Category Archives: Free Speech

Brent Harold| Columnist

I've stood on the very stage in Chautauqua, New York,where Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times last month.

When I was young my grandparents used to take me and my sister to Chautauqua, a 150-year-old summer resort emphasizing lectures, music and other cultural recreation, for a few weeks in the summer. I've always owed them hugely for those memorable, influential seasons.

Along with other kids I would hang out at the Amphitheatre, where famous people would be invited to speak or otherwise perform, hoping for autographs. Perhaps there were kids hoping to score Rushdie's autograph last month.

Chautauqua defined and defines itself as in the world but not of it. During my first, idyllic visit World War II raged. The attack on Rushdie feels like an attack on the very meaning of that Brigadoon-like venue.

One of the instructive sayings I learned when young didn't all middle-class children? was: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. That is: develop a thicker skin before resorting to physical retaliation. For most of my life, that seemed axiomatic.

But the distinction between words and physical actions is a nave one, a false dichotomy. As those murdered in 2015 at the magazine Charlie Hebdo for drawing satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed discovered, names words, art can hurt enough that those who don't have a witty comeback in kind may resort to sticks and stones.

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Salman Rushdie learned the same thing when his words provoked thefatwadeath sentence. (I've always wondered if he has wondered if he could have put the offensive part of his novel in a gentler way without hurting the book but avoiding the life-transforming reaction.)

The freedom of speech issue is more complicated than sticks and stones suggests.

I've written this column for almost 30 years now, very much in the same innocent spirit as sticks and stones, of Chautauqua, or Charlie Hebdo. Greatly appreciative that I get to have my say, and also sort oftaking it for granted because this is a free speech democracy.

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Many years ago, in my first few years as a columnist, as rarely happened, I got a phone call in reaction to a column. I had written about angry men. I suggested that we might be a less violent nation if we didn't as a culture tend to glamorize violent men as sexy in a macho sort of way ("Go ahead, make my day!"). We should instead begin seeing such men as we had come to see smokers, a category that had formerly included the sexiest of celebs, as self-destructive unfortunates with yellow-stained fingers.

When I picked up the phone I was assaulted by one of those violent men, calling to object, as far as I could make out through the abuse, to my call for de-glamorizing his kind. Since it was a phone call it was just words, But the words sputtered obscenities suggested that if we were in person, it would be sticks and stones I'd have to worry about. It was sobering. Since Trump I've received many a sputtering, hateful email, a less aggressive medium than a phone.

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I think about that when I read about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, or all the murders of Mexican journalists (from 2000 to 2017, 104 killed). I realize that if I lived in Mexico, as painful as it would be as a writer not to have my say about cartel and government abuse I doubt I would be writing a column like this. As much as I admire their courage, as far as I'm concerned, being a Mexican journalist is above and beyond the call of writerly duty. Mexico as it is constituted doesn't deserve journalists. But of course a huge majority of Mexicans, poor, vulnerable, more endangered by government than helped by it, need all the help they can get.

Mexican journalists know how misleading it is to dichotomize words and actions. Talking the talk is walking the walk. Words are actions.

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Journalists and other practitioners of free speech in the U.S. have had hard going given the dominance of social media and the politics of fake news. But still, in crucial contrast with Mexico or Putin's Russia, we are, to my knowledge, not afraid for our lives. But there's no reason to think that will continue to be true if Trumpism is ratified in coming elections. If, as many think, a free press is essential to the maintenance of democracy, it would be the next to go.

I wonder: how would it go? How would we (will we?) get from our current situation to the plight of the press in Mexico or Russia? And at what point in that trajectory would I prudently stop practicing freedom of speech, it having become less free if practitioners have to pay with their lives.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him atkinnacum@gmail.com.

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Opinion/Harold: Sticks and stones, free speech and writing under the threat of death - Cape Cod Times

The paradox of democracy by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing is a disappointing book. The New York Times made me aware of it, promising an analysis of what impact digital media have on democracy. Therefore, I hoped the book would outline the pros and cons of digitalisation. Unfortunately, the two authors use a far too simplistic notion of democracy and largely shy away from considering how exactly the Internet is modifying political communication.

Normally, I do not review books that I consider to be failures. In this case, however, I want to point out crucial fallacies because both topics the essence of democracy and the impact of digital media are of vital relevance. Ill start by summarising the authors core thesis and then elaborate on what they get wrong about Internet media in this blog post. In the next, Ill discuss why their idea of democracy is incomplete.

Gershberg and Illing argue that democracy is always fragile because it is defined by the freedom of speech. This freedom allows people to criticise governments and demand change. That is healthy, as they point out, because it allows grievances to be tackled in peaceful and constructive ways. The downside, however, is that the freedom of speech can also be turned against democracy itself, with authoritarian actors undermining not only elected leaders, but the political system itself. Populist demagogues, according to the authors, are doing exactly that.

On this basis, they argue that liberal democracy has died. They define liberal democracy as an order in which powerful media and strong institutions reinforce the existing order by ensuring that public discourse does not become erosive. In their eyes, newspapers and broadcasting stations no longer dominate public discourse the way they did the second half of the 20th century and the Internet has introduced an era of truly free speech. Editorial offices no longer serve as gatekeepers. Everybody is free to express themselves online, and conventional ideas of civility no longer apply. Indeed, the two authors even argue that democracy has become more democratic because masses of people are now venting frustration, anger and even hatred online without restraint. Whether statements are true or not matters less than whether they resonate, according to them.

Gershberg and Illing state that any political order ultimately depends on the underlying political culture. It is true that democratic institutions depend on public expectations, so they are indeed only as strong as peoples faith in them is. In this fundamental sense, the authors theorem of democracy being permanently at risk is correct. What Gershberg and Illing miss is that institutions can and should shape public discourse too. Moreover, not every message that is legally permitted is legitimate. The two authors fail to consider how disruptive information can and indeed should be challenged systematically.

The core reason that so much populist propaganda is spreading online internationally is that the US Congress has exempted Internet platforms from liability for the content they make available. US law matters internationally because many of the most important Internet companies are based in the States and we have no international regulation. Conventional media houses can be held accountable for disinformation they spread, but that does not apply to social media platforms. Legislation thus could and should limit the tide of fake news propaganda.

Germany experienced two totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century, first Nazism and later, in the eastern part of the country, communism. We have learned that democracy must be able to defend itself. As a result, a legislative reform in Germany has obliged social media companies to take down within 24 hours any hate-speech post that they are made aware of. This is binding law and no longer an issue of corporate self-regulation.

Much more could be done institutionally. Given that we know that free speech can threaten democracy, readers should always be able to find out who is responsible for any kind of published information. On social media platforms, we often do not know. Accounts may be fake after all, and the platform itself is not liable.

The notion, moreover, that the Internet has facilitated truly open media is wrong. No, not everyone is equal in the digital public sphere. Gershberg and Illing basically claim that everyone can post what they like and that Internet corporations basically only give people what they want. They do not discuss the role that algorithms play, even though algorithms downplay some topics and promote others. If you invest in Facebook advertising, for example, the Facebook algorithm will ensure that your posts get more attention. Not everyone has the money to do so, but some can spend heavily.

The full truth is that Internet users pick from the choice that the algorithms present on their screens, but they hardly become aware of what is not shown. If you follow us on Facebook, you can check for yourself by comparing what D+C/E+Z content appears on your timeline with what we post on our profile page and what we publish on our website. One thing you will notice is that the Facebook algorithm does not appreciate D+C/E+Z headlines that appear even mildly controversial.

The algorithms are secret. As users, we do not fully understand their biases, though we do know that they serve corporate interests (see Ndongo Samba Sylla and myself on http://www.dandc.eu). The algorithms are designed to maximise profits by attracting users attention. So even while supposedly controversial topics on our website are downplayed, we also know that YouTube and Facebook have a tendency to drive a persons radicalisation by offering gradually more extreme content with an eye to keep users hooked.

It is also common knowledge that Russian bot farms make divisive messages go viral in western democracies. To what extent does such automated programming in a foreign nation amount to free speech that western democracies must accept? The book offers no answer.

