Monthly Archives: April 2017

The courts have failed. The culture is failing. Unless Congress acts, we may lose not only free speech on college campuses, but free speech in America. In the memorable phrase of my friend, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff, college students are unlearning liberty, carrying the virus of censorship and oppression beyond the university and into the nation.

The courts are failing not because the underlying legal doctrines are flawed but because the remedies for censorship are completely inadequate. As of right now, there is a far greater financial incentive for a university to keep its sidewalks shoveled in the winter than to protect one of our nations founding liberties. If a student slips and breaks an arm, they stand to win much larger damages in court than a professor denied a promotion because of his speech or a student group thrown off campus merely because its Christian.

As it is, students and professors can launch exhausting legal cases, fight the university tooth-and-nail through years of depositions, motions, trials, and appeals, and at the end of the ordeal win an injunction and attorneys fees. In one memorable case, I fought a university for more than seven years and won a week-long jury trial, only for my client to be awarded a total (including attorneys fees) of far, far less than $1 million. Universities are some of the richest institutions in American life. These dollar amounts are utterly meaningless to their bottom lines.

Its worth achieving individual justice in individual cases, but even the strongest precedent ends up providing only a minimal deterrent effect, especially when compared to the overwhelming cultural pressure for more censorship, more thought control, and less tolerance of even the most reasonable dissenting voices on campus.

The New York Times today published an op-ed that provided a public window into the kinds of free-speech arguments that dominate campus discourse. The piece, by Ulrich Baer, a vice provost at New York University, argues that restricting speech that invalidate[s] the humanity of some people is a public good.

Its necessary to translate Left-speak to understand what it means to invalidate the humanity of some people. In real terms, it doesnt mean belonging to the KKK, it means nothing more than merely disagreeing with racial and sexual identity politics. So, if youre Heather Mac Donald and believe that radical anti-police rhetoric and actions from Black Lives Matters is actually costing black lives, then youre (in the words of activists at Claremont Pomona college) questioning the right of Black people to exist. If youre Charles Murray, and youve come to campus to discuss the class divisions that are causing America to come apart, a mob can and will shut you down.

Heres Baer, with words that should chill every American heart:

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities should not mean that someones humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

In other words, campus radicals will let you speak only when they deem your speech is worthy. And if they dont? Then, the mob isnt a mob, its a collection of idealists keeping watch over the soul of our republic.

Enough. We cannot count on campus administrators to protect free speech. Theyre so terrified of the radicals that theyre more prone to apologize for free speech, arguably our nations most essential liberty, than they are to defend it. Witness Berkeley bowing before the mob time and again. Witness the groveling apology from the chairman of Middleburys political-science department to the campus community. A mob attacked and wounded a member of the faculty, and this man actually said that his decision to offer a symbolic department co-sponsorship of the event at which that attack occurred contributed to a feeling of voicelessness that many allegedly experience on campus.

Their voices seemed plenty loud when they violently shut down Murrays speech.

If we cant count on courts or colleges to protect free speech, then its time for Congress to step up. Theres a remarkably simple solution to the problem of free speech, at least on public university campuses: Adjust the incentives. Make it costlier to censor than to protect the Constitution.

All it would take is a law holding that if a court of final jurisdiction finds that a public university has violated the constitutional rights of a student or faculty member, then the university will pay liquidated damages to the plaintiff in the amount of no less than $5 million. It will also forfeit 25 percent of its federal funding in that current fiscal year. If a university is a repeat offender at any point in the five years following, it will forfeit 100 percent of its federal funding in that fiscal year.

Heres what will happen: Universities will respond with all the energy and fury of a person experiencing an electric shock. The rule of law will be restored, and our essential liberties will be protected anew.

Does all this sound draconian? Its not. The primary task of any public official in the United States is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It doesnt matter how well you perform your secondary role, whether its governing a state, distributing drivers licenses, or even teaching biology if you fail in the primary task of preserving our constitutional republic, you have no business calling yourself a public servant.

