Category Archives: Free Speech

Political totalitarianism is coming to America, and it is being ushered in not by government thugs in jackboots but by progressive activists and their allies in Silicon Valley.

In a chilling oped published in The New York Times on July 14, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argued that so-called hate speech is the same thing as physical violence because it may possibly cause emotionally fragile individuals stress and should be made illegal.

Thankfully, the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from following such advice, but online companies are taking it upon themselves to stamp-out so-called hate speech, strangling free speech and the free exchange of ideas in the process.

A number of troubling actions by internet companies Google most prominent among them are making it increasingly clear that some in Silicon Valley have proclaimed themselves defenders of the progressive, politically correct faith, and that those firms will silence any and all heretics who challenge those beliefs.

"Silicon Valley lives in a politically regressive, exclusive bubble. They are not aware of their own biases in how they talk, have a limited understanding of the philosophy behind free speech, and find it difficult empathizing with other points of view," said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of the Lincoln Network, a think tank that seeks to promote libertarian ideas in the tech industry.

But Google not only has difficulty empathizing with other points of view it is also actively trying to suppress them. Google recently made the controversial decision to fire engineer James Damore for authoring an internal memo questioning the company's ideologically motivated diversity practices and highlighting sound scientific research suggesting that possible biological differences between men and women, not discrimination, could be a factor in the tech field's high percentage of men.

In the aftermath of Damore's firing, a number of anonymous current and former Google employees have come forward to reveal the full extent of the company's efforts to silence right-wing voices. One anonymous employee identified as "Hal" told Breitbart News last week that some employees in Google's ad sales department are "openly encouraging Adwords customers to pull their ads from Breitbart and Rebel Media."

Another anonymous employee under the alias "Emmet" confirmed this with Breitbart News, and also revealed the existence of "efforts to demote anything non-PC, anti-Communist, and anti-Islamic terror from search results."

"Emmett says he personally witnessed efforts from leftists within Google to bias YouTube's algorithms to push anti-PC content off the platform's 'related videos' recommendations," Breitbart reported. "The software could just 'astroturf' your Related Videos section [an effort to hurt overall ratings], and you would be none the wiser," said Emmet.

"Sure, if you know what to look for, perhaps you'd notice," he continued. "But the vast majority of the viewership would never ever know. That's the whole point of such a disinformation program, right? If you can tell it's disinformation, you would never, ever believe it."

People familiar with the process have told reporters recently that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is also laboring to cleanse its platform of alternative voices that challenge the mainstream liberal narrative. The social media video-sharing site has in the past few months systematically demonetized videos of right-wing commenters and journalists, such as Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson and former Rebel Media reporter Lauren Southern.

But the latest commentators to fall victim to this practice are far less controversial: YouTube celebrities and vocal Trump supporters Diamond and Silk. The duo discovered last week that a number of their videos including one that is two years old were suddenly demonetized. They have vowed to fight YouTube's efforts to suppress conservative voices and have even raised the possibility of legal action.

"The same video that is being demonetized has been monetized for two years, so how was it suitable for our advertisers for two years and now all of a sudden there's an issue?" Silk told LifeZette in an exclusive interview.

The pair say the demonetization is a transparent attempt at censorship. "How can [YouTube] oust us and say [we're] not suitable for all advertisers?" said Diamond. "Have you spoken to each and every one of you hundreds of thousand of advertisers and said, 'Hey do you want to advertise around Diamond or Silk, yes or no?' or are you as YouTube making this decision for your advertisers?"

YouTube is "a social media platform, and a social media platform is a platform for ideas, for all ideas," said Diamond. It's a place "for people to be able to come together and collaborate with those ideas."

"So even though people want to call YouTube private, it's open to the public, so when it's open to the public, you cannot discriminate against conservative voices or against people that chose to support the president," she argued.

"We're being discriminated against because first of all, we're two black people, we don't fit the norm we're black, Republican conservatives, and we support our president," said Diamond. "What they want to do is control the narrative."

"They're putting our videos in a category now as being extremist or 'hate speech,'" said Silk.

"And that's not fair because now that's defamation," Diamond added.

The duo, which gained even more recognition for their consistent support of Trump during the presidential race, wants YouTube to remonetize not just their videos, but also those of other right-wingers who have had their livelihoods altered in a similar fashion.

"We want to give YouTube the opportunity to make this right, to be inclusive instead of exclusive. We want them to include people and not leave out conservative voices," Diamond said.

But "if YouTube does not make this right, then we have to take this a step further," said Diamond. On Thursday the two tweeted, "We Smell A Class Action Lawsuit," and confirmed with LifeZette that they are prepared to follow through on the threat.

"Listen, they can regulate, but you can't discriminate while you regulate," she said.

"Because what they're trying to do is dominate, and that's unfair," Diamond said. "It's unfair that we allow Google and YouTube to team up together and really monopolize a sector of the internet."

Unfortunately it's not just Google. On Thursday, Watson of InfoWars posted a YouTube video titled "I Won't Be Around Much Longer," in which he revealed that "they banned me on Facebook because of a video I posted 18 months ago," and went on to posit that if digital platforms continue at the current rate, Silicon Valley will have soon entirely purged all right-wing voices from mainstream social media.

