Category Archives: Free Speech

A battle over free speech and abortion rights is brewing in the East Bay.

The city of Walnut Creek is considering a buffer zone law that will force anti-abortion protestors to stand further away from a Planned Parenthood clinic after reports of aggressive protesters at clinics nationwide. But local Demonstrators say theyre anything but aggressive and simply want to offer pregnant women alternatives to an abortion.

Stacey Cavanagh deals with fetuses 24/7. At work shes an ultrasound tech.

Ive been doing this for 22 years and Ive seen so much stuff, she said.

And when shes home, she sees abortion rights opponents picketing outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in Walnut Creek.

My dogs bark of course at them but I dont have a problem with them being there, said Cavanah. I see babies at every stage and I hear lots of very sad stories, Im pro-choice and Ive always been that way.

On Monday, members of the group 40 Days for Life, quietly held signs opposing abortion steps away from the clinics parking lot.

40 days for life tries to stay off the sidewalk as much as possible, I feel like we have not intimidated anyone, said a member.

But that wasnt always the case. A year ago, the abortion rights opponents brought four armed guards with them to demonstrate there. Two of those private security guards were charged for pepper-spraying abortion rights supporters. Mayor Kevin Wilk wants to avoid a repeat of that, especially during a time when abortion rights are threatened in states like Texas and Mississippi. Thats why hes called on city staff to come up with options on how to set up a buffer zone that will keep demonstrators further away from the clinic.

I think that it is important to review the options of a buffer zone, how much that buffer zone is, whether its twenty feet, or 30 feet or whatever it is the law allows, he said.

The Walnut Creek City Council will consider a buffer zone ordinance at their meeting Friday.

We hope that they will decide not to do such a thing we feel like we are in our rights, where we are, were keeping our boundary away from our driveway, said a member of 40 Days for Life.

The Mayor says protecting womens reproductive rights is one of his personal priorities.

If the buffer zone law passes, it will be up to the Walnut Creek Police Department to enforce it.

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Battle Over Free Speech and Abortion Rights Brewing in the East Bay - NBC Bay Area

One of the hallmarks of Jewish tradition is its intense focus on debate and disagreement. Unfortunately, it appears that this value is being lost on many of the nations younger Jews namely those currently enrolled in colleges and universities.

A just-released survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education captures the voices of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges and provides empirical insight into the current state of speech and expression on campus today.The picture is not good.

The data show that one-third of all students think trying to disrupt and shout down speakers when they visit campuses is sometimes or always acceptable. Among Jewish students surveyed, 40% reported feeling this way.

As for blocking other students from attending a campus speech and hearing potentially controversial ideas, 13% of students surveyed, and 18% of Jewish students, think this is sometimes or always acceptable.

Two-thirds of Jewish students compared to just about half of students nationally answered that blocking other students from attending a campus speech is justifiable.

These data suggest that Jewish students are more open to the idea of shutting down speech and the dissemination of ideas than other college students. How are we to understand these troubling findings?

Political identity is a good place to start. Like American Jews overall, Jewish college students tend to be Democrats. The data show that 54% of Jewish students surveyed identify as a Democrat, compared to 35% of students surveyed overall. When you include self-identifying Independents who lean Democratic, 67% of Jewish college students fall into the Democratic column compared to a lower national figure of 55%.

In this survey, identifying as a Democrat strongly correlates with espousing anti-free speech positions.

The data show that 81% of Democratic identifying Jewish students believe that there are cases when shouting down speakers is acceptable, compared to a much lower 59% of Jewish political independents and leaners and just 44% of Republicans.

Similarly, almost 60% of college Jewish Democrats maintain that blocking their peers from hearing the ideas of others can be justified, while slightly more than a third of Jewish Independents and leaners and a quarter of Jewish Republicans feel the same way.

Most troublingly, 27% of Democratic students surveyed responded that it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech, though the number is 22% for Jewish Independents and leaners and 17% for Jewish Republicans.

This data is deeply upsetting to me as a professor who has watched collegiate life change drastically over the past two decades. One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to attend Stanford University.

