Tag Archives: #FreedomOfSpeech

Posted on by

#Transgender activism and #FreedomOfSpeech

I start to worry when I agree with both Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, both in the same week! Heck, I’ve even been listening to Glenn Greenwald.

Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?

The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege.

by Andrew Sullivan | 2:21 PM EDT

There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?

And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots — aka “TERFs” — hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

And so when the greatest living comedian, Dave Chappelle, bases almost an entire Netflix special on the subject — alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true — and wades into the debate with wellies on, the exact same piece about the special will be written in much of elite media.

You could write it yourself, couldn’t you? 1. He’s a bigot. “The phobic jokes keep coming — and Chappelle’s efforts to ironise them, to dance around rather than wallow in the boorishness, are derisory,” says the Guardian review. 2. He’s out of date: “All that’s left is the same tired observations delivered behind a bizarre form of commiseration, this time with an added dash of JK Rowling solidarity and using someone else’s death to validate his half-decade of public stubbornness,” according to IndieWire. NPR adds a “multi-racial whiteness” edge: “Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia.”

Both the “stubbornness” and the “bigot” theme are reiterated in Vulture: Chappelle is full of “outdated excuses masking a refusal to update a worldview … his head is up his ass. He needs new ideas.” And, with respect to the marginalized: “He’s just asking for you to take up less space, to usher in progress by giving other people time to come around to you.”

There’s much more at the original, but it has to be asked: why would a conservative Catholic like me be agreeing with three famously liberal homosexuals?[1]Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label. Shockingly enough, all three of these famous commentators believe in some very, very radical things like freedom of speech and individual liberty.

In his recent column on substack, Mr Sullivan notes the rather objective truth: despite what today’s left and the ‘transgender’ activists want you to believe, only females can carry a child through gestation and give birth. We noted, last Monday, The Washington Post’s stylebook change to reference “pregnant individuals” rather than “pregnant women”, due to the left’s cockamamie notion that men can be pregnant.

A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate.

This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block?

The struggle is one of language, because language is the formative basis for thought. If the term “woman” can encompass both females and biological males who claim to be female, it has become meaningless. That the terms “cisgender” and “sex assigned at birth“[2]Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as: Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to … Continue reading ever came into existence demonstrates the idiocy of modern life.

Mr Sullivan has no problems with homosexual or transgendered persons, but he is mocking the idea that current political correctness requires not only acceptance of transgenderism as something real and normal, rather than a mental illness, but that everyone must publicly conform to the demands of the transgendered for recognition of their claims.

Chappelle’s final Netflix special, “The Closer,” is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.

I will admit it: I had to follow the link in the New York Post’s mocking article about Justin Trudeau to find out that 2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for “Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual”. As people keep adding letters to “LGBT” it kept getting sillier and sillier, to the point at which mockery is the natural response.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being mocked on social media after he published two posts that mention the latest woke iteration of an acronym for people with different sexual identities — 2SLGBTQQIA+ — which some likened to an encrypted password or “headbutting the keyboard.”

“People across the country are lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered. We must continue to work together, raise awareness, and advocate to end this ongoing national tragedy. #SistersinSpirit,” the prime minister posted to Facebook and Twitter on Monday, referencing the Sisters in Spirit vigil, which honors women of specific racial or sexual identities who are missing or have been murdered.

The number and letter ‘2S’ in 2SLGBTQQIA+ includes people who identify as “Two-spirit,” ​referring to someone who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit. It is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.

The acronym, which used to be most commonly known as “LGBTQ,” sparked confusion among social media users.

I guess that some people just aren’t #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough to keep up with the silly acronyms.

I suspect that Messrs Greenwald and Sullivan, and Miss Weiss, despite the fact that they would not approve of my stance on transgenderism and homosexuality, would very strongly support my right to say and publish my beliefs. Fortunately, I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘cancelled’ from my job, but it’s pretty sad that I have to depend upon that protection.

Mr Sullivan’s subtitle claims that reality “is currently under siege,” which is certainly true, because reality and transgenderism are diametrically opposed. No one really thinks that Bruce Jenner[4]Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street … Continue reading is actually a woman, but political correctness and the #woke left and the credentialed media all pretend that he is, because it’s practically required now.

At some point, the left, who were the champions of unrestricted freedom of speech not all that long ago, will have to recognize people’s freedom of speech. Miss Weiss and Messrs Sullivan and Greenwald have done so, but they are too far and in between these days.

References

References
↑1 Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label.
↑2 Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as:

Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to birth through prenatal sex discernment. In the majority of births, a relative, midwife, nurse or physician inspects the genitalia when the baby is delivered and sex is assigned without ambiguity.

But look at the interchanged terms: discernment is defined as assignment, but assign means, among other things, “to appoint to a post, duty or task,” something which is designated by the authority in question, as though it is that authority’s decision.

↑3 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑4 Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street Journal’s editorial policy to refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their given names and biological sex.
Posted on by

Laurie Penny and Americans “weird” about our First Amendment

I first heard of Laurie Penny through my good friend Robert Stacy McCain, who pretty much has no use for her:

    Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) was the subject of an item here yesterday because of her quarrel with lesbian feminist Cathy Brennan, an argument that highlights the profound schism between radicals like Brennan (who are and always have been the core of the feminist movement) and trendy opportunists like Ms. Penny. The American reader may ask, “Who the hell is Laurie Penny, and why the hell are you writing about her?”