But although social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are already known among conservatives for suppressing even mainstream right-wing voices, despite allowing controversial content from the far Left and even radical Islamists to remain online unmolested non-social-media sites have also begun to target right-wing dissidents.

A number of online right-wing commentators including Southern and former Students for Trump director and independent journalist James Allsup have even had their Paypal, GoFundMe, or Patreon accounts canceled because of their perceived "support" for "hate speech."

These attacks, not just on people's free speech, but also on their livelihoods, represent a fundamental and chilling acceleration of the progressive Left's attempts to control thought and debate within society.

"Liberals can't have this one-sided. This works both ways," said Diamond.

"We have a conservative voice, we support our president, we support our country, and we want our voices heard, and if we have fans we want our fans to hear our voices," she said.

(photo credit, homepage image: affiliate, Flickr; photo credit, article images: Austin McKinley, Flickr)

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Silicon Valley Tightens Its Grip on Free Speech - LifeZette

Of the harrowing images televised nationwide from Saturday's white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, one of the more chilling sights, amid hours of raging hatred and mayhem, was of camo-clad militiamen on the streets, girded for combat in tactical vests and toting military-style semiautomatic rifles.

Photos and video of the heavily armed cadre - a relatively small force commanded by a 45-year-old machinist and long-ago Navy veteran from western Pennsylvania - spread rapidly on social media, raising fears the clash of hundreds of neo-Nazis and counterprotesters might end in a bloodbath.

The show of strength was about "allegiance . . . to the Constitution," particularly the First Amendment, said Christian Yingling, leader of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia. He said he and his troops "convoyed in" to Charlottesville early Saturday to defend free speech by maintaining civic order so everyone present could voice an opinion, regardless of their views.

The fact that no shots were fired, Yingling said, was a testament "to the discipline of the 32 brave souls serving under me during this particular operation." In a telephone interview Sunday, he sought to dispel "the absurd idea in the public's mind" that his group of "patriots" was allied with or sympathetic to the white nationalists.

Many militia units in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast have "mutual defense agreements," Yingling said. Because he has overseen several militia responses at contentious gatherings in recent months - helping "keep the peace" at right-wing public events in Boston; in Gettysburg and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and at an April 29 rally in Harrisburg for President Donald Trump - Yingling said the commander of a Virginia militia asked him to organize and take "tactical command" of the Charlottesville operation.

"He had never handled anything like this," Yingling said. "And given the volatility of the event, it was not a good place to start."

When his group arrived in Charlottesville, "we put our own beliefs off to the side," Yingling said. "Not one of my people said a word. They were given specific orders to remain quiet the entire time we were there. . . . Our mission was to help people exercise their First Amendment rights without being physically assaulted."

He added: "It was a resounding success until we were just so drastically outnumbered that we couldn't stop the craziness. It was nothing short of horrifying."

In the interview and in a Facebook Live monologue Sunday, Yingling detailed why the militia members participated, how he went about organizing their appearance, and how his group was received - which he said was not with much welcome.

"Jacka---s," was how he described both sides, meaning the white nationalists, who billed the gathering as Unite the Right, and the counterprotesters, many marching under the banner of Antifa, for "anti-fascist." Yingling also criticized police, saying that officers were poorly prepared for the violence and not assertive enough in combating it and that they should have enlisted the militiamen to help prevent the mayhem.

Instead, about five hours after Yingling and his platoon arrived at 7:30 a.m., they were ordered by police to leave the area, he said. By 1:42 p.m. - when a man reputed to be a neo-Nazi adherentallegedly drove his car intentionally through a crowded pedestrian mall and into a sedan, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 others - the militiamen were far from Charlottesville, headed back to their encampment 50 miles northeast of the city, Yingling said.

He said several of his troops were battered and bloodied, having been attacked by people on both sides of the demonstration, yet they did not retaliate.

He said he does not know the suspect in the car killing, James Alex Fields, 20, of Ohio, or any of the white nationalists involved in Saturday's demonstration.

Virginia's secretary of public safety, Brian Moran, rejected the assertion that police were ill-equipped to handle Saturday's unrest. "To say we were unprepared or inexperienced is absolutely wrong," Moran declared Sunday, adding, "We unequivocally acted at the right time and with the appropriate response."

He said: "The fighting in the street was sporadic. But soon after it started, we began to have conversations about when to go in. The concern was that the fighting was in the middle of the crowd and that if we went in there, we would lose formation, lose contact. We would be putting the public and law enforcement in jeopardy."

Saturday marked the first time in 28 years the Virginia National Guard was used to help quell a civil disturbance. "The militia showed up with long rifles, and we were concerned about that in the mix," Moran said. "They seemed like they weren't there to cause trouble, but it was a concern to have rifles of that kind in that environment."

Authorities also were worried that Yingling - who was carrying a Sig Sauer AR-556 semiautomatic weapon - and his troops would be mistaken for National Guard members by the public, Moran said.

Yingling called the weapons "one hell of a visual deterrent" to would-be attackers from either side. Although the weapons' magazines were fully loaded, he said, the day's standard procedure "was that anyone who was carrying a long gun was not to have a round in the chamber. Now, our sidearms are generally chambered and ready to go."

The Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia is one of several Light Foot Militia outfits in states nationwide. In addition to having overall command of units in Pennsylvania, Yingling said, he is the leader of his home unit, the Light Foot Militia Laurel Highlands Ghost Company, based near his home in New Derry, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh. The Ghost Company has about a dozen members, he said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit watchdog group that monitors extremist organizations, classifies 276 militias in the country as "antigovernment groups," meaning they generally "define themselves as opposed to the 'New World Order,' engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines."

The Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia is on the list, as are Light Foot Militia units in South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon. But the SPLC points out that inclusion on its list "does not imply that the groups themselves advocate or engage in violence or other criminal activity, or are racist."

Yingling said he abhors racism and that his company, which usually trains in the woods once or twice a month, is open to prospective members "of all races and creeds," although its active roster is entirely white.

A Navy veteran of Operation Desert Storm, Yingling said he was an aviation machinist's mate for three years before leaving the service in 1993 as a petty officer third class, meaning he was four rungs up the enlisted ranks.

"I joined the military to avoid the addictive lifestyle of my parents," he wrote in a Facebook post. "I was raised in a VERY dysfunctional, abusive home. The military gave me the structure I needed." After his discharge, however, "I quickly fell right into the lifestyle I had known all my life with my parents. I quit going to church, I started using drugs and alcohol, heavily becoming addicted to both. It started a . . . downward spiral which led to an eventual suicide attempt."

Then, in 2008, President Barack Obama was elected. Yingling said he was drawn then to right-wing, anti-government extremism.

"I left my old addictive lifestyle behind and traded it for the lifestyle of a patriot," he wrote. "I had found my calling" as a militiaman. "I founded The Westmoreland County Militia, Regulators 1st Battalion with two fellow patriots." He later left the unit and formed the Laurel Highlands Ghost Company.

"No, I don't think the government, as a whole, is out to get us," he said in the interview, but "a lot of people in society are self-absorbed. They don't get involved with the Constitution and defending the freedoms that it gives us. We need to defend those freedoms - for everyone, on all sides of the political debate - or eventually we'll lose them."

About a month ago, when he learned the Unite the Right event was being planned, Yingling said, "I, like most militia commanders, did not want to touch it with a 10-foot pole" for fear of being wrongly perceived as an ally of white supremacists. But after talking it over with a fellow Light Foot commander, in upstate New York, he decided he had a duty to defend the right of free speech on the streets of Charlottesville.

Through Facebook and various militia chat rooms, he said, he recruited militia members from various East Coast units and organized a rendezvous Friday night at a farm in Unionville. He said he was angered and embarrassed that only 32 people showed up. Many others, he said, were afraid of being publicly branded as racists.

"We knew what we were walking into," he said on Facebook Live. "We knew what the results were going to be. And yet we walked in anyway. We weren't afraid. And we didn't give a good damn about our image or about what anybody thought about us. And I still don't."

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Militia chief says his group sought to guard free speech at Unite the ... - The Daily Progress

Scores of Hub residents who gathered on the Common last night to condemn the violence in Charlottesville, Va., say theyre prepared to return to the sitenext Saturdayto protest against a local Free Speech Rally organized by the man behind yesterdays white nationalist demonstration.

Were trying to mass mobilize said a woman named Elise, a member of the Boston Feminists for Liberation, which organized last nights vigil. We hope to get as many people as we can. Boston is my home and theyre coming here. I want to defend my home.

The Boston Free Speech Rally, set to begin on Boston Common at noon, is reportedly being organized by Jason Kessler, who led yesterdays protest in Charlottesville.

As dozens of people chanted bash the fasc and no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA, demonstrators said theyre gearing up for a confrontation next week.

Its clear that the far right feels emboldened right now, said Khury Peterson-Smith, 35 of Dorchester. I think that starts with the president. I feel confident that the majority of people in this city and this country oppose that kind of bigotry. I hope we can show that through our presence.

Bonnie McBride of Boston said she worried that a large counterprotest would give them more of a voice but stressed she also didnt want to ignore it.

If it doesnt affect you directly, its easy to turn your face, she said. Its important for those of us who are white to stand up against this.

Nick Serpe, 29, of Cambridge said he was shocked by what happened yesterday in Virginia.

I think a lot of people werent planning on taking them seriously until what happened in Charlottesville, he said. We feel as a community we need to respond. I think everyone will be on high alert but I find comfort and strength in numbers from the people who are out against those demonstrators. Were not afraid.

Kristin Doyle, 23, of Framingham agreed.

Its really important to be proactive and get involved, she said. Things keep getting worse and we need to take a stand together. Its obviously going to probably be huge and probably terrifying. But solidarity is important I think well be ready.

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Boston protests ahead of 'free speech rally' | Boston Herald - Boston Herald

As college students wrap up summer jobs and internships, university administrations are girding for another round of campus battles over issues of free speech, protest, and the universitys role as a setting for education and intellectual exploration. For those a step removed from todays college students (alumni, donors, parents and pundits), these periodic flare-ups have often been taken as dismaying evidence of a generations intolerance toward opposing views and free speech. Students who seek to shut down speech that offends through calls to disinvite speakers, punish offensive remarks or shout down opponents have been dismissed as coddled, unenlightened, entitled, anti-intellectual, dogmatic and infantile.

