Category Archives: Free Speech

Video: Buncombe County school board meeting sees anti-mask protesters

Buncombe County resident Stephanie Parsons protests during a meeting with the Buncombe County Board of Education on Thursday, August 5, 2021.

Maya Carter, Asheville Citizen Times

Todays batch of burning questions, my smart-aleck answers and the real deal:

Question:In Buncombe County's recent mask mandate order and the city's, too it gives an exemption for First Amendment rights. What does that mean? It seems kind of nebulous...

My answer: Who doesn't like a nice splash of nebulousness in their mask mandate? I just wish they would've added some language along the lines of, "The mandate also does not apply to those wishing to remain in touch with their inner child, hoping not to inhibit the free flow of chi or just wanting to ride free and not be hassled by the man."

Real answer: The county and city recently did pass mask mandates for public places. The city order essentially mirrored the county's, which did offer mask exemptions for several activities. It reads:

Worship, religious, and spiritual gatherings, funeral ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, and other activities constituting the exercise of First Amendment rights are exempt from all the requirements of this order.

More: Protesters object to Buncombe County Schools' mask mandate, attempt to 'overthrow' board

This being the land of the free, I can see where some folks, whether they're customers, employees, or just folks trying to ditch the mask because it "inhibits their free speech," may try to take advantage here. The mandate is meant to be pretty narrow, though.

"This language is straight out of language used in the Governor's Executive Orders," Buncombe County spokeswoman Lillian Govus said via email. "The language in the Executive Orders speaks primarily to mass gatherings, and specifically exempts fundamental First Amendment rights. The U.S. District Court essentially held that the state cannot restrict religious gatherings of 10 or more people."

More: Asheville City Schools clarifies COVID-19 protocols ahead of first day of school

The county's new order "simply requires face covering in public spaces and does not prohibit or define gatherings," Govus said. It implements public health officials' recommendation to require people to wear face coverings indoors in public in communities with substantial or high transmission.

Buncombe County, like many other counties nationwide, has seen COVID-19 cases surge in recent weeks as the delta variant spreads.Health officials told county leaders last week the rate of COVID-19 infections have increased six-fold, or 500% in a month's time.

In mid-July, the county was seeing 34 cases per 100,000. Last week the number had skyrocketed to 261 per 100,000, a rise attributed tothe coronavirus' highly contagious delta variant, which some data showcauses more severe illness than earlier strains.

TheCDC also strongly encourages social distancing again.

"When preparing the order, we felt it was important to clearly indicate that there is no intention to abridge the First Amendment rights of persons by implementing this new local order requiring face coverings in public spaces," Govus said.

By way of review, here's what the First Amendment says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

For Asheville, City AttorneyBrad Branham responded, first noting the city wanted to maintain consistency with the county by mirroring the county directives. The First Amendment exception "is intended to be very limited in nature," Branham said.

The city believes strongly in the need for the most recent mask mandate, but while also safeguarding the constitutional rights of our residents and visitors," Branham said via email. "We do not consider the mere act of mandatorily wearing a mask to infringe upon a persons freedom of speech.Therefore, this exception would be limited to circumstances in which a person was prevented from fully exercising their free speech rights because of the mask.

I can imagine anti-maskers trying to fall back on all sorts of "free speech" arguments to shed their masks, but Branham said the exemptionis meant to be very narrow in scope.

"We can envision very few, if any, circumstances in which this would arise, but wanted to ensure that recognition of personal freedoms be included in the document," Branham said. "To reiterate, this language should absolutely not be read to mean that disagreement with the mask mandate gives someone the right to refuse to wear a mask under the guise of the First Amendment.

Judging by the lack of masks I saw at the Arden Walmart Saturday evening, I'd say folks are doing just fine in finding plenty of ways around the mask mandate. I suspect most folks would just claim a "medical exemption," if asked.

But honestly, I don't think stores, restaurants, bars or other establishments really want to fight the mask fight anymore. I'm still wearing a mask indoors, because it's the right thing to do to beat down the delta variant, but I'm probably in the minority these days.