    Briefly, then: An ambitious young British journalist who attended exclusive private schools (which are for peculiar reasons called “public schools” in England), Ms. Penny graduated from Oxford and then went to New York. There, she was rescued from death by actor Ryan Gosling, an incident that became the subject of an embarrassingly narcissistic article at Gawker. Ms. Penny is a certain type — a “posh bird,” as the Brits would say, whose ostentatious leftism is a fashionable pose among many upper-class youth — and as such is well on her way to becoming the Most Despised Woman in England. She came to my attention here in the States only because, in researching my “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism, I was browsing Amazon for recent feminist books and came across Ms. Penny’s new volume, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution. Ranked #6 by Amazon in the “Gender Studies” category, and #11 in “Feminist Theory,” this seemed relevant to my project.

    With our American reader’s questions asked and answered, then, we proceed to explain what no English reader needs to be told, namely that Laurie Penny is an impudent young fool with a penchant for making an utter spectacle of herself. As soon as I blogged about her yesterday, comments on the blog and feedback on Twitter began to fill up with notices of Ms. Penny’s previous self-inflicted embarrassments, including this public implosion in June 2012:

The rest is available on Mr McCain’s website, which I shan’t quote further here.

Now, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in this British posh bird, but I found myself particularly amused that Miss Penny was exercising her freedom of speech and of the press to criticize freedom of speech and of the press.

Where We’re going, We Don’t Need Platforms….

When does free speech absolutism become moral cowardice?

by Laurie Penny | September 10, 2021

Imagine you’re throwing a party and somebody kicks off. It was going so well. You spent ages deciding on drinks and making a playlist, and now some blowhard is off on a homophobic rant. He’s not holding back, either. He’s getting loud and mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, and people are getting uncomfortable. It’s your party. What do you do?

What you do depends on lots of things. What sort of party is this? Is it your birthday, or a rave, or Christmas dinner, or a fundraiser for sick kids? Who is this guy? Did you invite him? Is he an old friend who’s going through something and is very drunk and likely to be very embarrassed in the morning? Is he the father of a gay son? Is he your father-in-law? Your most important client? Your boss? Your husband’s boss? Your husband? What are the consequences of calling him out? Who gets hurt if you don’t? Are there any gay people in the room?

Are you sure?

There’s no good choice here. The mood is already ruined. Doing nothing would be a statement in itself. It’s up to you, and you’ve got minutes to decide, and your decision matters.

So does context.  Are you throwing this party in a fascist, homophobic dictatorship where gay people are persecuted every day? Is this guy surrounded by people who are secretly waiting for permission for a bit of rhetorical queer-bashing? If you confront him, will other people be in danger? Character matters, including your own. How brave are you? How much are you prepared to sacrifice, or ask others to sacrifice, for a quiet life and the pretence of civility? How important is it that this party goes well, and is that still even an option? Lastly – this one’s important, so be honest, if only with yourself.

In one regard, she is right: context matters. While Miss Penny is firmly stuck in the #woke mentality of the early 21st century, for the vast, vast majority of the time about which we have any knowledge of human societies, said “blowhard” would be thought of as informed and sage, and homosexual activity thought of is immoral, sinful, wrong and mentally deranged. And you don’t have to venture far from Western societies to find the same opinions this very day.

This is my first post on Substack, and it’s partly about why I’m on this platform, given that Substack continues to host and profit from the propaganda of, among others, transphobic hatemonger Graham Linehan. The best and most comprehensive breakdown of Linehan’s behavior and why it’s so abhorrent comes from Grace Lavery, also on this platform. I share her conviction that Substack ought to throw this deranged bigot out of their party right now, before anyone else gets hurt.

I said so, in fact, in my initial conversations with Substack. I also spoke with some queer creators and allies who have decided to leave or boycott the platform. I respect that choice. I made a different one, for lots of reasons, but mostly because I think I can do a lot of good work here, with the tools and structure Substack offers, and that that work outweighs what I’d achieve with a public boycott. Before I made that choice, I told my contacts at Substack that they ought to ban Linehan, along with anyone else doing deliberate, wilful, hateful harm to any oppressed minority.

I didn’t actually expect them to change their policy based on my objection. They’re libertarians. They really are libertarians, and I believe that because they know I’m writing this post and told me I had every right to do so, and I’m holding back on details purely out of respect for privacy.

I do not know how much money Miss Penny makes from Substack; given that this was her first article there, probably not much so far. But it is interesting that she exercised her freedom of speech, over Substack’s ‘press,’ if we can call an internet platform that — and I do — to advocate that Graham Linehan not be allowed to use Substack’s press, in an attempt to keep his exercise of freedom of speech as unheard by others as possible. Miss Penny even admitted that Substack knew of the subject on which she was going to right, and stressed that she “had every right to do so.”

I also told them that at some point soon, whether they like the idea or not, they’ll find themselves having to make an active moral choice about whose ideas are worthy. I said that the time is coming when all platforms and publishers will need to take a stand somewhere, and I advised them to start thinking now about how to do so with dignity.

That paragraph of Miss Penny’s is one I take two ways. First, I take it as a not-so-veiled threat, that unless the ‘publishers’ of Substack start refusing to publish ideas she doesn’t like, bad things will happen to them. But secondly, and more importantly, is Miss Penny’s belief that some ideas are not worthy, at least not worthy of debate.

One wonders: if Miss Penny believes that Substack should judge “whose ideas are worthy,” does she not realize that, a hundred years ago, even sixty years ago, her ideas would be rejected as not “worthy” of publication.

What does it mean, then, when a company like Substack chooses to host this sort of malicious hate speech- and to do so in the name of free speech?