The desire to defend free speech and broad-mindedness is admirable, but a culture of respect for open discourse and tolerance for disagreeable opinions wont be built through insults, hand-wringing, financial pressure from irate alums or even the legal mandates now being proposed in some state legislatures. Those who are genuinely concerned about defending academic freedom and fostering intellectual diversity on campus would do well to grasp five factors that are fueling the impulse some students and professors have to try to silence speech they consider harmful.

The first factor at work is a striking lack ofunderstanding of the basic premises that underpin free speech. Many student leaders of the recent campus protests evince only a cursory grasp of the principles enshrined in the First Amendment, much less the more complex and harder-to-articulate values of free inquiry and expression in which most American colleges and universities take pride. Whether the blame lies with the demise of university core curricula that typically included liberal philosophers such as John Milton and John Stuart Mill, the retreat from civics education in recent decades, or other factors, principles surrounding free expression, freedom of association and press freedom are poorly understood among millennials.According to a 2015 survey by the Newseum Institute , 33 percent of Americans have no idea what rights the First Amendment protects. Subsequent surveys revealed that 69 percent of students think universities should be able to restrict offensive speech or slurs, and that young people are more likely than their elders to believe that constitutional rights to religious freedom do not apply to faiths that are considered extreme or fringe.

Whats more, some students, particularly nonwhite students, report that their primary experience with such strictures has occurred when free speech has been asserted as a justification or excuse for racist comments. One prominent student leader from the University of Missouri, when told that punishing speech could violate the First Amendment, replied that the First Amendment wasnt written for me. Her meaning was twofold: that when the Bill of Rights was written, each black American was treated as three-fifths of a person, and that her own prime exposure to the precept was its invocation to protect white students and administrators from reprisals for speech she considered offensive. It doesnt help that, often, the only vocal advocates for free speech on campus lean toward the right. Left-leaning students may find that the clubs they belong to, professors they admire, or personalities they follow on social media are not interested in defending the right to voice unpopular views.

A second influence shaping the campus climate for speech is grounded in technological change. The old adage Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me sounds quaint when insults, exposs, and quotes or video clips taken out of context can go viral online, leading swarms of antagonists to harass and intimidate a speaker with whom they disagree. The Internet offers a largely anonymous arena where hateful speech can easily flourish and where smears are available in perpetuity for family members or potential employers to stumble upon. The potency of social media has fueled calls to curtail and even shut down services like the now-defunct anonymous messaging app Yik Yak that seem to fuel cyberbullying. The potential for abusive online speech has made it difficult to argue that speech cannot do real damage and, correspondingly, that protections against harmful speech are unwarranted.

A third cause relates to the current movement for social equality in the United States. Our society has reformed many of the most obvious legal and structural manifestations of racism, sexism and anti-gay bias: keeping blacks from voting, firing women for getting pregnant, criminalizing gay sex and so forth. Now, the imperative to tackle more subtle and insidious forms of discrimination or exclusion including the quietly denigrating terms and unconscious stereotypes that may reveal and entrench implicit bias has rightly grown. Language is unavoidably implicated in this next phase of transformation. In fact, the evolution of language to reflect changing understandings of race, gender and culture is nothing new and does not simply indicate political correctness run amok. The terms Negro, colored and Oriental are all reminders that changing mores routinely render certain words out of bounds. As unfamiliar as some may find gender-neutral pronouns or neologisms such as Latinx, the insistence on them fits into this tradition, and the justifications behind them deserve a respectful hearing.

A fourth factor relates to our polarized and contentious political environment. The tone of political discourse had been degenerating well before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, but his campaign and election achieved through his distinctively impudent style have helped to normalize public speech that is intemperate, personally insulting, and derogatory toward women, the disabled, Muslims, African Americans, Jews and many other vulnerable groups.

The United States has the most protective standard for hate speech in the world, yet unwritten codes of civility and pluralism have, at least for the past few decades, largely confinedovertly bigoted sentiments to the margins of society.With these views now voiced among some of Trumps supporters and with the president himself repudiating them reluctantly, if at all, members of targeted minority groups understandably feel under siege, lacking confidence that their government will protect them.Students, meanwhile, see their campuses as places of refuge: a home where they can learn and socialize in security and relative comfort. If students witness a permissive environment for hateful speech in American society writ large, they will be more insistent in their demand for safeguards that prevent such attitudes from invading their schools.

The final development is that not all free speech standard-bearers come in peace.Conservative commentators including Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Richard Spencer style themselves as defenders of free speech for the purpose of building their brands and galvanizing followers, subscribers and book-buyers, but they manufacture confrontations to provoke controversy and draw headlines, rather than to elucidate ideas. This doesnt mean they should be barred from campuses or silenced; they still have their rights. But those who rally in defense of their freedom to speak, and those who invite them to speak, should engage not only the question of their rights but also the substance of their message. Free speech cannot be turned into a partisan cause of the right: At its core, free expression is a progressive concept and a liberal value.We value the right of all to speak because we want equal rights for all.

