Category Archives: Censorship

Progressive intellectuals Try to Stop the Censorship Monster They Created (EFE).

Spanish In an open letter, 153 prominent academics, writers, and intellectuals, mostly from the left, called for an end to the radicalization of censorship promoted by activists for social justice causes. They warn that the freedom to write, to express an opinion, is in danger.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted, the letter states, warning of an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other, it continues. As writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk-taking, and even mistakes, the letter adds.

Black Lives Matter has succeeded in creating a climate of intersectionality. The founders of the movement converge trans-feminism and racial justice. Intersectional movements have achieved everything from removing books to firing writers, and they have also conducted massive cancellation campaigns.

And it is not limited to the mockery of right-wing figures who question the collectivist ideology and identity politics; it also affects progressives, leftists, and even feminists.

For example, J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, has been accused of transphobia for saying that people who menstruate used to be called women.

In 2020, saying something so obvious and biologically demonstrable is tantamount to a hate crime and the outright accusation of transphobia. Reducing femininity to biology is seen as an attack on transsexual, transvestite, and transgender people who identify as women.

The need for a message of self-criticism from progressive intellectuals is exposed by the fact that one of the signatories of the letter has already had to apologize. Trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan highlighted the presence of socialist intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and feminists Gloria Steinem and Margaret Atwood. But she regretted that she was not aware of the presence of other signatories. Among them is the transphobic J. K. Rowling.

I did not know who else had signed that letter. I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.

The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan) July 7, 2020

A video by John Stossel for the libertarian platform Reason TV explained the extent of cancel culture and the restrictions on debate by far-left activists.

Campaigns by activists calling for the dismissal of professionals, censorship as the norm, and even the mass removal of books can be described as internet mobs.

Leftists incapable of living by neutral principles. The digital mob led by NYT columnist Paul Krugman arrived at the Univ of Chicago pressuring to remove Professor Harald Uhlig as editor of Journal of Political Economy, after criticizing Black Lives Matter https://t.co/x8GkbjdVk4

Fernando Amandi Sr. (@FernandoAmandi) June 12, 2020

His crime? He said that the Black Lives Matter campaign was making a mistake by joining the campaign to defund the police.

There was nothing racist or discriminatory in how he said it, says Reason magazines senior editor, Robby Soave, who is covering the recent protests. But because he has some different views from the protesters, he must be a racist, he says.

Soave points out that the most worrisome aspect of these activists actions is that they advocate an ideology where different opinions are assumed to be dangerous to the extent that they justify censorship as an act of self-defense.

They even highlight how professionals have been fired because of the actions of their relatives, such as the case of a footballer who was fired because of what his wife said something against Black Lives Matter on Instagram.

Therefore, more than a hundred intellectuals, particularly writers, joined the call. Most of them are left-wing, progressives, including Mexican historian Enrique Krauze.

But they dont have the backing of their co-conspirators. The New York Times published an article titled Artists and Writers Warn of an Intolerant Climate. The reaction was quick. The NYT article compiled criticism of the authors, including accusations that they are afraid of losing their relevance.

The letter makes it very clear that it does not seek to delegitimize the actions of Black Lives Matter or any civil protest. They simply fear the persecutory nature it has taken.

Being progressives, the letters signatories warn how the radicalization of the left benefits the right, particularly the U.S. president.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, they exclaim. And they invite their co-conspirators to avoid letting their resistance become its own kind of dogma or coercion, which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides, they say.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty, the letter adds.

The letter issued by these intellectuals takes us back to the poem by Niemller, a religious Lutheran persecuted by Nazism in its final stage. The letter highlights how he remained silent when others were being persecuted and stresses the importance of calling out ideological persecution before it knocks on your door.

Otherwise, your own story will end like the poem: When they came for me, it was already too late.

See the rest here:
Progressive intellectuals Try to Stop Censorship Monster They Created - PanAm Post

In recent years, there has been a marked and disquieting increase in the willingness of a raft of actors left, center, and right, both in government and in civil society, to engage in a practice and attitude of censorship and to abandon due process, presumption of innocence, and other core civil liberties.

There have been some attempts from different quarters at a pushback against this, but the most recent such effort at a course correction is an open letter decrying the phenomenon appearing in Harpers magazine. The letter, signed by some 150 public intellectuals, writers, and academics including figures like Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, has provoked a polarizing response.

Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, for example, argues that all this is a right-wing myth, slander against the Left, that those perpetrating the alleged acts of censorship are in fact relatively powerless, and that when incidents of alleged cancel-culture censorship are investigated, one finds that the targets are doing just fine after all.

Because the Harpers letter was fairly anodyne and declined to mention any specific incidents, Robinson cherry-picks a small sample of occurrences that he imagines must be what the signatories are talking about and tries to demonstrate that these incidents were really nothing-burgers of no consequence, distracting us from real issues.