It also ignores that disinformation tends to be particularly bad in languages other than English. The half-hearted self-regulation social-media platforms use so far hardly apply to posts in Spanish, Swahili, Amharic, Hindi, Tagalog, et cetera. Moreover, democracy subverting strategies are sometimes tested and pioneered in developing countries and emerging markets (for the example of the Philippines, see Alan C. Robles on http://www.dandc.eu). At the same time, Internet corporations are obviously keen on staying in business in Latin America, Africa and Asia, so they are doing their best not to offend autocratic leaders there. Algorithms have a pattern of accelerating anti-minority agitation in many countries, while slowing down criticism of the government.

Gershberg and Illing do not tackle these issues at all. Accordingly, they do not discuss how they could be tackled by institutional means. Instead, they muse about how radical rhetoric can essentially undermine the democratic order that allows it to spread. In my next post, Ill explain what they misunderstand about democracy.

Reference Gershberg, Z. and S. Illing, 2022: The paradox of democracy Free speech, open media and perilous persuasion. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press

Hans Dembowski is the editor in chief of D+C/E+Z.euz.editor@dandc.eu

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Freedom of speech and the internet | D+C - Development + Cooperation - D+C Development and Cooperation

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EXCLUSIVE TikTok, the popular social media app with close ties to Communist China and Chinese state media outlets, has silenced at least 11 pro-free speech organizations, according to the Media Research Center.

The Media Research Centers CensorTrack database tracked bans on TikTok and found "many groups came under fire for supposedly running afoul of TikToks leftist apparatus" in recent years.

"The Chinese Communist Party-tied TikTok is muzzling conservatives and free thinkers by shutting down their accounts, typically with no explanation," MRC researcher Gabriela Pariseau wrote.

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TikTok, the popular social media app with close ties to Communist China and Chinese state media outlets, has permanently banned at least 11 pro-free speech organizations, according to the Media Research Center. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The MRCs CensorTrack database "found that TikTok canceled accounts associated with no fewer than 11 pro-free speech organizations since January 2019. Satire accounts, various pro-free speech groups and commentators, pro-life groups and even the MRCs own MRCTV account, are among those that TikTok shut down," Pariseau wrote.

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The 11 pro-free speech organizations or leaders impacted include Lt. Col. Allen West, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, Live Action, MRCTV, PragerU, Students For Life of America, The Babylon Bee, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, Timcast IRL and Young American Foundation, according to CensorTrack. Many of the account holders were notified of a "permanent ban," without an option to appeal, but eventually restored months later without explanation.

"None of the 11 permanently banned organizations in this report received an explanation why. Though the platform sometimes claims that censored users violate so-called hate speech or integrity and authenticity policies, TikTok often gives no explanation for its seemingly arbitrary banning of user accounts," Pariseau wrote, adding that other organizations that have condemned communism or supported the Second Amendment have also been banned or silenced.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TikTok, available to millions of Americans through Apple and Google online stores, is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, an organization that FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asserts is "[beholden] to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRCs surveillance demands."

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The Media Research Centers CensorTrack database tracked permanent bans on TikTok. (Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

"TikTok banned 11 of a total of 14 (79%) censored organizations mentioned in this report. It banned five of those 11 organizations more than once," Pariseau wrote.

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The banned accounts all received the same notice, according to CensorTrack, which simply stated: "Your account was permanently banned due to multiple violations of our Community Guidelines."

Pariseau added that "no further explanation or reason for the permanent ban" was offered. When accounts are suddenly restored, no explanation is given why TikTok reversed course, either.

In 2021, the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) group said a video in support ofKyle Rittenhousewas censored and then removed by TikTok before ultimately being restored. According to YAL, no explanation was given for the removal of the video beyond accusing it of containing "illegal activities and regulated goods," likely referring to the image of Rittenhouse carrying his gun during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020.

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 05: Federal Communication Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Communications and Technology Subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill December 05, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Getty Images)

Last month, Forbes surveyed hundreds of LinkedIn profiles for employees of TikToks parent company ByteDance and found that at least 300 workers had previously heldpositions in Chinese state media and 15 of them currently work for both.At the time, a ByteDance spokesperson told Forbes that hiring is decided "purely on an individuals professional capability to do the job."

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TikTok has come under increased scrutiny as U.S. officials continue to warn of the national security threat the app poses. The FCC's Carr in June called on the CEOs of Google and Apple toremove the app from their stores, citing reports that suggest the app harvests "swaths of sensitive data."

TikTok recently admitted that employees outside the U.S. could access user information, but insisted that such access required "robust cybersecurity protocols and authorization" from its U.S. security team.

Fox Business Peter Aitken, Timothy Nerozzi and Fox News Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.

Brian Flood is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent tobrian.flood@fox.comand on Twitter: @briansflood.

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TikTok has silenced 11 pro-free speech organizations while muzzling conservatives, study finds - Fox News

In 2017 Suzanne Fortier made headlines as the Principal of McGill University during the Andrew Potter affair. Potter, a former editor of the Ottawa Citizen, was hired in 2016 to direct the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), the mandate of which includes hosting annual conferences and other public events. In March of 2017, Potter published a column in Macleans that portrayed Quebec as an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society. Two days after the article appeared, Potter, although he remained a professor at McGill, stepped down as director of MISC, triggering widespread concern that Fortier had pressured him to do so.

Fortiers retirement last week as McGills Principal is a fitting occasion to revisit the Potter affair and through it her legacy as it concerns academic freedom. Fortier is one of the countrys most distinguished university administrators. Prior to coming to McGill, she was president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and chair of the World Economic Forums Global University Leaders Forum, to name but two of her many honours. Her handling of the Potter case suggests she holds an alarming view of academic freedom, one that, given Fortiers prominence, risks fostering an academic ethos in which the ability of scholars to speak out on matters of public concern is undermined. Credible sources suggest that Fortier not only violated Potters academic freedom but did so in a way that highlights deeper structural problems with academic employment in Canada.

Potters Macleans piece appeared on a Monday. The next day, McGill administrators woke up to waves of angry emails. Some came from faculty and other members of the campus community, but a greater number were from the wider public, including alumni, mainly Francophone, who are upset, as one of many internal McGill emails obtained by the news site Canadaland noted. The emails, running to over 600 pages, were obtained through an Access to Information request. They reveal that alumni and others were threatening to cut off donations and demanding Potter be fired.

The uproar saw the schools administrators go into crisis mode; a flurry of messages were sent to and from Fortiers office. After a meeting with his dean to discuss the fallout from his article, Potter wrote to his institutes board of trustees, apologizing profusely for its unwarranted generalizations and other shortcomings. In that email, also among the cache released to Canadaland, Potter noted how much he valued his job: being Director of the MISC is an enormous privilege and responsibility, the dream job of a lifetime, he wrote. This description matches the impression I had formed of Potter when he invited me to present at MISCs annual conference the previous month (I also knew Potter slightly 20 years ago, when we were both Toronto journalists). He clearly took pride in running the institute and was brimming over with ambitious plans for the future.

According to Fortier, however, Potter asked to meet with her the day after he apologized and during that meeting volunteered his resignation. As she put it in a letter to the Canadian Association of University Teachers three months after the affair, he had, on his own, come to the conclusion that what he had done was incompatible with his role as Director, prior to meeting with me. (Potter and Fortier both declined to provide comment for this article, Fortier through a spokesperson.)

In addition to offering a version of events in which she did not retaliate against Potter, Fortier was at pains to make a second claim. It was that because Potter was not just a professor but the director of a McGill institute, he did not enjoy the same level of academic freedom as rank-and-file faculty.

We have an institute that is there to promote discussions between people who come to the table with very different perspectives, Fortier said in a 2017 interview with the Globe and Mail. It is not a role to provoke, but to promote good discussion. Remarks that embroiled the institute in controversy would interfere with the institutes ability to uphold its mission. If an institute director was too outspoken or provocative, therefore, while it would not be right to fire them, it would be acceptable to remove them from their managerial position. As Fortier put it in a meeting of McGills Senate addressing the Potter controversy, the University may, through the relevant institutional procedures appropriate for each case, replace academic administrators who are no longer able to discharge their responsibilities effectively.