I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings in college when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights during which I was able to connect, learn and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly recall the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new.

While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night.

Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education and Jewish students seem to be helping lead the charge to silence others, missing out on genuine opportunities to learn, grow and connect.

Perhaps many Jewish students think that they occupy a noble place on the front lines of cancel culture in the spirit of social justice. But these progressive and woke impulses are misguided and ignore another equally important Jewish precept real discourse which involves learning, listening and debate.

Discourse is so prized and cherished in Jewish thought and history that Judaism has sometimes been called a culture of argument. Jewish students and all students for that matter must recognize that true equity and inclusion must include viewpoint diversity, respect for real and meaningful political differences and outlooks and embracing a multitude of ideas even if they make some members of the community uncomfortable.

Social justice values are certainly important, and a big part of Jewish thought. But they do not override the virtues of argument and respecting viewpoint diversity.

Both the Jewish community and our system of higher education have long embraced the idea that a competition of ideas is foundational to free and prosperous societies. The Jewish community cannot lose sight of one of our unique and virtuous features.

Instead of leading the charge to silence speech, our students should be doing just the opposite, demanding more speech and more ideas, not enforcing a culture of silence and cancellation.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.To contact the author, email opinion@forward.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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Jewish college students are more likely to oppose free speech and that should scare us - Forward

had the woman's sign not specifically names Dr. craft, then I believe they would have let her wear it. However, her campaign finds its self in complete folly. COVID cases are dropping significantly across the district and county. Not a single student had died as a result of infection from COVID. There are multiple studies, one by Waterloo University and one by U of Virginia, that show there is 10% or less protection provided by mask wearing. KISD has protected parent's rights and right fully let us decide what is best for our children. They have not prevented one person from wearing a mask if they chose to wear one. Masking is and should remain the choice of the individual.

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Is the Killeen school board denying a resident's free speech rights by making them not wear their protest sign at a recent Killeen ISD meeting? - The...

Steve Bannon is taking a page out of Mike Lindells playbook and backing the narrative that Donald Trump will be reinstated before the next election. Bannon said on his Real Americas Voice program The War Room, the return of Trump aint going to be in 2024, its going to be in 2022 or maybe even before as we start the decertification process out in Arizona. This prediction is a dumb one for a few reasons: Biden has already been president for nine months, several states would need to be overturned to make Trump the victor, and there is no constitutional process in place for bringing back an ex-president or defeated candidate. But also, the Republican-led audit in Arizona did not show the widespread voter fraud they were promising and in fact only served to add slightly to Joe Bidens margin of victory. Bannon is smart enough to know that what hes saying doesnt make sense and so the best case scenario is that hes trying to trick his audience to give them a glimmer of hope so that they keep watching his program. The worst case scenario is that he is trying to rile them up to take action into their own hands and inspire another coup attempt like what happened on January 6th.

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Steve Bannon: Trump's Return Will Be "2022 or Maybe Before" - Free Speech TV

Caution: Free Speech May Be Hazardous to Your Health. Such a rewording of theoriginal 1965 warningon tobacco products could soon appear on social media platforms, if a Senate hearing this week is any indicator. Listening toformer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, senators decried how Facebook is literally killing people by not censoring content, and Haugen proposed a regulatory board to protect the public.

But before we embrace a new ministry of information model to protect us from dangerous viewpoints, we may want to consider what we would lose in this Faustian free-speech bargain.

Warnings over the addiction and unhealthy content of the internet have been building into a movement for years.In July,President BidenJoe BidenMajority of Americans concerned about cyberattacks on critical groups: poll Labor secretary says 194K jobs added in September was 'not the best number' Biden task force has reunited 52 families separated under Trump: report MORE slammed Big Tech companies for killing people by failing to engage in even greater censorship of free speech on issues related to the pandemic.On Tuesday, many senators were enthralled by Haugens testimony because they, too, have long called for greater regulation or censorship. It all began reasonably enough over concerns about violent speech, and then expanded to exploitative speech. However, it continued to expand even further as the regulation of speech became an insatiable appetite for silencing opposing views.