A robust defense of free speech on campus should be an enlightened defense, one that is alert to the concerns and arguments roiling universities now. A first step for those who rightly fear for the future of free speech should be dialogue with students historically the most impassioned defenders of campus free speech. To mobilize a new generation in that tradition will require listening to and understanding how it sees questions of race, gender and what it takes for a school to be a suitable setting for learning.Such conversations and engagement efforts are not an alternative to a staunch intellectual, political and legal defense of free speech principles. They are a necessary enabler of it.

Twitter: @PENamerican

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How we communicate is changing. So should the way we think ... - Washington Post

The thing about free speech is how often its just plain wrong wrongheaded, factually wrong, deceitful, even. Thats always been true.

And there have always been two schools of thought about what you do about it. One is that you pronounce yourself, or like-minded others, to be the ruler of the universe, and you only allow people to say, write and broadcast what you agree with.

Those who dont are vilified and punished; they lose their jobs and their reputations.

When this happens in other countries, we call it totalitarianism. Dictatorship. Censorship.

Lately, when it happens here, we call it Tuesday. Thats how often, how routine its become at universities, at private companies, big and small. No need to name names.

With classes starting soon, professors are being warned that our lectures might be recorded and, if we say something impolitic, released to the world. I remember all those years teaching criminal-law classes: Whenever I first introduced the topic of rape, I would vigorously take the side of the rapist to ensure all sides were presented. What would happen to me today? Would I be punished for not giving trigger warnings before I told my own story? Or for taking the wrong side in the debate? How lucky that Im on leave.

Of course, our Founding Fathers had a different idea. They knew the danger of punishing speech because you disagree with it.They understood that the answer to speech that is wrong, wrongheaded, hateful or unpatriotic (not to mention unscientific) is not less speech but more speech; not censorship but an open market of ideas; not dictatorship but democracy.

I am not talking about speech that incites violence, speech that preaches hatred and killing, speech that poses a clear and present danger.

Im talking about speech that raises questions that we only talk about in private for fear that someones head will be chopped off.

When Harvard President Lawrence Summers a great mind, love him or hate him wondered whether there might be some biological explanation for the underrepresentation of women in math and science, he was, very soon thereafter, no longer president of Harvard.

But guess what? The problem did not disappear. Firing Larry Summers did not open up the floodgates for women. It just shut down the debate.

A whole lot of good that did.

Worse than no good. If you want to trigger backlash, if you want to leave people thinking precisely what you dont want them to think, shut down the debate. Tell them they have no right to think that. Meet their argument not with a counter-argument but with a delete key and a pink slip.

As if that will further understanding. As if that will make things better. As if that will encourage open and honest dialogue.

Not that I blame the supervisors who quake when they see such posts. Leave them unanswered and, whoosh, youre vulnerable to accusations that youve tolerated, if not created, a hostile environment for women, or for men, or for someone.

This is not what we spent a lifetime fighting for. It was to encourage debate about equality, not squelch it, in the hopes that open dialogue would lead to action and change. It was to encourage leaders such as Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, to educate more women to take those high-paying STEM jobs, if thats what they want or to go off and cure diseases in Africa, if thats what they want. Maybe the reason that there arent more women in those engineering jobs is because women have more important, if less lucrative, things to do. But well never know if we cant even talk about it.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at http://www.creators.com.

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The virtue of free speech - Times-Enterprise

Corey Stewart, who made the defense of the Robert E. Lee statue in downtown Charlottesville a central issue of his recent failed gubernatorial campaign, addressed the city's violence at 7:30 p.m.

He warned mostly about the lefts attempts to crack down on free speech and made a brief statement condemning the violence and alleged murder that took place at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville on Saturday.

He made no mention of the Virginia State police helicopter crash that took the lives of two veteran troopers, but thanked law-enforcement officials for their service today.

In a Facebook Live video filmed in his historic Bel Air Plantation home in Woodbridge, Stewart, who is now running for U.S. Senate, began his five-minute talk by declaring that the left has never condemned their own violence.

Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors, went on to criticize U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D), saying he applauded" his son when he was arrested as a member of Antifa after a protest in Minneapolis in May. Stewart is seeking the Republican nomination to unseat Kaine in 2018.

Linwood Woody Kaine, 24, was among five people arrested in connection with setting off smoke bombs or fireworks during a pro-Trump rally there. The attorney general declined to file charges against the younger Kaine or the other arrestees, according to news reports.

Kaine said in a prepared statement the displays of "violenceandbigotry" seen today in Charlottesville are "sickening."

"The fact that people like David Duke cited the president to justify their views is a disturbing reminder that divisive rhetoric has sadly contributed to a climate where individuals who espouse hate feel emboldened," Kaine said. "As they seek publicity through their hateful tactics, let's pull together--regardless of party, race or religion--to reject hatred in no uncertain terms and stand together."

Stewart went onto say he feared Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) would try to make all of Virginia a safe place, apparently meaning a place safe from what he called conservative speech.

The liberals will try to label all of conservative speech as hate speech and then try to forbid it, Stewart said. All those efforts will fail, and, in fact, the real irony of that, is as they continue to crack down on conservative speech that will lead to more violence.

If free speech is not protected, people do sometimes turn to violence, he added. That is not the right way to go. We must always condemn it. But we must not allow the left to crack down on free speech in the aftermath of what is happening in Charlottesville today.

Stewart thanked the police and Virginia National Guard for their efforts and said officials must hunt down and find the criminals who perpetrated these horrible crimes.

