Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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Using the Freedom of Speech and of the Press to condemn other people’s Freedom of Speech

My good friend William Tech’s website, The Pirate’s Cove, has as it’s blog tagline, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” That’s the important part of the First Amendment, “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.” What part of “no law” is so difficult to understand?

Well, some very good people in Minnesota are very upset that the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech and religion of people they despise. From The Washington Post:

Facing a First Amendment fight, a small Minnesota town allows a White supremacist church

By Kim Bellware | December 14, 2020 | 6:00 AM EST

The nation’s ascendant White supremacy movement and small-town bureaucracy collided in rural Minnesota last week when a city council vote over a zoning permit made the 273-person city of Murdock the latest First Amendment battleground.

The Murdock City Council voted 3-1 during a virtual meeting Wednesday to allow the Asatru Folk Assembly to turn the run-down church it purchased in July into its first “hof,” or gathering place, in the Midwest. The looming presence of the obscure Nordic folk religion, widely classified as a White supremacist hate group by extremism and religious experts, promoted months of pushback from concerned residents.

The group purchased a building, and were planning to use it for a legal purpose. The Mayor and City Council didn’t like it, but them not liking it did not mean the city government had any right to block a legal assembly.

Some, naturally, argue that the First Amendment should not cover such a group:

Murdock’s issue underscores the deficiencies with the First Amendment and exposes a lack of neutrality in who it really protects, argued Laura Beth Nielsen, who chairs the Sociology Department at Northwestern University and wrote the 2004 book “License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy and Offensive Public Speech.”

“Right now, every local government is broke trying to deal with coronavirus. The idea that you would arguably subject yourself to a costly lawsuit — what town would want to do that?” Nielsen said. “But letting these organizations flourish and take root is scary, especially if you’re the Black or the Jewish family in town.”

She said Murdock’s individual battle is taking place in a broader legal and social environment where, “in the universe of the First Amendment, White people tend to win.”

White people tend to win? Surely there was little more offensive speech than that of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who called Judaism a “gutter religion.” He was condemned for that, but not fined or imprisoned, because his speech, no matter how vile, is protected by the First Amendment. The Reverend Al Sharpton has uttered plenty of anti-white and anti-Semitic bovine feces, but his statements, too, have, and deserve to have, the protection of the First Amendment. I do not have to like Messrs Farrakhan and Sharpton to believe that they have freedom of speech just as much as I do.

There’s a bit of irony in all of this, because Professor Neilsen is exercising her freedom of speech and freedom of the press to complain that other people’s freedom of speech and of peaceable assembly is “scary.”

The city council in Murdock, Minn., voted December 9 to grant a permit that allows the Asatru Folk Assembly, which has been identified as a white supremacist group, to gather at an abandoned church it bought. (Renee Jones Schneider/AP)

There’s much more at the Post original, with statements by other people, but I want to point out the final two paragraphs:

Nielsen, the Northwestern sociologist, noted that cities routinely restrict the First Amendment over issues it prioritizes, such as anti-pandhandling ordinances or obscenity laws.

“Even though the First Amendment is supposed to operate in this neutral way, when you dig in, hate speech against racial minorities is protected; harassment of women is protected,” Nielsen said. “In the big picture, the First Amendment is reinforcing who already has power.”

span style=”font-family: Georgia;”>To be fair, there is no quotation from the good professor that she believes the First Amendment should somehow be restricted; whether she says anything like that in any of her books, I do not know. But I do know that restrictions on speech, were they allowed, could condemn my website, given that our published Stylebook is not supportive of homosexuality and does not accept ‘transgenderism.’ With the incoming Administration of Joe Biden, RedState, where I frequently cross-post, could be shut down by the government for the many articles there which claim that the Democrats engaged in massive fraud and stole a presidential election they did not legitimately win.[1]I would note here that none of my articles make that claim.

When freedom of speech or the press is limited, the ox which gets gored depends on just who has the power to gore it.