It's a sad statement about society, folks. For nearly all of us, wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience.

Please, just do it.

This is the opinion of John Boyle. To submit a question, contact him at 232-5847 or jboyle@citizen-times.com

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Answer Man: In mask mandate, what's the meaning of 'First Amendment rights?' - Citizen Times

Sonali Kolhatkar speaks with Rahul Mahajan is the author of two books on the Iraq war: Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond and The New Crusade: Americas War on Terrorism. He also teaches at University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and the US Foreign Policy and Empire Correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali.

Meanwhile there are reports of the warlord resistance to the Taliban in the northern Panjshir Valley and fears of a new civil war breaking out. Former U.S. backed Afghan president Hamid Karzai is in talks to hand over power to the Taliban.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan cost more than 200,000 lives and 2 trillion dollars. Today, as an expert and author on Afghanistan, Ill be exploring how the war was doomed from the start with my colleague and long-time foreign policy expert Rahul Mahajan. Rather than an interview style format, Rahul and I will be engaging in a dialog about the war.

Rising Up with Sonali is a radio and television show that brings progressive news coverage rooted in gender and racial justice to a wide audience. Rising Up With Sonali was built on the foundation of Sonali Kolhatkar's earlier show, Uprising, which became the longest-running drive-time radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles hosted by a woman. RUS airs on Free Speech TV every weekday.

Missed an episode? Check out Rising Up on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

#FreeSpeechTV is one of the last standing national, independent news networks committed to advancing progressive social change.

#FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling, and online at freespeech.org.

Afghanistan Free Speech TV Hamid Karzai Joe Biden Kabul Kabul Airport Panjshir Valley Rahul Mahajan Rising Up with Sonali Sonali Kolhatkar Taliban U.S. Troops United States Withdrawal

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Missteps Defined Every Aspect of the Afghan War - Free Speech TV

Perhaps, like me, you inwardly sigh with the breath of a thousand winds whenever you hear the words cancel culture, as mangled and distorted as the expression has become. If so, know that the people behind Netflixs The Chair are likely sighing too. And yet here they are, presenting a unicorn: a near-perfect television show that clocks in at just three hours, and a comedy-drama that skewers the subject of free speech in academia without taking a side, demonizing a particular group, or descending into tweed-clutching.

The Chair, created by the actor Amanda Peet and the academic and screenwriter Annie Wyman, feels like it could have been a play (Peet has written two). The shows structurefrom introduction to rise to complication to catastropheis pure Freytag, and its setting (the fictional Pembroke College, a frigid northeastern school thats supposedly a lower-tier Ivy) is insular and wood-paneled. In the first episode, Ji-Yoon Kim (played by Sandra Oh) has finally reached a lofty career peak as the chair of the Pembroke English department. Apprehensive and endearingly awkward in a duffel coat, she walks into her new office, unwraps a gift (a nameplate for her desk that reads FUCKER IN CHARGE OF YOU FUCKING FUCKS), and sinks into her new desk chair, which promptly breaks beneath her. The pratfall is also an omen: More than the furniture is rotten at Pembroke.

The college, in fact, is in crisis, and the English department is hemorrhaging enrollments, largely because the majority of its professors are tenured, over 70, and totally unwilling to try to connect with their impassioned Gen Z students and their progressive priorities. On her first day, Ji-Yoon is instructed by the dean to ax the most egregious dinosaurs, including the Chaucer scholar Joan (Holland Taylor) and the American-lit professor Elliot (Bob Balaban). Elliots classes pale in popularity compared with those of his dynamic colleague Yaz (Nana Mensah), and yet hes presiding over her application for tenure. More troublesome still is Bill (Jay Duplass), a rock-star professor of modernism in a state of catastrophe after his wifes death. During one packed lecture, Bill satirically performs a Hitler salute while considering absurdisms power against fascism, sparking a viral meme and a furious debate about free speech on campus.