In recent hearings with social media giants, members like Sen. Chris CoonsChris Andrew CoonsDemocratic lawmakers, Yellen defend Biden on the economy Sunday shows - Scalise won't say if election was stolen under questioning from Fox's Chris Wallace Democrat on controversial Schumer speech: Timing 'may not have been the best' MORE (D-Del.) were critical of limiting censorship to areas like election fraud and insteaddemanded censorship of disinformation on climate changeand other subjects. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has repeatedly called for robust content modification to remove untrue or misleading information.

Haugen lashed out at what she said was the knowing harm committed against people, particularly children, byexposing them todisinformation or unhealthy views. Haugen wants the company to remove toxic content and change algorithms to make such sites less visible. She complained that sites with a high engagement rate are more likely to be favored in searches. However, the problem is that sites deemed false or harmful are too popular. Haugen said that artificially removing likes is not enough because the popularity or interest in some sites will still push them to the top of searches.

It was a familiar objection. Just the week before,Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenBuilding back better by investing in workers and communities Throttling free speech is not the way to fix Facebook and other social media Senate poised to stave off debt crisis MORE (D-Mass.) called for Amazon to steer readers to true books on climate change.Her objection was that the popularity of misleading books was pushing them to the top of searches, and she wants the algorithms changed to help readers pick what she considers to be healthier choices meaning, more in line with her views.

Similarly, Haugens solution seems to be well, her:Right now, the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what is happening inside there needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty afterworking at a place like [Facebook],and have a place to work on things like regulation. Censorship programs always begin with politicians and bureaucrats who in their own minds have the benefit of knowing what is true and the ability to protect the rest of us from our harmful thoughts.

Ironically, I have long been a critic of social media companies for their rapid expansion of censorship, including the silencing ofpolitical critics,public health expertsandpro-democracy movementsat the behest of foreign governments like China and Russia. I am unabashedly aninternet originalistwho favors an open, free forum for people to exchange ideas and viewpoints allowing free speech to be its own disinfectant of bad speech.

Facebook has been running a slick campaignto persuade people to embrace corporate censorship.Yet, now, even the Facebook censors are being denounced as too passive in the face of runaway free speech. The focus is on the algorithms used to remove content or, as with Haugen and Warren, used to flag or promote popular sites.

Haugen describes her approach as a non-content-based solution but it is clearly not that.She objects to algorithms like downstream MSI which tracks traffic and pushes postings based on past likes or comments. Asexplained by one site, it is based on their ability to engage users, not necessarily its usefulness or truthfulness.Of course, the objection to those un-useful sites is their content and claimed harm.

Like Warren, Haugen is calling for what I have criticized as enlightened algorithms to protect us from our own bad choices.Our digital sentinels are non-content-based but will magically remove bad content to prevent unhealthy choices.

There is no question that the internet is fueling an epidemic of eating disorders and other great social problems. The solution, however, is not to create regulatory boards or to reduce free speech. Europe has long deployed such oversight boards inremoving what it considers harmful stereotypesfrom advertising andbarring images of honey or chips but the results have been underwhelming at best.

It is no accident that authoritarian countries have long wanted such regulation, since free speech is a threat to their power. Now, we also have U.S. academics writing that China was right all along about censorship, and public officials demanding more power to censor further. We have lost faith in free speech, and we are being told to put our faith into algorithmic guardians.

We can confront our problems more effectively by using good speech to overcome bad speech. When it comes to minors, we can use parents to protect their children by increasing parental controls over internet access; we can help parents with more or better programs and resources for mental illnesses. Of course, it is hard to advocate for restraint when the image of an anorexic child is juxtaposed against the abstract concept of free speech. However, that is the sirens call of censorship: Protecting that child by reducing her free-speech rights is no solution for her but it is a solution for many who want more control over opposing views.

Free speech is not some six-post-a-day addiction that should be cured with algorithmic patches. There is no such thing as a content-neutral algorithm that removes only harmful disinformation because behind each of those enlightened algorithms are people who are throttling speech according to what they deem to be harmful thoughts or viewpoints.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates on Twitter@JonathanTurley.