Fortiers defence, in sum, was two-pronged. She did not demand that Potter resign his directorship. But if she had, it would have been fine anyway. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

Problems with Fortiers cramped view of academic freedom were noted in a report on the Potter Affair written by University of Manitoba professor Mark Gabbert. Gabberts report, which was commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), relied on a review of public documents as well as further materials obtained by the CAUTs own Access to Information request. Gabbert observed that a widespread view of academic freedom is that it protects the ability of all academics to speak out on controversial subjects, including in the media, regardless of their administrative duties. As a CAUT policy statement cited by Gabbert puts it, [faculty] who continue as members of the academic staff of their institutions while fulfilling administrative roles enjoy the full protection of academic freedom. A letter to Fortier signed by 10 directors of different McGill institutes, also cited by Gabbert, expressed a similar view.

Fortier issued a one-sentence statement in response to the CAUT report. We disagree with the reports conclusions with respect to academic freedom at McGill University, she told Inside Higher Ed. Gabberts carefully researched report received no media attention in Canada, perhaps because the news cycle had moved on by the time it appeared in 2018.

This is unfortunate. Academics sometimes need to draw attention to problems at their own institutions. They therefore need the freedom, as Gabbert writes, to continue to criticize a given policy or practice even while being obliged to implement it. The Fortier doctrine, as Gabbert terms Fortiers narrow view of the freedom of academics who participate in university management, renders academic freedom a secondary value to managerial conformity. It would strip academics who perform administrative duties of the freedom to criticize their institutions, even though such freedom is necessary to prevent universities, with have a responsibility to sustain vigorous research and inquiry, from becoming just another business.

Potters hiring letter was among the documents released to Canadaland. It states nowhere that his academic freedom would be reduced by accepting a directorship. After his column attracted the attention of an angry public, the reaction of McGills administration must therefore have been a surprise to him. As Gabbert describes that reaction, over the course of several weeks, the University developed and promoted a theory of the conditional academic freedom of academic administrators. Fortier and her administration thus essentially free-styled a revised version of academic freedom, one that, conveniently, released them from standing up for a faculty member. Gabbert concludes that Fortiers doctrine is contrary to the academic freedom rights of the Universitys academic administrators and of all members of the McGill faculty.

Fortiers handling of the affair was problematic in a further way, unmentioned by Gabbert. Suppose we grant for the sake of argument that the Fortier doctrine is correct. Even if Potter should have faced repercussions, there are the separate questions of how quickly he should have faced them, and how severe they should have been.

Experienced institutional managers have ways of riding out a controversy. Fortier for example might have attempted to follow a 30-day rule, which says that employees who are mobbed online (or, as in Potters case, by email), should keep their jobs for 30 days, to give the controversy a chance to die down. (Its a rule that free-speech advocate Angel Eduardo says should be written into some employment contracts.) Potter lost his directorship with extraordinary haste, only two days after his article appeared. In addition, the consequences for his career were stark: unlike most people who go into academia primarily to become professors and only later drift into administration, Potter had come to McGill specifically to direct the institute.

The problem with the Fortier doctrine in other words is not merely that it represents a doubtful understanding of academic freedom, bad as that is. It is that Fortier appears to have invoked her doctrine to justify a high-stakes, one-strike-youre-out response, without even attempting to delay Potters crucifixion until a time when calmer discussion, and a less extreme resolution, might have been possible.

Fortier was the first francophone to lead McGill, a traditional bastion of Anglo Quebec. A week before her appointment was announced in 2013, a group of nationalist academics published an open letter calling for major cuts in provincial funding for McGill and other Anglophone universities. A cynic might wonder if the Fortier doctrine is a smokescreen, and the real reason Fortier advanced it was to protect the university budget in a challenging funding environment. If so, there is no evidence that Potters departure made a difference to McGills provincial funding. Moreover, preserving a university budget by disregarding academic freedom saves the village by setting it on fire.

The more disturbing possibility however is that Fortier actually believes her doctrine. James Turk, a Toronto Metropolitan University professor who now directs that universitys Centre for Free Expression, has suggested that Fortiers lukewarm support for academic freedom is a sign of the times. As he wrote in 2017, Fortiers view that academic administrative leadership and provocative intellectualism shouldnt mix is becoming more common among university presidents. Turk, a former executive director of CAUT, has criticized Universities Canada, a body representing university chief executives such as Fortier, for endorsing a minimalist view of academic freedom, one that, much like Fortiers, demotes it to second place after what Universities Canada calls institutional requirements.

If the Fortier doctrine is false then it matters a great deal whether she pushed Potter out. While she has claimed that her administration regretfully accepted Potters resignation, more than one media outlet ran stories at the time describing his decision to step down as involuntary. As an editorial in Macleans that drew on unnamed sources put it, The use of the word resignation here is spurious. In 2017 a source inside McGill with knowledge of the case wrote to me with a narrative of events closer to the Macleans version than to Fortiers. While there was no immediate threat of Potter losing his job as a professor, when it came to the separate matter of his directorship, according to my source (who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions), Fortier in a meeting with Potter bluntly ordered him to resign from the position immediately, or she would tell the MISC board to strip it from him.

Other sources, who are not anonymous, support this version of events. Ken Whyte, publisher of Sutherland House and founding editor of the National Post, was on the MISC board when the scandal broke (I have a book under contract with Whytes press). Whyte, who resigned from the board over Fortiers handling of the affair, was on the phone with Potter when he was walking to the meeting that marked the end of his directorship. My impression was that resignation was the furthest thing from his mind, Whyte told the National Post in 2017. That was not the outcome that he was going for. He was hoping to see if he could keep his job. Similarly, the evening after Fortiers meeting with Potter, Daniel Weinstock, a tenured McGill law professor and a friend of Potters, said on Facebook that Potter was asked to resign a few hours ago. (Weinstocks remark was quoted in the 2017 cache of McGill emails, in a message from one administrator to another that asked, Has Andrew already told everyone?)

Potter himself never publicly confirmed that he was pressured to give up his dream job. But the nature of his position would have made it risky for him to speak candidly. He was what at McGill is known as an associate professor (professional), a position which, as his appointment letter noted, does not confer eligibility for tenure. Potters initial term was for three years. The renewal of his professorial position after that would require approval from administrators who worked under Fortier. Upsetting her could thus result in his contract not being renewed, which would leave him unemployed.

Potters arrangement, that of not being eligible for tenure, is increasingly the norm in Canadian universities. According to a 2018 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a left-leaning think tank, just over 53 per cent of all faculty appointments in Canada are of this kind. As the reports authors write, reliance on contract faculty appears to be largely driven by choices made by university administrations, raising questions about the role of universities as employer and educator. Our findings lead us to the conclusion that the heavy reliance on contract faculty in Canadian universities is a structural issue, not a temporary approach to hiring.

Most of these contract positions, unlike Potters, are part-time, low-wage positions. (Potter enjoyed the further advantage that after six years, his professorship could become indefinite). But, like these precariously employed academics, as the CCPA report terms them, Potter lacked the protection of tenure, one of the purposes of which is to offer faculty a strong safeguard against ill-considered demands by administrators. There is now a large academic class in Canada that will never know that protection. Potter, as a former newspaper editor, had an unusually high profile for a contract academic. If an administrator could quietly extract a resignation from him, imagine what pressure can be brought to bear in lower profile cases, which are less likely to make news.

Potter is a talented journalist capable of raising hell in print when the occasion calls for it. But the nature of his employment was such that the one story he dared not publicize when it counted most was his own. This limited the ability of the McGill faculty association, CAUT and similar organizations to defend his academic freedom. Advocacy organizations are most effective when they advocate for someone who can confidently speak out on their own behalf, which Potter declined to do. Similarly, media defences of Potter, which did appear, were less effective than they would have been had they included testimony from Potter countering Fortiers narrative. Fortier, by contrast, faced no corresponding limitation on her ability to disseminate her version of events. Indeed, she enjoyed the benefit of the considerable resources McGill has invested in PR, as Gabbert put it.

When the Potter affair was unfolding, the Canadian Association of University Teachers wrote to Fortier to express its concern. If Professor Potter was pressured or coerced into resigning, this would represent one of the most significant academic freedom cases in recent decades, its letter said. I believe Potter was pressured, and the outcome was indeed significant, most obviously for Potter, who has been quietly working as a professor at McGill even since, but also one would guess for other contract academics at McGill.