This is a post about platforming, and censorship, and moral choices, and why they matter. The question of who does and does not deserve a ‘platform’ is a massive, active issue. So much of our political speech and action is now effectively also publishing– and publishing using platforms that function as public space but are owned by private companies. Every platform is now having to make decisions about what it will and will not tolerate, and those decisions set the political agenda and shape our social world.

It’s significant that most of those platforms are run by precisely the sort of people most likely, for all sorts of reasons, to be free speech fundamentalists. That includes white, straight, cisgender men who are far less likely to be personally harmed by targeted hate speech than they are to be disadvantaged by speech restriction; tech libertarians soaked in a specific vintage of California ideology which considers the freedom of the individual utterly sacrosanct; and Americans. Who are weird about their First Amendment. Sorry, but they really are.

Sadly, Miss Penny is not quite right about that, as Google, Twitter and Facebook have most certainly censored or flagged speech they don’t like, and have done it in a one-sided direction: the mad mullahs of Iran and, now, Afghanistan are allowed Twitter accounts, but the immediate former President of the United States is banned. I have already noted how Twitter allowed a Tweet from Rachel Maddow, one which spread absolutely false and quickly debunked information, claiming that “patients overdosing on ivermectin” were clogging up hospitals in Oklahoma, while putting warning flags on those which stated that masks “don’t work” to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

We have previously noted how Twitter has banned “deadnaming” and “misgendering,”[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring … Continue reading and The New York Times, with its logo “All the News That’s Fit to Print, gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names … Continue reading to claim that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech.

For some people, the principle that all ideas have equal value, and that measured debate will always lead to reasonable compromise, is a shield against the realization that the world is worse than you imagined. Insisting that the liberal exchange of ideas still works protects you from having to face a world where the liberal exchange of ideas doesn’t work.

Not at all. I most certainly do not believe that Miss Penny’s ideas have “equal value” with mine, or even much value at all. Others may think differently, and put their money where their ideas are by subscribing to her Substack. But I am one of those Americans who are “weird about (our) First Amendment,” and strongly believe that the censorship of speech, and the punishment of ideas some people don’t like, is a far, far greater threat to liberty than censoring or ‘deplatforming’ Miss Penny.

Back to that dinner party, with the homophobe who is, by now, getting up in your other guests’ faces and making himself everyone’s problem and yours in particular. It’s not just about free speech. It’s about social context, and harm done. If you ignore him, if you brush him off by saying it’s his right to express himself, you’ve made a statement about whose comfort and safety matters in your space. This wingnut is still shouting about how gay men are perverts who can’t be trusted around children, and your best friend’s kid who just came out is sitting right there. You’re going to have to do something.

“(A)nd harm done.” Miss Penny is telling us that a person who does not approve of homosexuality is actively doing harm to other by expressing his opinions, without ever considering the harm done to individuals and to society in general by censoring those with whom the ‘governors’ disagree. Miss Penny’s example is about disagreeing with homosexuality, but somehow, some way, she has forgotten that without active societal discussion about homosexuality, the change in public attitudes about the subject in many people would never have occurred.

There is one thing about Americans, who are so “weird” about our First Amendment, that Miss Penny, and, sadly enough, far too many of the Special Snowflakes™ in the United States, really don’t understand. Freedom of speech and of the press require a thick skin for those who are willing to speak in public or publish what they think. More, it requires a thick skin of those who would listen or read, because it is always possible that someone will say, or write, something their listeners or readers just don’t like. Miss Penny would subscribe to cowardice, to the shutting down of all ideas which do not fit neatly into her own worldview.

In a world without white supremacy or transphobia or misogyny, we wouldn’t have to put a price on absolute free speech, or consider who might end up paying it. But we don’t live in that world, and if we don’t have the courage to make moral judgements when it matters, we never will.

And in the concluding paragraph of her 2,754 words,[3]No, of course I haven’t quoted all of her article, though I have quoted more of it, using ‘fair Use” standards, than is my wont. Miss Penny expresses the same ideas as The New York Times, once a great defender of freedom of the press, when it was their freedom of the press in question, that certain ideas are simply so beyond the pale that they ought not to be allowed.

When I read such things, I keep thinking that George Orwell was right about everything but the date.

References

References
↑1 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names and biological sex.
↑3 No, of course I haven’t quoted all of her article, though I have quoted more of it, using ‘fair Use” standards, than is my wont.
Posted on by

Censorship on Twitter 'Regular' user Red Walrus gets flagged, 'Blue Check' Rachel Maddow does not

Nice and early in the morning, I noticed this tweet from Glenn Greenwald. The image itself is actually a screen capture, and you can click on the image to enlarge it. Here is the link to Rachel Maddow’s original tweet, which as of 8:50 AM EDT on Monday, September 6th, is still up. Miss Maddow was on Twitter two days later tweeting this, and on the 5th, tweeting this, as well as retweeting this, so it’s not as though she was just taking a Labor Day weekend off the medium.

Then, a little bit further down, I encountered a retweet of this. Again, this is a screen capture, which you may enlarge by clicking in it. Note the Twitter warning that “This Tweet may be misleading. Get the latest on preventative measures and COVID-19.”

Then, attempting to see how far Twitter’s censorship goes, I clicked on the retweet button, and got this, a message from Twitter warning me, “This Tweet may be misleading. Get the latest on preventative measures and COVID-19. Help keep Twitter a place for reliable info. Find out more before sharing this Tweet.”

Well, I clicked on the blue “Find out more” button, and got an article which claims that experts all agree that masking helps prevent the spread of COVID-19. But I have to ask: if Twitter is so very concerned about tweets they consider misleading, why haven’t they flagged Miss Maddow’s tweet, the one promoting a thoroughly debunked story, and which had been retweet 7.3K times?