Furthermore, such a strong political statement in favor of free speech will have a potent cultural effect. Private universities that choose to maintain totalitarian enclaves will face powerful market pressures from more-free and less-expensive public universities, and the contrast between liberty and oppression will be made clear for all to see. (Its worth noting, too, that private universities are not immune from civil law. Mob violence is just as unlawful on private property as it is on a public campus, and law enforcement cannot and must not stand aside when radicals riot.)

At public universities, campus censors have the freedom to speak, but they do not have the freedom to oppress. Constitutional protections are meaningless if the law cant provide an adequate remedy for their infringement. Its time to change the calculus. Its time to crush campus censorship.

David French is a seniorwriter for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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It's Time to Crush Campus Censorship - National Review

In the past week, North Korea has allowed some Western journalists into the country to report on its military parade, and government officials have given a handful of rare interviews to international media outlets including The Associated Press, BBC, and Al-Jazeera as tensions escalated with the United States.

But this brief flurry of engagement should not be misinterpreted: North Korea remains one of the most heavily censored countries in the world. Supreme leader Kim Jong Un retains an absolute grip on the flow of public information. All media is state-owned, with the official Central Korean News Agency serving as a government mouthpiece, and the regime metes out harsh punishments for anyone accused of accessing uncensored information or sharing news from countries that it considers its enemies. Its own journalists remain strident propagandists, and advances in technology that could open up channels to independent news are fought with ever-stricter censorship and surveillance measures.

The AP maintains a permanent presence in the country, with a small team of international correspondents and photographers, and a few North Koreans who work primarily as fixers. Eric Talmadge, who has led the bureau since 2013, likens working in Pyongyang to being embedded with the military. Obviously the context is quite different, he said. But in practical and psychological terms, I find it very similar to my experiences embedded in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The freedoms granted to the AP reporters are denied to would-be journalists from inside the country, said Kang Cheol Hwan, president of the North Korea Strategy Center. Journalism in North Korea is run by the state, Kang said.

Jean H. Lee, a former AP reporter who opened its Pyongyang bureau and is now a global fellow at the Washington, D.C.based Wilson Center, said North Korean citizens rarely have access to a daily newspaper, and lack adequate electricity to watch television at home. Instead, most read copies of papers posted on news boards across the city or watch TV in public areas such as Pyongyangs main train station, said Lee, who also teaches a class on North Korean media studies at Yonsei University in South Korea.

Kang said the party elite has access to a secretive newspaper, Chango Sinmun (Reference Newspaper), with stories from Voice of America, Russias TASS agency, Chinas state-run Xinhua, and NHK in Japan. The average citizen who wants uncensored news either illegally tunes into foreign radio or relies on word of mouth, Kang said.

Advances in communications technology are mitigated by official steps to censor. Lee said the regimes elite can access news via the countrys intranet. But access to the internet is highly restricted, with only North Koreans who have a specific task, such as monitoring coverage, granted permission, she said.

In keeping with Kims efforts to appear that he is at the forefront of technology, North Korea has developed its own smartphones, tablets, and software, including Red Star 3.0, an operating system that mimics iOS, Kang said. Ultimately, these products were carefully designed to control and monitor information, he said. Red Star 3.0 has surveillance capabilities, and the interface of the intranet, Kwangmyong, is set up to give the impression that the user has full internet access. An analysis of Red Stars capabilities by the tech-focused outlet Fast Company found that its approximately 5,000 web pages mostly contain propaganda. Kang added that the countrys Arirang smartphone looks, feels and uses like a Samsung . . . but lacks the very component that makes a smartphone a smartphone such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an internet browser.