To The Chairs credit, it satirizes without picking a team, and resists the urge to make anyone ridiculous. (Its also the rare gift that allows people with an English degree to feel fleetingly relevant, although it should come with a trigger warning for anyone who was ever lumbered with The Dream of the Rood.) Elegantly and briskly, Peet and Wyman skewer all the reasons campuses might be igniting in discontent: professors held to different standards depending on their race and gender. Students made very aware by their mounting debt and limited opportunities that things are harder for their generation than they were for any other. Elder statesmen who suddenly realize how little they matter now. I used to bestride the world like Colossus, Elliot mournfully tells his wife in one scene, as she brandishes a box of adult diapers at him. Well, now youre going to bestride it in Tranquility Briefs, she replies.

Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point

Within its tight frame, the series packs in more than shows three times its length. Its particularly rewarding in its portrayal of Ji-Yoons personal life: In her 40s, after breaking up with her longtime partner, she tried for years to adopt, eventually matching with Ju-Hee (Everly Carganilla), whom she named after her dead mother. The sore points and conflicts between Ji-Yoon, her Latina daughter, and her elderly Korean father, Habi (Ji-Yong Lee), are thoughtfully and sweetly rendered. Oh has always excelled at playing women who reject the idea that things should be any way other than how they want them to be, and Ji-Yoonharried, focused on work, snappy, paranoid that her daughter doesnt really love herembodies a kind of motherhood thats rarely seen on-screen but is deeply gratifying nonetheless.

What truly sells The Chair, though, is how fast and funny it is while throwing around a legion of informed ideas about a well-trodden subject. Stop saying gag order! an exasperated Ji-Yoon yells at a younger teachers assistant after being excoriated on the front pages of the student newspaper. Then she pauses, catches herself, and diplomatically adds, Actually, no, say it as much as you want. Classes on Moby-Dick turn not to themes of monomania and open-mindedness, but to whether Herman Melville was a wife beater. The most talented people are given the hardest time because their talent allows them to see how urgently change is necessary. Why should they trust us? Ji-Yoon says of the students protesting outside her office. The world is burning and were sitting here worried about our endowment. The rifts between the generations seem impassable, and yet the thing the series suggests might unite them is the one thing they can agree on: that whatever art, language, and literature might mean to different people, theyre always worth fighting for.

Go here to see the original:
The Chair Is Netflixs Best Drama Series in Years - The Atlantic

Before Twitter banned thenPresident Donald Trump in response to the January 6 Capitol riot, the platform tried to police his false claims about election fraud by attaching warning labels or blocking engagement with them. A new study suggests those efforts were ineffective at preventing the spread of Trump's claims and may even have backfired by drawing additional attention to messages that Twitter deemed problematic.

Those findings highlight the limits of content moderation policies aimed at controlling misinformation and, more generally, the futility of responding to lies by trying to suppress them. But the researchers think their results demonstrate the need to control online speech "at an ecosystem level," with an assist from the federal government.

The study, published today in Harvard'sMisinformation Review, looked at Trump tweets posted from November 1, 2020, through January 8, 2021, that Twitter flagged for violating its policy against election-related misinformation. Zeve Sanderson and four other New York University social media researchers found that tweets with warning labels "spread further and longer than unlabeled tweets." And while blocking engagement with messages was effective at limiting their spread on Twitter, those messages "were posted more often and received more visibility on other popular platforms than messages that were labeled by Twitter or that received no intervention at all."

Sanderson et al. caution that these correlations do not necessarily mean that Twitter's interventions boosted exposure to Trump's claims, since the explanation could be that "Twitter intervened on posts that were more likely to spread." But the results are at least consistent with the possibility that flagging tweets or blocking engagement with them added to their allure. Either way, those measures demonstrably did not stop Trump from promoting his fantasy of a stolen election.

The problem, as Sanderson and his colleagues see it, is insufficient cooperation across platforms. They suggest the government should do more to overcome that problem.

"Taken together, these findings introduce compelling new evidence for the limited impact of one platform's interventions on the cross-platform diffusion of misinformation, emphasizing the need to consider content moderation at an ecosystem level," the researchers write. "For state actors, legislative or regulatory actions focused on a narrow band of platforms may fail to curb the broader spread of misinformation. Alarmingly, YouTube has been largely absent from recent Congressional hearingsas well as from academic and journalistic workeven though the platform is broadly popular and served as a vector of election misinformation."