The truth is simple: Twitter is concerned about “misleading” information only when it misleads in one political direction. We have previously noted how Twitter has banned “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals“, thus attempting to shut off all debate as to whether those who claim to be transgender have actually been able to change their sex. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy, a male who claims to be a female and now calls himself ‘Parker’ Malloy, to claim that Twitter’s policy censoring freedom of speech actually promotes freedom of speech. To refer to Bruce Jenner or Bradley Manning on Twitter, one must use their fake names of ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner or ‘Chelsea’ Manning, which is a surrender to their claims that they have actually changed sex.

The only thing George Orwell got wrong was the year.

Twitter and Facebook and the credentialed media understand this well: control of language and control of information means control over the debate, and forces the debate into the directions they want to see it go.

Don’t surrender, don’t give in, don’t allow the credentialed media to push you into saying something false, something you know to be false, just to push through the barriers!

Posted on by

Journolism at its finest: The Philadelphia Inquirer and one-sided reporting

We learned it in high school, if not earlier, how the Bill of Rights protected our rights as the citizens of a free republic. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

Over the course of our history, the Supreme Court has ‘incorporated’ most of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include protections for the people from actions by states and local governments, and Americans alive in the 21st century are all used to the concepts of freedom of speech.

We have, sadly, noted how some of our major media sources are no longer so adamant about protecting our First Amendment rights.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer, with a very slanted article about how some people have exercised their freedom of speech, and freedom of peaceable assembly, and how horrible it is! Continue reading →

Posted on by

Today’s left really do hate them some #FreedomOfSpeech

We have previously noted the hostility of the credentialed media to what everyone would have thought they supported, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, at least for other people.

Now comes Aaron Rupar, who claims to be a journalist for Vox. Mr Rupar us upset, highly upset, that Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade claims that he read Mein Kampf in school:

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want you to exercise a right she chooses not to use Today's left support freedom of choice on exactly one thing

Salon senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte moved to South Philadelphia sometime in early 2019, but unless she never listens to the local news — always a possibility, given that she never writes on it — she has to have noticed the tremendous homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love.[1]One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love? As of the end of Wednesday, June 23rd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported 262 homicides. 262 murders in 174 days so far is 1.506 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to, if that average is maintained, 550 for the year.[2]With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming. Philadelphia’s record is 500, during the crack cocaine drug gang wars of 1990, with last year coming in in second place with 499.

At the end of June 23rd last year, there had been ‘only’ 190 homicides in the city, so this year’s number is 37.37% higher than 2020.

How Democratic is Philadelphia? Joe Biden carried Philadelphia County 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%)

Unless something changes pretty drastically, 2021 isn’t just going to set the record, but blow it out of the water. And remember: the long, hot summer has just begun.

So, what is leading to all of this mayhem? According to Miss Marcotte, it ain’t the bad guys, but those inanimate guns!

oe Biden is right about the rise in crime: Blame guns — not police or protesters — for the violence

Conservatives are using crime as cover for ugly race-baiting, but their own lax gun policies are the real culprit

By Amanda Marcotte | June 23, 2021 | 1:11PM (EDT)

Violent crime is on the rise and it’s making Republicans happier than a fire sale on wraparound sunglasses.

Conservatives will find any excuse to indulge in their favorite sport: racist fear-mongering. The current uptick in violent crime fulfills their desire to use police to terrorize and stigmatize people of color while spinning it as merely in the interest of “public safety.” (Which is especially rich coming from the same people who left hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of COVID-19 rather than accept emergency pandemic measures.) And boy, they’re throwing themselves into the scare tactics with a relish usually reserved for sharing grammatically confusing memes on Facebook.

As the AP reported earlier this month, Republican politicians across the country are using rising crime rates as an excuse to pass laws aimed at suppressing Black Lives Matter protests and at protecting police budgets from re-evaluation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on June 11 blaming crime on “radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces,” which is, at best, a wild exaggeration of what have largely been efforts to redirect funds to crime prevention. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, falsely accused Democrats of supporting “the dangerous idea of defunding the police.”

Now, we noted, just yesterday morning, that very white, very liberal Portland, Oregon, had cut its police budget enough that the department was 150 officers under strength, and according to Portland Police Department numbers, the city is on pace for 92 murders this year, shattering 1987’s record of 70. With a city population of 662,549, that would give the city a murder rate of 13.89 per 100,000 population. How liberal is Portland? Joe Biden carried Multnomah County 367,249 (79.21%) to 82,995 (17.90%).

Just two days prior to that, we noted that Austin, Texas, where Miss Marcotte lived before her boyfriend and she moved to Brooklyn, had slashed its police budget by 1/3. Austin is the most liberal city in Texas; Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%).

Our deadliest city, St Louis? As of June 22nd, there had been 88 murders in the Gateway City, and 82 of the victims, 93.18%, were black. Of the 36 known killers of those 88 dead black people, all were black. Joe Biden carried the city by 110,089 (80.85%) to 21,474 (15.77%).

So, unless those inanimate guns are just leaping into the air by themselves and shooting people, those guns are seemingly leaping into the hands of Democrats.

Miss Marcotte claims that, since the rise in the homicide rate is seemingly everywhere, with no distinct differences between places like Austin, where the police have lost a third of their funding, and other big cities, where the funding drops have been significantly less, the increase in the homicide rate cannot be attributed to defunding. But then she goes on:

The sociological reasons for the rise are still ambiguous, though there is little doubt that the pandemic contributed by adding economic and social stress, while also depriving young people of jobs and school opportunities that keep them out of trouble. Pfaff also suggests there may be a reason to believe that rising tensions between police and communities contribute, if only because people are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement they see, for good reason, as oppressive. If that relationship “deteriorates significantly,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis-Missouri, told Salon’s Igor Derysh in February, “that simply widens the space for street justice to take hold.”