When researchers from the German security company ERNW studied Red Star 3.0, they found it contained sophisticated surveillance properties, Reuters reported. This capability is particularly concerning since citizens trade flash drives to access news. The North Korean Strategy Center is among the groups distributing flash drives in an effort to combat censorship. Kang said the content typically includes PDFs of South Korean newspapers, Wikipedia pages translated into the North Korean dialect, guides on how to run businesses, radio programs, and TV shows and films, including some about the foundations of democracy such as Lincoln.

The use of cell phones has been rising in North Korea thanks to a black market and porous border with China, but the general population is barred from making and receiving international calls, Lee said. The Daily NK reported in March 2014 that North Korea had added new clauses to Article 60 of the penal codeattempts to overthrow the statewhich include a minimum penalty of five years of re-education in a prison camp and a maximum penalty of death for communicating with the outside world, including through cell phone contact. Watching South Korean media or listening to foreign radio can result in 10 years of re-education.

Even with the availability of censorship work-arounds, Kang said, Once North Koreans escape and resettle, its quite difficult for them to come to terms with the influx of information available to them.

Jessica Jerreat is senior editor at the Committee to Protect Journalists. She previously edited news for the broadsheet press in the U.K., including for the foreign desk of The Times of London and at The Telegraph. She has a masters degree in war, propaganda, and society from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

This article is adapted from CPJs publication Attacks on the Press: The New Face of Censorship, which will be released on April 25.

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North Korean censorship | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post

I basically agree with everything Wesley Smith says about that tortured op-ed in todays New York Times.

But I still have misgivings with some of the pro-free speech arguments I often hear from my friends and colleagues on the right, including here at National Review.

That may be because Ive long been a defender of censorship, rightly understood. I came to this view by way of Irving Kristol.

Irving wasnt for political censorship, and neither am I (depending what you mean by the term). Irving argued that, If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship. But he more famously said, The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie but only if she is paid the minimum wage.

These two quotes are perfectly consistent. What Kristol was getting at was the fact that societies survive by upholding minimum standards of decency. Such views seem awfully quaint in the era of online porn and whatever-the-Hell-this-is. But I think he was basically right. Progressives spent decades arguing for maximalist free speech in areas not traditionally considered speech at all. I am highly dubious that the authors of the First Amendment ever had strip clubs in mind.

But Im no Comstock and, besides, these horses left the barn long ago. What vexes me is that at the same time progressives have maximized the right to free expression to even cover federal subsidies for craptacular art, they have worked assiduously to constrain the only speech the founders really cared about: Political speech.

As Ive written many times, this approach puts the whole argument of free speech rights on its head. Normally, we defend extreme forms of free speech on the grounds that if we maintain these freedoms on the frontiers of our civilization, our core freedoms will not be threatened. This is the form arguments for everything from abortion rights to gun rights usually work. We must protect this questionable thing less we risk this other, unquestionable, core right.

The argument about free speech on campuses is so maddening because these petty magistrates want to crush the free exchange of serious ideas in a setting that is supposed to encourage such exchanges.

But the more important point, at least for me, is not the censoriousness of the campus commissars, but the ideology. Most of the speakers they want to ban arent spewing hate speech whatever that is theyre offering heresy speech. Defenders of murderous Communist regimes arent banned from speaking on campuses heck they often get tenure. Christina Hoff Sommers, Ayan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray are kept off campuses because they are dangerous to leftwing orthodoxy and they expose the inability of college students to deal with arguments that undermine the secular religion of campus leftism.

That said, in a morally and intellectually healthy society, Id have no problem with campuses refusing to lend resources to certain speakers. The idea that, say, the administrators of Yeshiva University, should be required to offer a venue to David Duke strikes me as silly as silly as saying he has a right to run an article in National Review.

In other words, the problem isnt a lack of commitment to free speech (though that is a problem). The free speech argument is downstream of the real dilemma: The people running what should be citadels of civilizational confidence have turned against our civilization. Maybe some atheist speaker has been banned because he would hurt the feelings of religious students, but Ive not heard about it. In other words, these administrators arent principally concerned with the sensitivities of students or even students of color or female students, but of particular students who adhere to a specific ideology. The administrators use them as props and excuses to justify their ideological, quasi-religious, agenda.