Stewart made no mention, however, of the "Unite the Right" rally or white nationalists.

Staff Writer Hannah Dellinger contributed to this story.

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Stewart: Charlottesville will prompt liberal 'crackdown' on free speech - Fauquier Times

In 1996, the internet activist and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow famouslydeclaredto the governments of the world that they would have no sovereignty in cyberspace. Two decades later, it's certainly true that the internet has made the world much more interconnected. But rather than fulfilling Barlows utopian vision for cyberspace independence, national governments are finding new ways to assert their jurisdiction over the global internet. Weve already seen this jurisdiction creep with the European Unions right to be forgotten. And now its happening again.

In its JuneGoogle v. Equustekdecision, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a British Columbia court ruling ordering Google to remove entire domains and websites from its global search index, which would block access to that information on a global scale, regardless of users locations and nationalities. In the case, B.C.-based Equustek Solutions accused distributor Datalink Technology Gateways of selling counterfeit products and requested that Google delist the website selling these goods from its search results. At issue was the geographic scope of delisting, for which the Supreme Court granted a globally enforced injunction against Google, even though Google was never a party to the underlying suit.

TheEquustekcase is not the first attack on the integrity and freedom of the internet. In May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union recognized EU citizens rights to request information about them be removed from search engine results when it is either inaccurate, inadequate or no longer relevant or when it is excessive in relation to the "purposes for which they were processed," and when sufficient time has elapsed.

However, in the EU case, the underlying content remained intact on the internet. French authorities pushed the matter one step further in June 2015, when the French national data-protection authoritydemandedGoogle to apply delisting to all versions of its search engine. The authoritys rationale was that removing links only from European versions of Googles websites did not sufficiently protect the right to be forgotten, since readers could still access non-EU versions.

From a legal perspective, there are inherent limitations to any countrys jurisdiction. Permitting global application of domestic laws against private entities would lead dangerously toward over-enforcement and political chaos. While countries like Canada, France and Spain largely share the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, many others do not. What if an authoritarian regime sought to delist or censor LGBT websites, or ban news articles criticizing its head of state? Such legal fragmentation could only result in a race to the bottom. In the end, multinational service providers will have no choice but to surrender. The internet could end up only as free and democratic as the worst laws of the most repressive countries.

From an ethical perspective, its not clear that the values of privacy and self-determination ought to outweigh those of transparency and free expression by default. Rather, there should be an interest-balancing process on a case-by-case basis. For instance, in the EUs first right-to-be-forgotten case, the Spanish Data Protection Authority dismissed plaintiff Mario Costeja Gonzlezs complaint against a local newspaper after concluding that public interest favored accurate disclosures in a real estate auction over the plaintiffs privacy interests.

It's also important to understand that privacy expectations and levels of openness vary among countries, cultures and even generations. Todays sensitive data may have different interpretations tomorrow. Rather than removing information, the best option to promote continuous dialogue and innovation is to sustain and add even more content to cyberspace. For example, online service providers could enable people to annotate information related to themselves, or indicate that this is a disputed result or that this has been invalidated by a court, which would keep users informed and alert. Wikipedia adopted such measures to ensure accuracy, credibility and accountability on its website.

In theEquustekdecision, Justice Rosalie Abella ruled, The problem in this case is occurring online and globally. The internet has no borders its natural habitat is global. The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates globally.

However, it is theborderlessfeature of the internet that has made cyberspace such a valuable forum for different nations and cultures to come together. Governments have already used soft power effectively to assert jurisdiction beyond the territorial boundaries in, for example, France'sLICRA v. Yahoocase. Despite strong arguments about a lack of jurisdiction, Yahoo eventually agreed to remove all auction listings for Nazi memorabilia globally to ensure that such listings werent available to French residents, as the French court demanded. TheEquustekcase is testing this balance once again.

Google now seeks an injunction in California District Court to keep theEquustekruling from being enforced in the United States. Various civil society and internet trade groups haveofferedtheir support, but the fight is still ongoing. This should remind us all how easy it would be for governments around the world to unravel Barlows vision of the internet as an anarchic neutral zone for free expression, openness and commerce. It is not too late to defend these values, and patch the fractures that have begun to form in the foundations of cyberspace.

Ariel Jeng is a research assistant with the R Street Institute, a nonprofit group aimed at promoting limited government.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Canadian Google crackdown illustrates need to protect free speech online - The Hill (blog)

Driggs 0Updated at 3:23 pm, August 12th, 2017 By: Scott Stuntz, Teton Valley News We Matched

Courtesy Teton Valley News

DRIGGS One of the two men involved in a scuffle that disrupted an otherwise peaceful march for womens rights this January has been convicted by a jury of two misdemeanors.

Greg Geffner was convicted of misdemeanor obstructing a highway and misdemeanor disturbing the peace following a trial on July 28. He was sentenced to pay $803 in fines.

The judgment was withheld for the two charges meaning he wont serve jail time, but he will serve unsupervised probation. If Geffner fails to pay his fines during that time or is charged with new offenses he could be forced to serve the sentences for his original crimes.

