Tag: free speech

The UN Wants People To Report Each Other For “Hate Speech”

There’s been a lot of talk about the United Nations (UN) and its actions of late – mostly, those actions that fall way beyond the scope of what its founding Charter designates the organization’s role to be.

As a short history reminder – the UN is basically the international body that succeeded the League of Nations – the one that failed to prevent the (previous, atrocious) world war.

The UN is – and has, for a long time, focused its energy on “doing better” – mediating, providing a neutral ground for dialogue, helping those places around the globe unfortunately afflicted by local wars since 1945 – and just in general, not repeating the mistake of its predecessor of miring itself into irrelevancy.

You would think that with the real danger of another global war now on the cards, that would take up all of the UN’s energy and focus. But you would be wrong.

Here’s the UN, dabbling in things like alleged “hate speech.”

But – world peace – that’s supposed to be the mission. Not policing social media for dubiously defined “hate speech.”

The UN is now using its always precarious resources (depending on member-countries’ contribution, and, consequently, the way the organization satisfies the biggest contributors’ own agendas) to deal with things like real or perceived “hate speech” online.

But can that really be the mission of the world organization set up to make sure another world war doesn’t happen, and help/mediate in regional conflicts?

It seems almost absurd. Yet here it is. The UN is reported to be descending into internet censorship by “encouraging” people to report one another for hate speech online.

Keep reading

Rhode Island senator arrested, accused of keying car with anti-Biden bumper sticker

State Senator Josh Miller was arrested on Thursday, accused of keying a car in the Garden City shopping center parking lot that was sporting a bumper sticker reading “Biden sucks.”

Body-worn camera videos released by the Cranston Police Department showed Miller initially denied keying the man’s car when stopped by police at Garden City, but at his home later Thursday night acknowledged he did so because he felt he was being threatened by the man.

The arrest report says the alleged victim returned to his car parked near Ben & Jerry’s Thursday afternoon and heard a scratching sound coming from the passenger side.

“Upon checking, he observed a large scratch on his passenger side rear door and a male, later identified as Joshua Miller, quickly walking away, holding keys in his right hand and gripping a single key which he says was pointing towards his vehicle,” Officer Alberto Diaz wrote in the report.

Keep reading

Proposed ‘Hate Speech’ Law in Michigan Threatens First Amendment Rights, Conservatives Warn

A bill moving through the Democrat-controlled Michigan State Legislature would make it easier for prosecutors to bring felonious “hate crime” charges against dissident speech.

The possible implications for preachers, school administrators, teachers, parents, politicians, and citizen activists have alarmed conservatives concerned about the effect the bill may have on free speech.

The proposed legislation, HB 4474, would amend the state’s Ethnic Intimidation Act of 1988 in order to consider it a hate crime if a person is accused of causing “severe mental anguish” to another individual by means of perceived verbal intimidation or harassment.

The amendment defines the words intimidate or harass as a “willful course of conduct, involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested…”

“Words are malleable,” Attorney David Kallman of the Great Lakes Justice Center (GLJC), a non-profit legal organization dedicated to preserving liberty in America, told The Epoch Times. “They can be redefined by whoever is in power.

“Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass’ can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard,” he said.

“The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.

“The bill will lead to the prosecution of conservatives, pastors, and parents attending a school board meeting for simply expressing their opposition to the liberal agenda,” Kallman said.

Keep reading

Wearing Shirt Saying ‘There Are Only Two Genders’ Not Protected Speech, Rules Obama-Appointed Judge

School administrators were not infringing on a student’s constitutional rights when they ordered him to remove a shirt that said, “there are only two genders,” a district judge ruled on June 17.

Massachusetts middle-schooler Liam Morrison’s lawyers said the order violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said the violations have not been proven.

The school “permissibly concluded that the Shirt invades the rights of others,” Talwani, an Obama appointee, said.

Schools can bar speech that is in “collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone,” Talwani said, quoting from the 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. School Dist.

That means the administrators appropriately exercised their discretion when concluding the statement “may communicate that only two gender identities–male and female are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent, and to conclude that students who identify differently, whether they do so openly or not, have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,” she added.