What is true is that to limit this discussion to the acts of the extremely online mob, to, say, British author Jon Ronsons concerns about Twitter public shaming, or to the ill-defined term cancel culture, entirely misses the far wider atmosphere of an aggressive and accelerating threat to civil liberties.

It is understandable that a brief open letter would not offer a catalog of episodes, but this is nevertheless unfortunate, as it allows Robinson and others to maintain a nothing to see here, please move along stance.

When we do in fact consider such a catalog, we find that to deny that this is happening, or to diminish it as inconsequential is untenable. There are simply too many examples.

Consider efforts to ban Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists, other opponents of the current Israeli government, and critics of Zionism tout court from campuses. Since 2016, the Ontario legislature has been the site of multiple efforts to condemn or criminalize BDS activity and pressing campus administrations to cancel Israeli Apartheid Weeks.

In 2014, the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign withdrew an offer of employment to English professor Steven Salaita after some faculty, students, and donors asserted that his tweets critical of the Netanyahu administration during the Gaza war were antisemitic. Due to the controversy, hes been driven out of academic employment and now works as a bus driver. Political scientist Norman Finkelstein, another critic of the Israeli occupation, was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 after a successful campaign by the Anti-Defamation League and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He likewise has difficulty finding employment and says he struggles to pay the rent.

When appeals to academic freedom and due process are raised in all these cases, the response from the pro-Likudnik right has echoed the no platform rhetoric from the Left, arguing that criticism of the Israeli government is hate speech and thus should not be protected (and indeed, in Canada, unlike in the United States, hate speech is not constitutionally protected). They also copy the liberal-lefts demand for stay in your lane identitarian deference (in which only the oppressed group concerned may speak to an issue), asserting that non-Jews cannot comprehend Jewish suffering and so must shut up and listen.

Despite his cancellation, Salaita does not support the Harpers letter. This is perhaps understandable given that English professor Cary Nelson is a signatory but was also among those who led the charge against hiring Salaita. It must be equally galling to him that New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss, another Harpers signatory, spent her Columbia University days campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors for alleged intimidation of Jewish students under the Orwellian guise of Columbians for Academic Freedom.

But while Nelson and Weiss may be guilty of egregious hypocrisy, hypocrisy does not undermine the letters argument for freedom of speech. Despite Finkelsteins cancellation, or indeed precisely because he knows his cancellation to be a breach of academic freedom, he remains an adamant defender of freedom of speech. He knows that the solution to his own censorship comes not from censorship of those who censor him, but from an end to censorship entirely.

The upturning of lives and livelihoods comes not just in the arena of the Israel-Palestine conflict with respect to Salaita and Finkelstein. In some cases, the religious rights efforts to de-platform is actively defended by the Left, such as when Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie was shouted down in 2015 by Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths University and the universitys feminist society defended their use of the hecklers veto.

There are those who deny that the current chilly climate amounts to censorship, as censorship is only something that can be imposed by the state. Some concede that it is also something that elites can impose. But both positions deny that censorship is something that the crowd can impose. Yet there are many cases that involve independent schools, so this plainly cannot be the action of a state, even as this is quite clearly censorship. And the Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths could in no way be described as elites. So to suggest that ordinary people cannot participate in censorship or inculcation of an illiberal environment is to be blind to the ways that such attitudes can operate at multiple levels in society.

Campuses are in any case far from the only sites of struggle. Over the past two decades, conservative governments such as those of George W. Bush, Canadas Stephen Harper, Australias Tony Abbott, and now Donald Trump have repeatedly muzzled climate scientists and other earth science and conservation biology researchers.

Conservatives who historically tended to oppose free speech and held the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as chief in its pantheon of villains have suddenly rebranded themselves as free expressions greatest defenders. But while they were happy to defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopouloss right to express xenophobic and misogynist comments, when he began talking about the messy complications of the age of consent among gay men, they threw him under the bus.

Donald Trump has worked to clamp down on trade unions salting workplaces, that is, the century-old practice of getting a trade-union-friendly person hired at a workplace that is targeted for unionization. And perhaps most notoriously, the same man who at Mount Rushmore denounced a far-left fascist [sic] cultural revolution, calling for free and open debate instead, only weeks before used the National Guard to teargas and clear nonviolent protesters from the streets of Washington for the sake of a cheap photo-op.

One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources departmentorganized and employer-supervised sensitivity training industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.

How this enhancement of the semifeudal powers of bosses to deliver 24/7 monitoring of workers speech is going to advance the trade union movement is a mystery. Instead, they should join efforts to organize unions both as the greatest bulwark against workplace censorship and the greatest weapon we have in delivering sexual, racial, and economic equality, and, if anything, pushing for the extension of First Amendment protection to the workplace.

