Daily Archives: December 15, 2021

According to Dr. Judith Thomas

(Dec. 8, Biden suffers just like everyone else), she doesnt like the First Amendment.

Her words: I am sick and tired of people using the First Amendment, says a lot about their character. I have no doubt she is a doctor, but shes going against the very thing that people have fought and died for.

Without freedom of speech, she wouldnt be commenting in The Tribune-Democrat or have a social existence online. Perhaps the good doctor should be cautious of what she might think before it nips her in the bud?

Wilbert Clark III

Johnstown

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Go here to see the original:
Letter to the editor | People fought for freedom of speech - TribDem.com

Picture two recent scenes at British universities. In one, university staff stand huddled in the cold on picket lines, striking for the second year in a row to protest the sustained deterioration of their working conditions. In the second, students walk out of a college Christmas dinner where they are being subjected to a bigoted tirade by a sleazy tabloid columnist. Their principal and his wife label them pathetic, inadequate and arses.

Who in this scenario can count on the British governments support? Hint: it is not the students who had paid to attend a festive meal, not listen to misogynist and anti-transgender ranting. Nor is it the university staff who may face up to a 40 percent cut in their already modest pensions and an increasingly large number of whom earn low wages on precarious and even zero-hour contracts.

Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnsons ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus free speech crisis. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus cancel culture and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.

The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of no-platforming which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.

Despite media and political hype, very few have actually been denied platforms in recent years. A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was no wholesale censorship at universities. In a crucial piece of analysis, the independent think tank, Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) notes that a 2021 Government White Paper on free speech and academic freedom in higher education preceding the bill ignored the lack of evidence, insisting there was a problem on the basis of a small number of anecdotes, press reports and unspecified concerns.

Is this fake crisis just a classic dead cat distraction to draw attention away from a more substantial attack on a severely underfunded higher education sector also reeling from the damage of Brexit? It is obviously easier to decimate the higher education sector after painting it as intolerant and partisan.

While Universities Minister Michelle Donelan harumphed in outrage about a gender critical professor leaving the University of Sussex of her own will, pursuant to student protests, scores of staff have been made redundant at Goldsmiths University, eliminating entire humanities subjects. That is real cancellation on a scale which deserves our attention.

While gravely concerning, this is only part of the story, for what is at stake for the political right here is the opposite of freedom of expression. As draconian laws effectively criminalise political protest, the goal of the fake crisis is to foist retrograde and discredited ideologies like race science and climate denial upon universities which are among the few remaining spheres where knowledge is valued. An appreciation for truth, critical thinking and facts is therefore deemed indoctrination of students by the left.

Of a piece with the rise of fake news as a vehicle for the rise of right-wing populism, moral panics around free speech aim to legitimise academically unsound or hateful beliefs by giving them the veneer of brave and challenging ideas. Since universities also have a statutory obligation, alongside academic freedom, to uphold academic standards, repudiating specious thought is a scholarly duty, not cancel culture.

Tellingly, the same people who loudly denounce putative silencing on campus have a very good line in cancelling threatening ideas themselves. In late 2020, the Department for Education (DfE) issued guidance deeming anti-capitalism an extremist stance that should not be included in teaching materials for English schools.

In October 2020, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch declared that the Government stand unequivocally against critical race theory in education. Since critical race theory is simply a disciplinary framework for talking about race, this restricts discussions of race in schools and colleges.

Last year, then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warned English universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety or face sanctions despite widespread concerns. My own university has adopted the IHRA document wholesale even as scores of its academics have warned that some of the examples it gives conflate criticism of the policies, constitutional doctrines and laws of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and will silence those who work or speak on the topic of Israel and Palestine.

While universities are hectored like this and told they will be fined if the proposed Free Speech Champion finds them not to have defended free expression robustly, no such strictures seem to apply to the government itself. Shortly after the Home Office abruptly cancelled a speaking engagement with me on colonialism and anti-colonialism for Black History Month this year, a leaked memo warned civil servants to vet speakers opinions and to not invite anyone speakers who had spoken against key government policies. My disinvitation was claimed as a victory by right-wing website, Guido Fawkes.