Just to be clear: Sanderson and his colleagues don't think it is "alarming" when the federal government pressures social media companies to suppress speech it considers dangerous. The alarming thing, as far as they are concerned, is that the pressure, including "legislative or regulatory actions" as well as congressional hearings, is not applied more broadly.

"Political actors seeking to advance a narrative online are not limited to working within a single platform," study coauthor Joshua Tucker complainsin an interview with USA Today. "People who are trying to control information environments and who are trying to push political information environments are in a multiplatform world. Right now, the only way we have to deal with content is on a platform-by-platform basis."

Megan Brown, another coauthor, suggests that the problem could be remedied if social media platforms reached an agreement about which kinds of speech are acceptable. "Misinformation halted on one platform does not halt it on another," she observes. "In the future, especially with respect to the ongoing pandemic and the 2022 midterms coming up, it will be really important for the platforms to coordinate in some way, if they can, to halt the spread of misinformation."

And what if they can'tor, more to the point, won't? Given the emergence of multiple social media platforms whose main attraction is their laissez-faire approach to content moderation, this scenario seems pretty unlikely. It would require coercion by a central authority, which would be plainly inconsistent with the First Amendment. And even government-mandated censorship would not "halt the spread of misinformation." As dictators across the world and throughout history have discovered, misinformation (or speech they place in that category) wants to be free, and it will find a way.

This crusade to "halt the spread of misinformation" should trouble anyone who values free speech and open debate. The problem of deciding what counts as misinformation is not an inconvenience that can be overcome by collaboration. Trump's claim that Joe Biden stole the presidential election may seem like an easy call. Likewise anti-vaccine warnings about microchips, infertility, and deadly side effects. But even statements that are not demonstrably false may be deemed dangerously misleading, or not, depending on the censor's perspective.

The Biden administration's definition of intolerable COVID-19 misinformation, for example, clearly extends beyond statements that are verifiably wrong. "Claims can be highly misleading and harmful even if the science on an issue isn't yet settled," says Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who urges a "whole-of-society" effort, possibly encouraged by "legal and regulatory measures," to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation." Given the many ways that the federal government can make life difficult for social media companies, they have a strong incentive to cast a net wide enough to cover whatever speech the administration considers "misleading," "harmful," or unhelpful.

Meanwhile, the companies that refuse to play ball will continue to offer alternatives for people banished from mainstream platforms, as the NYU study demonstrates. Leaving aside the question of whether interventions like Twitter's perversely promote the speech they target, they certainly reinforce the conviction that the government and its collaborators are trying to hide inconvenient truths. They also drive people with mistaken beliefs further into echo chambers where their statements are less likely to be challenged. The alternativerebutting false claims by citing countervailing evidencemay rarely be successful. But at least it offers a chance of persuading people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society.

Read more:
Since Platform-by-Platform Censorship Doesn't Work, These Researchers Think, the Government Should Help 'Halt the Spread of Misinformation' - Reason

In the last 20 months that the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition has been in power in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has made a conspicuous effort to project himself as a sober leader and the Shiv Sena as an outfit that has evolved from its street-fighting days to take on the mantle of a party of government. That careful image construction, still incomplete, was severely dented Tuesday when the state police arrested Union Minister Narayan Rane and the Yuva Sena, the youth wing of the Shiv Sena was unleashed in response to his decidedly intemperate remarks against the chief minister. The brickbatting outside Ranes Mumbai home, the multiple FIRs filed against him, and his theatrical arrest, were part of an unprecedented drama that spoke of outright abuse and misuse of state power to settle political scores.

