Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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The sad, sad decline of The Philadelphia Inquirer

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, Jun1 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that the #woke didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”? No, the Inquirer has now become a non-profit newspaper for the left.

There’s a reason I’ve called it The Philadelphia Enquirer, mocking its name by using the same spelling as the National Enquirer.[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Before I retired, I used to pick up a copy of the Inquirer at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe, on my way to the plant. I read it, as did my drivers, though they sometimes said I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, being somewhat closer to local news. I read a lot of stories in the Inquirer, about the killings of Philadelphia police officers, I noted how the newspaper didn’t really care much about the murders of young black men in the city, but has the killing of cute little white girl Rian Thal splashed through the paper for days.[2]That site search for Rian Thal returned 3,128 results! Think the Inquirer was obsessed much, or were they just printing what the editors thought their readers wanted to see?

So, I’m sad to see what the Inquirer has become. They write about “gun crime” as though an inanimate object somehow jumps up and shoot people all by itself, because it’s just too politically incorrect to note that that “gun violence” is disproportionately committed by black Philadelphians. The editors have dozens and dozens of articles claiming that #BlackLivesMatter, when it has become obvious, to anyone who reads the newspaper, that black lives don’t matter, unless they are taken by a white police officer.

Despite the fact that I said I wouldn’t, I finally subscribed to the digital edition of the Inquirer, after Mrs Pico kept telling me to do so rather than try to get copies of stories for free and then have to manually type them into my blog articles. But the paper has gone downhill, even from just ten years ago.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
↑2 That site search for Rian Thal returned 3,128 results! Think the Inquirer was obsessed much, or were they just printing what the editors thought their readers wanted to see?
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The New York Times and the Ministry of Truth

Anybody who has ever written for a collegiate newspaper, a category which would include me, has had at least a few dreams about being a reporter and writer for The New York Times.[1]Though not a journalism major, I wrote for the Kentucky Kernel for two years while in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in the early 1980s.

Of course, to become a writer for the greatest newspaper in the world, you had to be well-educated, and it helped if you went to one of the top schools, such as the Columbia University’s School of Journalism. To have been well-educated, at least as far as a liberal arts degree is concerned, there is virtually no way you could not have read George Orwell’s 1984, the dystopian novel about life in a totalitarian society.

So, one would think that no one could ever suggest, in the pages of the Times, such a thing as Mr Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where the main character, Winston Smith worked, would ever be a good idea. But if one did think that, one would be wrong.

How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis

These steps, experts say, could prod more people to abandon the scourge of hoaxes and lies.

By Kevin Roose[2]Mr Roose is a technology columnist for The Times, and the host of the “Rabbit Hole” podcast. His column, “The Shift,” examines the intersection of technology, business, and … Continue reading | February 2, 2021 | 11:54 AM EST

Last month, millions of Americans watched as President Biden took the oath of office and, in a high-minded Inaugural Address, called for a new era of American unity.

But plenty of other Americans weren’t paying attention to Mr. Biden’s speech. They were too busy watching YouTube videos alleging that the inauguration was a prerecorded hoax that had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.

Quite the statement! Mr Roose seems to believe that if I didn’t watch the inaugural, I must be some evil or deluded conspiracy theorist. As it happens, I did not watch the inaugural, but I did not because I did not wish to see the transition to someone with Joe Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s repugnant policies.

Or they were melting down in QAnon group chats, trying to figure out why former President Donald J. Trump wasn’t interrupting Mr. Biden’s speech to declare martial law and announce the mass arrest of satanic pedophiles.

Or maybe their TVs were tuned to OAN, where an anchor was floating the baseless theory that Mr. Biden “wasn’t actually elected by the people.”

It’s a long article, in which Mr Roose suggests:

  • “Unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart, and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow.”
  • We must have a “holistic understanding of what the spectrum of violent extremism looks like in the United States, and then allocate resources accordingly.”
  • “The Biden administration could set up a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the planning and execution of the Capitol siege on January 6. This effort, (Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy) said, would ideally be led by people with deep knowledge of the many “networked factions” that coordinated and carried out the riot, including white supremacist groups and far-right militias.”
  • Several experts with whom Mr Roose spoke “recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.'”

Mr Roose graciously granted that this “sounds a little dystopian,” but continued to say that we needed to listen to the arguments for such suggestions, including tapping into the algorithms used by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to ferret out bad, bad, bad messages.

Really? As we noted previously, Twitter already takes sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’[3]‘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 … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, and no dissent can be tolerated.

