communication Studies was over. No substantive reason was given; Interim Dean of Social Sciences Laura Gmez simply stated "your teaching does not meet the standard of excellence." The decision attracted national attention in large part because Fink teaches courses on the First Amendment, including a course on Free Speech on Campus a hot-button topic that has become politically-charged in recent years (inversely and ironically so, because the Free Speech Movement was born within the liberal mecca of UC Berkeley in the 1960s).

Today, for reasons worthy of a Ph.D. thesis, Free Speech purism has shifted from a "liberal" cause to a "conservative" cause. The First Amendment (especially with respect to its first clause: speech) should be apolitical. Accordingly, I (and Fink, too) view it simply as a non-partisan constitutional law issue one where the past 10 years of campus speech codes, mandatory "diversity training," "hate speech," so-called "safe spaces," and "trigger warnings" all fly in the face of dozens of Supreme Court opinions, none of which lend any credence to the legality of the aforementioned "ideals."

The facts of Fink's case alone are intriguing, especially insofar as they highlight UCLA's lack of commitment to academic freedom, due process, and fundamental fairness. His case also illustrates the growing intolerance on campuses toward ideas that do not conform with their traditional progressive agendas, especially among faculty.

While American research universities have historically dominated international rankings, largely due to their willingness to support a wide range of intellectual beliefs, academic freedom is under siege. Administrators, who rarely are zealous defenders of academic freedom and instead are typically trained in problem mitigation, are undermining the very purpose of the modern research university: to promote the free exchange of ideas. This, in turn, leads to them targeting students, faculty, and ideas that are at odds with their own.

Indeed, Fink, a rare conservative on a campus largely comprised of left-leaning faculty and ideologues, is not the first victim of viewpoint and/or political discrimination at UCLA: there are striking parallels between Fink's story and those of Political Economist Tim Groseclose and Epidemiologist James Enstrom. The nexus between these three cases is UCLA's cultural intolerance towards "conservative" views, or more precisely, views that contradict those of the faculty majority.

Particularly galling, however, are the stark differences between Fink's treatment and that of Gabriel Piterberg, the disgraced Professor of History and sexual predator.

By all outward measures, Fink is an excellent teacher.

His qualifications to teach the subjects of free speech on campus, free speech in the workplace, entertainment law, and contemporary social issues are unparalleled. He's a renowned attorney who specializes in these fields, and won the National Collegiate Debate Championship for UCLA for three consecutive years a record unmatched to this day. His students (liberal and conservative alike) universally love his teaching and describe his classes as among the most influential and developmentally-important classes they've taken at UCLA, some going as far to say that his classes "teach tolerance without imposing tolerance." Students characterize his lectures as dynamic and engaging; he's garnered widespread admiration for the attention he gives to students' individual academic and professional pursuits.

His instructor ratings and course ratings are significantly higher than those of his peers a point that his department chair, Kerri L. Johnson, even concedes which has propelled his classes to the top of students' lists of favorites. Fink can easily fill classrooms with hundreds of eager students; there are always students that are turned away due to lack of space (or more recently, arbitrary and dishonestly-justified caps on his courses' enrollment).

In short, he's an excellent teacher with a virtually impeccable teaching record.

Piterberg's case is a totally different story.

Piterberg has been sanctioned by the UC Regents as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct with two graduate students. His settlement includes a minor reduction in pay along with a conveniently-timed quarter away from UCLA where he could instead pursue a prestigious fellowship, thereby boosting his (and UCLA's) academic credentials. As Cassia Roth notes, "Piterberg's 'quarter off' may have cost him financially, but it actually boosted his real academic capital, his research status. And it also enhanced UCLA's own academic standing."

Even before his sexual assault fiasco, he was not particularly popular in the classroom. Students characterize his lectures as monotone and unorganized; he's not known for his concern for students, and students generally note that success in his courses requires mere regurgitation of facts and that he is "not so great a lecturer."

That's no way to teach a subject as important as history. Many students are skeptical of taking his courses, with some even protesting his mere presence on campus. His classes this past year have failed to attract even 50 students. "[I]ts not a good learning environment," says one student who recently took his course.

Although the disgraced Piterberg may be tenured, sexual assault is absolutely "for cause" grounds sufficient enough to justify early dismissal yet he remains on campus. Fink, a lecturer up for promotion to Continuing Lecturer (effectively granting job security), who boasts an objectively excellent teaching record and well-documented influence on thousands of students easily exceeds the criteria set forth for his advancement yet he was shown the door.

These cases have diametrically different outcomes, but why?

This dissonance sheds light into some of the less-glorious aspects of UCLA's inner workings. It exposes a system where department chairs like Kerri L. Johnson can make up rules to suit their interests; it highlights UCLA's flagrant disregard for their very own rules; and perhaps most shockingly, it shows a top-down culture whereby deans and vice chancellors (such as Laura Gmez and Jerry Kang) don't simply administrate, but rather dictate their campus' intellectual climate in complete derogation of academic freedom (a principle they pay lip service to but rarely match it with their actions).

It's no surprise that Jerry Kang (Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) dislikes Fink's presence on campus. Fink regularly takes Kang to task about issues related to student speech, conduct, and academic freedom typically using Kang's in terrorem email missives as springboards to highlight how the abstractions of First Amendment jurisprudence commonly pan out in public universities.

After all, what better way to teach free speech on campus than to use examples from students' own university?

But when Kang and his peers took issue with this, they should have addressed their concerns directly, expediently, and professionally rather than waiting until Fink's eighteenth quarter where they could sheepishly assemble a star chamber review process rigged against Fink from the outset.

For now, Johnson, Gmez, Kang, and the other administrator-bureaucrats who orchestrated Fink's Kafkaesque review may be rejoicing in the fact that they successfully eliminated Fink's outspoken, popular, and intellectually-competing voice from their campus.

But their rejoice will be short-lived: UCLA is already suffering as a result. Fink will not put this battle to rest, not because it involves him, but because it threatens all lecturers' academic freedom and belies the very tenets upon the modern research university are predicated.

Andrew Litt is a law clerk at Keith A. Fink & Associates. He was a teaching assistant for Fink at UCLA.

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Read the rest here:

At UCLA, free speech is suppressed and double standards reign - Washington Examiner

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Visitors walk through Sather Gate at UC Berkeley.

Visitors walk through Sather Gate at UC Berkeley.

Give UC Berkeley credit for learning from the past years intensive course in free speech and right-wing provocation. After a series of standoffs with conservative speakers left the university looking less than eager to accommodate all comers, its approach to the latest controversial invitation strikes the right tone by making unfettered expression the clear priority.

University officials initially expressed reservations about the time, date and type of venue requested for the Berkeley College Republicans next would-be guest, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, prompting the group to revive its accusations of a consistent bias against right-wing speakers. But the university announced Thursday that it would take additional steps, including possibly paying or waiving venue fees, to make the speech happen on the September evening requested by the student organization.

UC Berkeleys new chancellor, Carol Christ, said in a statement that the university welcomes a broad range of perspectives, including Shapiros: We believe deeply in the value and importance of free speech and fully support student groups right to invite speakers of their choice to campus. She added that the school had hosted literally dozens of speakers from both conservative and libertarian movements without incident. The key is for the hosting organization to work collaboratively with the campus.

Indeed, the recent crop of speakers and their supporters have at times seemed more eager to be refused than to be accommodated and to therefore have the opportunity to accuse UC Berkeley of being a liberal echo chamber that has drifted a long way from the days when the Free Speech Movement began there. The Berkeley Republicans habit of demanding a particular date, time and venue without consulting the administration makes the universitys job more difficult. So do left-wing protesters threatening and carrying out violence, necessitating heightened security measures.

For those and other reasons, scheduled campus speeches by professional provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter were ultimately called off this year. UC Berkeley appears to be striving to avoid a similar outcome in the case of Shapiro, whose books and commentary have targeted Palestinians, Hollywood and universities.

If all the student group and its guests are looking for is a cancellation and a headline, maintaining an open campus will only serve to call their bluff.

UC Berkeleys efforts to welcome the next controversial speaker recognizes that the public university has a special obligation to facilitate the free exchange of ideas even when the ideas are questionable and the interest in exchanging them is in doubt.