RELATED: Teton Sheriffs Office investigating fight at Womens March

On Jan. 21 Geffner was in downtown Driggs during the local womens march. Hundreds of people joined the Driggs march, which was part of nationwide movement to promote civil rights, including womens rights.

While over 900 people attended, only two were involved in any sort of violence.

RELATED: Charges filed against two men after fight at Womens March

The confrontation was caught on several cell phone videos as well as by a drone flying overhead. Geffner was filmed standing in the roadway and then having a physical altercation with Scott Rehberg of Victor. Rehburg pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disturbing the peace in June. He will be sentenced in September.

Geffners defense centered on the first amendment, but the judge denied Geffners motion to have the charges thrown out because of his right to free speech.

Instead the jury only looked at whether he committed the crimes in question and found him guilty on both charges.

I think based on that were happy with the outcome and there was some accountability, said Deputy Prosecutor Lindsey Blake.

This article was originally published by the Teton Valley News. It is used here with permission.

The Teton Valley News in Driggs was founded in 1909 to cover events in eastern Idahos Teton Valley. This weekly newspaper is owned by Pioneer Newspapers and maintains a print circulation in Teton County, Idaho.

Contributed content is used on this site with permission and is owned by Teton Valley News.

Subscribe to the Teton Valley News' print or online edition by calling (208) 354-8101 or by visiting http://www.tetonvalleynews.net.

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Man convicted for disrupting Teton County women's march, free speech not at issue - East Idaho News

By Fredrik deBoer By Fredrik deBoer August 11 at 6:00 AM

Fredrik deBoer is an academic and writer based in Brooklyn.

When Google fired James Damore this past week for circulating a bizarre and offensive attack on its diversity practices, free speech advocates rushed to his defense, accusing the company of curtailing his rights. Activists have already planned a march on Google, to protest the firms anti-free speech monopoly. The trouble was that hed written his memo and sent it to colleagues, imperiling his ability to have a healthy working relationship with his peers. Surely he knew, when he signed his employment contract, that hed have to abide by the companys code of conduct. It is Googles prerogative to decide what is right and wrong to say at the office.

But corporations arent just enforcing speech codes at the office. Increasingly, they are cracking down on their workers expression outside of it. In 2009, a Philadelphia Eagles stadium worker was fired for criticizing the teams personnel moves in a Facebook post. That same year, Georgia public school teacher Ashley Payne was forced to resign, she says, for posting pictures of herself drinking beer and wine while on vacation. An Ohio woman, Patricia Kunkle, sued the military contractor that had fired her in 2012, alleging that the reason was her public support of President Barack Obama. (She eventually settled the case.) In late 2013, public relations rep Justine Sacco was famously let go for tweeting an off-color joke about AIDS while traveling to Africa. In 2014, the chief executive of software company Mozilla, Brendan Eich, was forced out, resigning amid a public backlash against his stance opposing same-sex marriage.

This trend even extends to academia, where speech is supposedly sacrosanct: Yale University dean June Chu resigned this summer under intense pressure after her offensive reviews on Yelp were made known to the Yale community. And Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey, was given the boot after an incendiary conversation about race with Fox Newss Tucker Carlson.

Most of these people said something that I find, to varying degrees, wrong or unhelpful. Some of it was outright offensive. But none of it deserves firing, because none of it happened in the workplace or had anything to do with work. Rather, each of these people was let go because of statements or gestures they made outside of their working duties. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways that private employers can constitute a grave threat to our free speech rights and expose a conflict between genuine freedom and capitalism.

There is a reason that, rather than letting legal codes alone protect expression, liberal societies rely on a robust norm of free speech. The basic processes of democracy require that we all feel free to disagree with one another in the public sphere; without such a norm, its impossible to deliberate as democracy requires. To abandon that norm is to give up the means by which people in democracies make decisions. When that norm has been abandoned, such as in the McCarthy era, we have considered it an injustice, and for good reason. The American Civil Liberties Union, lately a proud public challenger of President Trump and his travel bans, puts the point succinctly: Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Yet thinkers on the left and the right have failed, in many cases, to grapple with this.

Right-wing theorists have always insisted that free-market economics is the best guarantor of individual liberty. Friedrich Hayek, the economist and philosopher who did so much to create modern economic conservatism, insisted that only societies with free markets could ensure free people. We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice, he wrote, arguing against social programs that protect the poor and unlucky, programs that he insisted throughout his long career would lead inevitably toward authoritarianism. The libertarian movement embraces Hayeks view, insisting that personal freedom must include the freedom to act in a market economy unencumbered by government regulation.

In contrast, the left has argued that the fickle turns of the market inevitably erode freedom. Karl Marx and his followers famously said that only through radical egalitarianism in material and social terms could the Enlightenment ideal of personal freedom be fully realized. Todays left-leaning thinkers have echoed this sentiment, pointing to the highly regimented conditions of workers on factory floors and in white-collar offices as proof that capitalist enterprise curtails freedom rather than protects it. The political science professor Corey Robin, in particular, has made a career out of demonstrating that the tyrannies that most consistently afflict ordinary Americans are workplace tyrannies, part of what he calls the private life of power. Progressives who are pleased when businesses discipline workers illiberal speech have lost this essential thread of leftism, arguing that if the government isnt the one enforcing speech codes, then there are no threats to free speech. This is clearly wrong.