As for Fortier, if she did not compel Potter to resign, nothing in her actions afterward suggests any concern about the damage done to academic freedom, or to Potters career, or for the chilling message his resignation sent to other academics. Andrew Potter the person and academic freedom the principle were both inconvenient to her, so she treated both in a callous way. If she panicked and made a mistake in her handling of the situation, she did not, as far as we know, face formal consequences for it, and she is unlikely to ever face such consequences now.

Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His book, Against Canadian Literature, is under contract with Sutherland House.

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He wrote a controversial piece while in a leadership role at McGill. What the universitys response means for free speech on campus even years after...

Joe Biden during his primetime presidential address. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Dear Reader (Especially the newest member of The Dispatch team, Allahpundit!),

Full disclosure: Im vexed. So Im going to try to preventor delaygoing full splenetic by easing into my first point.

Remember those idiots who wanted to burn the Quran? I probably need to be more specific because I vaguely recall there were a lot of idiots who wanted to burn a lot of Qurans. But the moment I have in mind was probably this one in 2010, when a tiny fringe church led by Terry Jones in Floridagrandly called the Dove World Outreach Centerannounced it would burn the Islamic holy book to make some point it thought was clever. In 2011, the church literally put the Quran on trial for six hours, found it guilty of all charges, and set it aflame.

It was a dumb, hateful, un-Christian (spare me the lectures about the book burning at Ephesus) stunt intended to insult as many Muslims as possible. And it succeeded. Fatwas for Jones death were issued. A handful of protesters in various cities died in some riots. No doubt some terrorist attacks on Americans, Westerners, or Christians were at least partly inspired by the burning.

The whole thing sparked an intense debate about free speech, and I hated it. I hated it because it forced all sorts of people, institutions, and governments to take sides on the question of free speech for no productive purpose. It didnt bring anyone closer to Christianityor to free speech. Yes, forced to choose, I sided with his right to do it, but I was far more passionate in my belief that he was wrong to do it.

In other words, being right about a principle isnt enough. Think of it this way: We all have a constitutional right to be bigots. In no way is that a defense of bigotry. Burning the Quran forced people in favor of free speech to question their commitment to free speech. People in favor of free speech were put in the unnecessary and ugly position of defending an unnecessary and ugly act.

Right, rights, and wrong.

Some of the most important questions in our politics often get turned into arguments about whether so-and-so has the right to do wrong as a way to avoid answering the question of whether they were right to do it in the first place.

For instance, in both of Donald Trumps impeachment trials, his defenders argued that the president was within his rights to do the things he was impeached for. In the first impeachment, they argued that since he can bully a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponent for partisan ends, any further debate is irrelevant. He has the authority to withhold congressionally approved military aide in service to that bullying, so lighten up. In the second impeachment, people actually argued that since the frickn president of the frickn United States merely came close to the Brandenburg standard for incitement and (arguably) didnt cross that line, senators shouldnt rely on any other standard. Never mind that the standards for impeachment arent laid out in criminal law, but in the informal rules of statesmanship, stewardship, and decency. Also put aside the fact that allowing a president to come a hairs breadth short of meeting the exacting standards of criminal incitement is to declare you have no real standards at all.

The same thing happened during the Clinton impeachment. Diddling an intern isnt against the law, countless partisans argued, so we have no right to apply any other standard. Indeed, any other standard becomes a mere matter of taste and partisan persnicketies.

Time and again, the question of whether a presidentor some goofball pastorshould do X is dismissed as pharisaical partisan sanctimony and replaced by lawyerly procedural sophistry. Its pathetic, cowardly, and dangerous. Yes, Im all for the rule of law. But the rule of law is the skeleton of the body politic. The flesh, blood, and sinew of a healthy society are the morals, customs, standards, and principles that define not just our culture, but our conceptions of right and wrong. If the only argument you can muster in defense of someones action is that they can do it, youre conceding that you have no other defense.

Soul of a campaign speech.

Which brings me to Joe Bidens speech last night. I thought it was a perfectly defensible campaign speech. I agreed with some of his points, particularly at the beginning. His spirited defense of Americas founding and the Constitution was welcome to hear from the leader of the party that gave oxygen to the 1619 Project and often talks of the Constitution as if its a relicat least whenever it proves inconvenient to their preferred policies.

But it wasnt billed as a campaign speech. It was an official primetime presidential address, introduced by the Marine Band and guarded by Marines. I believe it was the first such official address in 40 years that neither made news in the form of an official policy announcement nor responded to a major event.

Some people point to Donald Trumps acceptance speech of the 2020 GOP nomination at the White House. I dont know if that was billed as an official presidential address, nor do I care. First, his speech would have been covered by the networks no matter what. Second, and far more important, I thought using the White House as a political convention venue was grotesque and indefensibleand so did all of the people citing it as a precedent for what Biden did last night.

Do you get the point? Countless defenders of Bidens speech say he was perfectly within his rights to use a national monument and a presidential address for partisan purposes because Trump did that kind of thing all the time. Theyre right that Trump did that kind of thing all the time, but if you condemned it for Trump, why are you celebrating it for Biden? For instance, when CNNs Jeff Zeleny matter-of-factly noted Bidens break with White House tradition, former Sen. Claire McCaskill blew a gasket.

This is the kind of garbage politics you get when everything is reduced to can rather than should. Your team did wrong and got away with it, so our team can now do wrong, but well call it right because its our team doing it now. A morality that cites the authority of your enemies sins as proof of the same sins virtue when theyre yours is not, in fact, morality. As I wrote in the Wednesday G-File:

My problem with whataboutism is that its virtually never a substantive retort. Its an effort to paint simple truths as simplistic distortions. To take an example from today, lots of people respond to eminently credible charges that Donald Trump mishandled classified information by saying, What about Hillary Clinton?

Well, what about her? If what she did with her server and emails was badand it wasthat doesnt make what Trump allegedly did good. If you were outraged by her mishandling of classified documents, saying Trump did the same thing should be an indictment of Trump, not an exoneration.

This hypocrisy goes down to the bone on both sides. Right now, a huge swath of right-wingers are whining that Biden was mean to them because Biden said mean things about Republicans or MAGA Republicans. We can argue whether Biden was right or wrong about what he said, but my God, spare me the tears. Contrary to some absurd spin that Trump never disparaged whole categories of people, Trump disparaged whole categories of people all the time. Deal with it.

But the problem is much bigger than mere hypocrisy. One of my complaints about the Quran burning stunt was that it divided Americans along partisan lines on an issue that should unite them. We believe in free speech in this countryor at least were supposed to. But because culture warrior right-wingers liked to dunk on Islam and identity politics besotted left-wingers patronizingly made allowances for Muslims they would never countenance for Christians, defending free speech rights got subsumed into the broader partisan food fight.

Biden did something similar last night. He claimed to be delivering a high-minded speech about the sanctity of democracyand some of it was exactly thatbut he included in the stew all manner of partisan ingredients that indisputably ruined the flavor. He tried to connect contempt for democracy with opposition to abortion. He insinuated that if you agreed with him on the high-minded stuff, you should be onboard with his domestic agenda and vote accordingly. He played verbal games about just how many Republicans he was indicting as a threat to democracy, but he clearly wanted the persuadable voters he was talking to hear pretty much all of them. To be sure, he had all the requisite to be sure caveats that will give partisan defenders permission to defend his partisanship. But I doubt theres a political professional on either side of the aisle that didnt see that speech for what it was: a rallying cry for Democrats going into the midterms and an effort to make the election about Donald Trump. It was unifying if you agree with him, but that is true of virtually every partisan speech ever given.

By melding a partisan agenda with an attack on what he claimsand probably believesis a real threat to democracy on the cusp of the general election campaign, he made the debate about the threat to democracy even more partisan. And thats reprehensible.

Donning the cynics hat.

But it might work. As a political strategy, making the election a choice between the forces of Trumpism and the forces of Bidenism is a hell of a lot smarter than making the election a referendum on Biden and his policies.

It could also backfire.

The Democrats fortunes were improving in no small part because Trump was back in the news thanks to his own unforced errors. I think a wiser course of action might have been to stay out of it. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, when your enemy is beclowning himself, best not to get in the way. It would be very bad for Bidenand the countryif Trumps legal troubles seemed like the fruit of political persecution, which is precisely why Republicans are trying to spin it that way.