Read the rest here:

Editorial: UC makes right call on free speech - San Francisco ... - San Francisco Chronicle

A very interesting post from Paul Alan Levy (Public Citizens Consumer Law & Policy Blog); here are the opening paragraphs:

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued an order signed only by the Clerk declaring that a significant free speech issue bearing on the rights of anonymous Internet users will be decided in a totally secret proceeding, involving sealed briefs, a sealed record, and without any help from would-be amici (including Public Citizen) seeking to explain the dangers posed by the proceeding.

The case arises from a subpoena served by the United States on the employer-rating site Glassdoor, originally demanding identifying information about the owners of more than one hundred pseudonymous accounts that had, it appears, been used to post reviews of a particular employer whose contracting practices were subject to a federal criminal investigation. Glassdoor refused to produce the information demanded by the grand jury subpoena, citing the First Amendment right of its users to speak anonymously.

In an effort to compromise, the government limited its production demand to eight specified reviewers. Glassdoor responded to that offer by proposing that it notify the users of the subpoena and provide identifying information for such of its users who were willing to be identified to the prosecutors. After the government rejected this offer, Glassdoor moved to quash the subpoena, invoking its users First Amendment right to speak anonymously which, Glassdoor contended, created a privilege against production of the information. At the same time, it notified its users of the subpoena, thus meeting one of the conditions of the Dendrite line of cases that it cited in its motion. Those cases rely on the First Amendment right to speak anonymously as a basis for posing procedural and substantive obstacles to civil subpoenas seeking to identify online speakers so that they can be served with process and sued for wrongful speech. Eventually, Glassdoor also invoked Bursey v. United States, a decision in which the Ninth Circuit quashed in part a grand jury subpoena directed at the process of publishing the newspaper of the Black Panther Party.

The entire subpoena litigation was conducted under seal, but we know some of the details because, having taken a contempt citation to secure its ability to appeal, Glassdoor next obtained the governments stipulation for the partial unsealing of the briefs exchanges by the two sides on Glassdoors motion to quash. Glassdoor had appealed, and raised the possibility that parties beside itself might wish to provide the Court of Appeals with the benefit of their views of the applicable law. The trial judge granted that request; as a result the briefs supporting and opposing the Glassdoor motion to quash, as well as reply briefs both from Glassdoor and from the government, are available in the public record, as is the judges ruling on the motion. The finer details from the papers were redacted, including for example the name of the company under investigation and some of the detail about the content of the employee reviews whose authors.

We know from Judge Humetawas opinion that she refused to apply the Bursey line of cases because she considered that it only protected against grand jury subpoenas directed at dissent against the government, and she refused to take seriously the First Amendment rights of Glassdoors users because well, for reasons that showed a misunderstanding of the First Amendment rights at issue. On the one hand, the judge thought that the First Amendment privilege being asserted could extend only to political speech, and on the other hand she seems to have suggested that no First Amendment obstacles could be posed to a grand jury subpoena because newspapers do not generally have any First Amendment rights to stop grand jury intrusion into their sources absent a showing of bad faith on the part of the government; the judge deemed Glassdoor indistinguishable from a journalistic enterprise.

Grand jury proceedings have historically been secret, and there are good reasons for such secrecy; but its indeed dangerous to have significant legal issues resolved in secret proceedings. Im not sure quite what should be done in cases like this, but I agree that this is an important issue, and Levys post is much worth reading.

See the rest here:

'Ninth Circuit poised to resolve major free speech issue in secret proceeding' - Washington Post

Sometimes in the course of our political life, someone proposes something so mind-bogglingly stupid that its hard to know exactly what to say about it. Senate Bill 720 is one of those things.

Over the past few years, a small but prominent movement has cropped up, using the age-old tactic of boycott to protest what it sees as Israels unjust occupation of territories that are assumed to belong rightfully to the Palestinians. Called BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) after the strategy it employs against the state of Israel and goods produced therein, it has acquired a certain notoriety on college campuses, not least for its uncomfortable associations with veritable anti-Semites.

Israels supporters in the Senate, justifiably seeing this as a problem, have come up with an innovative solution: Make participation in BDS or other boycotts of Israel a felony, punishable by enormous fines and up to two decades in prison. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act enjoys remarkable bipartisan support: Its not often you can get Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse to sign onto a measure alongside Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Its proponents number 43 in the Senate and 234 in the House.

The American Civil Liberties Union opposes it. This bill would impose civil and criminal punishment on individuals solely because of their political beliefs about Israel and its polices, the organization writes in a letter to senators. The thrust of itscriticism is simple. Many companies and individuals conduct no transactions with Israel, for lack of a need to; the bill would make illegal such an action only if it bears a political motivation. The bill therefore penalizes political beliefs and so is both unconstitutional and unconscionable.

This is correct, and we should be pleased that the ACLU has taken a break from mind-numbing Resistance-focused anti-Trump litigation and has rediscovered the meaning of the civil liberties so prominent in its name. This proposed legislation is indeed unconstitutional and unconscionable, an abridgment of the right to free speech, which is quasi-sacred in American life and enshrined in the founding document of our government. The senators who currently support it should be, quite frankly, ashamed of themselves; they have lost sight of one of the founding principles of American government, allowing it to be overshadowed by the spectral world of the IsraeliPalestinian dispute.

This condemnation will, I would hope, suffice for those on the Left whose first instinct, on hearing the news of the bills consideration, was to ask somewhat sardonically when the ostensible right-wing defenders of free speech would profess their opposition to the bill. Sean McElwee wrote on Twitter: I expect our valiant campus speech warriors will stay silent. From The New Republics Jeet Heer: Its interesting how silent free speech absolutists are when attack is not on campus but from Senate.

This point, now made rotelyon the left, is meant to insinuate that those on the center and Right who care deeply about the state of free speech on campus Conor Friedersdorf, Nicholas Christakis, Jonathan Chait, even some at National Review are in fact nothing but reactionaries dishonestly appropriating the free speech argument to keep the boots of the rich, white, and powerful stamped down upon the backs of leftist agitators.

This is, of course, total bunk. A significant number of prominent supporters of campus free speech have also expressed opposition to the Senate bill. Nicholas Christakis has; Jonathan Chait has; Yair Rosenberg has; Walter Olson has. The hypocrites whom those on the left desperately wish their opponents to be have not materialized; they are, by and large, a highly principled bunch.

Such is exactly how most debates over free speech have played out recently. Consider the case of Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College who was fired after making controversial comments on Fox News. Leftists jumped on the apparent lack of outcry as prima facie proof of conservative hypocrisy on the subject: Conservatives care only when its one of their own facing opprobrium. One commentator wrote:

In contrast to other free speech-related controversies on college campuses, there has been almost no media coverage of Durdens ouster. That omission is part of a pattern: When wealthy, right-wing speakers encounter protest, the tendency among both right-wing and centrist writers is to scold snowflake students while dutifully preaching the virtues of diverse ideas in a college education, no matter how outr or dangerous those ideas may be. When marginalized faculty, often women of color, encounter professional censure, the same centrist writers say nothing. Once could almost conclude that the PC-run-amok and trigger warning controversies exist solely to reaffirm existing power dynamics. Its not really about free speech on campus at all.

And, yes, when it comes to Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos or Tomi Lahren, thats more or less correct; they really are distasteful hypocrites who care not one bit about free speech and who use the principle instead to advance their particular cause. They are of the new breed of conservatism that views its primary goal as melting special snowflakes and doesnt give much of a damn about anything beyond that. But we knew that already; weve always known theyre unprincipled actors seeking only to aggrandize themselves. Their silence on Lisa Durden tells us nothing new or interesting about their character. Their place in the intellectual debate over free speech is marginal in any case, and what really matters is not what they think but what the more rational, principled minds of the Right and center say. From them we might be able to glean whether the defense of free speech is something truly principled or is just a veil for contemptible beliefs.

From them we hear a near-universal condemnation of Durdens firing. Jonathan Haidt of Heterodox Academy, a centrist talisman for the free-speech cause, wrote that in 2017, its clear that the threat profile is now bipartisan. Jonathan Marks, a conservative, said, I am no fan of Lisa Durden....Yet it is precisely as an academic conservative that I must say, to coin a phrase, Im with her. Similar reactions could be found across the span, from right to center, of defenders of free speech. Again, the supposed hypocrites were not what they were presumed to be.