The sharpest end of governmental cancellation is reserved for those who assess Britains imperial past critically. Attempts to undo silences and amnesia around empire and slavery, or question mindless glorification are frequently met with enraged denunciations of town hall militants, woke worthies and baying mobs, to use Communities Minister Robert Jenricks epithets.

Heritage organisation National Trust has also come under attack. Its Colonial Countryside project which sought to modestly illuminate some colonial and slavery connections for properties in its care was met with political fury from Conservatives. A particular red rag was Winston Churchills family home, Chartwell, in relation to which his imperial connections, hardly a state secret, were mentioned.

After tabloid attacks, academics who had done research on the project were met with verbal abuse and threats. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden condemned turning the wartime leader into a subject of criticism and controversy. Dowdens warnings to heritage bodies to act in line with government policy or face funding cuts have rightly worried museum staff about political interference in the sector.

Right-wing cancel culture in Britain is at its most implacably repressive when it comes to any mention of Winston Churchill that does not unconditionally glorify him. I have personal experience of this as well, having helped set up a series of talks to examine Churchills links to empire and race at Churchill College Cambridge, the national memorial to him, where I am a fellow.

After only the second event, pursuant to a ferocious and baseless denunciation of the discussion by Policy Exchange, a think tank co-founded by government minister, Michael Gove, the planned series was halted by the college. Policy Exchange rightly described by the HEPI as a partisan think tank with a clear political agenda that mirrors that of the Government was openly jubilant.

The case of Policy Exchange raises questions about the extent to which the concocted free speech crisis is influenced by far-right forces in the United States and their culture war agenda. An expos by Open Democracy last year found that the freedom of speech White Paper, not only cited Policy Exchange (complete with false claims) liberally but also the US-based Alliance for Democratic Freedom International (ADF), a Christian anti-equality organisation which has been classified as a hate group. This organisation has spent 410,000 ($542,000) on lobbying in the UK since 2017, also getting involved in campus disputes.

The Byline Times has just published a report which also raises very serious questions about the shadowy presence on British university campuses of powerful conservative American billionaires who may be funding an anti-equality agenda which includes rehabilitating racist doctrines and gender hierarchies. With a history of supporting extreme right causes in the US, these entities also appear to have influence on UK government higher education policy which now shows a pronounced anti-diversity bent.

British universities are currently nurturing a generation not inclined to toe the conservative line and therefore pillories as woke snowflakes. For that they are being targeted, in a Tory reprise of former US President Richard Nixons dictum, Professors are the enemy, is no surprise. Behind the fabricated cultural battles and false flag free speech campaigns, a real battle is now unfolding, a fight to defend critical thought, robust scholarship, and the right to challenge the line that wealth and power would have us all acquiesce to.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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Behind the UK governments false flag free speech campaign - Al Jazeera English

This week in my POLS 117 (freedom of speech) class at UW-Eau Claire, we end the semester by discussing the freedom of expression on the internet. To understand constitutional protections for expression online, it is useful to recount how the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to apply to media that emerged earlier in American history.

The Court has not always found the same level of protection for expression in newer media as it has for the printed word and speech uttered in person. For instance, in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), the Court found that movies received no First Amendment protection. The Court overturned this in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952), when the justices held that expression by means of motion pictures is included within the free speech and free press guaranty of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Supreme Court maintains that the First Amendment permits the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to restrict more expression in broadcast media (radio and television) than the government may regulate in print media. In cases like Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (1969) and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), the Court ruled that the government possesses greater power over broadcast media due to three factors: (1) the long history of its regulation, (2) the scarcity of available frequencies, and (3) its invasive nature.