It is well known that the Sena and Rane are intimate enemies. Rane, a former Sainik and chief minister, was ousted from the party for opposing Uddhavs anointment as Balasaheb Thackerays chosen successor. When Rane was picked by the BJP for one of four Jan Ashirwad Yatras in the state, it was expected that he would target the Thackerays to prepare the ground for the upcoming civic polls, including for the all-important Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. At first, Sena leaders seemingly took the mature view that he should be ignored, even if his inaugural programme of the tour a visit to the Balasaheb Thackeray memorial in Mumbais Shivaji park was seen to be aimed at provoking the Sena. But even before he made the offensive remark that set off Tuesdays events, the police had, without naming him, started to stack up FIRs against his rallies for violating Covid protocols. After the remark, it was almost as if the Sena calculated that it could make more political capital by reverting to type, flagrantly weaponising its cadres and the government.

If the Shiv Sena has got it terribly wrong, however, the BJP seems ill-suited to mount the moral high ground. It is not just that its own decision to field Rane was precisely aimed at generating heat in Maharashtra, where it has not been able to shake the coalition government despite trying to do so. Its high-pitched denunciation of Sena heavy-handedness even as it distances itself from Ranes controversial remark Devendra Fadnavis compared Sena action to the Taliban, while party chief JP Nadda alleged violation of constitutional values are at odds with its own governments proven preference for blunt instruments against speech it doesnt agree with. At the Centre and in the states where it is in power, the BJP has shown a troubling intolerance of speech that doesnt match its definition of what should be spoken or heard. So dissent becomes anti-national, criticism becomes derogatory, the IPC the states most potent tool to squeeze legitimate spaces. The Sena is clearly the aggressor in the Rane episode and the Uddhav Thackeray government must step back but when it comes to victimhood for political remarks, its the clanging of the pot and the kettle.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on August 26, 2021 under the title State and street.

More:
Arresting Narayan Rane is irresponsible. But a little too rich for BJP to lecture on free speech - The Indian Express

The Governments Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will limit, rather than protect, academic freedom, argue Liz Fekete and Liam Shrivastava

The Government is attempting to take the moral high ground over free speech on campus. But the real purpose of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, is to limit academic freedom and weed out progressive views on campus particularly, though not exclusively, related to racial justice and the teaching of Britains imperial history.

Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, has even compared the fight to ban the wicked ways of the self-appointed thought police and their bigoted views to a contemporary Battle for Britain.

His choice of the word bigoted is pretty rich, given his support for capital punishment and a ban on abortion, and the fact that the bill, it has been argued, would provide legal protection for hate speech.

The bill builds on the Conservatives 2019 manifesto pledge to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities. As such, it signals the role the Government expects higher education to play in cementing its cultural revolution from the right one that revolves around greater acceptance for nationalist and nativist ideas, while asserting a virtue in colour-blindness.

Through the proposed legislation, institutional barriers to the expression of racist and bigoted views on campus will, in effect, be removed alongside the introduction of a new statutory tort for breach of the duty to actively promote freedom of speech. Under the bill, powers are to be granted to the university regulator, the Office for Students, to impose sanctions on universities and student unions, including fines in case of breaches.

Two reports by the influential right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, calling for viewpoint diversity in universities, have provided the justification for the bill and the Governments wider war on woke.

The methodology used for these reports has been criticised for bias within question-framing and for drawing simplistic conclusions designed to generate clickbait headlines. The reports posit a number of claims, including that Brexit-supporting students are victimised and that right-wing lecturers have fallen foul of a structural discrimination that blights their career paths.

Eric Kaufmann, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, co-authored its report on Academic Freedom in the UK: Protecting Viewpoint Diversity. In a recent article for the American conservative magazine National Review, he attacked the progressive authoritarianism associated with woke culture, called on Conservatives to use the law to limit the institutional autonomy of elite institutions such as universities, and set out a legislative framework for equalities where political diversity and viewpoint neutrality is afforded the same legal protection as race, gender and other forms of diversity.

Kaufmann also called on all freedom-minded allies on the left to join with those on the right in a struggle to prevent a woke takeover and progressive conformity.

But, when it comes to free speech, the Government is cryingcrocodile tears. Because, unless academic freedom comes dressed-up in in a patriotic, socially-conservative wrapper, it is quitehappy for it to be eroded through censorship, bans and legal threats. There are a number of recent examples.