As goes the debate over free speech, so drifts the broader current in our public sphere. Over and over again, it seems, we care more about scoring partisan points in the eternal shouting chamber of Twitter than we do about achieving concrete change in the tangible conditions of everyday life. Rank partisanship has allowed us to rest quite content with having uncovered hypocrisy on the other side. This tactic is nothing but a cheap cop-out. We blissfully avoid all the difficulties of a serious debate that challenges our intellectual precepts. It is possibly the least edifying, most counterproductive way to run a civil society. It only heightens the tensions already latent in our partisan system. It distracts us from the content and merits of the issue at hand.

Ive focused on the Left so far, but I dont mean to suggest that this phenomenon occurs only there. Its prominent enough on the right as well publications like The Federalist specialize in a sort of Obama did it too! smarminess, always allowing them to the elide the actual issue at hand. Through this strategy, they decline to express an opinion on the content of the actual matter, instead directing their ire at the Left. This is a convenient way to avoid being trapped in the contradictions and convulsions of the Trump administration, but its a terrible way to run a public sphere in a democratic society.

What, then, is a reasonable path forward? Besides taking a Luddite approach to Twitter a remarkably poor platform for any sort of reasoned and constructive discussion, prone more to aggravation than to conciliation the world might be a substantially better place if we simply decided to step away from the partisan register in which we conduct our debates. Stop thinking about what the other side thinks, at least for a while. Start looking more critically, with a more penetrating eye, at what you and your side think. Otherwise the cycle of finger-pointing will do little but deepen, and our public sphere become all the more barren.

Noah Daponte-Smith is a student of modern history and politics at Yale University and an editorial intern at National Review.

Link:

BDS: Free-Speech Conservatives Oppose Senate Bill That Would ... - National Review

Do you think the creators of Pokemon Go should have to fill out a 10-page event-permit application each time you want to play the augmented reality game in a public park?

Neither does a Wisconsin district judge, who just pressed pause on a local ordinance that singled out AR games for particularly tough treatment.

Some three months after Candy Lab, the creator of a Pokemon Go-like game sued Milwaukee County over the local law, US district Judge J.P. Stadtmueller gave the company, and by extension the makers of other AR games, a temporary win.

In an order Thursday, Stadtmueller ruled AR games constitute free speech and thus any law affecting them would have to be narrowly tailored so as not to unreasonably harm companies or citizens and avoid falling afoul of the First Amendment. The county had been trying to control the games after parks were allegedly trampled by Pokemon Go players last year.

Here's the ordinance:

Permits required for location-based augmented reality games. Virtual and location-based augmented reality games are not permitted in Milwaukee County parks except in those areas designated with a permit for such use by the director of the department of parks, recreation, and culture (DPRC). Permits shall be required before any company may introduce a location-based augmented reality game into the parks, effective January 1, 2017. The permitting application process is further described on DPRC's website for companies that create and promote such games. That process shall include an internal review by the DPRC to determine the appropriateness of the application based on site selection, protection of rare flora and fauna, personal safety, and the intensity of game activities on park lands. Game activity shall only occur during standard park hours, unless otherwise authorized by the DPRC director, who has the authority to designate special events and activities within the parks outside of the standard operational hours.

The permit application also requires a $250 deposit and for the event sponsor to have $1 million worth of general liability insurance.

As it stands, the judge believes the law may be unconstitutional. So Milwaukee is now unable to enforce it, at least until the relevant lawsuit -- again, by Candy Lab, not Pokemon Go creator Niantic -- reaches its conclusion.

Representatives for Milwaukee County, Candy Lab and Niantic didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

You can read the judge's order below.

Candy Lab Wisconsin Preliminary Injunction Order Augmented Reality Games by CNET News on Scribd

via The Associated Press

Read more:

Take that Milwaukee. Pokemon Go is protected free speech - CNET

Censorship is demeaning.

When the New York Times finds a professor of psychology to tell us that hold on to your seats words can actually hurt, and therefore certain speakers should be prohibited from campuses, it is arguing that the vulnerable students need protection from authorities on high.

When the U.K.s Advertising Standards Authority proposes to ban harmful traditional gender roles from all advertisements, it makes clear that it doesnt believe women can handle a depiction of a mother cleaning up after her family. Even if women are not bothered, they must be protected: They may not recognize harm because certain negative stereotypes are so normalised.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, the aforementioned professor of psychology, demeans us with science. On Sunday, she wrote, If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech at least certain types of speech can be a form of violence. This allowed her to conclude that its reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school and that we should halt any speech that bullies and torments.

Barretts conclusion does not follow from her premises. As Jesse Singal notes in New York, the studies that Barrett cites are mostly about chronic stress, attributable to prolonged and sustained emotional neglect or verbal abuse during childhood. They has nothing to do with attending a college at which a loathsome person happens to be giving a speech that can be protested or simply ignored. Yiannopoulos, stupid as he is, is not going to physically damage your brain by speaking on your campus.

Barrett surely knows this, which is why she adds that Yiannopoulos is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. Therein lies her sleight-of-hand: On the one hand, he can be banned because his words are literally violent, but on the other, it is acknowledged that his words dont actually cause physical harm, but only contribute to the larger campaign of abuse that can be claimed, without any evidence, to have equivalent effects to sustained verbal abuse during childhood.

Barrett poses as a faithful interpreter of scientific evidence, determined to protect students from the words endangering their telomeres. But in reality, her argument would pave the path to the criminalization of unpopular speech. Violence is dangerous, after all, and it merits state violence to subdue and prevent it. By her logic, any controversial speaker could be grouped with a campaign of some sort and thus made into a contributor to something akin to physical violence in its effects.

Consider what the results would be of treating this argument seriously. Take Linda Sarsour. Among her other activities, she delights in claiming that Zionists have no place in the feminist movement. So whats stopping me from saying that, while not physically harmful in themselves, Sarsours bullying statements join a larger campaign of abuse against Jews, and therefore deeming her speech responsible for causing chronic stress? Should she on these grounds be prohibitedfrom criticizing Zionism?

In Britain, you can be arrested for speech, even if its only an offensive Facebook post. This is all for the safety of the public, of course. On Tuesday, Britains Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) published a new report, pushing Britain further into the free-speech abyss. The report presented an evidence-based case for stronger regulation of ads that feature stereotypical gender roles or characteristics which might be harmful to people.

The report will form the basis of new standards to be created for 2018 by the ASAs sister organization, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP). Together, the ASA and CAP self-regulate the advertising industry, a power they have been granted by the British government. Advertisers cannot opt out of their advertising codes unless theyd like to face sanctions as severe as criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and confiscation of financial assets.

This means that, for example, ads that depict men as stereotypically inept at performing housework or women cleaning up after a mess they did not make themselves will be prohibited. Ella Smillie, the lead author of the ASA report, says she hopes to ensure that modern society is better represented. I would have no problem with that, but it is not what Smillie has recommended. She has sought to forbid the representation of anything but modern society, whatever that means. So just like that, Britain will essentially make it illegal to depict my father and mother in advertisements.

To depict a man struggling with an old vacuum cleaner while a woman succeeds with a newer product would supposedly restrict the choices, aspirations, and opportunities of children, young people and adults. But again, this has nothing to do with expanding womens range of choices. Rather, the new proposals aim to promote one choice and forbid the representation of another.

The ASA claims its report is backed by a major independent research study by GfK, the German market research firm. But if you care to read the report in full, you will find its evidence laughably sparse. Free speech and liberty to offend does not correspond with a right to cause harm, its authors assert, unaware of how broad a claim they have just made. On this logic, one could call for the banning of a million books and the suppression of a thousand columnists for causing harm.

But the report continues, As the evidence links the depiction and reinforcement of stereotypes to unequal outcomes and real-word harms for men and women, it could be argued that the right to offend does not apply. But just a few lines earlier, the authors state that the literature is not conclusive on the role advertising plays in constructing or reinforcing gender stereotypes. In any event, these harms are suspect, relying on value judgments about men and women that the British people never authorized their advertising regulators to make. And the report uncritically presents very controversial claims about them, including about so-called stereotype threat. This is the contested idea that people will perform more poorly when they feel at risk of conforming to a stereotype.