Was Mr Roose simply reporting? The Times has already published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.[4]Full disclosure: I maintained a Parler account, and have a Gab account.

Until the nation reckons with the self-inflicted wounds stemming from an under-regulated, unreformed social media information architecture, President Biden’s calls for healing and national unity won’t produce substantial, lasting results. The new administration needs a long-term plan to confront the escalating threat, as far-right insurgents migrate from one platform to the next.

The Parler hack is the place to start. It indicates that moderation of violent, racist, anti-democratic content will increasingly lead to migration of that same hateful content. For instance, the deplatforming of Parler triggered a virtual stampede to similar forums like Gab and Rumble. Analysts have already documented Parler groups re-forming and spreading evermore hateful content on Telegram and a host of smaller platforms.

When the Times prints OpEd pieces claiming that social media are “under-regulated (and) unreformed,” what are we ro conclude other than the Times, which so jealously and zealously protested that its own Freedom of the Press should not be restricted in New York Times Co v United States, believe that other people’s speech and publications must be more strictly regulated, that those who decline to conform to the Accepted Wisdom — meaning: the wisdom of the left — should simply not be allowed to make their cases or present their views?

If Chad Malloy writes an article claiming that ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ is bad, horrible, and should not be allowed, the Times will publish it, and Twitter will be perfectly happy to allow positive tweets referencing it. If William Teach tweets “Since the gender confused have a much higher chance of having mental issues and suicidal tendencies, let’s put them around military grade weapons for Social Justice, am I right?” he gets suspended by Twitter, and not allowed to express that viewpoint, despite the fact that every point he made is true.[5]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy.

Twitter suspended the account of Catholic World Report for noting that Dr Richard Levine, appointed by President Biden to become Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services is “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman”, despite the fact that the statement is completely accurate.[6]Dr Richard Levine claims that he is female and goes by the name “Rachel.” As noted in our Stylebook, we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their biological sex and given … Continue reading

The Times apparently wants some form of a Ministry of Truth, but, like the one for which Winston Smith worked, its business is making certain that whatever Big Brother says is not contradicted by history or the facts. “Ignorance is Strength” the Party says in the book, and it seems that The New York Times wants everybody to remain ignorant of any information, any views of which the Times disapproves.

The late William F Buckley, Jr, famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” It wasn’t so long ago that the editors of the Times would have shaken their heads at conservative views, but nevertheless simply argued against them, rather than trying to stifle and stamp them out.

Today? All of that has changed! The editors now want a government agency to tell everyone what is true, and stamp out anything they feel is contrary.

References

References
↑1 Though not a journalism major, I wrote for the Kentucky Kernel for two years while in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in the early 1980s.
↑2 Mr Roose is a technology columnist for The Times, and the host of the “Rabbit Hole” podcast. His column, “The Shift,” examines the intersection of technology, business, and culture. You can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. @kevinroose • Facebook
↑3 ‘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.
↑4 Full disclosure: I maintained a Parler account, and have a Gab account.
↑5 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy.
↑6 Dr Richard Levine claims that he is female and goes by the name “Rachel.” As noted in our Stylebook, we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their biological sex and given names at birth.
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Is there no actual journalism practiced at The Philadelphia Inquirer?

It’s a pretty sad thing that I have come to check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page every weekday morning.[1]The statistics are updated Monday through Friday only. Well, this is Monday morning, and the first of February, so we get the homicide statistics for the month of January. And an even fifty people didn’t experience much Brotherly Love in the City during what is normally the coldest month of the year.

In last year’s just-barely-missed-the-record, Philadelphia saw 38 homicides in January. Fifty is a 31.58% increase. Fifty in 31 days is a rate of 1.6129 per day, which, if maintained throughout 2021, would mean 589 people killed in the city’s mean streets.

Yet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the newspaper of record for the city, the metropolitan area, and really the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, didn’t have the first hint of a story about this, at least not as of 11:38 AM EST, when last I opened the newspaper’s website.

Oh, there was plenty on the website’s main page. There was a big story about why the Inquirer was closing comments on its news stories, because “Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.”

How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or is it because the #woke in the newsroom, who got Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski fired to resign because he wrote an attention grabbing headline, but one of which the left wholly disapproved, didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions?

The Inquirer could post an OpEd piece by Patrick J Egan strongly in opposition to capital punishment,[2]Yes, I, too, am opposed to capital punishment, though not for the same reasons. The author claims that executions could resume once Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) is out of office, and a capital punishment … Continue reading but make no mention of the one crime, murder, that can result in capital punishment, even as it has surged to record levels?