Well, yes, that’s true enough, but it undermines her other points. She claimed that crime, overall, had dropped, and the violent crime rate had spiked only modestly. As I have previously noted, there are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals.

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

So when I read that other crime has decreased, I just don’t believe it. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime; it’s a crime committed primarily by people who have committed other crimes. When you read about a murder who was caught — and the police actually catching killers is getting progressively worse — you almost always read that the killer was legally barred from owning a firearm, or that he was carrying it illegally. Noting Miss Marcotte’s own statement that people are less willing to cooperate with the police, it stands to reason that crimes of reporting would be reported less.

After a few paragraphs in which the author ties the existence of illegally purchased or possessed guns to the existence of legally owned firearms, she gives us her solution:

The surest way to reduce murder rates is to get guns out of people’s hands.

Miss Marcotte’s biggest issue has always been abortion, but it’s certainly not the only right she cherishes. She frequently and loudly exercises the rights she believes she should have. She exercises her freedom of speech and of the press in her tweets, her articles in Salon, and other places. She exercises her right to use contraception. She has exercised her right of peaceable assembly to join the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Philadelphia. An avowed atheist, she exercises her right not to go to church. She will defend those rights to, well, to the death is the common phrase, but I can’t say that she’d go that far.

But the right she has and chooses not to exercise — and, to me, it is actually choosing to exercise the right in the negative[3]Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press. — is her right to keep and bear arms. Because it is a right she chooses not to keep and bear arms, she doesn’t think that anyone else should have that right. Her solution to the illegal use of firearms is to take guns away from people who have not used their weapons illegally.

Miss Marcotte is but a small, if vocal, part of the left in America. Very much proclaiming her own views, she, like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, doesn’t like hearing other people expressing their own. The left just plain don’t like anyone exercising their constitutional rights in a way of which they don’t approve.

Me? I support Miss Marcotte’s right to choose to buy, or not buy, a firearm. I support her right to write, or not write, whatever she chooses. I support her right not to go to church, and I even support her right not to read what I happen to write. Our freedoms are both positive and negative; we may choose to do or not do something as we please.

The left used to support that, but that was a long, long time ago.

 

References

References
↑1 One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love?
↑2 With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming.
↑3 Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press.
Posted on by

The Supreme Court bitch-slaps a small school district in Pennsylvania Mahanoy Area School District should never have appealed the initial decision in the first place.

Have you ever been to Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania? It’s a bit more than a wide spot in the road, but only a bit, having an area of 0.5 mi² and a population of 3,944 people. Located in the Keystone State’s old anthracite coal mining region, it has fallen on hard times as the demand for coal has greatly waned. I have driven through Mahanoy City several times, as it was on Pennsylvania Route 54 just a mile from Exit 131 onto Interstate 81; that was my shortest route from our previous home in Jim Thorpe and the farm in the Bluegrass State.

I can’t say that I was impressed.

There have been a lot of people who’ve yelled, in anger, “I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court.” Well, taking something all the way to the Supreme Court costs money, lots of money, something Mahanoy City, and the Mahanoy Area School District do not have in abundance. From Wikipedia:

Mahanoy Area School District serves the borough and Mahanoy Township. The district operates: Mahanoy Area Elementary School (K-4), Mahanoy Area Middle School (5th-8th) and Mahanoy Area High School (9th-12). The district has provided full day kindergarten since 2004. In 2015, the Mahanoy Area School District’s enrollment declined to 1,004 students.[16] Mahanoy Area School District was ranked 433rd out of 493 Pennsylvania school districts, in 2015, by the Pittsburgh Business Times.[17] Mahanoy Area High School has been listed on the Commonwealth’s annual lowest achieving schools list.[18] In 2015, Mahanoy Area School District’s graduation rate was 91%. In 2012, Mahanoy Area School District declined to Warning Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) status, due to a low graduation rate and lagging student academic achievement.[19]

Brandi Levy. Photo from tweet by WNEP.

Near the end of the 2016-17 school year, Brandi Levy,[1]Though the courts continued to refer to Miss Levy by her initials, they specify her father’s last name in the decision title, and her name is in the public domain on the Associated Press. I am … Continue reading who had tried out for the school’s varsity cheerleading squad, posted two angry messages, one of which was profane, on SnapChat; Miss Levy was not on school grounds, nor was school in session at the time she posted the messages. One of the SnapChat recipients, a cheerleader herself, took offense, and made a screencap of the self-deleting SnapChat message, and showed it around.[2]Justice Alito, in his concurrent opinion, made the greatest ‘Karen’ criticism of all: “(Miss Levy) did not send the messages to the school or to any administrator, teacher, or … Continue reading The school responded by suspending Miss Levy from participating in the junior varsity cheerleading squad for one year. Her parents filed a lawsuit on her behalf in federal court, arguing that the district had unconstitutionally punished her for speech made completely outside of the school that did not pose a risk of disruption.

Miss Levy won both a preliminary injunction, preventing the school from suspending her from cheerleading,[3]Preliminary injunction granted to plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, 289 F. Supp. 3d 607 (M.D. Pa., 2017). and then her case.[4]Summary judgment granted in favor of plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist., 376 F. Supp. 3d 429 (M.D. Pa. 2019).

