Daily Archives: May 4, 2017

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Posted: May 04, 2017 12:01 AM

Liberal censorship is technically an oxymoron. But today liberal censorship is a common reality.

Where once free speech reigned on college campuses and in other secular institutions (or at least it was so thought), today you have the totalitarianism of political correctness. Say the wrong thing, and you may be fired.

Dissenting Justice Samuel Alito said after the Supreme Court same-sex marriage decision in June 2015: I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.

Ann Coulter, conservative firebrand, has proven recently that free speech is all but dead in America. Her aborted attempt last week to speak at Berkeley---the supposed birthplace of free speech in America---went up in flames. Almost literally.

Young Americas Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans had invited Coulter to speak, but the school would not ensure her safety, while the protesters vowed to violently shut her down. Coulter said to The New York Times: Its a sad day for free speech.

As we see repeatedly, the tolerant folk are the most intolerant among us. Their attitude is simple: Free speech for me, but not for thee

Historically, Christianity played a seminal role in the struggle for free speech---not that Christians have always gotten it right by any means.

The 17th century British Puritan writer John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, wrote a plea for a free press, Areopagitica. He stated, Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on.For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious. Gods truth stands on its own, needing no artificial man-made props.

This reminds me of the quote from Church Father Tertullian, writing about 200 A.D.: Truth asks no favours in her cause. She doesnt need any. Truth wins out in the marketplace of ideas.

In 1777, Thomas Jefferson noted that Jesus (the Holy author of our religion) is the reason we should allow civil freedom. This was in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, passed 1786.

Jefferson wrote: Almighty God hath created the mind freeall attempts to influence it by temporal punishment or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was his Almighty power to do. Jesus gives us freedom---who are we to deny it from others?

The alternative media continues to be a major lifeline for those in America who have dissenting views from the politically correct orthodoxy. We see a powerful example of this in WorldNetDaily, founded by journalist Joseph Farah. The pioneering independent online news source, WND celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. For his efforts, Southern Poverty Law Center profiles Farah as a supposed Extremist of hate. I emailed him their outrageous, derogatory profile of him. He emailed me back, Same old. Same old.

One of the saddest aspects of the Coulter-Berkeley story was the statement from former Democrat Chairman Howard Dean, who said, Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Tragically, many in our society today---including liberal protesters shutting down conservatives and Christians from being able to speak---do so supposedly in opposition to hate speech. First of all, where does the First Amendment make a provision for silencing hate speech? And secondly, who defines what is real hate and what is not? It seems that hate now is often, speech I disagree with.

I know a brother in Christ, David Kyle Foster, who used to be a male prostitute in Hollywood. He once told me that he probably had slept with more than a thousand different men before the Lord saved him.

Foster has interviewed hundreds of former homosexuals and lesbians and people struggling with all sorts of sexual issues, who found healing through the gospel of Jesus. Up until recently, these powerful, sensitive videos were available on Vimeo, which fashions itself as a high quality version of YouTube.

But Vimeo told Foster recently that all his videos had to be deleted because of their hate messages. Testimonials of lives set free through Christ are hate speech? That is another example of free speech for me, but for not for thee.

Now, if only our universities and media companies could come to grips with the First Amendment as designed by our founders, how better off things would be.

More:
Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee - Townhall

In all such examples, theyre at least conceding that were not wrong. Illustration: Rob Dobi

When you read rightwing commentators, youll notice that any grains of truth are frequently delivered along with a poison pill. A principled defense of free speech comes with a demand to wave through Ann Coulter. An acknowledgement of the destructive nature of inequality comes with a recommendation of more of the same. Sound analysis of problems with news media is salted with praise for Richard Nixon. And frank assessments of Trumps failures are accompanied by a castigation of the left or lots of shouting.

Still, we take what we can, where we can.

Look at it this way: in all such examples, theyre at least conceding that were not wrong.

Publication: The Week

Author: Anthony L Fisher is a libertarian journalist and film-maker who holds down an editing role at Reason, a column at the Week, and talking-head gigs at places ranging from Fox News to NPR.