The First Amendment has been used to protect many things I do not like: the American Nazi Party’s march in heavily Jewish Skokie, Illinois, the Westboro Baptist Church’s protests at the funerals of American soldiers, in Snyder v Phelps (2011), or the flag burning case, Texas v Johnson (1989), but it was right to protect those offensive actions. The First Amendment protects The Washington Post’s right to print Professor Neilsen’s objections. There are many things I’d rather not see voiced or printed, but it would be far, far worse for the government to have the power to ban them.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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↑1 I would note here that none of my articles make that claim.
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The Special Snowflakes™ are just so upset! "Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." -- William F Buckley, Jr

I’m old enough to remember when the left supported an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment, and I agreed with them. From Wikipedia:

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.

With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement’s legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, impacting on the political views and values of college students and the general public.

In 1971, The New York Times and The Washington Post received parts of what eventually were called the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, who was partially an author of them. President Nixon’s decision to seek an injunction against the newspapers to prevent their further publication of them was overturned by the Supreme Court in New York Times Company v United States, by a 6-3 margin. Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote:

I adhere to the view that the Government’s case against the Washington Post should have been dismissed and that the injunction against the New York Times should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented to this Court. I believe that every moment’s continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, after oral argument, I agree completely that we must affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the reasons stated by my Brothers Douglas and Brennan. In my view it is unfortunate that some of my Brethren are apparently willing to hold that the publication of news may sometimes be enjoined. Such a holding would make a shambles of the First Amendment.

Our Government was launched in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, followed in 1791. Now, for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country.

Freedom of Speech and of the Press continued to expand, and what appears to have been the last vestige of government censorship, that of censoring pornography, has finally faded away due to the ubiquity of pornography on the internet; technology has rendered porn uncontrollable.

But now, the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: “Woke is a political term originating in the United States referring to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It derives from the … Continue reading and the Special Snowflakes™, creatures of today’s left, have become utterly appalled that people who have different opinions than their are allowed to speak, allowed to publish:

Penguin Random House staffers broke down in tears over release of Jordan Peterson book: report

Employees cried to management at a town hall addressing the book’s release in March

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News | November 24, 2020

A new report shows inner turmoil that is apparently taking place at Penguin Random House Canada over the publisher’s release of a book written by Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Peterson, a psychology professor from the University of Toronto and a popular podcast host who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, announced on Monday that he is releasing a new book titled “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” which is set to be released in March of next year.

However, Vice reported on Tuesday that Peterson’s book has sparked an emotional outcry within the Canadian publishing giant with an effort by employees to pressure the company into canceling the book’s release.

According to the report, “several” employees confronted management of Penguin Random House Canada (PRHC), a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, at an internal town hall on Monday and “dozens more have filed anonymous complaints” about PRHC’s plans to release the latest work from the politically and culturally outspoken professor.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” one town hall attendee, who is also a member of the LGBTQ community, told Vice.

So, quit! If this unnamed “member of the LGBTQ community” is not proud to work for PRHC, there is no law — other than the laws of economics, I suppose — forcing him to stay there.

Another employee alleged that “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives” with one explaining that Peterson had “radicalized their father” and another insisting the publishing of Peterson’s book will “negatively affect their non-binary friend.”

Well, wahhh! Dr Peterson’s arguments have persuaded some people, and the #woke don’t like it, so they want to clamp down on his speech so that others won’t hear it.[2]Full disclosure: if I have ever read anything by Dr Peterson, I do not recall doing so, or that he was the author of something I did read.

PRHC is, of course, a private company, and therefore their decision to, or refusal to, publish anything, by anyone, is not an act of government censorship. But Penguin Random House is in the business of publishing, so yeah, they are going to publish things that the company believe will make money.

PRHC told Vice in a statement, “We announced yesterday that we will publish Jordan Peterson’s new book ‘Beyond Order’ this coming March. Immediately following the announcement, we held a forum and provided a space for our employees to express their views and offer feedback. Our employees have started an anonymous feedback channel, which we fully support. We are open to hearing our employees’ feedback and answering all of their questions. We remain committed to publishing a range of voices and viewpoints.”