At that point, the Mahanoy Area School District appealed the decision. The judgement for Miss Levy had been in the whopping sum of $1.00, so it’s not as though the School District had lost a bunch of money. The School District lost again in the Court of Appeals for the Third District.

But, because the Third District’s ruling clashed with other rulings from other district Courts of Appeals, there was a justiciable split that the Supreme Court could, and did, address.

And so we come to Mahanoy Area School District v. B. L., a minor, by and through her father, Levy, et al., 594 U. S. ____ (2021). In the case, the 8-1 majority held that Miss Levy’s First Amendment rights had been violated by the School District, though the justices did not go as far as the Third District; the Court allowed that public schools had some authority over student speech, even if off of school grounds, such as when students are transiting to and from school, given that school attendance is compulsory. Justice Breyer concluded:

It might be tempting to dismiss B. L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary. See Tyson & Brother v. Banton, 273 U. S. 418, 447 (1927) (Holmes, J., dissenting). “We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values are truly implicated.” Cohen, 403 U. S., at 25.

This, to me, is important, because it states that even the most trivial of speech is protected by the Constitution, and that officious little pricks have no authority to impose state punishment just because they don’t like what someone else has said.

Our representative democracy only works if we protect the “marketplace of ideas.” This free exchange facilitates an informed public opinion, which, when transmitted to lawmakers, helps produce laws that reflect the People’s will. That protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, with Justice Neil Gorsuch agreeing, wrote:

public school students, like all other Americans, have the right to express “unpopular” ideas on public issues, even when those ideas are expressed in language that some find “‘inappropriate ’” or “‘hurtful’”.

and:

But it is a “bedrock principle” that speech may not be suppressed simply because it expresses ideas that are “offensive or disagreeable.” Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397, 414 (1989); see also Matal v. Tam, 582 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 1–2) (“Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend”); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726, 745 (1978) (opinion of Stevens, J.) (“[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it”); Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S 50, 63–64 (1976) (plurality opinion) (“Nor may speech be curtailed because it invites dispute, creates dissatisfaction with conditions the way they are, or even stirs people to anger”); Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576, 592 (1969) (“It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers”).

The Court, in my opinion, gave less protection to Miss Levy’s speech than it should have. The justices reasoned that, though schools have a right to control some of what students say, such as not being allowed to be disruptive in class, what Miss Levy SnapChatted was be protected not because it was off campus — though they did allow that most off-campus speech did not fall under the school’s authority — but because it did no identifiable harm. It would have been far better to have stated simply that, once the student is out of school and off-campus, and not involved in any school-sanctioned event, his speech was protected, period.

More importantly, the freedom of speech must be protected, period. The left are doing everything they can to censor speech by conservatives, and though they are using mostly ‘private’ methods — if Twitter and Facebook can really be considered private entities anymore — we have reported on how even The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, are now opposed to freedom of speech. The city of New York even has compulsory speech requirements. If these things are not fought, the freedom of speech will be lost.

The School District attempted to put lipstick on the pig of having lost:

The Mahanoy Area School District is pleased with and vindicated by today’s Supreme Court decision. The School District unanimously won the issue upon which it sought Supreme Court review: all 9 Justices rejected the Third Circuit’s conclusion that school districts lack authority to regulate off-campus speech. The Supreme Court held that it does “not agree with the reasoning of the Third Circuit.” The Supreme Court instead enumerated many examples of situations when school districts can regulate off-campus speech and made it clear that its list was not exclusive. So, although the Court upheld the $1 judgment in favor of Ms. Levy, we are very pleased that the Court agreed with our arguments about schools’ authority to address off-campus speech under a wide variety of situations. This decision is an important vindication of schools’ authority to protect students and staff and to fulfill schools’ educational missions.

https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif The School District could have had that much had they simply not appealed the initial summary judgement. Instead they wasted scads of money, and wound up with eight Supreme Court Justices rhetorically bitch-slapping them for their rotten judgement.

I am amused. 🙂

References

References
↑1 Though the courts continued to refer to Miss Levy by her initials, they specify her father’s last name in the decision title, and her name is in the public domain on the Associated Press. I am not somehow ‘outing’ Miss Levy by the use of her name.
↑2 Justice Alito, in his concurrent opinion, made the greatest ‘Karen’ criticism of all: “(Miss Levy) did not send the messages to the school or to any administrator, teacher, or coach, and no member of the school staff would have even known about the messages if some of B. L.’s “friends” had not taken it upon themselves to spread the word”.
↑3 Preliminary injunction granted to plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, 289 F. Supp. 3d 607 (M.D. Pa., 2017).
↑4 Summary judgment granted in favor of plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist., 376 F. Supp. 3d 429 (M.D. Pa. 2019).
Posted on by

And people wonder why conservatives don’t trust the left Liberals, some of whom claim to be Christians, sure hate them some freedom of religion!

One would have thought that the Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd v Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018) would have chastened liberals that people’s religious freedom is, and ought to be protected, but, Alas!, it appears to have emboldened the left even more.

The Court decided, 7-2, with liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joining the majority, that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted with hostility to the religious beliefs of Jack Phillips, who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex ‘marriage’ ceremony.[1]Yes, you may infer from my placing the word ‘marriage’ in single quotation marks that I do not believe that, though legal, a homosexual ‘marriage’ constitutes a real marriage. Mr Phillips does not believe that homosexual ‘marriages are legitimate, and that baking a wedding cake for such would violate his religious freedom rights.

