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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’
For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.
Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.
This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.
A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.
A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.
NYT Warns of ‘Right-Wing Threat’ to Democracy, Calls to ‘War-Game’ Insurgency, Secession, Civil War
The U.S. may be on the verge of collapse due to right-wing threats on democracy, according to a recent New York Times piece that called to intensify “war games” for scenarios concerning the 2024 presidential elections such as “insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war” in order to avert “political decay” of the country.
A Thursday New York Times essay, titled “We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country,” begins by deeming the U.S. perhaps “even more alarmingly fractious and divided” one year after the January 6 Capitol riot.
“Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for [former President] Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms,” it continues.
The essay was penned by Jonathan Stevenson, a former National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration, and Steven Simon, a former staffer in the State Department and on the National Security Council in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.
Speculating that the next presidential election “will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested,” the authors warn of a “politically existential” threat to the country due to right-wing preparations for a potential 2024 “power grab.”
In Reporting Shift, Associated Press Tells Staff to ‘Avoid Emphasizing’ COVID-19 Case Counts
The Associated Press (AP), a wire service used by numerous news outlets, told staffers recently to “avoid emphasizing” COVID-19 case counts in stories after the Omicron virus variant began infecting large numbers of vaccinated people.
The AP has written dozens of stories about cases surging in certain areas but has decided to shift its focus due to the rise of the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, and the lack of inclusion in case counts among people who test themselves at home, the service said.
The shift means the wire will produce “no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable,” AP reported.
COVID-19 case records have been set across the country and the world in recent days.
Don’t Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech
Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.
The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.
State Leaves People Stranded After County Refuses to Implement Vaccine Mandate
If you disagree with today’s authoritarian establishment, it will crush you.
It doesn’t matter how sincere your disagreement is or how nonsensical the establishment’s rules are. If you fall out of line, you’re done for.
This is the case for Kittitas County, Washington. In a Wednesday statement, the county revealed that the Washington State Department of Transportation is refusing the county’s help to clear snow from its own roadways, all because Kittitas does not mandate COVID-19 vaccination for its employees.
On Oct. 18, after Washington’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, issued a vaccine mandate, the state began firing all unvaccinated employees, according to the Post Millennial. As a result, hundreds of WSDOT workers were let go.
A little over a month later, Kittitas County signed an “interlocal agreement” with the WSDOT. According to the statement issued by Kittitas County, the WSDOT had requested the agreement “based on an identified need for additional resources caused by reduced staffing.”
In January, snowfall in the state — and in Kittitas County in particular — began to get out of hand. Nevertheless, at a time when Kittitas was in need and the WSDOT needed assistance clearing snow, the department declined Kittitas’ offer to help because the county had not mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for its workers.
Patrick Henry on politicians…
Former Acting Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Pleads Guilty to Scheme to Defraud the U.S. Government
A former Acting Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General (DHS-OIG) pleaded guilty today to federal charges stemming from the theft of proprietary software and sensitive databases from the U.S. government.
According to court documents, Charles K. Edwards, 61, of Sandy Spring, Maryland, executed a scheme to steal confidential and proprietary software from the government. Edwards worked for DHS-OIG from February 2008 until December 2013, including as Acting Inspector General. Prior to DHS-OIG, he worked at the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (USPS-OIG). At both agencies, Edwards had access to software systems, including one used for case management and other systems holding sensitive personal identifying information of employees.
After leaving DHS-OIG, Edwards founded Delta Business Solutions Inc., located in Maryland. From at least 2015 until 2017, he stole software from DHS-OIG, along with sensitive government databases containing personal identifying information of DHS and USPS employees, so that his company could develop a commercially-owned version of a case management system to be offered for sale to government agencies.
‘White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,’ Duquesne professor says
He defended a proposition by a fellow professor
Duquesne University Professor Derek Hook said there are merits to the argument proposed by another professor who argued that it would be ethical for white people to kill themselves.
The anti-critical race theory group Mythinformed MKE posted the video recently. “This is part of an ‘anti-racist’ discussion on ‘nice white therapists held by the [American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work],” the group wrote on Facebook. The video appears to be from a summer session hosted by Hook, though the content is not otherwise publicly available.
“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” the top of a presentation by Hook said.
He quoted from a South African philosophy professor named Terblanche Delport, who wrote in 2016 about white people killing themselves.
Delport allegedly made similar comments in 2016, in reaction to racial division in the former apartheid state.
Unvaccinated is the new leper…
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