We have previously noted how the #woke are really, really, really opposed to Freedom of the Press, at least as far as printing things with which they disagree. But, at bottom, much of it is fear that healthy debate undermines their own positions, because their positions are, well, kind of stupid. How would you like to have to defend the position that girls can be boys and boys can be girls?

Children have their own ‘logic,’ and I suppose that it sounds good to them. But, being children, there’s always the great fear that the grown ups will show up, and to the #woke at Penguin Random House, Jordan Peterson is one of those awful grown ups.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

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↑1 From Wikipedia: “Woke is a political term originating in the United States referring to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke”, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.

First used in the 1940s, the term has resurfaced in recent years as a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movement. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, socially liberal and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has also been the subject of memes, ironic usage and criticism. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.” I confess to being one of those who uses the term disparagingly.

↑2 Full disclosure: if I have ever read anything by Dr Peterson, I do not recall doing so, or that he was the author of something I did read.
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Could the credentialed media get any more fawning of Joe Biden?

Sometimes I believe that this would be the more accurate spelling.

The Democrats and their willing allies in the media have attacked President Trump every way of which they could possibly think, reasonable or otherwise, and I suppose that it worked: they defeated Mr Trump in the 2020 election. Now The Philadelphia Inquirer is praising Joe Biden, and slamming the President, because Mr Biden has pets while Mr Trump does not:

Major and Champ Biden are about to make the White House warm and furry again

by Alfred Lubrano | November 16, 2020

Of the more than 500 million Americans who’ve ever lived, fewer than four dozen have ascended to the presidency.

It’s hard to relate to a group that exclusive. But pets that dig up the Rose Garden, chew tassled loafers in the West Wing, and have accidents under the Resolute Desk are the great equalizer: There are more Americans who live with animal friends — around 66%, studies show — than those who don’t.

“Pets humanize presidential figures who seem remote,” said Andrew Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, formerly in Williamsburg, Va., now awaiting a new home. “Seeing the most powerful person in the free world romping on the floor with a dog looks so much more like you or I — a very different image than a person in a suit behind a podium.”

When he moves into the White House in January, the already avuncular President-elect Joe Biden will morph into Romper-in-Chief, cavorting with two German shepherds, 12-year-old Champ and nearly 3-year-old Major, who will become the first shelter animal to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and his grandchildren picked out Major at the no-kill Delaware Humane Association in Wilmington in 2018.

For the last four years, the White House has been a kibble-free zone. Although President Donald Trump has been accused of emitting racist-rousing dog whistles, he hasn’t owned an actual dog.

Yeah, no bias there, huh?

My family have pets. We have had cats around for as long as I can remember, but until we moved to the farm, we never had a dog. Why? Dogs require a lot more room to run around, and until we moved here, we never had what I thought to be enough room. Now we have the room, and my wife brought home a puppy in May of 2019. This summer, another dog just moved in. No, we didn’t seek him, but he just moved in on his own.

We have an outdoor feeder for the cats, and that has meant that we’ve had ‘visitor’ cats show up to eat as well. Floyd, our 21-toed polydactyl cat, just showed up, skinny as a rail, charged in the house when I opened the door and immediately attached himself to my wife. Right now, we have four cats, two dogs and two chickens, plus any other critters which just show up. Living on the border of the Daniel Boone National Forest, animals abound here; we see deer on the property frequently, and I’ve found bobcat tracks. There are bears and coyotes in the forest, and the dogs regularly growl and bark when they sense creatures I cannot see in the National Forest.

So, I’m not exactly an anti-pet person.

Yet President Trump is.

“Donald was not a dog fan,” wrote the outgoing president’s first wife, Ivana, in her memoir, Raising Trump. “And Chappy [her poodle] had an equal dislike of Donald.”

Trump is believed to be the only president other than James Polk (in office from 1845 to 1849) not to have a pet, Hager said, adding, “Even the impeached, sad, racist, drunk Andrew Johnson fed flour to mice friends he kept.”

To which I say, “So what?”