What about the internet? The foundational case is Reno v. ACLU (1997), where the Court ruled that the government does not possess greater regulatory power online like it does for broadcast media. Regarding the three factors above, the Court in Reno found that those factors are not present in cyberspace.

Put another way, in 1997 there was no long history of government regulation of the internet, there was no structural limit to how many people could produce online content, and the internet was not deemed to be invasive. Therefore, the governments power to regulate the internet is more restricted by the First Amendment. In Reno, the Court spoke positively of the internet as a vast platform from which to address and hear from a world-wide audience of millions of readers, viewers, researchers, and buyers.

As for social media, the Court in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017) reasoned that a fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more. The Court went on to state the following: While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace the vast democratic forums of the Internet in general, and social media in particular. Thus, the Court scrutinizes government attempts to ban people from social media.

What about persons who have their accounts removed or suspended by social media companies? While the Constitution protects ones free expression rights from being violated by the government, American courts have not found that the First Amendment restricts what social media companies may do regarding user accounts.

The basis of this approach can be found in a case involving a privately-run cable company, Manhattan Community Access Corporation v. Halleck (2019), where the Supreme Court stated that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment constrains governmental actors and protects private actors. Other federal courts have used this reasoning in recent cases to protect social media companies which as private actors possess their own First Amendment rights from laws that would restrict those companies abilities to moderate content or ban/suspend users.

The Supreme Court could eventually overrule or modify some of these precedents, just as it did when overturning Mutual Film Corporation in Burstyn to reinterpret First Amendment protections for movies. Although there are legitimate questions about what powers the government has under the Constitution to regulate social media companies, those companies have not been found to be state actors. Individuals who disapprove of social media companies policies can use their own First Amendment rights to advocate that those companies change their policies. The scope of what the First Amendment protects online is shaped by the Reno, Packingham, and Manhattan Access cases.

Eric T. Kasper is a professor of political science and the director of the Menard Center for Constitutional Studies at UW-Eau Claire. He also serves as the municipal judge for the City of Rice Lake and is a member of the Wisconsin Bar Association.

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Ink Blog: The First Amendment and the internet - Ashland Daily Press

Opponents are concerned that the Hate Crime Bill which passed in March creates a new offence of stirring up hatred which it is feared could stifle or chill public debate.

Offences are considered aggravated if they involve prejudice against a host of characteristics.

Fraser Hudghton, director of case management at the FSU, commented: I [nominated] Nicola Sturgeon for the Hate Crime Act, which has yet to be put into practice because its so unworkable... If it is ever activated it will mean theres less free speech permitted in Scotland that anywhere else in Europe.

Toby Young, the general secretary of the FSU added: The Hate Crime Act is the biggest assault on free speech in the British Isles since the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55 BC. The really scary thing is that the Law Commission wants parliament to pass a similar law in England and Wales.

The Law Commission makes the case for change in England and Wales, stating on its website that aggravated offences only apply in respect of racial and religious hostility whilst the stirring up offences dont cover disability or transgender identity. It also wants new protections for freedom of expression to ensure that only the most egregious hate speech is criminalised and private conversations will be exempted.

The Scottish Government defended its law, with a spokesman saying: The Act does not prevent people expressing controversial, challenging or offensive views nor does it seek to stifle criticism or rigorous debate in any way.

The debate comes as senior Conservative MP John Penrose has made a plea for the UK to avoid adopting culture wars and tribal identity politics which are blamed for pitting different groups against one another in the United States.

He said: Importing US-style culture wars is causing serious damage to hope of a genuinely fair and open British society. [I] argue we must avoid labelling everyone with an indelible, original sin or victimhood based on their race, which god they worship, their gender or anything else.

In his new paper, Poverty Trapped, he makes the case for new measures to ensure fairness in how people are hired and promoted to ensure discrimination and bias do not hold people back.

Mr Penrose wants post-Brexit, post-covid and post-poverty Britain to become a fairer, happier society that wastes less of our human talent, and where the old political battles of class, inequality and jealousy have become quaint historical curiosities.