Why you should read it: Fisher responds to recent liberal efforts to erect a category of hate speech as a way of finding loopholes in the first amendment. (The stimulus was a recent tweet by Howard Dean on the topic of Ann Coulters histrionic schtick.) Forcefully, he argues that the category of fighting words, often mobilized in this debate, has dubious legal force. In passing, he notes the irony that the precedent which is often imagined as establishing this category involved an antiwar Jehovahs Witness describing a police officer as a fascist. Rightly, he observes that the right to unpopular or offensive speech has been a foundation for progressive political projects. Professors, politicians and the left more broadly should know better than to put their faith in authority when it comes to the competition of ideas.

Extract: These characters might not deserve free speech, but they are entitled to it. Rights are not earned by the righteousness of ones values. Theyre just rights. And the right to freedom of expression is the tool that cultivated the fight to win every civil right in this countrys history. There is no civil rights movement, no gay rights movement, no feminist movement, and no anti-war movement without broad free speech protections for unpopular expression.

Publication: National Review

Author: David Alexander is a former Australian conservative apparatchik he served as an adviser in the government of John Howard who has trod the well-worn path to lobbying. He has written for rightwing outlets in Australia and the UK; this is his debut at US conservative mothership, National Review.

Why you should read it: Up to a point, this is extremely interesting. Alexander acknowledges the obvious limitations on neoliberalisms beloved Pareto principle, which states that if one groups spending power improves, we should assume zero impairment to other groups providing their absolute position does not go backward. But some assets marriage partners, job status, land are zero-sum and do drive inequality into the future. Meanwhile, conservative rhetoric about taxes has convinced the rich that they are the victims of middle class and working class takers who, the theory goes, pay no net tax. Thus, widening inequality has been a recipe for bottom-up and top-down resentment.

Unfortunately, Alexanders main recommendation is to follow the lead of former Australian PM John Howard. As any Australian can tell you, Howard squared the circle by scapegoating refugees, drumming up war fever and dishing out electoral bribes to the middle class.

Extract: Once we understand the causes of increasing frustration at both the top and bottom of the economic ladder, the deeply destabilizing political consequences of widening economic gaps become clearer. Where underlying inequality expands we can see the development of increasingly intense grievances at both ends of the spectrum: Those at the bottom feeling less and less competitive in important areas, while those at the top feel increasingly resentful about the proportion of tax coming from them and insist that those below start paying more. If the bidding-power gap grows wide enough it is possible to imagine the system crumbling through a combination of frustration, illiberal measures, populist demagoguery, repression, and stagnation the sorts of cycles that Latin American countries, with the highest inequality levels in the world, go through regularly.

Publication: The American Conservative

Author: Pat Buchanan is Americas grandfather of paleoconservatism, the founder of the American Conservative, and, until Trump came along, the man who ran the most anti-immigration and isolationist presidential campaigns in modern American history. He fell hard for Trump, and despite the presidents reversals and stumbles, Buchanan cant quite seem to get over him.

Why you should read it: In between the gloating, there are some horrible truths in Buchanans celebration of Trumps war on the news media. The institutions that deservedly took down Nixon are, today, themselves objects of significant scorn, derision and mistrust. This unhappy state is partly the result of a deliberate, decades-long campaign of demonisation by conservative politicians and their captive, partisan outlets. MSM is practically a dirty word; somewhere, Nixon is smiling.

Extract: Whatever happens to Trump, the respect and regard the mainstream media once enjoyed are gone. Public opinion of the national press puts them down beside the politicians they cover and for good reason. The people have concluded that the media really belong to the political class and merely masquerade as objective and conscientious observers. Like everyone else, they, too, have ideologies and agendas.

Publication: Conservative Review

Author: Does Mark Levin have the loudest yell in conservative talk radio? Only a shirtless Alex Jones could hope to come close. Certainly, his dulcet tones have proved irresistible to this column before.

Why you should listen to it: Levin was a #nevertrump Cruz guy, and hes only ever offered grudging praise of the president. This is his niche, and therefore his job: hes the tribune of the same grumpy-but-principled constitutional conservatives that swelled the ranks of the Tea Party; he and his loyal listeners have always suspected that Trump was a crypto-Democrat. Trump and Paul Ryan were, as Charles Krauthammer put it, rolled in the recent budget negotiations, and Levinites have little patience with the explanations that have emphasized keeping Republican powder dry for the bigger fight in September. They want Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, the EPA and the NEA buried now. Levin here articulates and stokes their rage. If Trump doesnt start winning like he promised on domestic issues, he will face a full-blown rebellion from these folks. But then again, its hard to imagine that he could ever have pleased them. Theyre uncompromising.