Mr Trump, long before he became President, moved around a lot. He had his suite in Trump Tower in Manhattan, his golf course digs in New Jersey, and his resort home in Mar-A-Lago in Florida. Believe me, it was no fun at all moving four cats from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania to the farm in Kentucky, and we only had to do that once; what would it be like having to move pets around between New York, New Jersey and Florida several times a year?

Pets are simply not part of Mr Trump’s lifestyle, and he recognized that, apparently early on. If he wouldn’t be a good ‘father’ for pets, then he shouldn’t have them, and chose wisely enough not to do so, even though it might have helped him politically.

In 2017, Trump reportedly said he was “embarrassed” by the cats, snake, and rabbit (Marlon Bundo, subject of two children’s books) living with Vice President Mike Pence and his family. The Atlantic reported that the menagerie inspired Trump to label the Pences “low-class” and “yokels.”

“Animals are so against the Trump Fifth Avenue brand,” said Hager, who credits Trump for being “self-aware enough” to realize it’s best he avoid bonding with all creatures, great and small. In February 2019, the famously germaphobic president said his getting a pet “feels a little phony.”

And he apparently wasn’t phony.

So now the media are fawning over Mr Biden’s dogs. He adopted from a rescue shelter! He might have named a dog in honor of his late son, Beau!

The Inquirer article wasn’t listed as “Lifestyle” or “Human Interest” or “Opinion.” It was presented as a straight news story. Mr Biden hasn’t even taken office yet, but The Philadelphia Inquirer is already working on his 2024 re-election campaign.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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Do they not even see themselves?

I have previously noted how the Associated Press surrendered to political correctness on language, saying that, when referring to race, it will capitalize “black” but leave “white” in lower-case.

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

I found the whole thing not only obviously silly, but poor grammar. The use of “white” or “black” is simply shorthand for large racial groups, Caucasian and Negro, which are properly capitalized. Irish or French should be capitalized, as they refer to the inhabitants of countries as well as ethnic groups, while white should not be. Similarly, I would capitalize Kenyan or African, but not black. That the Associated Press would treat the words differently is just not very bright.

And now The Philadelphia Inquirer has provided, through its apparent adoption of the Associated Press stylebook, the silliness of it. In an article entitled “Why the term ‘legal votes’ is racist,” Jeffrey Barg wrote:

News media use the descriptor Black three times as much as white, which normalizes white and others Black. Similarly, legal vote others ballots from areas that aren’t predominantly white.

One would thing that a writer who styles himself The Angry Grammarian would have the capitalization of “Black” without a similar capitalization of “white” almost jump off the page at him as an obvious error. More, it would be discordantly harsh on the perceptions of the reader, especially the white reader whom one would expect Mr Barg to wish to influence.

Then again, one would not expect someone who claims to be a “grammarian” to write sentences such as, “It’s the insinuation of illegality in service of eliminating Black votes”, or “Adding the adjective legal implies the presence of illegal votes, which lawsuits, the Department of Justice, and even super-sleuth Rudy Giuliani have been unable to provide evidence of.”

Then, in the article “Haverford students end strike after getting demands met,” Inquirer writer Susan Snyder wrote, “But concerns about the college’s treatment of Black and brown students had been mounting long before the college leaders sent the email”, and “Raymond, who is white, announced last week that she would step down as the interim chief diversity officer, a position she didn’t intend to keep, and that provost Linda Strong-Leek, who is Black, would step into the position.”

https://i0.wp.com/www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif?w=612&ssl=1 I suppose that the Associated Press’ and the Inquirer’s stylebook failed to consider whether “brown,” when used as a racial identifier, should be capitalized. One wonders: will “brown” readers of the Inquirer be offended?

In the end, the decision by the Associated Press, one followed by many but not all media organizations, paid homage to political correctness, but wound up exposing the folly of it. In arriving at their decision, the AP might have limited their discussions to what they said in their press statement, but when the stylebook change effects are seen in print, in actual stories meant to inform or persuade the reader, the ridiculousness of it becomes apparent.

Cross-posted on RedState.