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Throttling free speech is not the way to fix Facebook and other social media | TheHill - The Hill

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UNH and free speech: Fares well on student survey - The Union Leader

The federal government recently announced it would investigate threats against local school board members. The announcement comes amid growing acrimony between parental groups and public school leaders over issues like face masks and critical race theory. Its part of broader social issuesthe coronavirus pandemic and social justice efforts. Yet, where some see a threatothers see an exercise of free speech.

In recent months, as the public discourse over issues like social justice, race, and the pandemic has deteriorated, so have local school board meetings. In school districts with mask mandates, the climate has been downright hostile.

It feels like were just under constant attack," said Leon Superintendent Rocky Hanna.

According to WUSF Public Media in Tampa, Sarasota School Board Chairwoman Shirley Brown said she recently had more than a dozen people show up at her house, carrying signs calling her a tyrant, and yelling at her through a bull horn to resign.

"I'm not sure if it was the Proud Boys, but the boy with the -- the man with the speaker at my house last night, he had a Proud Boys T-shirt on. And I know they stormed the Capitol with guns. I don't know what they are going to do here," said Brown.

That sort of actionshowing up to people's houses toes the line, said Florida School Board Association Executive Director Andrea Messina.

When it crosses the line is when it moves beyond speech on an issue or topic related to education, and instead, it focuses on a person," she said.

Messina started teaching in 1987 and says she's never seen the education climate this bad.

"Ive spoken to people whove been in education two, to three times longer than I have [and] theyve never seen the climate like this. Ive heard someone liken it to the last time they saw this level in intensity and emotion, was when schools were [de] segregated.

Schools were largely desegregated in the 1960s. As for whats driving todays fury? Messina cant say for sure. But she has her own theories. During Floridas 2004-05 storm season, Hurricane Ivan hit Charlotte County hard. Messina was living there at the time. Businesses and homes were destroyed and the district lost a third of its public schools. Grief counselors were brought in to help.

"[And] one of the things they told us wason the backside of grief, is anger. That those educators needed to be prepared for people to lash out in anger because they had no other way to express it. So when you ask about COVID, I think theres an element of that.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on October 4th that it would be convening a meeting of federal and local law enforcement agencies to come up with ways to address a rise in criminal conductincluding threats, harassment, and intimidationaimed at local school board members. The announcement drew a rebuke from conservatives like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. State Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran says the DOJ memo treads dangerously close to the constitutional right to free speech, if not trampling on it.

We will not be strong-armed or allow others to be," Corcoran told the State Board of Education. "Should the federal government's efforts even stray slightly from justice, they should prepare for a swift and zealous response.

The school boards are hoping people will begin to calm down.

Ill borrow some of Richard Corcorans words," said Messina. "We need to give each other grace and space."

Leons Hanna has taken most of the verbal abuse leveled at his district. Leon is one of six school districts suing to overturn the states ban on their mandatory mask policies.

There are those haters out there that cuss me and my wife out in the parking lot at the grocery store. But the vast majority of people in our community, I think theyre appreciative of our approach. I really do.

Educators have long asked for more public input. Now theyre getting it. Just not exactly in the way they may have wanted.

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Florida school boards are under fire over COVID, race policies. Where conservatives see free speech, others see threats and harassment - WFSU

Photo: ROBERT SULLIVAN / Staff (Getty Images)

In response to a lawsuit brought by the grieving family of a teenage girl whose suicide was reportedly inspired by the hit show 13 Reasons Why, Netflix is flexing its First Amendment rights to argue that were the complaint to proceed, it would be dangerous to the free speech of artists and Netflix itself.

In new documents filed in a California district court on Wednesday, Netflix invoked Californias anti-SLAPP statute, which gives plaintiffs the right to file a motion to dismiss a complaint brought against any content that might be considered protected speech. In its motion, the streaming giant argues that if a First Amendment challenge to its ability to produce potentially triggering content were to be successful, a long line of creative worksfrom classics like Anna Karenina, Antigone, The Awakening, Madame Bovary, and The Bell Jar, to countless modern works like Dear Evan Hansen, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wristcutters: A Love Story, and The Virgin Suicideswould also be at risk.