How could fifty homicides, occurring at a higher rate than during the previous year be so blithely ignored, be not considered newsworthy?

Oh, wait, I know! You have to have actual journalists on the staff to practice journalism. No wonder I’ve seen it called The Philadelphia Enquirer!

References

References
↑1 The statistics are updated Monday through Friday only.
↑2 Yes, I, too, am opposed to capital punishment, though not for the same reasons. The author claims that executions could resume once Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) is out of office, and a capital punishment proponent is in office, while ignoring the fact that the previous Governor, Tom Corbett, a Republican, signed 47 separate death warrants during his four years in office, yet not one execution actually occurred.
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The New York Times and The Washington Post want to censor other people’s #FreedomOfSpeech WaPo OpEd piece argues that the Sedition Act of 1798 was a good idea

From 1984, Chapter 2:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing — and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

Winston Smith knew that all evidence of incorrect thought needed to be erased, yet he couldn’t help from keeping his diary. Mr Smith had found the beautifully-paged blank book in the window of “a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town,” the type of shop that Party members were not supposed to frequent, and just buying the thing had been a violation of discipline. George Orwell didn’t really imagine computers or word-processors or the horrors, horrors! of widespread self-publication on the internet, where anybody, anybody! could read things.

From the Editorial Page of The Wall Street Journal:

Speech and Sedition in 2021

The progressive press decides that dissenters should be suppressed.

By The Editorial Board | January 29, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

The author of the referenced Washington Post OpEd piece is Katlyn Marie Carter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and currently a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She is writing a book entitled “Houses of Glass: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Birth of Representative Democracy.” She argued:

Citing the problem of misinformation in 1801, Rep. John Rutledge Jr. (S.C.) did not mince words in identifying falsehood as a particular threat to democracy. “In a Republican Government, where public opinion rules everything, it is all-important that truth should be the basis of public information,” he asserted. If public opinion was ill formed — poisoned by lies, deception, misrepresentations or mistakes — the consequences could be dire. “Government, which is the preservative of the general happiness and safety, cannot be secure if falsehood and malice are suffered to rob it of the confidence and affection of the people.”

Rutledge’s words sound like a premonition. Democracies are uniquely dependent on public opinion and trust, which makes the truth crucial to their function — and early Americans knew it.

While the communications world in 1801 was a far cry from the world of smartphones and social media, the two shared a key similarity. When the Internet debuted, it prompted significant optimism that the ease of access to information would promote knowledge. Similarly, early Americans had faith that a newly expanded print media would spread enlightenment. But like today, this initial hope soon gave way to concern. By the late 1790s many concluded that the truth was actually endangered by unregulated freedom of the press; they believed the only way to secure the republic was to punish people for spreading lies. Otherwise, falsehood would poison public opinion and people’s trust in their elected officials would be unduly eroded.

Rutledge’s warning came as he argued for renewal of the Sedition Act of 1798, which among other things, criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute.”

Who, I wonder, did Dr Carter believe would determine what was true and what was not? We noted earlier that the (purportedly) private publisher Twitter has, in effect, determined that transgenderism, the idea that people can change their sex through a combination of drug therapy and surgical procedures, is the truth, and speech arguing differently must be prohibited. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy[1]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 state that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech. One side of the argument is simply to be suppressed, or, as Mr Orwell put it, “Ignorance is Strength.”

Twitter and Facebook and Joe Biden have all determined that the matter is settled, and therefore statements to the contrary are simply falsehoods, and ought to be suppressed. So far, so far! the government under President Biden hasn’t acted to declare such speech seditious, but private social media sites, which have near monopolistic publication control, apparently have.

Of course, President Biden has only been in office for eleven days now, so give it time; he just might try to use the power of government to shut people up.

The Journal continued to note articles by Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calling for advertiser boycotts of Fox News, as did Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post. So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” So much for “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Apparently these august credentialed media sources believe that Freedom of the Press means only their Freedom of the Press, 

I’ve reached the point where I’ve quoted too much from the Journal, and there is much more at the original. But just one more paragraph:

Much of American journalism, which was supposed to revert to its historic role as a check on those in power after Donald Trump left town, is now devoted to shutting down the commercial lifeline of other media. Think of the precedent for the next populist Republican President who might declare pro-choice publications “deadly.”