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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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¹ – 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.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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Once Again, The New York Times Opines Against First Amendment Protections . . . For Wrongthinkers

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.

Well, that was then, and this is now:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

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

By Andrew Marantz¹ | 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.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical:

It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

Mr Marantz, the author, continued:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

He has now made the argument of speech causing tangible harm, pretty much the opposite argument made by the Times in 1971, when the government claimed a “clear and present danger” in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Speech, at least the unregulated speech of “trolls and bigots and propagandists,” has caused direct harm, and, of course, he argued that free speech, in the form of “social-media-fueled campaigns,” helped elect right-wing leaders Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and, of course, the evil Donald Trump. No wonder Mr Marantz is appalled!

The author’s bias is apparent in so many ways. The speech he decries is all from the right side of the political spectrum. Not a word was published against the speech of Antifa, which has led to violence from the far left in this country. There was no criticism of speech by those supporting the socialist regime in Nicaragua or advocating the same socialism which led to totalitarianism and as many as 100 million deaths in the old Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea. No, he was concerned that a social media campaign helped elect Donald Trump!

Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others:

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

So, he believes that it is a problem, is out of character, for a self-identified “leftist” to support freedom of speech? We did learn about his feelings concerning our rights under the Second Amendment; is it any wonder that conservatives don’t trust leftists?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

No, actually. We punish the consequences of such speech, but we do not censor it. We do not have all speech going through government-controlled channels to nip such things in the bud before they ever hit people’s computer screens, but we can punish people for causing harm by speech. But perhaps that government-controlled channel is what he wants:

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Facebook and YouTube get away with the glorification of murder? Might as well mention Hollywood, and the body count racked up by Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Terminator series, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies and, let’s be honest, every action-adventure movie ever made. Heck, even the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies were filled with death and destruction, albeit that it was mostly orcs and goblins who bit the dust therein.

But I digress. Mr Marantz apparently sees some great good in a government-controlled social media network, forgetting, perhaps, the old Russian saying, В Правде нет новостей, и в Известиях нет правды.² Government organs of information are controlled by the government, and if the BBC is mostly innocuous, it isn’t completely. Given how the British have criminalized certain speech, something happening in the United States as well, perhaps Mr Marantz might remember just who is President. Perhaps had such existed when Barack Obama was President, the government could have censored all of the information about Hillary Clinton and gotten her elected President, which would have made Mr Marantz happier, but Donald Trump is President now, and might be for the next 5¼ years. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t like an official social media channel controlled by conservatives.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

Those first two examples already have legal problems, in that they aren’t subject to prior censorship, but the speakers can be held liable for illegal actions.

The third, “drive a democracy toward totalitarianism?” That is what bothers Mr Marantz, given that he seems to believe that was what happened in 2016. I could argue that it is the policies enunciated by the various Democratic candidates, which include confiscation of some firearms, and restrictions on personal actions and vehicles with the “Green New Deal” proposals; why shouldn’t those be censored?

Mr Marantz suggested that it needn’t be the government, that private companies could “ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service.” That’s something they already do, far too much, with a decided tendency to censor conservatives much more than the left. Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Parker Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech³ — and Mr Marantz himself noted, with some apparent glee, that two far-right speakers, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, “have been permanently banned from all major (social media) platforms.”

The notion of banning “egregious actors” on the left?  That got no support, or even mention, by Mr Marantz.

Mr Marantz’s totalitarian impulses were evident in his concluding paragraph:

In one of our conversations, (John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley) compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.

The philosophy of the left is the impulse to control, to control everybody. It’s supposedly all for our own good, of course, so we couldn’t possibly object to that.

The New York Times has a long and distinguished record of being champions for First Amendment protections and freedoms . . . for itself. For other people? Not so much. The editors of the Times appear to believe in the freedom of speech for those who rightthink, but for those who commit the thoughtcrime of wrongthink, well, they don’t really deserve to be able to speak, do they? After all, it’s harmful to our civil society!
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¹ – Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
² – There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.
³ – Parker Malloy is a male claiming that he is female.
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