What the Court failed to do is to rule, explicitly, that Mr Phillips’ actions were protected by the First Amendment, and to some on the left, that provided an opening. From The Victory Girls:

Court Rules Masterpiece Must Bake The Cake

by Nina Bookout | Thursday, June 17, 2021

Bake the cake! That’s the ruling from a Denver judge yesterday regarding Masterpiece Cakeshop and owner Jack Phillips.

According to Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones, Jack Phillips can be compelled by law to go against his conscience and beliefs to bake the cake the customer demands. 

In Tuesday’s ruling, Denver District Judge A. Bruce Jones said Autumn Scardina was denied a cake that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside to celebrate her gender transition on her birthday because of her transgender status in violation of the law. While Jack Phillips said he could not make the cake because of its message, Jones said the case was about a refusal to sell a product, not compelled speech.

He pointed out that Phillips testified during a trial in March that he did not think someone could change their gender and he would not celebrate “somebody who thinks that they can.”

“The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as ‘others,‘” Jones wrote.

There is OH SO MUCH WRONG with this judge’s ruling!

First of all, Autumn Scardina deliberately sought Jack Phillips out. It is no coincidence that Scardina went to Jack Phillips business the very afternoon after the United States Supreme Court announced it would hear Phillips’ appeal.

Scardina wanted, no demanded, that Jack Phillips make a specific gender transition cake. He refused to do so and, as he’s done before, offered an alternative. Scardina refused. But THEN called back and demanded he bake the cake that shows Satan smoking a joint. Phillips again refused to do so. Scardina complained to the state civil rights commission.

Here’s what Judge Jones refused to consider, IMO, regarding this case. Scardina’s deliberate targeting of Jack Phillips.

It’s not clear exactly why Ms. Scardina wanted a cake featuring Satan, apart from provoking him. When asked why she ordered the Satan cake, she said she wanted to believe Mr. Phillips was a “good person” and hoped to persuade him to see the “errors of his thinking.” That’s some deal for someone you say is a “good person”: Change your thinking or I will try to ruin you.

But according to Jones, Scardina’s request/demand of Jack Phillips was not a set up.

And that, my friends, is a boatload of horseshit.

First of all, Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission got smacked down hard by SCOTUS on the case. Secondly, even though Jack Phillips was handed a victory, the lawsuit by Scardina was allowed to proceed. Which, as is publicly known, Scardina did deliberately target Jack Phillips, and an activist judge bought into it.

It’s simple: Charlie Scardina[2]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we always refer to those who claim to be ‘transgender’ by their birth name and with the pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading is attempting to use ‘lawfare‘ to either force Mr Phillips to knuckle under and go along with the cockamamie notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, or to drive him broke and out of business. Beliefs in opposition to what the left say they must be cannot be tolerated.

Live and let live? Not something with which the left agree!

Justices Ruth Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented in the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, but Mrs Ginsburg has now gone to her eternal reward, and been replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, a strong supporter of religious freedom.

Now the Court has struck another blow for the free exercise of religion:

U.S. Supreme Court denounces Philly for dropping religious foster agency over same-sex marriage stance

The ruling described the city’s 2018 move to end its relationship with Catholic Social Services as unconstitutional.

by Jeremy Roebuck and Julia Terruso | June 17, 2021 | 10:38 AM EDT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday condemned Philadelphia’s decision to end a long-standing contract with a Catholic social services agency due to its refusal to consider same-sex married couples as potential foster parents.

In a unanimous decision, the justices described the city’s 2018 move to end its relationship with Catholic Social Services, which had cited its religious beliefs about marriage in refusing to work with LGBTQ couples, as unconstitutional.

The ruling is the latest in a series of decisions favoring religious rights since the emergence of a more conservative high court during the administration of former President Donald Trump. But the court’s more liberal justices also signed on to the decision.

It’s likely to reverberate nationwide, with implications for anti-discrimination clauses in government contracts, particularly in the social services sector, where religious providers are common. . . . .

The agency argued that it views the certification of couples as good candidates for fostering children as an “endorsement of the relationship,” and therefore its religious beliefs prevent it from certifying LGBTQ partnerships. Catholic Social Services also noted that it doesn’t work with unmarried couples, either.

There’s more at the original. I anticipate an editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer denouncing this decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court, and, citing Masterpiece Cakeshop, said, “Government fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature.” This, to me, is hugely important, because it actually goes beyond Masterpiece; it holds that even a facially neutral regulation — there is no claim that the city of Philadelphia acted with hostility, as is the case with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in Masterpiece — that is “intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature” cannot withstand Constitutional scrutiny.

It is clear that, should the case between Mr Scardina and Masterpiece Cakeshop proceed to the Supreme Court, Mr Phillips will, once again, win; Mr Scardina is not, by the refusal of Mr Phillips to bake his ridiculous cake, prevented from having his ‘transition’ cake to celebrate his birthday baked at all. It is simply that Mr Phillips will not bake it. In Fulton v Philadelphia, it was made clear that, Catholic Social Services not being the only provider of foster care and adoption referrals, homosexual couples or unmarried persons would not be denied the possibility of becoming foster or adoptive parents,[3]It is the opinion of The First Street Journal that only legally married heterosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children, though I would make an exception for unmarried persons who are … Continue reading and the Inquirer article notes that Bethany Christian Services chose to change its Christian-based policies to continue to provide such services to the city.

There is a significant difference between conservatives and the left here. Conservatives have not been trying to prevent Mr Scardina from having anyone bake his pink-inside-of-blue cake; they simply hold that if a particular individual does not want to bake it, that is his right. We are (mostly) willing to live and let live. I have no objection to Mr Scardina calling himself a woman; I simply would not call him one myself, and I would object to any government regulation specifying that I must do so.