Extract: From 0:13 right to the end of this cut from Levins show, this is a bravura performance of the conservative rage that Trump and Congressional Republicans will have to deal with for so long as they do not meet every demand of Tea Party conservatives. They may not have gotten their man (Ted Cruz) but they can still cause incalculable political damage by firing up the Republican base just ask John Boehner and Jeb Bush.

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

Author: Peggy Noonan is the grande dame of conservative opinionators. She was a Reagan speechwriter, has written five New York Times bestsellers and has held down her slot at the Wall Street Journal since 2000 (she won a Pulitzer for her column this year). She leans establishment and moderate by the standards of contemporary American conservatism she famously criticized Sarah Palins bearing and credentials in 2008, and the base was not well pleased. Shes been increasingly critical of Trumps chaotic tenure in the White House.

Why you should read it: Noonan thinks that the only thing saving Trump from his own blunders is the character of his enemies. She notes the perfect historical irony that if the Trump administration ends in failure (a result that is looking more likely by the day), it remains true that because of the anger of the base, Donald Trump was the only Republican who could have won the GOP nomination and also the only Republican who could have won the general election.

Only the incoherence of the Democrats response and, according to Noonan, the fact that the resistance has become identified with the far left is preserving his administration from total collapse. Naturally, Noonan does not canvas the role of rightwing media in demonizing protesters as violent insurrectionists. Progressives, though, should take note of the feedback loop here between the smearing of protesters and more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tut-tutting like Noonans. This is how movements get wedged.

Extract: The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students they are now the face of the progressive left. This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first. He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: Hes lucky in his main foes.

See the rest here:
Burst your bubble: five conservative takes on free speech - The Guardian

A recent poll found that 69 percent of college students were in favor of some limits on campus free speech. This would have been inconceivable to students in the 1960s and 1970s.

Left: A Free Speech Movement rally at Berkeley in 1966. (Wikimedia Commons) | Right: The Battle of Berkeley, February 1, 2017. (Ben Margot/AP)

When I attended Philadelphias Charles Morris Price School of Journalism, in 1970, America was waging the Vietnam War. Students at that time were either pro-war (a hawk) or pro-peace (a dove). At Price, however, the majority of students were reluctant to take a side: They didnt want to voice their opposition to the war because peaceniks in those days were often labeled dirty long-haired hippies in need of a bath. And sometimes these labels were bestowed by teachers.

When Price teachers would occasionally blurt out a pro-hawk sentiment during class, they would usually accent it with an acerbic anti-hippie comment. Hearing these impromptu attacks was always unsettling for those of us against the war, but we took it in stride. We viewed teacher snits of this sort with a grudging tolerance. Their disapproving words often echoed what we were hearing at home from parents and siblings, yet we never allowed the clash of ideas to bring us to the brink of despair.

But this is no longer true on many college campuses. Today when a college professor voices a view that goes against the prevailing PC canon, students dont take it in stride they make their discomfort known by boycott, demonstration, or efforts to get the unorthodox offender fired. Much the same goes for outside speakers.

Two campus speakers who have generated intense student protests this year are former Breitbart journalist/provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and writer Ann Coulter, a woman Washington Times columnist Wesley Pruden described as a slender woman who might weigh 90 pounds stepping out of a shower. Yiannopoulos had a planned February appearance at UC Berkeley canceled after violent protests caused thousands of dollars in property damage at the campus. Coulter, the author of Never Trust a Liberal Over Three and Adios America!, had a talk canceled in April after threats of more protests. (Yiannopoulos vows to to bring an army to Berkeley in September to make sure that conservative speakers have a platform.)

A 2016 Gallup Poll found that 69 percent of students were in favor of some limits on campus free speech if that free speech was upsetting or perceived as hateful by some student groups. But thats not all. At some colleges the latest trend is banning white male poets like T.S. Eliot and John Milton. This would have been inconceivable to students in the 1970s.

There were no space spaces at Price, no padded side rooms with play dough, licorice-flavored binkies or plates of milk and cookies to soothe over a students hurt political feelings when a professor said something controversial. There was zero coddling at Price, for instance, when one teacher invited a pro-war colonel to speak to a class or when the school sponsored a Support the Troops day code, of course, for Support the War.