Creators obligated to shield certain viewers from expressive works depicting suicide would inevitably censor themselves to avoid the threat of liability, lawyers for Netflix wrote in the new filings. This would dampen the vigor and limit the variety of public debate ... The First Amendment does not permit such a result.

Based on the young adult novel of the same name by author Jay Asher, 13 Reasons Why depicts the events that precipitate a high school-aged narrators suicide. Although the Netflix suit is being brought by a single grieving family, a study published by the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported a 28.9% increase in suicides among Americans aged 10-17 in the month after 13 Reasons Why premieredan increase greater than any other seen in a single monthover the five-year period the researchers studied.

In the motion to strike filed on Wednesday, lawyers for Netflix were careful to note that the platform is not being sued for the content of 13 Reasons Why itself, but rather for its ...failure to adequately warn of its Shows, i.e., its products, dangerous features and for its trove of individualized data about its users to specifically target vulnerable children and manipulate them into watching content that was deeply harmful to themdespite dire warnings about the likely and foreseeable consequences to such children.

G/O Media may get a commission

That recommendation systemwhich is dictated by an algorithmcounts as protected speech, and is tantamount to a news editor deciding to exercise editorial control and judgment, Netflix argues:

The recommendations system, and the display of suggested titles, is speech, the dismissal motion states. Plaintiffs allege that the recommendations here are different because they are dictated by an algorithm. But the fact that the recommendations may be produced algorithmically makes no difference to the analysis. After all, the algorithms themselves were written by human beings...

Netflix and the plaintiffs are due in court on November 16.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255).

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Netflix Argues Tragic 13 Reasons Why Lawsuit Is a Danger to Free Speech - Gizmodo

When the Chinese dissident Liu Xia was under house arrest with state security guards posted at her front door, she wrote a passionate poem to her husband, Liu Xiaobo: Ill never give up the struggle for freedom from the oppressors jail, but Ill be your willing prisoner for life.

Shilpa Gupta has typed up these translated words on what looks to have been an old-fashioned typewriter. They are pinned to the wall beside her line drawing of the late Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel prize for his outspoken defence of human rights, was repeatedly imprisoned for challenging Chinas authoritarian state, and died in custody in 2017. The following year the Chinese state allowed Liu Xia to leave for medical treatment in Germany, presumably to avoid a second outcry. Liu Xias moving poem of protest and love pulls you up. What a story! Where are all the plays and films about this extraordinary couple who told truth to power and spoke their love to one another?

Hollywood may be too keen to stay friends with China to make biopics of dissidents, but Gupta is drawn to such lives. Her moving exhibition at the Barbican speaks up for a cause that seems almost old-fashioned: the free word.

If you are old enough to remember the Berlin Wall you may also remember when dissident writers were revered and free speech was a noble cause. That started to change when Salman Rushdie, who like Gupta was born in Mumbai, faced death for his novel The Satanic Verses and was far from universally defended. Today, without a state such as China needing to do anything, many people find reasons to censor the words of others. Books get pulled, authors ostracised, in what is still officially the democratic west.

So Guptas art has something quietly heroic about it. She reminds us of the infinite preciousness of free expression. Poets and writers who have been imprisoned fill her imagination. Whether theyll shoot me at that point when chaos starts, wonders another of her typescripts, And Ill press my trembling hands to the hole that was my heart These are the words of Irina Ratushinskaya, whose poetry got her sentenced to seven years in a Soviet hard labour camp in 1983. At the foot of her typed message, Gupta explains how it got out of the camp: Scratched on soap, memorised, washed away. Then written on cigarette papers, smuggled outside the prison.

Gupta reminds you how shockingly recent this all is Soviet camps were not something that just existed in Stalins time: poets were going to prison for their words in Communist Europe in the 1980s. Across the gallery is a sculpture that says it all, or rather doesnt: a metal cast of the inside of a human mouth in which you can clearly see the shape of the palette and teeth but not the tongue. It is stopped. Silenced. This ugly chunk of metal looks like it could be a torture instrument specially made for imprisoned writers.