The Equalities Minister Kemi Badenochs suggested that teachers who use critical race theory, or conceptssuch as white privilege, could face action for breaking the law.

The Universities Minister Michelle Donelan said that the decolonisation of British history which shecompared to Soviet-style censorship has no place in universities.

The Education Secretary Gavin Williamson instructed school leaders on framing discussions around Israel-Palestine, in a letter which critics claim fails to guarantee the right to free speech and association in relation to Palestine.

Last years Department for Educations guidelines warned schools against using resources from organisations that expressed views harmful to British society or a desire to end capitalism. The guidelines were only placed under review following the threat of legal action. As lawyers for the Coalition of Anti-Racist Educators and the Black Educators Alliance argued in a pre-action letter, banning resources from certain political groups is a clear statement of the Secretary of States political preferences and limits free speech. Teachers could be prevented from using material from campaign groups including Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, thereby limiting anti-racist or environmental teaching on crucial social matters.

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The legal status of another Government challenge to university research has yet to be clarified. It has indicated support for a recommendation by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities to remove funding from university research departments that continue to use the research terms such as BAME or BME (referring to black, Asian and ethnic minority people) in data collection. This attempt to control the funding of university research, in line with a particular ideological view of how race should be conceptualised, is hardly in line with academic freedom.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill intends to shift the focus from protected characteristics in law such as age or race to protecting beliefs, which will essentially reverse hard-won civil rights for minority groups. In doing so, the Government will arguably create a harmful culture on campus for racial and sexual minorities.

The phrase crying crocodile tears derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey. There can be no doubt that, in promoting this bill, it is the civil rights of racial and other minorities and of all progressive groups that are under threat of being devoured.

Liz Fekete is director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of Europes Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right, published by Verso.Liam Shrivastava is communications officer at the Institute of Race Relations

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The Government is Crying Crocodile Tears Over Free Speech On Campuses Byline Times - Byline Times

I cover politics for a living, but Ive also been a fan of stand-up comedy for most of my life. Over the last five years or so, a lot of political comedy has grown stale. I keep asking myself, why is that?

Im tempted to say its because the Trump era was too easy for comics. And yet thats too simple and probably just wrong. Besides, there are plenty of great comics right now. My main objection (and to state the obvious, Im just a fan) is that much of it is predictably partisan. Dont get me wrong, comedians can be political and funny, but the partisan comics have always bored me to death. For me, the best comedy is reflective and honest; it spares no one and nothing.

I recently spoke to Bill Maher, an acclaimed stand-up comedian and the longtime host of HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher, for an episode of Vox Conversations. Mahers a political comic, and clearly a liberal, but Ive always enjoyed his work because Ive never really considered him a partisan, even though conservatives are the butt of most of his jokes. For all of his anti-Republican bits, you also get jabs at the left, like his recent segments on progressophobia and cultural appropriation.

Depending on the day, Twitter progressives are as likely to be pissed off at Maher as MAGA conservatives. And I suspect that has a lot to do with the enduring success of his HBO show, which premiered back in 2003.

We discuss how a guy who donated a million dollars to Obamas presidential campaign, whos been way out front on issues like animal rights and climate change, became a lightning rod. We also talk about the risks of political comedy and why ideology is always a threat to humor.

Listen to our conversation below or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

See the article here:
Bill Maher on free speech, comedy, and his haters - Vox.com

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The government wants you to believe its targeting hate speech, when in reality its targeting free speech

Author of the article:

Free speech ensures that Canadians have the right to tell governments when theyre wrong. While this may be unpleasant for governments, it is absolutely vital in a democratic society.

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Rather than strengthening Canadians rights, the Trudeau government wants to filter free speech through the lens of a bureaucratic superstructure. There can be no doubt that there are bad things on the internet. Child pornography, hate speech, and other such crimes are detestable. But these crimes are already labelled as such through the criminal code with lengthy prison sentences for those who are convicted.

If the federal government wants to review these laws, thats a discussion worth having. However, it is an entirely separate issue.