Of course, the last populist Republican President did not do that; the worry is that the current pro-abortion Democratic President might declare pro-life publications “deadly.”

That would include this publication!

The next step? Look for the left to start pressuring site hosting services to stop hosting sites like The Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain and Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion and RedState because those sites don’t agree with what is apparently the Accepted Wisdom concerning transgenderism, and that’s simply unacceptable to the left. Because Parler used Amazon as its site hosting service, Jeff Bezos, owner of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post was able to lights out the service.[2]Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.

The Pirate’s Cove uses the blog tagline, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all,” while The Other McCain has, “‘One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.’ — Arthur Koestler”. The left and the credentialed media want us to do the latter, just shut up.

I’ve never been very good at shutting up.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.
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The truth will not set you free The truth will land you in Twitter jail

We have already noted that Twitter, and the left in general, do not like Freedom of Speech. When it comes to the subject of transgenderism, Twitter has already 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; … Continue reading The New York Times, which so strongly defended its right to Freedom of Speech and of the Press in New York Times Co v United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), gave space in the OpEd section to Andrew Marantz to write “Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence.” Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others. The Times had earlier given OpEd page space to ‘transgender’ activist Chad Malloy to claim that Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnamimg’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes the Freedom of Speech.[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 … Continue reading

Well, now our good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove has been given a seven-day suspension by Twitter, because he did something really radical like tell the truth about the ‘transgendered.’ Mr Teach replied to Representative David E Price (D-NC 4th District) regarding his support of President Biden lifting the ban on ‘transgenders’ in the military along the lines of it being a really bad idea to have people with serious mental health issues who are prone to suicide around military grade weapons. Mr Teach told me, in an e-mail, that Twitter responded to his appeal by saying that his reply was “threatening,” and required him to delete it.

The truth is that the ‘transgendered’ are much more heavily prone to suicide. The Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law, not exactly a right-wing site, reported:

Studies of the transgender population demonstrate that the prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts among transgender adults is significantly higher than that of the U.S. general population. For example, transgender adults have a prevalence of past-year suicide ideation that is nearly twelve times higher, and a prevalence of past-year suicide attempts that is about eighteen times higher, than the U.S. general population. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), which is the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S. to date, found that 81.7 percent of respondents reported ever seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetimes, while 48.3 percent had done so in the past year. In regard to suicide attempts, 40.4 percent reported attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes, and 7.3 percent reported attempting suicide in the past year.

In other words, Mr Teach’s Twitter reply that the ‘transgendered’ are prone to suicide was truthful . . . and Twitter suspended him for telling the truth.

The case of Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence technician, is instructive: he made at least two suicide attempts, and stole hundreds of thousands of pages of classified materials and dumped them to WikiLeaks. Mr Manning’s suicide attempts occurred in prison; what if he had not been in prison, but serving as an Army soldier, and had access to military weaponry?

I don’t know this to be the case, but I’m guessing that Mr Teach’s use of the term “gender confused” is what triggered Twitter’s Ministry of Truth to spot his reply.

What Mr Teach tweeted was a real, logical and truthful concern . . . but Twitter found the truth “threatening.” Jack Nicholson put it best:

Pierced Hearts, a Catholic site, had this story:

Twitter Locks Catholic Publication’s Account for ‘Hateful Conduct’

By Lisa Graas | January 29, 2021

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ — On Sunday, Jan. 24, Catholic World Report received a notice from Twitter, alerting it that its account had been suspended for hateful conduct, and unless it removed the offending tweet, its account would remain suspended.

The tweet in question was a link to this Catholic News Agency news brief, written by Matt Hadro, and posted on CWR on Jan. 19, 2021. The tweet stated:

Biden plans to nominate Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological man identifying as a transgender woman who has served as Pennsylvania’s health secretary since 2017, to be HHS Assistant Secretary for Health. Levine is also a supporter of the contraceptive mandate.

Catholic World Report appealed the decision and Twitter has denied their appeal. Twitter considers the tweet hate speech, and unless Catholic World Report removes the tweet, its account will be suspended.

There’s more at the original.

But I have to ask: how is this tweet in question untrue? The tweet used Dr Richard Levine’s preferred name, “Rachel,” so it did not ‘deadname’ him. The tweet stated that Dr Levine is “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman,” a fact not in dispute. The tweet stated that Dr Levine has served as Pennsylvania Secretary of Health since appointed to the position by Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) in 2017, and that President Biden has appointed him to be Assistant Secretary of Health, which are, again, accurate statements.