Of course the media can encourage conformity, and of course the British regulators pose as advocates of choice and liberation from conventions. They cast themselves as protectors of women everywhere, vulnerable to have their ambitions crushed by ads for home appliances. However, this is just a pose. In reality, the regulators only offer a different, more modern conformity, casting traditional practices as not only unjust, but bad for your health.

In suppressing free speech, the paternalistic censors in Britain and at the Times cannot claim to be on the side of freedom or the little guy. Long past destroying the old orthodoxies, they seek to create new ones. While claiming to watch out for your interests, they pursue social engineering.

Elliot Kaufman is an editorial intern at National Review.

Continued here:

Censorship: It's Always for Your Own Good - National Review

There is a cartoon making the rounds on Facebook accompanied by comments announcing that Rick Friday, the cartoonist who drew the panel, had been fired by The Farm News, a Fort Dodge, Iowa, publication, after 21 years on the job.

The cartoon depicts two guys in bib overalls standing at a fence row. One of them says, I wish there was more profit in farming and the second guy says, There is. In the year 2015, the CEOs of Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and John Deere combined made more money than 2,129 Iowa farmers.

Not exactly knee-slappingly funny, but apparently the companies named in the cartoon are also big advertisers with The Farm News.

The posting quotes the fired cartoonist as saying, When it comes to altering someones opinion or someones voice for the purpose of wealth, I have a problem with that. Its our constitutional right to free speech and our constitutional right to free press.

Although I can understand Fridays frustration at being let go, his objection that being fired is a violation of his constitutional rights of free speech and a free press shows a remarkable ignorance about those rights.

The First Amendment to the Constitution states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment says that the government cannot pass laws prohibiting cartoonists from making fun of companies, but with respect to its employees, The Farm News can and is completely within its rights to fire the cartoonist.

The First Amendment outlines a relationship between the government and the people, not between a publishing enterprise and its employees. The management of The Farm News has an obligation to its owners and employees to maintain the financial integrity of the company. When one employees behavior threatens the finances of the company, management may discipline or even terminate the employee without violating his freedom of speech and press rights.

The constitutional protections of speech and press freedom do not guarantee that people may express themselves any way they want. You cannot post on the company bulletin board a notice declaring that the boss is an imbecile and then expect to be protected from being disciplined or fired because of your First Amendment rights. There is nothing in the Constitution compelling companies to spend advertising money in a particular publication, nor is there any provision in the First Amendment that requires a particular company to employ someone.

The government may not constrain Friday from drawing and having his cartoons published, but his employers are within their rights to fire him without violating his First Amendment rights.

Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who refused to stand for the National Anthem last year, was completely within his rights not to stand. However, just like Kaepernicks relation with the NFL, Fridays dismissal from The Farm News is not a violation of his First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from silencing individuals and the press in most cases, but it is silent on work arrangements voluntarily entered into between both employees and management.

The Farm News has since rehired Rick Friday.

http://www.myjournalcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/web1_web-freespeech.jpg

Jacksonville resident Jay Jamison writes each Friday for this page.

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Here is the original post:

Commentary: Free speech far from free - Jacksonville Journal Courier

DENVER | Education Secretary Betsy DeVos offered a reminder Thursday to state legislators frustrated by protests shutting down free speech at public universities: You control the purse strings.

Ms. DeVos, who delivered her remarks at the American Legislative Exchange Council annual meeting, said that we all have a role to play in reversing the trend toward campus intolerance, which has been manifested in recent years with the muzzling of conservative speakers and viewpoints.

For state legislators, you have the power of the purse, she said. And I wouldnt hope to suggest how you might approach that, but I think that really bringing some of the most egregious examples to the forefront we all have the opportunity to use our bully pulpits to talk about these things and bring light to places of darkness where speech is not being allowed to be free and open and heard.

Her comments came with state lawmakers increasingly exasperated by campus melees, including last semesters University of California, Berkeley rioting and the student takeover at Evergreen State College, driven by students unwilling to brook dissenting opinions.

Let me say I think this is a really, really important issue, one that has become even more important in the last couple of years, said Ms. DeVos. We have seen in far too many cases an intolerance toward listening to and at least hearing from others that have different perspectives than ours.

State lawmakers have begun to react. In Washington, a pair of Republican legislators introduced bills in June to defund Evergreen State and transform it into a private college.

For those who might find such a solution extreme, ALEC unveiled last month the Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act (FORUM), a piece of model legislation aimed at reopening debate on increasingly close-minded campuses.

The model policy eliminates campus free-speech zones, reaffirms First Amendment rights, allows those whose free speech rights may have been violated to bring causes of action and requires free speech education for students as well as administrators and campus police.

The measure also empowers legislators to hold universities accountable by requiring each institution to report on free speech issues prior to the legislatures appropriations process.

Shelby Emmett, director of ALECs Center to Protect Free Speech, said the proposed policy differs from others that require free speech education only for incoming freshmen.

Obviously, theres a problem with free speech on campus well before freshmen arrive if you have administrators or campus police officers who think you can detain or arrest or suspend a student because they passed out a Constitution, said Ms. Emmett. I think its easy to go after the students, but this is a cultural problem.

The focus today lies with progressive students suppressing conservatives, but this is not at all a political issue, said Ms. Emmett.

This happens on both sides, she said. It goes back and forth. Free speech is one of those things where people say they love it until they dont love it.

Universities have seen their reputations take a hit as a result of their apparent opposition to conservative views.

A survey released last week by the Pew Research Center found 58 percent of Republicans believe higher education has a negative effect on the nation, compared with just 36 percent who say the effect is positive.

The reverse was true two years ago, when 54 percent of Republicans found higher education positive and 37 percent said it was negative.

In between those two surveys, there have been massive student demonstrations, notably the campus shutdown in 2015 at the University of Missouri, as well as incidents at private institutions such as Yale University and Claremont McKenna College.

Ms. DeVos can speak from personal experience: In May students booed and interrupted her graduation address at Bethune-Cookman University in Orlando, Florida.

The education secretary typically draws a protest crowd driven by teachers unions wherever she speaks, but there were no demonstrators Thursday outside the Hyatt Regency Denver for her ALEC address.

The day before she arrived, however, several hundred foes of her school choice agenda held a rally at the state capitol and then marched to the Hyatt Regency, chanting resist and holding signs with messages like ALEC Leave Our Kids Alone!

The marchers were greeted by ALEC staffers who passed out water bottles in the nearly 100-degree heat. The message on the water bottles: Quenching your thirst for free speech.

Thats perfect, said Ms. DeVos.

Free speech is a very important issue, and one which I plan to continue to talk and speak out about, and I hope all of you who have opportunities to do that in your states will do the same, she said. Because the value of hearing and learning from others is an invaluable, invaluable thing.

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DeVos urges state legislators to take on foes of campus free speech - Washington Times

The University of California, Berkeley's decision to block another conservative lecture, this time featuring popular author Ben Shapiro, rightfully sparked a fresh round of disgust among free speech advocates on Wednesday.

The school is under heavy fire from conservatives for a series of First Amendment controversies that unfolded over the course of the last school year, even facing a lawsuit from Young America's Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans over Ann Coulter's canceled lecture in April. Between the riots that blocked Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking and the university's decision to cancel Coulter's lecture, Berkeley has become a high-profile battleground of the contemporary campus speech movement.

During a Senate hearing last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, criticized the school in his remarks decrying the state of free speech in higher education. In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ardently defended her state's flagship university.

"I know of no effort at Berkeley, at the University of California, to stifle student efforts to speech," she said at the time, continuing, "And if there is a specific effort, I would certainly appreciate it if people brought that to my attention."

Ben Shapiro is happy to help.

"If there is no effort to stifle free speech at Berkeley," Shapiro responded in an email to the Washington Examiner, "why has Berkeley failed to protect Milo Yiannopoulos' event, cancelled Ann Coulter's event, and now makes excuses about lack of availability for a speech already cleared by the College Republicans?"

"If Feinstein is so unconcerned about this, she should push her fellow Democrats in California to sponsor legislation requiring the suspension or expulsion of students who utilize violence to prevent others' free speech," he concluded.

Easy enough. But will the senator agree?