One of the nice things about cynicism is it keeps you from taking things too personally. Save for my passionate and patriotic desire for Trump to never soil the White House again, I really dont care which team benefits from all of this. I dont have a partisan rooting interest here, which is why I see hypocrisy in every direction.

Victims progress.

But let me change gears a bit and address what I think is the generator of a lot of the hypocrisy soaking our politics: victimology. Conservatives love complaining about the liberal cult of victimhood. Indeed, many have convinced themselves that victimology is solely an animating spirit of the left. But conservatism these days is shot through with its own cult of victimhood.

The whole deplorable fad was an exercise in victimhood. J.D. Vances struggling campaign rests on pandering to the grievances of people who blame their problems on them. The idea that you have to vote for Trump because the FBI was unfair to him is nothing if not some barmy epiphenomena of a collective persecution complex, as is the potted idea that if you insult or offend Trump, youre insulting or offending the 74 million Americans who voted for him. Kevin McCarthy demands an apology from Biden for saying some Trump supporters are semi-fascists. We can argue about the numbers, but it strikes me as unequivocally true that some Trump supporters are, in fact, semi-fascists. CPAC had some installation art intended to make peoples hearts bleed for the January 6 rioters. They even ran an electronic banner wallowing in their victimhood status proclaiming, We Are All Domestic Terrorists. Just this week, Trump promised that if elected he would issue pardons and an apology to the convicted criminals he encouraged to assault the Capitol. I cant believe I have to say this, but if you willingly beat up a cop or defecated in the halls of Congress, you are owed neither an apology nor a pardon.

Trumps cult of personality fuels this cult of victimhood, but its a larger phenomenon. The rights obsession with media bias and cancel culturedespite the obvious merits of many complaintsis only understandable in this larger context. Lots of avowed Christians see their victim statusand the politics that attend itas an outsized source of their identity. White supremacists are nothing if not peddlers of theories of their victimization.

Inherent to seeing yourself as a victim is bemoaning the unfairness of the system, double standards, etc. This only makes sense. If you thought you deserved your plight or some insult, you wouldnt see yourself as a victim. Losers only whine like victims when they think they lost unfairly. The insulted only complain when they think the insult was misplaced.

Theres plenty of room to complain about unfairness or even injustice without crossing the line into a quasi-religious theory that denies individuals of their personal agency and personal responsibilitytwo concepts that are foundational to both conservatism and the American project. Conservatives see this clearly when criticizing the left, but they are blind to it on their own side. Thats in part because populism has become institutionalized on the right, and populism as a political and psychological phenomenon is always about perceived victim status. They are against us, and we are righteous.

Various & Sundry

Im going to invoke authorand editors privilegeand give a small example of the above in defense of The Dispatch and specifically one of our writers. A few weeks ago, we ran a piece by our excellent reporter Alec Dent about the young new right in Washington. In the course of writing the piece, Alec came into possession of a recording of a Twitter Spaces chat in which Nate Hochman, a former Dispatch intern and current writer at National Review, engaged in a colloquy with Nick Fuentes, an infamous racist, antisemite, and white supremacist (though he denies these things through an incels coporaphagic grin). Alec included some quotes from that exchange and a fulsome statement from Hochman admitting his error in engaging Fuentes too generously and, at times, seemingly approvingly. Hochman says he did so to goad Fuentes into a more fulsome debate. Whether that was a good idea or notI vote notHochman admitted the error, and we quoted the admission at length. I said some really stupid things, which I don't actually believe, he said.

Personally, I think nothing good is gained from treating fever swamp bigots as a faction of the right with some valuable contributions to make, either as part of some broader popular front or as worthy interlocutors within the right. Over the years, National Review, sometimes painfully and tardily, exerted a lot of time and energy arguing for bright lines and fortified borders between such voices and respectable conservatism.

Bethany Mandel disagrees, and thats fine. She has every right to embrace a different strategy in dealing with bigots, and she thinks more is to be gained by trying to talk them out of their wrongness. This might be a commendable interpersonal strategy, but I think its profoundly wrongheaded as an institutional, public approach. We simply differ on this. Everyone has a right to their opinion.

But not to their own facts. In a piece for The Spectator, In defense of the canceled Nate Hochman, she accuses Dent and The Dispatch of shoddy practices. Note: She doesnt say the story is wrong. She concedes that the Dispatchs reporting is accurate and adds that Hochman admits as much.

But she says that we tried to cancel Hochman. Having excellent sources when it comes to my own motives, not to mention our internal editorial discussions, I can report that this is false. Mandel might have known this if she actually called anyone at The Dispatch for comment, as youd think she might in a piece opining on good journalistic practices.

She also says that the Dispatch sent the quotes, without context, to Hochmans employers and claims that the Fund for American Studies (TFAS) revoked Hochmans Robert Novak Fellowship based on an email Dent sent TFAS asking for comment about Hochmans praise for Fuentes. (In contrast with his manful admission of error, Hochman has recently publicly complained about the unfairness of Dents email, too.) The problem is that this isnt true either. Dent talked with TFAS at great length and on numerous occasions and provided the organization with the full 75-minute audio file (which Hochman is free to release if he thinks more context will cast him in a better light or us in a worse one). This leaves out whatever other fact-finding TFAS did on its own. Similarly, we provided National Review with ample additional contextas did Alecs actual article. Mandel is right that we didnt provide more context beyond an initial email to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another sponsor of Hochmans work. But thats because ISI refused to talk to Dent, apparently preferring to feed a misleading tale to Mandel, who promptly wrote it up credulously.

This is all very inside baseball and not worth even this much time or space. Nate Hochmans a promising young writer, and I wish him well. But I think that helike a lot of people on the very young, very online, so-called new rightis misreading the moment in myriad ways that are good neither for him nor conservatism. I think he made a mistake, and I was glad he admitted as much. I think he should have left it there and Mandel probably should have too. But as his initial admission seemed to confirm, hes not a victim and Dentsby all accounts accuratearticle doesnt make us victimizers, never mind cancelers. And no amount of tiresome and uninformed grievance peddling on social media is going to change that fact.

Canine update: The quadrupeds had a grand time in Maine and New Hampshirewhen there wasnt thunder. Gracie got in some very important sleeping. I think Pippa may more properly be called a New English Springer Spaniel, she likes that neck of the woods so much. Though who can doubt how much shed like the mother country? But Gracie really didnt like the drivein either direction. She complained vocally for hundreds of miles. But man, shes such a great cat. On the drive back, the Fair Jessica would let her out in grassy secluded spots and the Queen would find a shady spot to pee before trotting back to the car. Still, I think the days of long drives for Grace are at an end. Meanwhile, everyone is still struggling a bit to get back into the familiar routines here at home.

ICYMI

Last Fridays comforting G-File

Last weekends Ruminant

The Remnant with Sarah Isgur

Deconstructing Bidens student debt proposal

Grading Gorby on a curve

The Remnant with Katherine Mangu-Ward

The Dispatch Podcast on the DOJs disclosure

And now, the weird stuff.

Fiduciary trouble

Casually

Devilled

Customer service

Goated

Go here to read the rest:
Rights and Wrongs - by Jonah Goldberg - The G-File - The Dispatch

Ukraines largest book festival is to partner with Hay festival for the first time, with Hays CEO describing it as an act of solidarity across art, culture and audiences.

Lviv BookForum, organised by Ukraines Publishers Forum, is in its 29th year and will take place from 6-9 October, both in person and online.

As digital partner, Hay will broadcast all the festivals 15 events free online, and has also curated a number of events with an international digital audience in mind.

Julie Finch, who has replaced Peter Florence as CEO of Hay festival, said she hoped the events would bring a new audience to Ukrainian writers and their work, while offering a space for a dynamic exchange of ideas between different cultural perspectives.

She went on to describe the partnership as an act of solidarity across art, culture and audiences.

Lviv BookForum will have a hybrid programme this year, with guests appearing in person or in virtual live appearances. It will blend the greatest contemporary Ukrainian writers with internationally acclaimed literary figures in conversations ranging from art in times of conflict, memory, gender-equality, loss, corruption, imperialism, and hope, said an announcement from Hay.

Sofia Cheliak, programme director at Lviv BookForum, said the festival would give people the chance to learn more about Ukraine. Using culture and literature is a way we can explain what is going on [here], she said. Its our chance to tell our true story and who we are and why we are fighting, why its important for us to be independent.