Glen Harlan Reynolds, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Tennessee, believes the term hate speech is meaningless because all speech is equally protected whether its hateful or cheerful. Yet this solid Constitutional definition doesnt wash with campus social-justice warriors, especially at schools like Swarthmore, Brandeis, UC Berkeley, Smith College, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Wesleyan, Oberlin and Sarah Lawrence.

Students in the 1970s seemed to understand that college is a trial run for adulthood. And adulthood, after all, is an Upton Sinclair jungle of clashing opinions and warring ideas. Colleges that seek to protect students from the world of ideas are not colleges at all, but four-year vacation retreats. Better to be born a hothouse flower in Longwood Gardens than a human being if you are afraid of honest dialogue.

When a friend and I were named co-editors of the Price school magazine, we were able to respond to our hawk professors with antiwar material. Although many teachers came to object to the magazines editorial slant and register letters of protest (which we always printed), we were never called into the deans office and told we had to cease publication, although we expected this to happen at any time.

We thought the magazine would be shut down because the fight for free speech then was all-consuming. This was a time when books and plays were banned, when comedians like Lenny Bruce went to jail, when Banned in Boston was more than an archival, historic joke.

Perhaps the strangest twist of all an example of how one can have respect for opposing points of view was on Price graduation day, when those same hawk professors awarded us a journalism award for our commitment to the (civilized) exchange of ideas.

Thom Nickels is a journalist and author of 11 books, including Philadelphia Architecture, Spore, and Literary Philadelphia. He was awarded the Philadelphia AIA 2005 Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. Hes written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, New Oxford Review, and many other publications.

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Originally posted here:
Free Speech on Campus, Then and Now - Philadelphia magazine

The report follows a five-day visit by Ben Emmerson QC on behalf of the UN to Riyadh. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Saudi Arabia has been accused of using anti-terror laws to suppress free expression and failing to carry out independent inquiries into its Yemen bombing campaign in a hard-hitting report published on Thursday by the UN special rapporteur on human rights.

The report follows a five-day visit by Ben Emmerson QC on behalf of the UN to Riyadh, where Saudi officials refused to grant the rapporteur access to prisoners the UN believes are being wrongly held under anti-terror laws.

He also said he had heard repeated stories of wrongful arrest, misuse of court procedures, cases of torture to extract confessions and clear cases of miscarriages of justice in recent beheadings.

Emmerson also called specifically for the release of 10 named Saudis who he said had been arbitrarily arrested, largely because they had expressed criticism of aspects of the kingdom.

His strongly worded statement, passed to Saudi authorities on Wednesday, is unusually powerful since he was granted numerous conversations with senior Saudi judicial figures, who were clearly eager to impress on him that the kingdom was either reforming or acting proportionately in the face of a genuine terror threat.

Emmerson praised Saudi rehabilitation work and the standard of its prisons as among the best in the world, but his criticism of human rights abuses gives substance to the concerns openly voiced by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on her visit to Riyadh this week.

He said that, contrary to the basic international human rights standards, Saudi anti-terror laws enable the criminalisation of a wide spectrum of acts of peaceful expression, which are viewed by the authorities as endangering national unity or undermining the reputation or position of the state.

At a press conference he said: I have received numerous reports about prosecution, on the basis of this law, of human rights defenders, writers, bloggers and journalists in connection with their expression of non-violent views. Despite repeated requests and efforts, the government was unable to give access to any of the individuals whose names I provided to be interviewed.

I strongly condemn use of counter-terrorism legislation with penal sanctions against individuals peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, as well as freedom of religion or belief and freedom of peaceful association and assembly.

Emmerson urged the Saudis to set up an independent mechanism to examine all crimes allegedly committed by speech or writing in order to determine whether they violate the protected rights of expression, thought, conscience, religion or belief, assembly or association.

He said there was evidence that complaints of torture were not systematically investigated and called for lawyers to be present within the first hour of detention and not after permission of the Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution.

In Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition war to fight back against Iranian-backed Houthis, Emmerson reminded Saudi Arabia of its international legal obligation to conduct a fact-finding investigation, independent of the chain of command involved in the strike, in any case in which there are reliable indications that civilians may have been killed or injured and to make the results public.

He said he wanted the Saudi government to ensure that such investigations were conducted in every case and the true civilian death toll made public.

Go here to see the original:
UN accuses Saudi Arabia of using terror laws to suppress free speech - The Guardian