Why have so many companies turned into petty dictators when it comes to their employees speech, political and otherwise? Progressives enamored of speech codes might like to imagine that corporations are motivated by genuine concern for social equality, but this gives them far too much credit. The reality is that in the Internet era, when outrage goes viral at incredible speed, companies have a pressing need to get out in front of potential controversies as swiftly as possible. Quick termination often works quite well to stamp out such fires until the publics attention shifts. Meanwhile, though the official unemployment rate has declined for years, flatlined wages and a steadily falling labor force participation rate suggest a weaker job market than the unemployment figures alone would indicate. Under such conditions, employers probably think they have little to lose in cracking down on workers speech, since there are probably eager replacements waiting to fill the spots of those who object.

Most Americans have no legal right that prevents them from being fired for their political beliefs. Public workers enjoy some protection, and some states such as New York and California afford private employees certain leeway to speak politically outside of work, free from reprisals by their employers. But the vast majority of American workers have no such defenses and can be fired for their political expression at the whim of their bosses. As Alina Tugend wrote in a 2015 New York Times essay on these issues, If youre a nonunion private employee, your boss has great latitude to control your political actions.

This condition is not new. What protected employees in the past was, first, a dividing line between work life and private life that has been blurred by digital technology. And second, that aforementioned norm of free speech, a societal expectation that workers were entitled to say what they wanted to say away from the workplace. Now, that norm is being eroded, from both the left and the right.

Tools of surveillance, whether public or private, coercive or voluntary, have never been more powerful or sophisticated, and while the reactions of private employers to employees speech vary, it doesnt take many incidents like those listed above to create a chilling effect. Every engine of online expression is also a tool with which our bosses might investigate our lives and our opinions. They will also therefore be key instruments of employer coercion going forward. As businesses gain new ways of observing the private lives of employees, they will become more adept at policing those off-the-clock moments, and all of us will become less free.

Twitter: @freddiedeboer

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Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office and out - Washington Post

At colleges and universities across the country, the right to speak freely faces brutal attacks on a regular basis. But the tide is turning in favor of free expression. Last week, North Carolina enacted bipartisan legislation to protect speech on campus by overwhelming margins.

North Carolina isnt alone. Arizona passed campus free speech protections last year, and California, Michigan and Wisconsin are considering similar legislation. Its not surprising. The furor over free speech on campus has affected people across the political spectrumand thats creating some unlikely bedfellows.

By now, the saga of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, is well-known. Students at the avowed progressive school shouted down Bret Weinstein, the self-professed deeply progressive faculty member, after he opposed the idea of asking all white members of the campus community to leave school for a day. As racially charged protests overran the campus, images of the unrest spread across social media and even national television. In one video, protesters trapped the school president and would not allow him to use the bathroom without an escort. Weinstein told the Wall Street Journal that campus officials could not guarantee his safety.

Colleges must be places that allow for the free exchange of ideas, but schools are failing in this role. A string of speaker disinvitations has been punctuated by violent demonstrations that blocked lecturers earlier this year at Middlebury College in Vermontand Claremont McKenna College in California. At Middlebury, the response was milquetoast: some students had a letter placed in their permanent record; no one was suspended. At Claremont, students were suspendedsome for as much as one yearor placed on probation. These two instances show how an ad hoc approach to discipline is inadequate to deal with free speech cases.

But on campus, free speech is making a comeback.

Earlier this year, Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and researchers at the Goldwater Institute developed a model proposal to help state lawmakers protect free expression at universitiesfor both speakers and protestersand ensure that all voices can be safely heard.It calls for universities to nullify restrictive speech codes and eliminate the notoriously small and isolated free speech zones that limit where students can debate and distribute literature outside of class.

Some university leaders agree that change is overdue. In March, Northern Arizona University President Rita Cheng challenged safe spaces, saying universities need to provide [students] with the opportunity for discourse and debate. In response, students protested and called for her resignation.

Protests like these imply that certain speech should be freer than others. In reaction to the proposal, the University of California-San Diego student newspaper argued that protesters are just exercising their right to express themselves. We couldnt agree moreuntil those protesters block other individuals ability to do the same. At that point, it becomes an oppressive response inimical to free speech.

Ultimately, for campus free speech reforms to succeed, individuals on campus must be held accountable for their actions. Universities should suspend or expel those who break the law and forcibly block others ability to be heard. The Goldwater Institute's model makes sure that those accused of violating others free speech rights receive due process protections so that when students face suspension or expulsion, they can be represented by counsel and recover legal fees if a school punishes them unfairly.

These two provisionsdisciplinary sanctions and due process protectionsare important to adopt in tandem. Righteous indignation over disruptive protests has not kept innocent members of the university community safe. Off campus, physical and verbal abuse is subject to prosecution. The same rules should apply on campus. Likewise, protesters accused of violence should be able to present their side of the story and have legal protection.

Colleges should be places where students learn to handle difficult topics in civil debates. After all, everyone will face challenging ideas and conflict once they graduate and move into the next stage of their lives. A universitys best gift to its graduates will be to prepare them for this.

Jonathan Butcher is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and Jim Manley is a senior attorney at the Goldwater Institute.

Read more:
A Campus Free Speech Comeback - RealClearEducation