The programme for the festival is incredible said Cheliak, and she hoped the event would be the beginning of Ukrainian literature promotion.

Authors who have appeared at Lviv BookForum in previous years include Ukrainian writers Oksana Zabuzhko and Ivan Dziuba and international authors Paulo Coelho and DBC Pierre.

Hay, which named the DECs Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal as official charity partner of its main festival in Wales in May and June, has also specially curated five online events pairing icons of global literature with their Ukrainian contemporaries.

Finch said that with freedom of expression under attack globally, organisations such as Hay festival and Lviv BookForum are more important than ever before as catalysts for change by exercising freedom of speech and the tolerant exchange of ideas.

Hay festival champions free speech, empathy and curiosity, she added. Russias invasion of Ukraine is not only an attack on Ukraines territory and people, it represents a desire to destroy the very idea of Ukraine, its right to generate its own culture, identity and stories.

The partnership is the beginning of a longer term relationship where we can showcase Ukrainian artists, writers and thinkers internationally, said Finch.

Lviv is the largest city is western Ukraine and the sixth largest in the country. It has remained largely safe from fighting, although in April Russian rockets smashed into the city, killing seven people.

The partnership between Hay festival and Lviv BookForum is part of the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture, which is supported by the British Council and the Ukrainian Institute.

David Codling, director of the Season of Culture at the British Council, said the season would celebrate cultural exchange between our two countries and the vital importance of free expression and independent critical discourse at this time.

Ukraines literary culture always has much to contribute but more urgently than ever now, he added.

The seasons other events include Cheltenham literature festival and the International Book Arsenal festival in Kyiv partnering for a special Ukraine Day event, celebrating emerging voices in Ukrainian literature; a Ukrainian to English literary translation summer school at the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, bringing together translators and authors; and a Ukrainian programme at the 2022 Huddersfield contemporary music festival, focusing on contemporary Ukrainian opera and chamber music.

The Lviv festival events broadcast online will be live-captioned in English and Ukrainian, with viewers able to choose which they would like. Post-event, captions in Spanish will be added to all sessions.

The full programme for Lviv BookForum will be announced in mid-September on the Hay festival website.

See the rest here:
UK and Ukraine book festivals partner to protect freedom of expression - The Guardian

Ian McEwan was on holiday on the remote coast of north-west Scotland when he heard the news that his great friend Salman Rushdie had been attacked in New York. His wife, the writer Annalena McAfee, let out a cry from the next door room in the small hotel where they were staying. The numbness of his first response was quickly followed by a feeling of horrible inevitability: How could I have been so blind? Like Rushdie, McEwan had hoped the threat of the fatwa was over. The tragedy of this is Salman always wanted to get back to having an ordinary writing life, and that seemed to have happened, McEwan says on a video call a week after the incident. The 74-year-old novelist is back in his Cotswolds home, surrounded by books and looking slightly beaten up after his first bout of Covid.

The grim effects of coronavirus added to his sense of visceral disgust at the violence of the stabbing. It all seemed one with my own perception of it, he says. A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to push a knife deep into someones eye. It is beyond the edge of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to disprove in any way, could bring you to the point.

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwans epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novels far-reaching look at postwar British history. It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman, he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasnt an issue: We didnt even deny religion, it just didnt come up. So when the fatwa was decreed, it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.

Although not originally part of the notorious gang of writers Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens who made their names in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to their critics), Rushdie arrived a few years later with the publication in 1981 of Midnights Children, which transformed both British and Indian writing, and won the Booker prize that year. It was amazing, it expanded horizons, McEwan says. Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief, he adds. So we all got on straight away.

Audio extract: Lessons Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook of Ian McEwan's forthcoming novel

Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp3

McEwans ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which global events penetrate individual lives, of which the fatwa was a perfect example. It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech, he says. It was a very steep learning curve. It seems strange to remember that 1989 was also the year the Berlin Wall came down, a central event in the new novel. The fatwa just preceded a rather wonderful time when democracies were sprouting out across Europe, free speech was on the rise, free thought was on the rise, he says. Everything has changed from 33 years ago. We now live in a time of heavily constricted, shrinking freedom of expression around the world: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, you name it. Plus the self-inflicted free speech matter of the rich west.

It is exactly this trajectory from youthful optimism to disillusionment and despair that the novel charts, following the life of his central character, Roland Baines, from the Suez and Cuban crises right up to Brexit and the pandemic. McEwan finished writing Lessons before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or else he would have included it as a further example as part of the trashing of his hopes, which he compares to the thwarted dreams of Orwells generation at the end of the 30s. If he was still writing, the attack on Rushdie would be in there, too. It is horribly consonant with the times, he says. We live in an age of casual death threats, of the kind that washes towards JK Rowling, for example. For some lone, insufficient individuals, its a short step to carry out some terrible act. This is a very dark moment.

Things look much brighter when I meet McEwan in his immaculately white Bloomsbury mews back in July. He is tanned and healthy from a recent walking holiday (he is a committed hiker) in the Lake District with McAfee.

He shows me a photograph of Lingcove Bridge, which they visited, the site of a late scene in Lessons, when Roland, on the eve of his 70th birthday, has a tussle with a Tory peer and is pushed into the river. That was me feeling I was defeated by Brexit, McEwan admits. He describes Lessons as a sort of post-Brexit novel. Our world has got smaller, he says. The ceiling in our rooms has lowered by two feet. Its the day before Boris Johnson is forced to resign, and he tells a jolly story about a delightful hour he spent discussing Shakespeare with the former prime minister (who is writing a biography of the playwright), after a dinner, long before Brexit. He needs to get back to that book, McEwan says drily.

Few interviews fail to note the disconnect between the genial man in linen shirt and jumper, who might just as easily be an eminent scientist, and his enduring reputation as contemporary fictions prince of darkness. Over his 50-year writing life, which has included winning the Booker in 1998, becoming a fixture on school reading lists and blockbuster films, not least Atonement, McEwan has been accorded the position of national novelist; national psychologist even, a tag he winces at now. Lessons is teasingly alert to the perils of being white, hetero and old as a writer today.

If there is no longer a commotion when his novels dont make it on to the Booker longlist (Lessons hasnt), hes not complaining. We had our time, he says sanguinely. My generation, when we were first publishing in the 70s, it was very boyish. It was a tight world. Were all in our 70s now. We cant complain. And I especially cant complain. And for very good reason. We got the prizes and some money, and we had the writing life. And now its this tsunami of other voices. Everything has opened up wonderfully.

He started writing Lessons in 2019, after a long publicity tour for Machines Like Me. All he wanted to do was stay at home and write throughout 2020. One should be careful what one wishes for, he deadpans. All novelists are locked down. Lockdown is what we do. But I never thought Id have such opportunities for total immersion, seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, broken only by walking the dog. I really wanted to write a long novel, to relax into it, to live in it.

Coming in just shy of 500 pages, it is far longer than McEwans characteristically short, smart and saturnine novels, as John Updike summed up his work in a 2002 review of Atonement. So much for his assertion in previous interviews that he was going to spend his 70s writing novellas. I think you have written your last novel, a writer friend wrote after reading the end result. Even though I hope you will write more. As McEwan concedes, you know what he means. It is a novel of the backwards look.

Billed as the story of a lifetime, it is in many ways the story of McEwans life. Ive always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels, he explains. I thought, now Im going to plunder my own life, Im going to be shameless. Before readers assume that he was abused as a boy, or went through any of the misfortunes that befall Roland, parts of McEwans past are fictionalised and interwoven with the narrative. It is certainly my most autobiographical novel, but at the same time, Roland is not me. He didnt lead my life, McEwan explains. But in a way he lives the life I might have led. All of us have these moments, when we think about them later, where we could have gone down some other path. I could so easily not have become a writer.

While McEwans previous historical novels have zoomed in on specific periods unforgettably the second world war (Atonement), the cold war (Sweet Tooth, Black Dogs, The Innocent), the 80s (Machines Like Me) and post-9/11 (Saturday) Lessons marches through the political landscape of postwar Britain, taking in Thatcherism, New Labour (Tony Blair with his copious hair, good teeth, an energetic stride) to the new populism (Trump and Johnson are pointedly unnamed). He wasnt aiming to write the British equivalent of the Great American Novel: We dont have that phantom bearing a whip that American writers have. Instead he wanted to show how the actions of those all too human gods, our political leaders, can wreak havoc on mere mortals: a piece of dust as it were from their heels flies in your eyes.