Talwani’s ruling rejected a request from the boy for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped administrators from prohibiting the student from wearing the shirt at John T. Nicholas Middle School.

The case has not been thrown out and Talwani could ultimately rule in the boy’s favor.

Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom who is helping defend the plaintiff, said that the ruling was disappointing.

“Public school officials cannot censor a 7th grader’s free speech by forcing him to remove a shirt that states a scientific fact,” Langhofer told The Epoch Times via email. “Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment and we will be appealing this ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Lawyers for the defendants, which include acting principal Heather Tucker and Middleborough Public Schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons, did not return an inquiry.

First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh said the ruling does not appear to be consistent with the Tinker ruling, which held that school officials in Iowa illegally ordered students to remove armbands amid protests against the Vietnam war. Lawyer Hans Bader, who is not involved in the case, said the ruling was wrong, noting that previous cases have upheld students’ rights to convey messages “as long as they weren’t vulgar or likely to cause a disruption,” including a ruling in favor of wearing a shirt that said “Be Happy, Not Gay.”

“The judge suggested that the T-shirt interfered with other students’ ‘right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,’” Bader said. “But other courts have refused to recognize a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking one’s identity, when the messages don’t disrupt school, and don’t involve ‘independently tortious speech like libel, slander or intentional infliction of emotional distress.’”

Keep reading

“We Are Restricting Freedom… For The Common Good”: Irish Green Party Calls For Limiting Free Speech

The Irish Green Party followed many on the left around the world, including our own Democratic Party, this week and came out for censorship and speech controls. Indeed, the party went full Orwellian as its chairwoman Pauline O’Reilly called for “restricting freedom” to protect it.

O’Reilly’s comments are part of the introduction of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022. We previously discussed this massive assault on free speech.

The legislation that would criminalize “incitement to violence or hatred against” people with “protected characteristics,” as well as “condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.”

Limiting free speech has become an article of faith for many on the left. I have written about my distress (as someone who grew up in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago) in watching the abandonment of free speech values by the party. Democratic leaders now uniformly call for censorship and speech regulations. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.”  Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.”

The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom.  It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.”

That effort was on full display this week in Ireland with this anti-free speech legislation.

Keep reading

Did You Know That Biden Is in the Midst of Three Lawsuits for Infringing on Free Speech?

Lawsuits and legal battles are everywhere lately.  Trump’s indictment for the mishandling of classified documents has been all over the news, but the Biden White House is also in the middle of a few lawsuits that may be of some interest to First Amendment enthusiasts.

Alex Berenson sues Twitter and Biden

Former New York Times journalist and popular novelist Alex Berenson sued Twitter in December 2021.  Berenson had retweeted Pfizer’s own data about the Covid jabs, but since he did not present the data in a flattering manner, he was booted off the site after being previously told by Twitter that they supported him in his Covid dissidence, as he explains in this interview with Clay and Buck.

Berenson filed his lawsuit in Northern California, and he won.  In July 2022, Alex Berenson was back on Twitter.

But some weird details emerged.  During the discovery phase of his lawsuit against Twitter, where the parties are given access to each other’s documents, Team Berenson got the chance to look over internal Twitter communications.  And Team Berenson found out that Twitter had been pressured by the White House and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb to kick him off.  So, on April 12, 2023, Alex Berenson filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration.

Berenson v. Biden is moving really slowly, and who knows how it’ll end up.  But the Twitter Files releases look only to strengthen his argument; Michael Shellenberger found more email chains about the internal Twitter arguments over whether or not to ban Berenson and turned the emails over to him to use in his lawsuit against the White House.  The more time goes by, the more it looks like Berenson was correct in suspecting that outside forces were at work in removing him from Twitter.

Alex Berenson was a highly respected writer before Covid, though after 2020 many in the medical field adopted a “stay in your lane” attitude toward anyone not practicing medicine and who didn’t buy into the official narrative.

Keep reading

BIDEN EMBRACES ANTISEMITISM DEFINITION THAT HAS UPENDED FREE SPEECH IN EUROPE

DURING A GRADUATION speech at the City University of New York’s law school last month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Yemeni American student, criticized “Israeli settler colonialism” and advocated for “the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism.”