Everything in the ‘offending’ tweet was true, but Twitter considered it “hate speech.”

The only thing I can conclude is that Twitter sees the truth itself as hate speech. Twitter can’t handle the truth!

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth had three slogans:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
For Twitter, those slogan seem to apply. If they can censor the non-approved views, if they can keep people ignorant of the fact that there actually are opposing views, it strengthens their position. The Freedom of Speech and of the Press that they apparently despise must lead to slavery, in the way Mr Malloy put it. War is Peace? Judging by Twitter’s uncritical acceptance of the #BlackLivesMatter rioters, and the left’s attempts to silence people like Andy Ngo who reported on the protesters’ violence, yeah, that fits, too.

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.
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Are there no mirrors in the Biden Administration?

The much nicer, and better-looking, Dana commented, on Patterico’s Pontifications:

Boom:

The United States strongly condemns the use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists this weekend in cities throughout Russia. Prior to today’s events, the Russian government sought to suppress the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression by harassing protest organizers, threatening social media platforms, and pre-emptively arresting potential participants. This follows years of tightening restrictions on and repressive actions against civil society, independent media, and the political opposition.

Continued efforts to suppress Russians’ rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, the arrest of opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, and the crackdown on protests that followed are troubling indications of further restrictions on civil society and fundamental freedoms. Russians’ rights to peaceful assembly and to participate in free and fair elections are enshrined not only in the country’s constitution, but also in Russia’s OSCE commitments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in its international obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

We call on Russian authorities to release all those detained for exercising their universal rights and for the immediate and unconditional release of Aleksey Navalny. We urge Russia to fully cooperate with the international community’s investigation into the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny and credibly explain the use of a chemical weapon on its soil.

Putin now: Damn Navalny for surviving that poison!

Of course, in the good and noble United States, we would never try “to suppress the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression by harassing protest organizers, threatening social media platforms, and pre-emptively arresting potential participants.”

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Speaking truth to power means telling the truth I will not tell lies just to not hurt someone's feelings

I found this on Twitter:

It would not surprise me that Richard Levine, a mentally ill male who thinks he’s a woman and calls himself “Rachel,” wanted to do that, but it appears that the Associated Press has retracted the article:

AP Retracts Article About Biden’s New Assistant Secretary Of Health Declaring “Hostile Misgendering” A Mental Illness

By Clover Chronicle | January 20, 2021

An article that was reportedly posted by mainstream news media outlet Associated Press (AP) revealed how Rachel Levine – President Joe Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health – is vowing to make “hostile misgendering” a mental illness under his administration’s new health guidelines.

Title: Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health vows to make “hostile misgendering” a mental illness under administration’s new health guidelines

Summary: Rachel Levine, herself a Transgender women [sic], has been appointed as assistant secretary of health and has vowed to save America’s Trans kids from misgendering

It has to be conceded that the whole thing could have been faked. Some enterprising hacker could have put the whole ting together and inserted it on the AP site. But, as we have previously noted, Joe Biden wants to ‘normalize’ transgenderism, and The New York Times, which so vigorously protected its own First Amendment rights in New York Times Co v United States, wants to limit the freedom of speech for other people and, more specifically, supports bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering.’[1]‘Misgendering,’ as used by the credentialed media, means referring to a ‘transgender’ person with pronouns or other forms of address which claim that person to be his … Continue reading

Let me be clear here: while some claim that going along with a ‘transgendered’ person’s preferred pronouns and name is simply a matter of being polite, to me it is an attempt to coerce people to lie. More, by pushing people to lie, the credentialed media are attempting to turn a lie into accepted truth.

I will not participate in such.

Dr Levine has been Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health under Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), and, with the coronavirus outbreak, has been in the news rather a lot for the last ten months. While The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Commonwealth’s ‘newspaper of record,’ noted Dr Levine as being ‘transgender’ in the stories about his appointment by Mr Biden, due to the ‘historic nature’ of it, in stories not related to the appointment, Dr Levine is simply referred to by his assumed name, and referred to with the feminine pronouns.

While the AP story about Dr Levine wanting to define “hostile misgendering” as a “mental illness” might be a fake, he might well consider it to be:

Pa. health secretary denounces transphobic attacks: ‘Our children are watching’

by Sara Simon | July 28, 2020

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s top health official on Tuesday denounced a recent series of transphobic attacks against her, saying she felt compelled to personally address the discrimination.