The irony comes when the defenders of these totalitarian enclaves must defend their stance to the larger society. Normal people and other elite critics shout What about free speech? And so the secular priests contort themselves into pretzels trying to make the case that their censorship is somehow consistent with some nonsensical notion of a higher principle of what free speech is. They cant be honest and say, We have a hecklers veto for anything that smacks of heresy and were not afraid to use it.

So much of the arguments about free speech would be better served if they skirted the issue of rights and stuck to old-fashioned notions of decency, good manners and sound judgment. But such antiquarian considerations dont do the work the left wants them to do. Those standards wont keep Charles Murray & Co out (though they might leave Richard Spencer in the anonymity he deserves). Worse, such values stem from a mainstream tradition of what college is supposed to be and how democracy is supposed to work, and in the new time religion, those wellsprings have been rendered off-limits.

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What The Free Speech Debate Misses - National Review

All who cherish free expression, especially on campuses, must combat the growing zeal for censorship.

Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas that they dont like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row earlier this month, the more serious incidentat Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and a less virulent one at UCLA.

Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to shut down this notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald. A Facebook post from we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges announced grandiosely that as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.

A Facebook event titled Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald and hosted by Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists encouraged students to protest the event because Mac Donald condemns (the) Black Lives Matter movement, supports racist police officers and supports increasing fascist law and order.

When I arrived on campus, I was shuttled to what was in effect a safe house: a guest suite for campus visitors, with blinds drawn. I could hear the growing crowds chanting and drumming, but I could not see the auditorium that the protesters were surrounding. One female voice rose above the chants with particularly shrill hysteria. From the balcony, I saw a petite blonde walk by, her face covered by a Palestinian head scarf and carrying an amplifier on her back for her bullhorn.

Just before 6p.m., I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator into CMCs Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows.

The administration had decided that I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators outside.

I completed my speech to the accompaniment of chants and banging on the windows. I was able to take two questions from students via live-streaming. But by then, the administrators and police officers in the room, who had spent my talk nervously staring at the windows, decided that things were growing too unruly outside to continue. I was given the cue that the presentation was over. Walkie-talkies were used to coordinate my exit from the Athenaeums kitchen to the exact moment that a black, unmarked Claremont Police Department van rolled up. We passed startled students sitting on the stoop outside the kitchen. Before I entered the van, one student came up and thanked me for coming to Claremont. We sped off to the police station.

Theseevents should be the final wakeup call to the professoriate, coming on the heels of the more dangerousattacks on Charles Murray at Middlebury College and theriots in Berkeley, Calif.,against Milo Yiannapoulos.

When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry. Of course, an ever-growing part of the faculty is the reason that police protection is needed in the first place. Professors in all but the hardest of hard sciences increasingly indoctrinate students in the belief that to be a non-Asian minority or a female in America today is to be the target of nonstop oppression, even, uproariously, if you are among the privileged few to attend a fantastically well-endowed, resource-rich American college.

Those professors also maintain that to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in hate speech, and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty, I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of communication rights.

We are thus cultivating students who lack all understanding of the principles of the American Founding. The mark of any civilization is its commitment to reason and discourse. The great accomplishment of the European enlightenment was to require all forms of authority to justify themselves through rational argument, rather than through coercion or an unadorned appeal to tradition. The resort to brute force in the face of disagreement is particularly disturbing in a university, which should provide a model of civil discourse.

But the students currently stewing in delusional resentments and self-pity will eventually graduate, and some will seize levers of power more far-reaching than those they currently wield over toadying campus bureaucrats and spineless faculty. Unless the campus zest for censorship is combated now, what we have always regarded as a precious inheritance could be eroded beyond recognition, and a soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.