Her words, which the university administration condemned as “hate speech,” kicked off a new round of public debate about the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Republican members of Congress responded by introducing legislation that would deny federal funding to academic institutions that “authorize Anti-Semitic events.”

The bill cites a definition of antisemitism that the Israeli government and its supporters have been pushing in the United States and elsewhere, one that conflates prejudice toward Jews with criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel. And it comes on the heels of President Joe Biden nodding to the definition in the White House’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, released in late May.

In the 60-page document, the Biden administration referred to the IHRA definition — named after the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which promotes it — as the “most prominent” of several definitions of antisemitism and one the administration has “embraced.” But it emphasized that it has no legal value and does not supersede existing laws or constitute binding guidance for public agencies and local government.

Still, by providing neither a rejection nor a full endorsement of the definition, the Biden administration left room for further lobbying for its adoption. Indeed, conservative and pro-Israel groups hailed the strategy as a victory, even as the single reference fell far short of what they had lobbied for: a full-throated endorsement of the IHRA framework as the “sole definition” of antisemitism and as the foundation for federal policy.

Keep reading

“Your Speech Is Violence”: How The Mob Is Using A New Mantra To Justify Campus Violence

When those words became a popular mantra years ago on college campuses, I wrote that the anti-free speech movement was moving toward compelled speech while declaring dissenting views to be harmful.

Today, it isn’t just silence that is considered violence on college campuses. It is also speech, as both faculty and students are actively shutting down opposing views on subjects ranging from abortion to climate change to transgender issues.

Recently, many people were shocked by a videotape of Hunter College professor Shellyne Rodríguez trashing a pro-life student display in New York. Most were focused on her profanity and vandalism, but there were familiar phrases that appeared in her diatribe to the clearly shocked students.

Before trashing the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”

The videotape revealed one other thing. At Hunter College, and at other colleges, it seems that trashing a pro-life student display and abusing pro-life students is not considered a firing offense. Hunter College refused to fire Rodríguez.

The PSC Graduate Center, the labor organization of graduate and professional schools at the City University of New York, supported that decision and said Rodríguez was “justified” in trashing the display, which the organization described as “dangerously false propaganda” and “disinformation.”

Rodríguez later put a machete to the neck of a reporter, threatened to chop him up and then chased a news crew down a street with the machete in hand. Somewhere between the machete to the neck and chasing the reporters down the street, Hunter College finally decided that Rodríguez had to go.

Rodríguez denounced the school for having “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” She explained that her firing was just a continuation of “attacks on women, trans people, black people, Latinx people, migrants, and beyond.”

The redefinition of opposing views as “violence” is a favorite excuse for violent groups like antifa, which continue to physically assault speakers with pro-life and other disfavored views.  As explained by Rutgers Professor Mark Bray in his “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” the group believes that “‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”

Keep reading

Why The Media Is Attacking Free Speech

Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years.

And things are getting worse. Last week, the European Union announced it would punish Twitter for withdrawing from its supposedly “voluntary” censorship laws. “Twitter leaves EU voluntary code of practice against disinformation,” said the EU’s top censor, Thierry Breton, “You can run, but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under [the Digital Services Act] DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement.”

Politico begs to differ. The Censorship Industrial Complex, it wrote last week, is an “unproven conspiracy theory that a group of left-leaning academics, think tanks, tech workers and government employees coordinated to silence right-wing voters ahead of nationwide votes. To be clear (looking at you, Twitter Files), none of this has been proved, and there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.”

But it’s not unproven. In fact, the existence, funding, and actions of the Censorship Industrial Complex are extremely well-documented at this point. Across thousands of pages of Attorneys’ General lawsuits, thousands of pages of Congressional reports and testimony, and hundreds of pages of Twitter and Facebook files themselves, it’s clear that here was a highly coordinated campaign by top White House officials, government agencies, and government-funded contractors to demand Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies censor, in their own words, “often-true” content, including about drug side effects, both to prevent the public from seeing it but also to spread misinformation on behalf of a political agenda.

Politico did not, notably, provide any source or link to support its claim that “there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.” The reason might be that such “evidence” is a single highly selective study attempting to generalize about the whole of the social media experience through the lens of an outdated and simplistic Left-Right framework.

Keep reading