The government wants you to believe its targeting hate speech, when in reality its targeting free speech. Experts say that the Trudeau governments new proposed online harms law would fundamentally weaken free speech in Canada and would require a costly bureaucratic superstructure to enforce all of the governments new rules.

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As University of Ottawa Law Professor Michael Geistput it, the government seems to treat freedom of speech as a danger to be constrained rather than a right to be defended. The planned legislation wouldcreatefour new government bodies, which would become the foundation of a costly new bureaucratic superstructure.

The new bodies include a Digital Safety Commission, led by a commissioner appointed by the federal cabinet, and an advisory board composed of seven members chosen by the Minister of Heritage. The commissioner and advisory board would be taskedwith identifying content that should not be kept online and would refer that content to a new tribunal.

Does anyone really believe a commissioner appointed by cabinet and an advisory board appointed by the minister of heritage would be completely impartial in identifying what should be removed online?

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Of course not.

If these new bodies were created today, all eight bureaucrats would be appointed by the Trudeau cabinet. Does that sound fair, balanced, and neutral? Some of the powers that would be handed to the new tribunal are reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwells 1984. The tribunal, acting on the recommendations of the commissioner, could order online communication services like Facebook and Twitter to take down any content the government deems harmful.

These platforms would have to address any complaints within 24 hours. Failing to remove content could lead to anindictable offenseand fines of up to$25 million. These undemocratic proposals seem eerily similar to those supported by authoritarian regimes.

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Canadians shouldnt have to rely on a hope and a prayer that bureaucrats appointed by a partisan government will safeguard our right to criticize that very same government. To put the cherry on top of this disastrous cake, the Trudeau governments new bureaucratic superstructure would cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

Online communications services would faceregulatory chargesto do business in Canada, which no doubt will be passed onto consumers.

The governments new proposals amount to a dangerous shift toward state censorship. Canadians, not bureaucrats, should be able to determine exactly how and why they want to criticize the government online. With an election just weeks away, now is the perfect time to have a vigorous national debate about government censorship.

Jay Goldberg is the Interim Ontario Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

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Opinion: Free speech cant be filtered through a bureaucratic superstructure - Financial Post

In 2018 the Camp Fire, the largest and deadliest wildfire in California history, leveled the entire town of Paradise, where nearly 19,000 buildings, mostly homes, were destroyed. The Poor People's Campaign and the California Homeless Union together supported the newly homeless residents. 3 years later, in the midst of yet another devastating wildfire season, what has happened in Paradise and the surrounding communities? Our guests are Anthony Prince, General Counsel for the California Homeless Union, and Greg Shafer, originally from Paradise, who works as a mental health provider and advocates for those made homeless by the fire.

FSTVs Just Solutions features inspiring conversations with activists, community leaders, and others working to make our world a better place. We discuss the many challenges we are facing, while exploring the solutions emerging from the grassroots.

Missed an episode? Check out Just Solutions on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

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From the Ashes - California Wildfires - Free Speech TV

In 2018 the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, leveled the entire town of Paradise, where nearly 19,000 buildings, mostly homes, were destroyed. The Poor People's Campaign and the California Homeless Union together supported the newly homeless residents. 3 years later, in the midst of yet another devastating wildfire season, what has happened in Paradise and the surrounding communities? Our guests are Anthony Prince, General Counsel for the California Homeless Union, and Greg Shafer, originally from Paradise, who works as a mental health provider and advocates for those made homeless by the fire. FSTVs Just Solutions features inspiring conversations with activists, community leaders, and others working to make our world a better place. We discuss the many challenges we are facing, while exploring the solutions emerging from the grassroots. Missed an episode? Check out Just Solutions on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips. #FreeSpeechTV is one of the last standing national, independent news networks committed to advancing progressive social change. #FSTV is available on Dish, DirectTV, AppleTV, Roku, Sling, and online at freespeech.org. ---

From These Ashes Homelessness Just Solutions Paradise wildfires

Link:
Homelessness In The Wake Of Wildfires - Free Speech TV