The opening section, a minutely played out affair between the young Roland and his 25-year-old piano teacher at boarding school (very like the one the author attended), which Roland ony later realises was abuse, is vintage McEwan: psychologically gripping, erotically intense and morally troubling. On the brink of the Cuban missile crisis, the only question among Rolands classmates after lights out in the dormitory was what if the world ended before you had it? It. Roland isnt about to take any chances: chasing up overtures made by the seductive Miriam, he fetches up at her front door. The pair embark on a summer of throbbing duets and Lawrentian allusions. This was what the far-off belligerent gods, Khrushchev and Kennedy, had arranged for him, Roland reflects helplessly.

This story was not, McEwan makes clear, drawn from his own life, but from an abandoned earlier novel, part of which became On Chesil Beach, also set in 1962. Having taken on the biggest contemporary issues the climate emergency as comedy in Solar (2010), artificial intelligence in Machines Like Me (2019) it was only a matter of time before McEwan turned his dark-seeking antenna to the subject of historical child abuse. He admires Zo Hellers 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, about a relationship between a teacher and one of her pupils. But the decision to have a female abuser was not simply McEwanesque contrarianism. I wanted to write it from the point of view of the victim, to show the consequences for the rest of the life, he says. But I didnt want to appropriate a womans experiences.

McEwan hadnt intended to write about his family history, but his discovery in 2002 of a brother, David Sharp, a bricklayer, was so powerful an illustration of the novels central idea that he found he couldnt step away. His parents came from very poor, hard-working families: both left school at 14, his father, David (Robert in Lessons), to become a butcher boy, before joining the army, where he worked his way up to major; his mother, Rose, went into service as a chambermaid. They met when his father was training in Aldershot and his mother was already married. After her first husband was killed fighting they married, but never reclaimed the baby who had been born as a result of their wartime romance. Wanted, Home for baby boy, age 1 month; complete surrender, reads the heartbreaking advertisement his mother put in the paper offering her illegitimate child for adoption.

McEwans father, with his Brylcreem and spit-and-polish ways, as well as the frustrations of a highly intelligent man deprived of formal education, which led to drinking and often violent anger, and his mothers anxiety and unexplained sadness, all that just fell on to the page. By the time the secret was finally revealed, his father was dead and his mother was in the late stages of dementia. My mother was worried, frightened and sad as a person, he says now. There would be moments when shed relax and laugh, but I think this matter hung over her all her life. When the story became news in 2007, it was widely described as like something out of an Ian McEwan novel. Now it is.

As a boy in Libya, growing up in an obscure crevice of history, as he puts it in the novel, the Suez crisis gave the young McEwan his first taste of freedom and adventure, when he spent a rapturous two weeks at a military camp, an experience he gives to Roland. It was just bliss, he says now. The long shadow or the light it cast over the rest of my life meant I never wanted a full-time job. This became clear to him after a visit to the careers office at the University of Sussex, when he was presented with a chart of civil service salary scales from 22 to retirement: Just looking at that, I knew I could never do anything like that. Ever.

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Rolands peripatetic adult life unfolds alongside his childhood. It is 1986 and Roland is in his mid-30s. Theres a hosepipe ban and ominous news of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl. Rolands wife, Alissa, has suddenly deserted him and their seven-month-old son to return to her native Germany to fulfil her ambition to become the greatest novelist of her generation.

Ive read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards, he explains. If you read Doris Lessings cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.

While McEwan was never left to bring up a baby single-handed, both his sons lived with him from their early teens after a messy custody battle with his first wife. Unlike Alissa, he never felt it was either/or in terms of his writing. His office door was always open If children come in and out, they rapidly find its very boring and he would work in the school hours. Theres no messing around, theres no third cup of coffee, he says. Today he keeps the door of his study, a converted barn, open for his sheepdog, who also likes to wander in. He works on two desks an old kitchen table and a headmasters desk he picked up in a junk shop in London in the 70s one reserved for the screen and one for longhand. He maintains the old disciplines: Do an hour, then empty the dishwasher, he advises firmly.

Decline and death inevitably creep into the final section of the novel. Ive had so many friends die of cancer, he says, the complicated last three years, the intrusiveness of the treatment. He wanted to pay tribute to their amazing bravery and incredible sense of purpose. He has also lost many people to less talked about smoking-related illnesses, he adds ruefully: his father; Malcolm Bradbury, his creative writing teacher at UEA; Ian Hamilton, his editor at the New Review; and he was at Hitchenss bedside shortly before he died.

He compares ageing to driving a car: The car is your body and one day you notice the wing mirror has come off. And someones taken the front bumper away in the night, and the passenger side door no longer opens. Then theres systemic change of course. Rushdies age makes the attack particularly cruel, he says when we speak later. People use the phrase life-changing injuries. This is very hard at 75. Being 75 is life-changing enough. It is going to take a good while for him to get to the other side of this and face the new kind of life.

Does he worry about his own legacy? I dont know, maybe. Honestly? Yes. Id like to continue to be read, of course. But again, thats entirely out of ones control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But Ive had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they havent reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, Start worrying about your legacy because its not looking good from here.

He was greatly saddened by what he describes as the assault on Updikes reputation; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. Those problematic men who wrote about sex Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.

Surely the reputations of his generation, many of them the self-styled British disciples of those problematic American men, none of whom have been shy about writing about sex, now seem similarly precarious? Weve become so tortured about writing about desire. Its got all so complex, he says. But we cant pretend it doesnt exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether its Flaubert youre reading or even Jane Austen. People will be compelled, theyll just have to write about it. He recalls listening to a young writer on the radio who said how difficult it is to write about male desire. I thought, oh, poor kid.

McEwan, like Alissa in the novel, was criticised for comments about gender at the end of a speech on identity at the Royal Institution in 2016. I said: Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of most people with penises as men, he recalls now. I did say most men, I didnt say all. He was accused of inciting violence against transgender people. Violence! he exclaims now.

It is important to resist the temptation to think because youre coming to an end, therefore the world is, he cautions. But its very, very tempting. He finds it chastening that many young people also feel fearful about the future, and timid in the face of history. Theres no big project, as it were, for a new kind of society. He worries about the return of Trump, or someone even worse, he says. We could be looking at a very authoritarian state, that could probably swing it so the Democrats are never in power again.

He recently set himself the challenge of writing a short story in which he had to be optimistic about the future up to 2060 (there are a couple of strategic nuclear explosions cheery). I thought, am I just writing a delicious fantasy? That old saying that most things arent as bad as you fear? But he is reluctant to make any real predictions. The world is so connected now its like a giant mind, he reflects. And just as with our own minds, or with our own fates, we can never predict what were going to do next collectively.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the new novel, it is that true comfort and happiness are to be found at home, and Lessons is touching on the quiet consolations of domesticity. One of the few compensations for getting old, he says, is becoming a grandparent. Like Roland, McEwan is a doting grandfather (he has eight grandchildren). Just when you think that youre never going to meet anyone new, you have this love affair, he says. There is another explosion of love in later life. Even having plundered his life for Lessons, he doesnt rule out writing a straightforward memoir: I keep saying I will and then I dont.

He is a firm believer in what, borrowing VS Pritchetts phrase, he likes to call determined stupor between novels: I just read and soak things up. His greatest pleasure when he is not writing is walking. Over the years he has hiked all over the world, especially across America. But he never feels totally free in the US. One of the things he most loves about England is the footpaths, historically laid down over the centuries. Every village more or less is connected; in every town, if you walk to the edge of it there is a footpath. He often hikes with a close friend with a bottle of good red wine in his rucksack. To be high on a ridge with a glass of wine in your hand absolutely transforms the landscape, he says looking wistfully into the distance. Suddenly its your vast drawing room. Its your space.

Lessons by Ian McEwan is published by Vintage on 13 September at 20. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Hell be discussing it at the Southbank Centre in London on 14 September; tickets from 15.

This article was amended on 3 September 2022. Ian McEwan has eight grandchildren, not four as an earlier version said, and the bridge in the photograph that features in Lessons is Lingcove Bridge, not Lincoln Bridge. The author told us the VS Pritchett phrase he quoted as productive indolence should have been determined stupor; this has been corrected.