In a statement to Young America's Foundation (my previous employer), the organization set to sponsor his lecture, Shapiro indicated he won't accept the university's excuses. "Using ridiculous pretexts to keep conservatives from speaking is unsurprising but disappointing. We'll find a way to get this event done, and UC Berkeley has a moral and legal obligation to ensure we do so," he declared.

Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

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Thanks to blocked lecture, Ben Shapiro has a message about free speech for Berkeley defender Dianne Feinstein - Washington Examiner

In what was surely the most hot-button episode of WCPN's Sound of Ideas in months, City Club of Cleveland CEO Dan Moulthrop appeared alongside local attorney Subodh Chandra* and the ACLU's Elizabeth Bonham Wednesday morning to discuss the City Club's recent announcement that it'll be hosting fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on August 3.

That announcement met with immediate criticism on social media. Cleveland.com clutched its pearls and called the response "one of the most volatile in the 105-year history of the citadel of free speech."

The Twitter critics people who wondered, among other things, what exactly Lewandowski would bring to the City Club (besides, perhaps, notoriety) and who prodded Moulthrop to explain the decision, in light of Lewandowski's thuggish behavior on the campaign trail were described as "voices of intolerance."

Moulthrop has since orchestrated a kind of publicity tour, which included the Wednesday morning SOI broadcast. First, he penned an op-ed for Cleveland.com, celebrating the distinguished history of the City Club and casting the decision to host Lewandowski (at Congressman Jim Renacci's invitation) as a natural extension of the organization's valor in the face of tension and controversy. In a head-scratching formulation, he characterized the criticism of the City Club's decision as "intolerance for dissent."

But that particular position was greeted with skepticism by Subodh Chandra, a City Club member, Wednesday morning. He agreed in principle with Moulthrop's invocation of free speech ideals, but reminded Moulthrop and listeners that the First Amendment protects citizens from government infringement on their free speech rights. It has nothing to do with private entities like the City Club, which makes specific choices about who it invites and what topics it elevates. In Chandra's view, Lewandowski "degraded" the City Club. If he was a valid guest, Chandra asked, who would be off-limits?

Moulthrop said the outer limits were for the City Club's board to determine.

Elizabeth Bonham, too, stressed the need for clarity when framing the debate. She agreed that the current controversy was not a First Amendment Issue, and that when private organizations invoke the First Amendment, it's a misrepresentation. They can certainly advocate free speech, she said. But they aren't bound by the First Amendment at all.

Moulthrop pushed back, suggesting that citizens engage with free speech in a different way than lawyers do, and that it's incumbent upon civil society organizations to work adjacent to the Constitution.

To Chandra, the question was almost immaterial "a distraction," he said. There was no disputing that the City Club was constitutionally allowed to host Lewandowski. To him, though, Lewandowski was just a shitty, substandard guest a "third-tier, B-list" failed politician and fired strategist best known for assaults on reporters and protesters. One caller suggested that Chandra's take was "elitist."

But it gets to a fundamental issue that critics of the City Club's decision have voiced: Unless you're the United States government, being "inclusive" in celebrating free speech does not at all mean being exhaustive. Unlike the government, which must permit everything short of violence, critics believe that private entities can (and should) be selective in the speech they choose to give a platform to. In their view, celebrating civil discourse might mean the opposite of what it's being said to mean; it almost certainly means excluding people like Ann Coulter and Alex Jones and holocaust deniers.

In the critics' line of thinking, declining an invite from Jim Renacci to host Lewandowski should not be seen as "suppressing free speech" or "silencing" an opposing viewpoint. The City Club should be perfectly capable of defending a person's right to say something without flying that person to Cleveland and giving them an hour at an esteemed local institution to spew kooky or bigoted hot takes. One can recognize (and cherish) the U.S. government's inability to censorMilo Yiannopoulos, for example, and still believe that Simon & Schuster shouldn't publish his memoir.

Mercifully, Dan Moulthrop does not appear to believe that the City Club is the United States government. But his exact position is difficult to nail down: He has advanced the idea that the City Club musthost Lewandowski "we must engage in dialogue with those who are shaping public discourse" but not in spite of his behavior. Moulthrop seems to believe that the former strategist is really a top-hole guest. He has deflected questions about Lewandowski's documented assaults.

To the City Club, Lewandowski is valuable because he was part of something historic (the election of a real estate mogul and reality TV star to the U.S. presidency), and now influences more than 2 million people every day on Fox News. Inviting him and, crucially, giving attendees the opportunity to ask him tough questions is in keeping with the City Club's mission.

But to Chandra, Lewandowski is only famous for being infamous. And as a known purveyor of alt-facts and propaganda, even the vaunted City Club Q&A isn't likely to yield an informative or productive dialogue. Chandra said, though, that his primary issue was with the City Club's apparently diminished standards. Now that Lewandowski has been invited, Chandra encouraged people to attend and ask questions.

Meanwhile, eye-rollers on social media are curious about the "dissent" which they're being called intolerant of: What is Corey Lewandowski dissenting from, for example? And by whom are we called upon to practice inclusive free speech values vis-a-vis C-Lew? Well, by Dan Moulthrop and the City Club's recent defenders. In their view, presumably, Lewandowski represents dissent from our own ideas. It's important to welcome him,therefore, as a civil/civic attempt to broaden our minds and find common ground, etc.

Here's the best thread from the Twitter opposition:

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Civility Now! Corey Lewandowski Ignites Free Speech Debate in ... - Cleveland Scene Weekly

Claremont McKenna, the small, Southern California liberal-arts college, has punished seven students for their part in trying to shut down a speaking event last spring.

The undergraduates targeted Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute scholar who often focuses on law enforcement. She is most controversial for arguing that aggressive policing tactics pioneered by the NYPD in the 1990s saved thousands of black lives by reducing crimeand thatprotest movements like Black Lives Matter are part of a war on cops that makes everyone, especially cops and black men, less safe.

On April 6, roughly 170 people from the Claremont Colleges and beyond organized and executed a blockade of the venue where she was to speak. Some erroneously asserted that she is a white supremacist who disputes the right of Black people to exist.

They breached the perimeter safety and security fence and campus safety line, and established human barriers to entrances and exits, according to a statement released by administrators. These actions deprived many of the opportunity to gather, hear the speaker, and engage with questions and comments.

Among those found guilty of policy violations by a panel made up of a student, a staff member, and a faculty member, three students received one-year suspensions; two received one-semester suspensions; and two were put on conduct probation.

Their identities were not released.

The disciplinary measures are as harsh as any I can recall being levied against student activists in the spate of campus protests that began in October 2015 at the University of Missouri. That is sure to please one faction at Claremont McKenna, an institution where many alumni, trustees, and faculty members were perturbed to see free speech attacked by activists at their historically conservative institutionand convinced that a punitive response was needed to assure that going forward, students will be able to host controversial speakers without fear of getting shut down.

The administrations statement addressed those concerns:

Our Athenaeum must continue to invite the broadest array of speakers on the most pressing issues of the day. Our faculty must help us understand how to mitigate the forces that divide our society. Our students must master the skills of respectful dialogue across all barriers. Our community must protect the right to learn from others, especially those with whom we strongly disagree. And Claremont McKenna College must take every step necessary to uphold these vital commitments.

If any sizable faction of students are upset by the disciplinary measures, their reaction is likely to be tempered by the fact that they wont return to campus until the fall semester begins. In their absence, a Los Angeles civil rights lawyer, Nana Gyamfi, has emerged as the leading critic of the disciplinary measures taken against the students. She was kind enough to grant me a half hour interview on her birthday.

In her telling, Claremont McKenna first erred in extending an invitation to someone like Mac Donald, because she is not merely conservative in her viewsher rhetoric is dangerous. This is so, the civil rights lawyer argued, in part because of the way that Mac Donald vilifies participants in the Black Lives Matter movement, thereby putting them at greater risk of being harmed by critics agitated into violence. There is an element of karmic symmetry to the accusation, as Mac Donald insists cops are at greater risk of harm by critics agitated by Black Lives Matter.

Gyamfi went on to argue that students of color feel unsafe at the prospect of a Mac Donald speech on their campusand that they are, in fact, justified in that feeling. At first, I thought that she was using the characterization unsafe in the fashion of campus progressives who invoke the term even absent any claim of actual physical threat.