“While these individuals may think that they are only expressing their displeasure with me, they are in fact hurting the thousands of LGBTQ Pennsylvanians who suffer directly from these current demonstrations of harassment,” Health Secretary Rachel Levine said at a news briefing.

“I have no room in my heart for hatred,” she said. “And frankly, I do not have time for intolerance.” . . . .

In her remarks, Levine expressed the need for Pennsylvanians to “work towards a spirit of not just tolerance, but a spirit of acceptance and welcoming,” and told LGBTQ youth, “It is OK to be you.”

“Our children are watching,” she said. “They are watching what we do. And they are watching how we act.”

Yes, our children are watching, and Dr Levine knows that if parents go along with the cockamamie notion that a person can change his sex, just to be polite, it will subtly educate their children to believe that ‘transgenderism’ is normal, positive and real.

This is Orwellian Ministry of Truth stuff. If the credentialed media repeat the lie often enough, if the New York City Commission on Human Rights can force people to use the ‘transgendered’s’ preferred forms of address, it is normalizing the notion to try to turn a lie into the truth.

In the year 2525, if man is still alive following a nuclear holocaust, some enterprising anthropologist, trying to find clues as to what society was like back in the 21th century, is going to come across the grave of Dr Levine. Exhuming the remains, he will do detailed measurements of the skeleton, the soft tissue having long ago decayed away, and state, from the hip structure, “The subject was male.” Going further, this scientist will be able to extract some DNA from the remains, run an analysis, and state, having found the subject had XY chromosomes, “The subject is confirmed as having been male.”

In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today

It seems that Zager and Evans were overly optimistic that it would take so long; Twitter, The Philadelphia Inquirer, really all of the credentialed media, the government of New York City, all want to be the pill that governs everything you think, do, and say.

Well, Dr Levine and Bruce Jenner and Bradley Manning can call themselves whatever they want; that’s their right. But it is my right not to go along with their delusions, and I will not. I will do as I always have done; I will speak the truth.

References

References
↑1 ‘Misgendering,’ as used by the credentialed media, means referring to a ‘transgender’ person with pronouns or other forms of address which claim that person to be his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be. At The First Street Journal, misgendering is referring to a ‘transgender’ person by the sex he claims to be rather than his actual, biological sex. ‘Deadnaming,’ according to the credentialed media, means referring to a person by his given name at birth rather than the name he claims to be following ‘transition.’ The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth rather than the name he claims.
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No, no attack on #FreedomOfSpeech at all! It isn't just 'insurrection' speech the left are trying to stifle

As we noted a few days earlier, Twitter hates Freedom of Speech. Parler is a Twitter-like message sharing board, created specifically because Twitter and Facebook had been censoring messages, primarily from conservatives. Oh, both services claimed that they were just keeping threats and violence off their services, but, as one might expect when the ‘judges’ of such things are almost entirely from the political left, messages from conservatives, and the banning of certain users, was heavily tilted against patriotic Americans. They deleted President Trump’s accounts, but the Twitter account of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still active:

From The New York Times:

How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech

The app has renewed a debate about who holds power over online speech after the tech giants yanked their support for it and left it fighting for survival. Parler went dark early on Monday.

By Jack Nicas and Davey Alba | Published January 10, 2021 | Updated January 11, 2021 | 3:21 AM EST

John Matze, chief executive of the alternative social networking app Parler, has said the app welcomes free speech. Credit…Fox News, via YouTube

From the start, John Matze had positioned Parler as a “free speech” social network where people could mostly say whatever they wanted. It was a bet that had recently paid off big as millions of President Trump’s supporters, fed up with what they deemed censorship on Facebook and Twitter, flocked to Parler instead.

On the app, which had become a top download on Apple’s App Store, discussions over politics had ramped up. But so had conspiracy theories that falsely said the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump, with users urging aggressive demonstrations last week when Congress met to certify the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Those calls for violence soon came back to haunt Mr. Matze, 27, a software engineer from Las Vegas and Parler’s chief executive. By Saturday night, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores and Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, saying it had not sufficiently policed posts that incited violence and crime.

Early on Monday morning, just after midnight on the West Coast, Parler appeared to have gone offline.

Translation: Freedom of Speech, the raison d’être for Parler’s existence, was not to be allowed. Mr Matze parlayed:

That’s a screenshot, because Mr Matze’s parlay is not visible on the site, because the site is down.