For the left, that ain’t good enough. The left want to use the force of government and the police power of the state to require everyone to go along with their particular beliefs, even trying to consume Harry Potter author J K Rowling, a very liberal woman herself, for not being #woke enough to accept the notion of transgenderism.

This is why surrendering to the left on language is such a bad idea; ever inch given leads to another mile demanded. Even as conservative an author as Mrs Bookout gave in to the language of the left by referring to Mr Scardina as “she” at one point. My Stylebook has not been adopted by any other source of which I am aware, but conservatives should look at it, and consider following it as they can.

References

References
↑1 Yes, you may infer from my placing the word ‘marriage’ in single quotation marks that I do not believe that, though legal, a homosexual ‘marriage’ constitutes a real marriage.
↑2 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we always refer to those who claim to be ‘transgender’ by their birth name and with the pronouns appropriate to their biological sex. From the references I have found, “Charlie” appears to be Mr Scardina’s birthname, but the references do not actually specify that.
↑3 It is the opinion of The First Street Journal that only legally married heterosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children, though I would make an exception for unmarried persons who are already close relatives, as long as they are heterosexual.
Posted on by

Pegging the irony meter: The New York Times tells us about someone else’s problems with freedom of speech!

I have, in the past, joked that I have an eidetic memory, but it isn’t true. My memory is pretty good, and I have also joked that, despite my advanced age, I don’t have Old Timer’s Disease. At any rate, I do seem to have a longer term memory than the editors of The New York Times:

Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis

An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.

By Michael Powell | June 6, 2021 | Updated 1:13 p.m. ET

It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.

A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.

Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.

“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”

The A.C.L.U., America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties, has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits. But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

It’s a long article, thousands of words, but, shockingly enough,[1]There should be a sarcasm tag here; I don’t find this shocking in the slightest. nowhere in the article does it mention the Times own opposition to freedom of speech.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Of course, All the News That’s Fit to Print was to be determined not by the readers, but by the editors!

Well that was then, but it sure isn’t now. On November 29, 2018, the editors of the Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy to claim that a restriction on speech actually promoted freedom of speech:

How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech

Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.

by Parker Malloy[2]‘Parker’ Malloy is a male, born Chad Malloy, who claims to be female. The Times referred to Mr Malloy as ‘Ms Malloy,’ and the Times went along with that. The First Street … Continue reading | November 29, 2018

In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.

While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

Translation: any reference to a ‘transgender’ person’s biological sex or birth name can earn a person a suspension or permanent removal from Twitter. In mocking Twitter’s recent whine about Nigeria blocking all of Twitter within that country, and stating, “Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society”, William Teach noted:

My old account was given time-outs and suspensions many times before being permanently suspended. They never told me why the last. My new account has been given a few timeouts and a 7 day suspension (that one was for scientifically noting that the gender confused have many more mental health issues and a higher percentage of suicidal thoughts and suicide, and it’s a really bad idea to have them around military grade weapons).

Twitter, and, seemingly, The New York Times, will never agree to publish any opposition to the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.[3]I asked if Three Dog Night should be canceled because in their song Joy to the World they wished joy to all the boys and girls without including the intersexed, the non-binary, the questioning, etc. Questioning the acceptance of ‘transgenderism’ is simply not to be allowed, but, to Mr Malloy and the editors of the Times disallowing that promotes freedom of speech.

That was hardly all. Ten and a half months later, the Times gave OpEd space to one of its own staffers, Andrew Marantz, to argue against the freedom of speech:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

By Andrew Marantz | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

As we noted here, the editors of the Times considered this such an important article that they added a title graphic of a statuette of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker on fire.

Freedom of Speech, it seems, matter only to the editors of the Times when it is their freedom of speech, and of the press, that is in question. Greg Bensinger, a member of the Times’ Editorial Board, celebrated Facebook’s banning of Donald Trump.

The editors of the Times, and the rest of the credentialed media, have never gotten over the halcyon days in which they were the gatekeepers, the arbiters of what did, and did not, get published. Rush Limbaugh started to break their hold, by attracting a huge audience to his talk radio show, and then the internet destroyed it completely, allowing anyone with a computer to self-publish. On twitter, on Facebook, on blogger.com, people can publish their thoughts for free, and while yes, I do pay for this site, I really don’t pay that much. I guess that it was easier for the editors of the Times to support the freedom of speech and the press when they were the ones who determined just who got to exercise the freedom of the press. The #woke[4]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading got mostly liberal editorial page editor James Bennet fired because he agreed to print an OpEd piece by a sitting United States Senator with which they disagreed, and ran off liberal columnist Bari Weiss because, horrors! she is Jewish and mostly supports Israel.

Freedom of speech, of the press? Not something really allowed at The New York Times!

So, yeah, I was amused when the Times told us of the ACLU’s struggle with freedom of speech, without mentioning their own lack of support for it.
_______________________________
Cross-posted on American Free News Network

References

References
↑1 There should be a sarcasm tag here; I don’t find this shocking in the slightest.
↑2 ‘Parker’ Malloy is a male, born Chad Malloy, who claims to be female. The Times referred to Mr Malloy as ‘Ms Malloy,’ and the Times went along with that. The First Street Journal does not go along with the silliness of transgenderism, and while we do not change other people’s quotes, we always refer to a ‘transgender’ person by his biological sex pronouns, honorifics and his birth name, where known.
↑3 I asked if Three Dog Night should be canceled because in their song Joy to the World they wished joy to all the boys and girls without including the intersexed, the non-binary, the questioning, etc.
↑4

From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.