Heather Mac Donaldis the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor ofManhattans City Journal,and the author of The War on Cops. She wrote this for InsideSources.com, and it is adapted from Manhattans http://www.city-journal.org.

Published: April 24, 2017 3:01 AM EDT

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Fight the campus zest for censorship - Philly.com - Philly.com

STEVE STEPHENS barbarity in Cleveland on Easter Sunday certainly wasnt the first time onlookers witnessed a slaying an execution, actually in real time.

Go back to 1963, two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. TV cameras rolled as authorities walked his suspected killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Millions saw Jack Ruby jump in front of Oswald and fire a handgun, mortally wounding him. A reporter at the scene described Oswald as ashen and unconscious as rescuers loaded him into an ambulance.

The decades-old footage was a shocking coincidence of action, timing and broadcasting.

Whats different a half-century later? Murderers intend to film themselves live, or nearly so, on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. They aim to make a statement, no matter how twisted. They sometimes pick victims at random.

Stephens did just that in targeting 74-year-old Robert Godwin, who was walking on a Cleveland street searching for aluminum cans. Stephens shot Godwin after asking him about Joy Lane, Stephens former girlfriend; his video later showed a trail of blood beside the prone Godwin, a retired foundry worker.

Stephens killed himself Tuesday in Pennsylvania as law enforcement authorities tried to arrest him.

Suspects or accomplices frequently have taken videos of slayings and other violent crimes. They are testimonials in many respects, even if delusional and amoral. Facebook, with its nearly 2 billion users, provides an easily accessible platform for these dark messages:

Vester Flanagan, a former reporter at the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, killed a station reporter and cameraman and wounded a third person during a live televised interview in Moneta, Va., in August 2015. A few hours later, Flanagan (who used the on-air name Bryce Williams) posted a video to Twitter and Facebook from the shooters vantage point, showing him approaching his victims, gun in hand. Flanagan shot and killed himself as police closed in on him the same day.

Chicago police said a 15-year-old girl was allegedly sexually assaulted last month in an incident involving several people. It was streamed on Facebook Live and viewed by dozens of people.

What responsibility do social media companies have? What should they do? Local academics caution that these officials must seek balance. They dont want to be accused of censorship but should work to keep gratuitous violence off our screens.

They also point to compelling, dramatic narratives that have aired. That includes the footage taken by the girlfriend of Philando Castile shortly after he was shot during a traffic stop in July 2016 by a police officer near St. Paul, Minn. The officer faces manslaughter and other charges in the case.

If social media organizations censor footage based merely on the suspicions of the intent of posters, doing so may itself be unethical, said Nikhil Moro, professor and chairman of the Mass Communications and Journalism Department at Norfolk State University.

There are limits in trying to crack down what we view, said Yuping Liu-Thompkins, professor and chairwoman of marketing at Old Dominion Universitys Strome College of Business. Given the sheer volume of content, Im not sure we can have the scrutiny, she said.

Money is a part of the calculations, too: The New York Times reports that Facebook Live has been embraced by users and advertisers. Video advertising commands a premium compared with traditional photo and text formats, The Times reports.

Facebook released a statement from Justin Osofsky, vice president of global operations, saying the Easter shooting in Cleveland has no place on Facebook, and goes against our policies and everything we stand for.

We disabled the suspects account within 23 minutes of receiving the first report about the murder video, he said, and two hours after receiving a report of any kind. But we know we need to do better.

On that, no one disagrees. But Facebook should have foreseen that some individuals would corrupt the live video option. Violent, deranged people will take advantage of whatevers at hand. Such depictions might be only a small fraction of the posts, but they have an outsize effect because Facebook is so ubiquitous.

As such, Facebook must lead the way in discussing where the line should be drawn between free expression and cracking down on certain images. Users expect better, and narcissistic criminals will continue to exploit that service until companies such as Facebook can deliver.

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Editorial: Striking a balance between access and censorship ... - Virginian-Pilot