I’ve said in the past that Parler has some serious issues with its presentation, as you can see in the screenshot; it just isn’t as good as Twitter, and Mr Matze’s efforts to update it haven’t been particularly successful. But that does not mean it should be shut down.

From Wikipedia:

Many jurisdictions have laws under which denial-of-service attacks are illegal.

  • In the US, denial-of-service attacks may be considered a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with penalties that include years of imprisonment.[109] The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the US Department of Justice handles cases of DoS and DDoS. In one example, in July 2019, Austin Thompson, aka DerpTrolling, was sentenced to 27 months in prison and $95,000 restitution by a federal court for conducting multiple DDoS attacks on major video gaming companies, disrupting their systems from hours to days.[110][111]
  • In European countries, committing criminal denial-of-service attacks may, as a minimum, lead to arrest.[112] The United Kingdom is unusual in that it specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison with the Police and Justice Act 2006, which amended Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.[113]
  • In January 2019, Europol announced that “actions are currently underway worldwide to track down the users” of Webstresser.org, a former DDoS marketplace that was shut down in April 2018 as part of Operation Power Off.[114] Europol said UK police were conducting a number of “live operations” targeting over 250 users of Webstresser and other DDoS services.[115]

On January 7, 2013, Anonymous posted a petition on the whitehouse.gov site asking that DDoS be recognized as a legal form of protest similar to the Occupy protests, the claim being that the similarity in purpose of both are same.

What the big boys have done to Parler is different in method, by the same in kind.

The Times again:

Parler’s plight immediately drew condemnation from those on the right, who compared the big tech companies to authoritarian overlords. Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, told Fox News on Sunday that “Republicans have no way to communicate” and asked his followers to text him to stay in touch. Lou Dobbs, the right-wing commentator, wrote on Parler that the app had a strong antitrust case against the tech companies amid such “perilous times.”

Parler has now become a test case in a renewed national debate over free speech on the internet and whether tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have too much power. That debate has intensified since Mr. Trump was barred from posting on Twitter and Facebook last week after a violent mob, urged on by the president and his social media posts, stormed the Capitol.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others. But the moves also focused attention on the power of these private enterprises to decide who stays online and who doesn’t. And the timing struck some as politically convenient, with Mr. Biden set to take office on Jan. 20 and Democrats gaining control of Congress.

The tech companies’ newly proactive approach also provides grist for Mr. Trump in the waning days of his administration. Even as he faces another potential impeachment, Mr. Trump is expected to try stoking anger at Twitter, Facebook and others this week, potentially as a launchpad for competing with Silicon Valley head on when he leaves the White House. After he was barred from Twitter, Mr. Trump said in a statement that he would “look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was understandable that no company wanted to be associated with the “repellent speech” that encouraged the breaching of the Capitol. But he said Parler’s situation was troubling.

Troubling, huh? How odd that an organization dedicated to defending Freedom of Speech, such as the march by neo-Nazis through the heavily Jewish village of Skokie, Illinois, only finds this “troubling,” and not outrageous.

Skokie authorities contended that the activities planned by the Nazi party were so offensive to its residents that they would become violent and disrupt the Nazi assembly, initially planned to take place on the steps of city hall on May 1, 1977. Therefore, they sought an injunction against any assembly at which military-style uniforms, swastikas or Nazi literature were present. Frank Collin appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to represent the marchers’ right to free speech and assemblage. The President of the Chicago ACLU chapter said: “We have no choice but to take the case.” In its brief, ACLU attorneys claimed that so long as the demonstrators were peaceable, no injunction could be issued against their activities; furthermore, that such an injunction would constitute a prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment. The ACLU relied upon First Amendment doctrines articulated consistently over the past fifty years by the Supreme Court, and recently by Chief Justice Warren Burger, who said: “The thread running through all of these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

The Times article with which I began was a straight news piece, but this was on their OpEd pages last week:

Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?

A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

By Thomas B. Edsall | January 6, 2021

In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House and Senate will embrace.

“The formation of public opinion is out of control because of the way the internet is forming groups and dispersing information freely,” Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor and former dean, said in an interview.

Before the advent of the internet, Post noted,

People were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness. Now we are confronting a new phenomenon and we have to think about how we regulate that in a way which is compatible with people’s freedom to form public opinion.

Trump has brought into sharp relief the vulnerability of democracy in the midst of a communication upheaval more pervasive in its impact, both destructive and beneficial, than the invention of radio and television in the 20th Century.