In fact, she was worried about real violence. She noted that in 2015 an anonymous figure posted a death threat against Claremonts students of color in an online forum. She spoke in general of speakers who rile up campuses, leaving members of marginalized groups feeling that, Damn, after this person spoke I feel physically in danger, I'm going to go back to these dorms and people are going to physically assault me. And she asserted that students in that situation have a duty to act in self-defense.

Thus the attempted shutdown in Claremont.

The students that engaged in this did so because they have an understanding of something we're all coming to: that we keep us safe, that we cannot depend even on the institutions we pay, whether the police or our universities, to keep us safe, she said. So we have to put our bodies on the line to be able to be safe. It doesn't make sense for you to be pursuing a degree somewhere and for someone to put a bullet in your head.

The notion that Mac Donald would plausibly incite students at Claremont to physically assault black classmates in the dorms after her speech struck me as incorrect and unfairMac Donald has been speaking publicly at college campuses and beyond for decades; her frequent speeches have never incited any audience member to violence; and nothing Ive ever known her to say, in years of listening critically to her words and reading her critics, has ever come close to even attempting incitement.

(For what its worth, multiple students of color I spoke to at the Claremont Colleges agreed that Mac Donald presented no threat and disagreed with the attempt to shut down her speech; be wary of any source that treats students of color anywhere as a monolith.)

I asked if anything in the remarks that Mac Donald ultimately delivered, in a live stream at Claremont McKenna, struck Gyamfi as something that could incite violence. I have no idea, she said. If someone writes books and articles that I feel positions Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, and that positions extrajudicial killings of black people as acceptable I'm not going to wait until she says kill the n-words or who cares if n-words die, I'm not going to wait for the outrageous thing to come from her mouth when I know where this could possibly go.

If any student protesters were earnestly fearful that Mac Donalds speech would trigger an assault on them, or would include a racial-epithet-laden tirade about killing black people, they would have been well-served by a trusted figure with an accurate understanding of Mac Donalds views to alleviate their fears with the truth.

I tend to agree with Gyamfi that the punishments were overly harsh.

For me, thats partly because Claremont McKenna and other institutions sent students lots of unfortunate signals that they could protest without consequence, and partly because semester rather than year-long suspensions, paired with a book report on John Stuart Mill, Henry Louis Gates, and Jonathan Rauch, seem sufficient to send the needed message: attempts to shut down speech will no longer be tolerated.

To Gyamfi, only educational discipline was appropriate, in part because this was a non-violent protest. They didn't punch anybody out. It was not destructive. They didn't turn over cars or burn anything down. And the way the university responded to the protest clearly is intended to intimidate, to bully, to chill speech, to make people feel that anyone who even thinks about pushing back against one of these alt-wrong people is going to be slammed. You're requiring people to just take it, to hear things that are harmful to hear, to experience things that are harmful to experience, and to hear that pressure makes the diamond and friction makes the pearl. We already understand that no, it doesn't work that way, it shouldn't work that way in an educational institution, and you certainly shouldn't discipline students who are making an attempt to exercise free speech. And that is what they were doing.

That the punishment violates the free speech of the protesters, and is likely to chill speech, is a critique I encountered on Facebook as well, though the college did not punish students who protested Heather Mac Donald but did not block the event space.

I asked Gyamfi if she saw a distinction. What those insisting on a punishment worry about, I observed, is that permitting students to physically shut down any event featuring a speaker they dont like will render colleges helpless to function in the face of any dissenters. Should the alt-right be allowed to blockade Deray Mckesson speeches with impunity? At first, she changed the hypothetical, saying she would not object if Jewish students attempted to shut down a speech by an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier. That too would fall under her notion of self-defense against dangerous speech.

But what about protesters shutting down a speaker whose ideas you regard as unobjectionable, I pressed. Would that be legitimate because peaceful protest should never be punished? Or is it okay to punish protesters who stop others from speaking or listening? If they're protesting it's okay, she argued. I don't think it's okay if you're being an ass and not engaging in protest. Then you're just being an ass. But I think if they're actually engaging in protest, then I'm not happy about it, but it is what it is.

It shouldnt be punished.

I respect the consistency of her view, and the empathy that it extends to people who believe themselves to be standing up for what is right. But I dont want to live in a society where it prevails. Think what it would mean, campus progressives, if people could block others from speaking, or assembling, then escape punishment so long as their protest was in earnest. Alt-right bigots could surround mosques to prevent Muslims from attending services. The right to abortion would be meaningless as those who regard even first trimester procedures as murder formed human barriers around rural clinics. The Westboro Baptist Church could decide that rather than just protest the funerals of AIDS victims, it would physically prevent families from gathering for the eulogy.

That dysfunctional arrangement could hardly stay nonviolent for long. Folks would still want to have political gatherings. Thus the rise of campaign rallies where protesters would try to prevent any assembling, and counter-protesters would be on hand to counter, with victory that day going to whoever happens to push harder in their blockade.

The red rover champions of 1980s elementary schools would thrive. But the arrangement would be a catastrophe for marginalized peoplejust as failing to protect freedom of speech or freedom of association on college campuses would be a catastrophe for marginalized students.

The perfect punishment is a difficult thing to determine. But in my estimation, Claremont McKenna was correct to impose some punishment on student protesters who denied others the ability to speak and listen. While many forms of protest should always be permitted on college campuses, all students will ultimately benefit if future shut-down attempts are averted.

Dissents are welcome at conor@theatlantic.com.

Excerpt from:

Suspensions for College Students Who Thwarted Free Speech - The ... - The Atlantic

People protest far-right writer Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017. A scheduled speech by Yiannopoulos was cancelled after protesters and police engaged in violent skirmishes Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

One fairly common idea that pops up again and again during the endless national conversation about college campuses, free speech, and political correctness is the notion that certain forms of speech do such psychological harm to students that administrators have an obligation to eradicate them or, failing that, that students have an obligation to step in and do so themselves (as has happened during recent, high-profile episodes involving Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, which turned violent).

Such claims of harm often summed up as speech is violence arent typically invoked in response to actual Nazis, or anything like that. Rather, they are used to argue against allowing speakers like Murray and Yiannopoulos who, for better or worse, do fit in the conservative mainstream or even significantly more moderate ones like Emily Yoffe, who has expressed skepticism about certain claims pertaining to the prevalence of sexual assault on campus. In one instance students successfully canceled a showing of American Sniper by arguing the films ostensible Islamophobia would make students feel unsafe and unwelcome though the screening was later uncanceled.

Now, given the fog of culture war that has descended on this subject and the tendency of opportunistic (mostly) conservative outlets to hype these kinds of events, it isnt clear how common they actually are people often forget the polls suggesting that college students, broadly speaking, tend to hold pro-free-speech views. But either way, it is hard to take seriously the idea that an American Sniper showing or an Emily Yoffe appearance, or even a Yiannopoulos talk, is so potentially psychologically harmful that established norms about free expression which protect both College Republicans and Palestinian students advocating on behalf of their people should be tossed out the window.

So its weird, in light of all this, to see the claim that free speech on campus leads to serious psychological harm being taken seriously in the New York Times, and weirder still to see it argued in a manner draped in pseudoscience. Yet thats what happened. In a Sunday Review column headlined When Is Speech Violence? Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, explains that scientifically speaking, the idea that physical violence is more harmful than emotional violence is an oversimplification. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain even kill neurons and shorten your life. Chronic stress can also shrink your telomeres, she writes little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes bringing you closer to death.

In light of all this, she writes, it makes sense to think seriously about banning certain campus speakers:

The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldnt be acceptable on campus and in civil society. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.

[]

Whats bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, thats the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. Thats also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

Thats why its reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

This is a weak and confused argument. Setting aside the fact that no one will ever be able to agree on whats abusive versus whats merely offensive, the articles Barrett links to are mostly about chronic stress the stress elicited by, for example, spending ones childhood in an impoverished environment of serious neglect and violence. Growing up in a dangerous neighborhood with a poor single mother who has to work so much she doesnt have time to nurture you is not the same as being a college student at a campus where Yiannopoulos is coming to speak, and where you are free to ignore him or to protest his presence there. One situation involves a level of chronic stress that is inflicted on you against your will and which really could harm you in the long run; the other doesnt. Nowhere does Barrett fully explain how the presence on campus of a speaker like Yiannopoulos for a couple of hours is going to lead to students being afflicted with the sort of serious, chronic stress correlated with health difficulties. Its simply disingenuous to compare the two types of situations in a way, its an insult both to people who do deal with chronic stress and to student activists.