A major research project last week highlighted enduring intolerance and prejudice. The Woolf Institutes study of anti-semitism on Twitter estimates there are nearly 495,000 explicitly anti-semitic tweets per year made in English that can be seen UK users; it understands there are between 100 and 1,350 explicitly anti-semitic tweets every day in the UK.

See the rest here:
Nicola Sturgeon named as Britain's greatest foe to freedom of speech - Daily Express

This article was written by Cheyon Sheen, a civil engineering student at Boise State.

With the current uproar of Scott Yenor, I want to mention that 1) signing a petition to further investigate and 2) emailing Marlene Tromp (or anyone else at Boise State) about how he should be fired will not create sustainable change.

Let me give some background information.

There were a ridiculous amount of bills last legislative session that attempted to restrict womens rights, to make it increasingly more difficult to vote, to control and punish Boise State, and to defund diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. Some of these succeeded. Why do you think the Student Multicultural Center got renamed to just Student Equity?

Last year, H0364 passed in the House of Representatives (thankfully not in the Senate but who knows what will happen next year).

Its statement of purpose was as follows:

This proposed legislation will direct our institutions of higher learning in their responsibility to uphold its student, faculty and staffs Constitutional and First Amendment right to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to peacefully assemble and more.

Supreme Court language is used to clearly define terms so that free speech in and outside the classroom is understood and protected. Since a significant amount of taxpayer dollars is appropriated to public institutions of higher education each year, and as such, the legislature must ensure that all public institutions of higher education receiving state funds recognize freedom of speech as a fundamental right for all.

Basically, we will defund you, Boise State, if you do anything that violates ones first amendment rights. PASSED 56-12-2. Interesting, because Republicans also claim to want less government control.

I hope students will try to understand why Boise State is only releasing statements about supporting the First Amendment rights and not specifically and publicly addressing Scott Yenor.

Boise State is walking a tightrope with the state legislature. And its not always so black and white.

Even if Boise State could fire this professor (and they cant, because Scott Yenor is tenured), we would be under more scrutiny from the legislature who would further decrease our budget.

There goes your research money, your sports, your departments funding to grow and offer more classes for you to further pursue your education. Though it may seem that Boise State officials are not addressing this and therefore do not support women, they do. They are trying to secure our funding for our education.

If you want to help make Boise State a better place, then please guide your energy into addressing the root problem, the Idaho Legislature.

We have elected officials that support and share the same values as Scott Yenor and these same elected officials vote to defund and lower Boise States budget for all kinds of wack reasons. Last year one of the reasons we lost funding was for indoctrinating students about social justice.

If you dont want people like that to continue to stay in positions of power, then start educating yourself about what is happening at Idahos capitol and start contacting your representatives and let them know how you, as their constituent, want them to vote on bills that concern higher education and womens rights.

If you are from Idaho, find out who your legislators are (maybe they are one of the 52 that voted to pass HB364) and contact them about supporting higher education and womens rights. Especially if you are outside of Ada County.

If you are not from Idaho, register to vote in this state, get involved in this communitys elections. As you reside here, these legislators create laws that directly affect you and your community. Help Idahoans create a better community.

For everyone, when you see organizers asking you to send a letter to your representative, please please please take the time to do so. I hope now you can see more of how these things affect us, especially marginalized communities.

Support organizations that fight to increase education funding, fight for womens rights, voting rights and whatever else you want to see change for the better. You can do this by donating your time, energy and uplifting their voices and sharing whats happening with a friend or two.

Sustainable change starts when you start taking action to address root causes.

With all this said, I want to express extra appreciation, especially as a woman in engineering, for all the staff and faculty at Boise State and within the community who immediately spoke up and are trying to make a change.

Dont let this energy die. We have a long way to go before we make sustainable change.

More here:
Opinion: To address Yenor, direct your efforts toward the legislature - Boise State University The Arbiter Online