The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

There’s a lot more at the original, but it’s amusing. The New York Times was a staunch defender of the First Amendment, fighting against prior restraint in New York Times Co v United States, 403 US 713 (1971), the so-called Pentagon Papers case. But that was then, before the internet, when the Times was the biggest voice among the gatekeepers, the ones who got to decide what got published, and what did not. The credentialed media have long despised that they no longer have that control, that anybody can now publish, and anyone who wants to read what someone has to say can access it, normally for free.[1]The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited … Continue reading Freedom of speech and of the press are things the Times supports, when it comes to the speech of which the editors approve. For others, not so much.

Mr Edsall quoted Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale:

The problem of propaganda that Tim Wu has identified is not new to the digital age, nor is the problem of speech that exacerbates polarization. In the United States, at least, both problems were created and fostered by predigital media.

The central problem we face today is not too much protection for free speech but the lack of new trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination. Without these institutions, the digital public sphere does not serve democracy very well.

Ahhh, yes, those “trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination,” meaning, for The New York Times, the Times itself and its long-lost gatekeeping functions.

A strong and vigorous political system, in Mr Balkin’s view,

has always required more than mere formal freedoms of speech. It has required institutions like journalism, educational institutions, scientific institutions, libraries, and archives. Law can help foster a healthy public sphere by giving the right incentives for these kinds of institutions to develop. Right now, journalism in the United States is dying a slow death, and many parts of the United States are news deserts — they lack reliable sources of local news. The First Amendment is not to blame for these developments, and cutting back on First Amendment protections will not save journalism. Nevertheless, when key institutions of knowledge production and dissemination are decimated, demagogues and propagandists thrive.

We do not need an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth,” the pundits tell us, but they are arguing for almost that, that the dissemination of thoughts and information be somehow regulated by the elites, private company elites to be sure, so that “demagogues and propagandists” do not thrive, that the ideas which are so very, very appalling to the political left die of loneliness.

Yet we are a nation created by “demagogues and propagandists,” by Thomas Paine and his Common Sense, by Patrick Henry and his great statement, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We had a great Civil War, egged on by “demagogues and propagandists” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by John Brown’s rebellion, and slavery was ended due to this.

The left are appalled that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, that he used media like Twitter to talk above the credentialed media, that WikiLeaks was able to publish Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails over the internet, and that, horrors! President Trump still has millions of supporters. But, despite Mr Trump’s supporters, he was still defeated, and handily, for re-election. The ugly demonstration at the Capitol on January 6th was just that, an ugly demonstration, one far less destructive and deadly than the Summer of fire and Hate led by the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

Of course, it isn’t just insurrection from which the Times believes we ought to be protected. On October 4, 2019, they published an OpEd by staffer Andrew J Marantz, entitled Free Speech Is Killing Us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

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.

Then there was the Times publishing an OpEd by Parker Malloy, claiming that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ transsexuals 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 Molloy | 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.”

The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”

Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.

As a transgender woman, I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.

Defenders of these practices claim that they’re doing this not out of malice but out of honesty and, perhaps, even a twisted sort of love. They surely see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok. But sometimes, voicing one’s personal “truth” does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.

It shuts down the conversation? And just what does compelling those who do not believe that someone can simply change his sex to acquiesce in the claims of a ‘transgendered’ person by agreeing with his changed name and the use of his preferred pronouns do? If I am compelled to refer to Mr Malloy as “Miss Malloy” or “Parker Malloy,” am I not conceding in the debate his claim that he is a woman?[2]The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a … Continue reading

Let’s cut through the bovine feces here: the left are simply opposed to the Freedom of Speech and of the Press when what is said or printed is opposed to what they want people to be able to hear or read. It isn’t just they are trying to save the country from a rebellion, but they are concerned that someone might say that Bruce Jenner isn’t a woman.

If you can control the input, the conversation, then you control the output, the decision, and that’s what the heavily leftist controlled media and social media sites are trying to do. If saying things of which they disapproved is censored, then the beliefs of people will eventually be pushed into the things in which the left believe. Or, more bluntly, garbage in, garbage out.

References

References
↑1 The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited in this post without paying a cent.
↑2 The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a trandgender woman” in his article. I do not use “Ms” as an honorific; it is an abomination. Women are referred to as Miss, Mrs or, when appropriate, Dr. Parker Malloy is not his birth name; I found a reference which implied, but did not directly state, that his birth name was Chad Malloy.
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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.
__________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 I would note here that none of my articles make that claim.