Its also worth pointing out that this sort of scaremongering Milo is coming and he is shrinking your telomeres! could become a self-fulfilling prophecy for some students. Theres an intriguing area of behavioral science known as mind-set research, and one of its tenets is that the relationship between stress and humans response to it is partially mediated by how people expect stress to affect them. In one intriguing study, for example, a group of Australian college students were given a psychological test and then told at random that it revealed they were either good at dealing with stress or bad at it. Then they watched, on a MacBook, a very disturbing ten-minute video of a car wreck, after which they were asked to close their eyes and relax for three minutes. When they opened their eyes, the researchers running the study asked them to estimate the number of times the films sounds and images intruded on their consciousness during the interlude, and how distressing they found the film overall. As it turned out, the students who were told at random they were good copers were less affected by the film they experienced, on average, about four and a half intrusions during the three-minute interlude, and rated their distress level at 5.65 on a 10-point scale. The poor copers, on the other hand, experienced about 18 intrusions and rated their distress level at almost an 8. Its an interesting finding albeit one conducted on a fairly small sample of 33 students and there are other studies which also suggest that the way we are primed to respond to stress can affect how we eventually do.

Now, it would be just as much of a stretch to say that a single column like Barretts could cause students to self-traumatize as it would be to say that an upcoming Yiannopoulos appearance could traumatize them. But in the aggregate, if you tell students over and over and over that certain variants of free speech variants which are ugly, but which are aired every moment of every day on talk radio are traumatizing them, it really could do harm. And theres no reason to go down this road, because theres no evidence that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus is harming students in some deep psychological or physiological way (with the exception of outlying cases involving preexisting mental-health problems). This is a silly idea that should be retired from the conversation about free speech on campus.

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Several provisions conservatives hitched to Obamacare repeal will need new legislative vehicles now that Trumpcare has crashed.

In light of recent track fires, MTA chief Joe Lhota says its not a bad idea.

Democrats could go small or big or refuse cooperation at all. But the party needs a strategy to deal with its sudden leverage over health-care policy.

Pulling out the worlds tiniest violin.

They want to know whether she disclosed her husbands and brothers meetings with foreign agents.

We now know the U.A.E. hacked Qatars news service and planted false information, ratcheting up regional tensions. What now?

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Telling Students 'Speech is Violence' Could Be Dangerous - NYMag - New York Magazine

Flying Dog Brewery terminated its membership with the Brewers Association over free speech concerns on June 1, marking the first time that a craft beer manufacturer split with the powerful trade group. The move was made in protest of a policy the Brewers Association announced in April aimed at cracking down on "sexually explicit, lewd, or demeaning brand names, language, text, graphics, photos, video, or other images."

Flying Dog, who produces a popular Belgian IPA called Raging Bitch, is no stranger to censorship challenges. In 2009, the Michigan Liquor Control Commission barred the sale of Raging Bitch in the Wolverine State, claiming that the label is "detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare." Oddly enough, the label was designed by renowned artist Ralph Steadman, who is best known for illustrating many of Hunter S. Thompson's best-known works, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

After a long legal battle, Flying Dog won a decisive victory for free speech in May 2016, with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Michigan Liquor Control Commission's ban violated the brewery's First Amendment rights. Flying Dog used the damages it received from the ruling to found the 1st Amendment Society, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about free speech issues. Over the past year, the 1st Amendment Society has held numerous educational events at Flying Dog's headquarters in Frederick, Md.

Thus, Flying Dog's decision to leave the Brewers Association should come as no surprise. Their steadfast defense of free expression is integral not just to its beer labels but to its core values as a company.

Flying Dog CEO Jim Caruso explains in Brewbound:

Free enterprise doesn't exist without freedom of expression If you've suppressed my ability to communicate my marketing message to my potential consumers, you are anti-free enterprise. It's appalling to think that the brewers who sit on the board of directors and the [Brewers Association] management are interfering in the industry, trying suppress free enterprise and suppress craft brewers from communicating their marketing message to their consumers.

These days, free speech is not just under threat by governments. Private institutions like universities and trade groups often embrace censorship, creating a chilling effect where individuals are afraid to share knowledge. While it's perfectly within their rights to impose such rules, their customers should not be afraid to raise their objection or vote with their dollars.

Such is the case case with the Brewers Association's unnecessary decision to regulate its members' brands. Flying Dog should be applauded for standing up for "good beer and no censorship."

Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.

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Flying Dog Brewery terminates its Brewers Association membership in defense of free speech - Washington Examiner

Patch.com

Free Speech Bill Sponsor Caught Stealing Anti-GOP Sign Patch.com Free Speech Bill Sponsor Caught Stealing Anti-GOP Sign. BROOKFIELD, WI A Republican lawmaker admitted on Friday that he stole an 80-year-old man's anti-GOP sign from the State Capitol Building under the guise of upholding the "decorum" of the ...

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Free Speech Bill Sponsor Caught Stealing Anti-GOP Sign - Patch.com

Conservative authorBen Shapirois expected to testify before a joint Congressional hearing on free speech on college campuses later this month, according to a new report by The Hollywood Reporter.

Comedian Adam Carolla, Shapiro and former American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen will testify before theCommittee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits and Administrative Rules and the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs for up to two hours on July 27.

Lawmakers on the committees include Darell Issa (R-Calif.), Mark Sanford (R-Fla.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.).

The hearing comes after protests, and in some cases riots, have broken out on college campuses over guests invited to speakto students.

In February, University of California, Berkeley was on a campus-wide lockdown after protests broke out against Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, an "alt-right" leader who was scheduled to speak at the school.

Similar protests happened later in the year when Ann Coulter was invited to speak at Berkeley's campus.

Shapiro,one of those invited to testify this month, has also sparked protests among students on campuses.He was escorted off the campus ofCalifornia State University, Los Angeles by police last year after protests broke out over his planned appearance.

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Ben Shapiro to testify in Congressional hearing on college campus ... - The Hill

If ever there were a more important time in the last half-century to lift up Americans First Amendment right to free speech, its today. Its a foundation stone of our democratic republic, but one that is under increasing stress with each passing day.

Take, for example, the events of July 8 in Charlottesville.

Earlier this year, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson and rename the parks where they now stand Justice Park and Emancipation Park. The actual removal is on hold with a suit by statue supporters making its way through the legal system.

In the meantime, the statues have become a flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars. Richard Spencer, a founder of the alt-right white supremacist movement, has been to town for a rally. Corey Stewart, the fiery anti-immigrant populist who barely lost the June 13 Republican gubernatorial primary, has embraced the statues as his ticket to a larger political stage. A Charlottesville white nationalist blogger has seen his profile rise considerably, and in June there was a torch-lit rally of support for the statues that reminded many of Ku Klux Klan rallies of decades past.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, last weekend more than four dozen members and supporters of a Ku Klux Klan coven from North Carolina, who had obtained an assembly permit from the city, held a rally at the foot of the Lee statue.

Community leaders, from the mayor to the president of the University of Virginia, urged folks to stay away from the KKKs protest. The university and city helped plan and stage several community events designed to blunt the KKKs message of hate. But still, more than 1,000 gathered in and around the two parks theyre just blocks from each other to protest the Klans presence in the city.

Tensions understandably were high. After all, its not every day you see a gathering of Klansmen in their robes and regalia, waving Confederate flags and spouting their hateful rhetoric. Nor is it every day that a thousand or more protesters show up to counter that message. Police officers took elaborate steps to protect the Klansmen as they exercised their First Amendment rights, the same rights the anti-Klan protesters were exercising.

At the conclusion of the rally, specially trained Virginia State Police troopers were on hand to make certain the Klan members were able to exit safely, but they still had a phalanx of protesters to make it through. In those moments, anything could have set off a tragic series of events.

Police asked the thousand-member crowd to disperse and go home as the Klan rally had ended. They begged, they pleaded nothing. They officially declared the crowd an unlawful assembly under Virginia law and warned protesters to leave nothing. They put on their gas masks as a way to tell protesters what was next nothing. Then came the release of three canisters of tear gas, and in the following moments, almost two dozen protesters were arrested and charged with various offenses.