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Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: Its beyond the edge of human cruelty - The Guardian

CONTACT

Edith Bullard, chief communications officerebullard@acluva.org804.418-1852

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. In a challenge brought by the ACLU and the ACLU of Virginia on behalf of local booksellers, ajudge rejected an effort to label two books as obscene and illegal to sell or lend in the state of Virginia.

The Circuit Court for the City of Virginia Beach rejected two petitions arguing that Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. K. Maas are obscene by holding that the statute pursuant to which the petitions were filed violated First Amendment free speech rights and the constitutional right to due process. Likewise, the Circuit Court vacated a lower court determination of probable cause for obscenity.

We are pleased with the outcome of todays proceedings, said Matt Callahan, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Virginia. The First Amendment protects literary expression, even when some people find portions of the works difficult or objectionable. All people should be able to choose what they wish to read.

The proceedings were initiated pursuant to Virginia Code 18.2-384a law that has not been used for decades, but which purports to allow any individual to file a petition claiming that any book is obscene. Under the statute, a book could have been deemed obscene and its distribution could have been made criminal without any noticemuch less an opportunity to be heard on the issue to the countless bookstores, book lenders, and other distributors who would have been governed by the result.

The books being challenged through two separate obscenity proceedings in Virginia state court are Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, an autobiographical graphic novel about adolescence, gender and sexuality, and A Court of a Mist and Fury, a fantasy romance novel by Sarah J. K. Maas. Gender Queer was the most banned book in the United States in 2021, according to the American Library Association.

The ACLU, the ACLU of Virginia, and Michael Bamberger of Dentons, and general counsel to Media Coalition, filed a motion challenging the proceedings on behalf of amici curiae Prince Books, Read Books, One More Page Books, bbgb tales for kids, American Booksellers for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers Inc., Authors Guild, Inc., Freedom to Read Foundation, American Library Association, and Virginia Library Association.

Click here for more on the proceedings.

# # #

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Virginia Judge Rejects Obscenity Proceedings Against Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury - ACLU

xkcd: Free SpeechPreorder What If? 2 (all US preorders eligible) and enter our contest for a chance to win a dedicated comic and What If blog post!

Free Speech

[[A person speaking to the reader.]]Person: Public Service Announcehment: The *right to free speech* means the government can't arrest you for what you say.[[Close-up on person's face.]]Person: It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, - or host you while you share it.[[Back to full figure.]]Person: The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.[[Close-up.]]Person: If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.[[Person, holding palm upward.]]Person: It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole,[[A door that is ajar.]]Person: And they're showing you the door.{{Title text: I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.}}

This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.

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xkcd: Free Speech

Teens and adults in the United States differ on a key issue tied to online speech and its consequences. A majority of teens ages 13 to 17 say a welcoming, safe online environment is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. A separate survey of Americans 18 and older shows that adults views on the same question are more evenly divided.

Overall, 62% of teens say people being able to feel welcome and safe online is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online, while 38% hold the opposite view. By comparison, half of adults say a welcoming and safe online environment is more important, while a similar share (47%) put more value on people being able to speak their minds freely online.

Adults ages 18 to 29 differ from their younger teen counterparts on this question. Some 57% of adults in this age group favor the idea that people should be able to speak their minds freely online. Those 65 and older, by contrast, are the only age group whose views are similar to teens: 58% of these Americans say feeling welcome and safe online is more important.

Pew Research Center conducted these studies to understand teens and adults views about online speech and the broader online environment. This analysis relies on data from two separate surveys. For the analysis of teens, the Center conducted an online survey of 1,316 U.S. teens from April 14-May 4, 2022, via Ipsos. Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents who were a part of itsKnowledgePanel, a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses.The teen results are weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with parents by age, gender, race, ethnicity, household income and other categories. The research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board, Advarra, which is an independent committee of experts that specializes in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

For the separate analysis of adults, the Center surveyed 3,581 U.S. adults from March 21-27, 2022. All adults who took part in the survey are members of the Centers American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey of adults is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about theATPs methodology.

Here arethe questions used for the survey of teens,along withits methodology; andhere are the questions used for the survey of adults,andits methodology.

But there is also nuance in peoples views of online speech. For example, when asked which of two statements about the way people react to offensive content online comes closer to their view, the majority of teens (59%) think that many people take such content too seriously, as do 54% of adults. Smaller shares in both groups believe offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal (40% of teens and 44% of adults).

Similar to teens, about six-in-ten adults ages 18 to 29 (62%) say offensive content is taken too seriously, as do 56% of those ages 30 to 64. By contrast, just 41% of adults 65 and older say the same.

These new results are from two Center surveys one of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted April 14-May 4, 2022, and one of U.S. adults conducted March 21-27, 2022. They come in the wake of heightened bipartisan calls for tech companies to address cyberbullying and create a safe environment for teens. They also come amid continued court battles over whether schools can impose consequences on adolescents for what they say online and broader debates about people being banned by social media platforms or canceled by their peers.

In both surveys, Americans views on these topics break sharply along partisan lines. But regardless of what party they identify with or lean toward, teens are more likely than adults with similar partisan leanings to say allowing for safe spaces online is more important than being able to speak freely online.

Some 71% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party say this, compared with 62% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults. About half of Republican-identifying or GOP-leaning teens (49%) also back a welcoming and safe environment 13 percentage points greater than the share of Republican and GOP-leaning adults (36%) who hold the same view.

Among both teens and adults, though, there are substantial differences by party. Republican teens are 23 points more likely than Democratic teens to say being able to speak freely online is more important. Among adults, Republicans are 26 points more likely than Democrats to say the same. Democratic adults instead are more likely to favor welcoming, safe spaces by the same margin.

On the question of offensive content, teens and adults views within each party are similar. Gaps between parties emerge for both teens and adults: Democratic teens are more likely than Republican teens to say that offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal (50% vs. 27%), and there is a similar pattern for Democratic versus Republican adults (55% vs. 32%). By comparison, 72% of Republican teens and 67% of Republican adults say many take offensive content they see online too seriously.

Among adults, views on these topics within each political party have continued to evolve over the past several years. In 2017, when Pew Research Center first asked adults these questions, Democrats and Republicans held largely similar views about the balance of online safe spaces versus freedom of expression. That changed in 2020 and the partisan split on this question has widened from 16 to 26 points in the past two years. On the question about offensive content online, the partisan gap among adults has slightly narrowed since 2020 but remains pronounced. Adults overall views on this question have remained largely unchanged during this period.

The changes since 2020 are largely driven by those at the ideological poles in their respective parties. The share of conservative Republican adults who say free speech is more important in this context has risen from 57% in 2020 to 68% today, even as the view that offensive content is taken too seriously among that group has dipped somewhat from 74% to 67%. Liberal Democrats are now slightly more likely to think offensive content is taken too seriously than in 2020 (rising from 31% to 39%), but the majority of this group think its too often excused as not a big deal (61% say this today, compared with 68% in 2020).

Views of the online environment that teens and adults encounter also vary by race, ethnicity and gender.

For example, Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than their White peers to say that feeling welcome and safe online is more important than free speech online, and that offensive content is too often excused as not a big deal.

Among adults, those who are Black (60%) are more likely than either White (50%) or Hispanic (46%) adults to prioritize feeling welcome and safe. Black adults are also more likely than Hispanic adults to say offensive content is too often excused as not a big deal (51% vs. 38%). The views of White and Hispanic adults are statistically similar on both questions. (There were not enough Asian teens or adults in the samples to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this analysis.)

Teen girls are also more likely than teen boys to prioritize feeling welcome and safe and to say offensive content is too often excused. Similarly, adult women (58%) are more likely than adult men (42%) to value a welcoming, safe environment and to feel people too often excuse offensive material as not a big deal (50% vs. 38%).

In many cases, differences are still present when accounting for other relevant characteristics that may be playing a role. Differences in by party and gender remain among teens on both questions when controlling for other factors, as do differences by race and ethnicity for views of offensive content. Among adults, party, age and gender matter after controlling for demographics.

Note: Here arethe questions used for the survey of teens,along withits methodology; andhere are the questions used for the survey of adults,andits methodology.

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Views of free speech and online safety: Teens, adults differ - Pew Research Center