Another sculpture consists of corked bottles lined up in a vitrine, each labelled with a poems title. The piece is called Untitled (Spoken Poem in a Bottle). It deftly politicises Marcel Duchamps celebrated 50 cc of Paris Air: instead of jokily bottling the atmosphere, she sincerely insists these bottles preserve the poetic voice.

For words are sacred to Gupta. Didnt she get the email that liberal humanism is dead? The biggest work here, Guptas low-lit, rhapsodically intoned sound installation called For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, feels almost nostalgic in its poetry of the human spirit.

A hundred typed fragments are speared on waist-high spikes in the prison-like darkness. Bare lightbulbs hang dimly above. There is an antiquated microphone above each spike. First there is silence. Then a single woman or man intones, declaims, whispers or sings a phrase. More voices repeat it, a chorus gathers strength.

The same texts that Gupta prints up elsewhere in the show are voiced here, among many more. Each was written by an imprisoned writer, today or long ago, in a conversation across time and place. Gupta takes up these isolated poems of the confined and the brutalised, and lends them a chorus of solidarity. It is like Wordsworths poem to the imprisoned Toussaint LOuverture: Theres not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee; thou hast great allies

But who does she think shes kidding? A chorus of support for lonely brave voices? It doesnt seem likely. Todays social media chorus is more likely to bay for an offending authors blood. Guptas project matters all the more, then, for its rarity. All she needs is a bit more bite: perhaps to celebrate voices that are provocative right here and now. As it is, her defence of freedom is slightly lacking freedoms danger. It is true and timely nonetheless.

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Shilpa Gupta review rousing reminder that free speech used to be a noble cause - The Guardian

Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson accused Democrats Tuesday of attempting to capitalize on the ongoing Facebook scandal by weaponizing the federal government to police free speech.

During an appearance on "The Ingraham Angle," Hanson argued that President Joe Biden's tanking approval rating, as well as the Democrats' agenda becoming more unpopular, would lead them to try and increase and weaponize the power of the federal government for their gain.

Facebook has become increasingly embroiled in scandal following an investigation by The Wall Street Journal that revealed the company was aware of several metrics, for which it took no action, showing use of its platforms were potentially harmful to the mental health of its users.

"As Joe Biden drops in popularity and as every one of the issues of their agenda become more unpopular, theyre going to try to increase and weaponize the federal government. And thats just because they dont have popular support. And we're already seeing it," Hanson said when host Laura Ingraham asked him why he thought Democrats were speaking out so staunchly against Facebook.

Hanson stated that no one on the left spoke out when riots, arson, looting and violations of quarantine were taking place in 2020 following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, events that he pointed out were coordinated on social media.

FACEBOOK IS STOPPING INSTAGRAM KIDS, BUT INSISTS ITS A GOOD THING'

"Not one person on the left said, Wow, weve got to stop this," he said. "All of those things are coordinated on social media and nobody said a word."

He added that no one on the left called out Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY., when he appeared to threaten conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices in early 2020, or when former Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., were harassed by activists in videos uploaded to social media.

Hanson argued that Democrats don't win when "empowered middle-class citizens" are informed and are in control of their own administrative state.

"They dont trust those people because they have this top-down utopian agenda that they think they're some type of platonic guardians and they're going to tell us, the stupid people, you do this about quarantine, you do this about vaccinations," Hanson said. "They dont want an empowered citizenry and theyve done their best with demographic change and open borders or from trying to dismantle things like the filibuster, the Electoral College, or the nine-person Supreme Court."

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"The only thing that surprised me is how naive Mark Zuckerberg is," he added. "He does not understand the mind of the left. You are never going to satisfy them unless you give complete fealty and he doesnt understand that, and the more that he compromises with the left, the more that they want from him."

Originally posted here:
Victor Davis Hanson: Dems using Facebook scandal to weaponize government against free speech - Fox News