The KKK rally and the counter-protest were difficult to watch, but they illustrate just how important the First Amendment is and why we must protect it. There are legal limits to free speech, but the Klan was well inside the perimeter of whats legal, as were the KKK opponents. The police stoically and professionally did their jobs of protecting the public and making it possible for citizens to exercise their constitutional rights in as safe an environment as possible.

Spencer, the alt-right founder, is planning another rally next month, and already there is trepidation about what could transpire. Let him exercise his right to free speech, though its ugly hate speech. Let his opponents rally against him, but peacefully. We cant let the First Amendment become the victim of mobs, on either the left or the right.

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Free Speech Can't Just Be For Speech We Like | Editorials ... - Lynchburg News and Advance

I had the privilege of addressing the Mount Pleasant Town Council July 11 on an issue near and dear to my heart; ironically enough the topic was the towns plan to update its rules for responding to Freedom of Information Act requests.

As I spoke I was well aware of the time limitations for speaking set forth in the towns ordinances and backstopped by the states FOIA law. I tried to keep my comments brief, but I went over my allotment of free speech. As I was trying to wrap up, the mayor kindly informed me that I had exceeded my time limit, thanked me for my input, and moved on.

I got the distinct impression that the mayor was more interested in moving the meeting along than listening to one of the people she was elected to represent.

Free speech and leadership sometimes means you have to at least listen and be receptive to ideas and opinions you may not agree with. Perhaps if the mayor listened a bit more some of the divisive issues the town is facing today could have been avoided.

Perhaps if issues were openly discussed, ideas fully expressed and a consensus reached, a more transparent administration could be achieved. Instead, the administration appears to be interested in complying with the letter not the spirit of the law, all the while watching the clock.

Anyway, later on closer to election time I hope I can invite the mayor to speak at a campaign event for two minutes.

Timothy C. Kiel

Pelzer Drive

Mount Pleasant

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Letter: Transparency and free speech - Charleston Post Courier

Recent incidents at the University of California-Berkeley where protesters threw Molotov cocktails and broke windows at the site of a sponsored lecture, and at Middlebury College where protesters assaulted a professor, highlight a disturbing trend in higher education: the assault on free expression.

This flouting of the norms of civil discourse and debate endangers the very heart of the university, for freedom of expression is essential to its mission and a fundamental constitutional right. Faculty recently demonstrated their commitment to open inquiry and to education, not indoctrination.

We encourage our students to speak freely and think critically. The citizens of Montana should applaud the University of Montana, where the Faculty Senate at its spring meeting overwhelmingly endorsed the University of Chicagos statement on principles of free expression. The university thus joins 20 other institutions who have done so.

Let us all encourage others, especially our students, to cultivate the virtue of toleration and to respect the basic rights of all.

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Applaud support for free speech - The Missoulian

Donald Trump Jr. walks offstage after Donald Trumps debate against Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, on Sept. 26.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Get ready for the latest defense for Donald Trump Jr.s actions: He had a First Amendment right to collude with the Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. This defense, which has been advanced by noted First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh and others, posits that he cannot be charged under campaign finance laws for soliciting a foreign contribution because seeking and providing such information would be protected political speech, or at least protected for an American to receive. Its a dangerous argument which fails to recognize the compelling interest promoted by Congresss ban on foreign contributions: specifically guarding American self-government against foreign intrusion.

Lets first start with the statute Trump Jr. may have violated. Federal law makes it a potentialcrime forany person to solicit (that is, expressly or impliedly ask for) the contribution of anything of value from a foreign citizen.

While we do not know enough to say that Trump Jr. should be charged with violating this statute, emailsreleased by Trump Jr. himself on Tuesday (as the New York Times was about to report on them) provide more than enough detail to merit an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. We know that Trump Jr. got an email from his friend stating that the Crown prosecutor of Russia had offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This high level and sensitive information was being presented as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.

Trump Jr. replied almost immediately:If its what you say I love it especially later in the summer.

It seems obvious that I love it constitutes solicitation in this instance. And there is a very strong argument to be made that very high level and sensitive information coming from the government of Russia is a thing of value for purposes of federal campaign finance law. The Federal Election Commission has said that providing free polling information to a candidate is a thing of value. It has said that when Grover Norquists Americans for Tax Reformgave a list of conservative activists in 37 states to the BushCheney campaign in 2004, this was a thing of value which had to be reported by the campaign, even if the list was publicly posted on the groups website. It said that Canadian campaign literature which an American candidate wanted to borrow from in his own campaign is a thing of value, even if its value is nominal or difficult to ascertain. It said that opposition research provided by a political group to Republican candidates can count as an in-kind contribution. And a federal court, in the prosecution of New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, said that a thing of value need only have subjective value to the recipient.

In the case involving the Canadian campaign literature, the FEC said the solution was for the campaign to buy it at fair market value, not to take it for free. And in the case involving the polling data, the court distinguished between volunteering for a campaignwhich is OK, even for foreignersand providing things of value that the campaign would otherwise buy, including information.

So heres where the First Amendment argument comes in. Professor Volokh argues that applying the FEC statute against Trump for getting a Russian government oppo dump must violate Trump Jr.s First Amendment rights because otherwise it would prevent all campaigns from obtaining mere information from a foreign individual. What if foreign individuals came forward during the campaign with dirt on Trumps travails in Russia and gave it to the Clinton campaign? Would that violate the law? Could a campaign not even speak to a foreign individual?

If a law is substantially overbroad, Volokh argues, it could be unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds against all people, including Trump Jr., even if a narrower lawfor example, against taking information from a foreign governmentcould pass constitutional muster.

Should it ever come down to a prosecution of Donald Trump Jr., I think courts wouldand shouldreject these arguments. One way to do so would be to read the statute more narrowly to proscribe actions like Trump Jr.s: campaigns taking compiled information for free that they would have paid significant value to receive from a foreign sourceor at least a foreign government.

Should it ever come down to a prosecution of Donald Trump Jr., I think courts would reject these arguments.

Campaign finance laws are usually justified on the grounds of preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption. But the laws barring foreign interference are different: They are about protecting self-government and the right of the American people themselves to decide who our elected officials and representatives are. As the FEC acknowledged in 2007, Congress passed and strengthened the foreign contribution ban with a broad scope out of a legitimate fear of interference in American electoral processes. It is a concern which has only been heightened by recent reports of Russian hacking into state voting and election systems in the 2016 campaign, as well as Russian proliferation of propaganda and Twitter botdriven fake news and the countrys hack of the Democratic National Committee.

Right after the Supreme Court decided the 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC, freeing corporations to spend money in elections independent of campaigns on the grounds that such independent spending cannot corrupt democracy, a Canadian lawyer living in New York named Benjamin Bluman brought a similar suit. He argued that his independent spending of 50 cents to make flyers and hand them out in Central Park in support of President Barack Obama should not be a crime because he could not corrupt the process.

A three-judge district court, in an opinion by conservative D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, roundly rejected the argument and affirmed the broad scope of the foreign contribution ban in Bluman v. FEC: It is fundamental to the definition of our national political community that foreign citizens do not have a constitutional right to participate in, and thus may be excluded from, activities of democratic self-government. It follows, therefore, that the United States has a compelling interest for purposes of First Amendment analysis in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in activities of American democratic self-government, and in thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process. The Supreme Court thought this result was so self-evident it summarily affirmed the lower court judgment withoutscheduling argument and without issuing a separate decision. That is how obvious the countrys interest is in preventing foreign influence over our elections.

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1. No contact with any Russians at any point 2. Okay, some contact, but just routine stuff, not related to the campaign 3. Okay, contact related to the campaign, but not collusion 4. Alright, collusion, but totally accidental 5. More...

To let someone off the hook who solicited very high level and sensitive information from a hostile government because there may be cases in which information from a foreign source does not raise the same danger to our national security and right of self-government is to turn the First Amendment into a tool to kill American democracy.

Put aside the incredulity Trump World would deserve if it pivots from saying there were no campaign contacts with the Russian government to acknowledging the contacts and saying they were just free speech. As a matter of protecting American democracy, the argument is pernicious and threatens the very core of what it means for we the people to decide who governs us.

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Donald Trump Jr.'s Free Speech Defense - Slate Magazine