Authoritarian governments such as the Islamic conservative administration of Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoan have demanded that comedians who make fun of them be censored by other governments. Germany acceded to the request for prosecution. In a similar fashion, China has convinced tech giants and even the NBA to censor discussion of human rights domestically and overseas. Hollywood is no less acquiescent, deleting from movies anything that Beijing objects to, from references to torture by Chinese police to appearances of Winnie-the-Pooh (a symbol of democratic opposition).

Meanwhile, too many on the liberal-left, like turkeys voting for Christmas, urge ever-greater de-platforming of hate speech from these tech companies, only to discover how easily their own expression gets categorized as hate speech and taken down (as when various left-wing groups were kicked off Reddit along with pro-Trump ones).

Liberal governments have been little better. Former president Barack Obama may have given a salutary address criticizing cancel culture, but he also used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden than all previous administrations combined.

Secularists in France and Quebec have produced a raft of laws banning burkas or the veil in various forms, thus engaging in the same practice of telling women what they can and cannot wear as those who elsewhere force women to wear burkas or the veil.

Similarly, the French government of center-left President Franois Hollande marched alongside millions in the streets in defense of free speech after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but then proceeded to prosecute school students for expressing their sympathy for the attackers.

Libertarian groups, to their credit, have criticized much of this, but when it comes to censorship by the likes of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit, there is a sudden quiescence. Despite such social media platforms becoming a de facto public square, these are private companies, note libertarians. This is simply the workings of the market. Their stance is simply, If you dont like what they are doing, then dont sign their Terms of Service agreements.

The galloping advance of censorship and restriction of civil liberties is not restricted to high politics and Silicon Valley. Local conservative politicians in some two-thirds of European Union member state Poland have declared their regions LGBT-free zones and tried to ban Pride parades as far-right thugs violently attack them. In the UK there have been regular efforts by municipalities of every political flavor, police, and private security firms to restrict leafleting by NGOs, campaigners, arts groups, and businesses, as well as ever stricter constraints on busking, homeless people begging, ball games, inappropriate dress, and other annoyances under such vehicles as Public Space Protection Orders and antisocial behavior laws. And whenever there are major international meetings, cities now regularly restrict protests to designated free speech zones.

And as any journalists rights organization such as Reporters Sans Frontires or the Committee to Protect Journalists will tell you, there has been a radical change in the terrain of war in the last couple of decades where both state and non-state actors increasingly view journalists as legitimate targets, from Western bombing of TV stations in Iraq through Turkish imprisonment of reporters to Russian arrest of those exposing Kremlin autocracy to Mexican cartels silencing news crews investigating missing women. Trump meanwhile takes every opportunity to attack the media as an enemy of the people, even encouraging physical assaults on reporters by his supporters. Some activists on our side seem to be of a similar opinion that the media are fair game, too.

In short, there is an epidemic of censorship and a retreat from an ethos of civil liberties across the board, in almost every country, by those of almost every political persuasion, and at all levels of society. And if the liberal-left denies that illiberalism is occurring when we are the ones perpetrating it, as Robinson does, then we have no leg to stand on when it comes to all these other, innumerable examples. Civil liberties are for everyone, and above all for those we oppose.

Some of these examples are plainly worse than others, but we do not win or lose our right to free speech at the advent of the most extreme and obvious cases of censorship. It is already lost with the smallest of infringements, at the edge cases, and the ones where all reasonable people would agree that the speech is indeed hateful.

David Goldberger, the Jewish ACLU lawyer so committed to free speech that he represented a group of Chicago Nazis in court in 1977 to defend their right to march through Skokie, Illinois, recognized that it was even or rather precisely in these sort of cases where the struggle for liberty is won or lost.

It is a particular shame when it comes to the Left, historically the first champion of civil liberties. Many progressives today are not aware that the struggle for free speech was a central project of the Left and something that was historically resisted by the Right. We know of Thomas Paines and John Stuart Mills pioneering articulation of these freedoms, but Karl Marxs entire philosophy grew in part out of his fury at Prussian official press censorship as a young man; Frederick Douglass recognized that there could be no struggle for abolition without a defense of freedom of speech, and that abridgment of that freedom is a double wrong, for it violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker; Eugene Debs was tried and convicted for sedition, and his trial and those of his comrades would set in play the crystallization of American free speech legal protections that are the envy of the world entire; and the New Left and counterculture of the Sixties that in many ways gave birth to the current left began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 under the leadership of giants like Mario Savio.

As a result, too many modern progressives, particularly younger ones, have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression.

This is a historic disaster. Throughout the twentieth century, from Stalins purges to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it was precisely when the Left abandoned civil liberties and embraced groupthink supposedly in the service of some greater good, that those who claimed the mantle of emancipation perpetrated their greatest evils.

Robinson decries such comparisons to Maoism or what Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi has critiqued as Twitter Robespierres, saying that it requires guns and concentration camps for something to count as totalitarianism. Yet if you read the heartrending personal accounts of those such as Victor Serge who experienced the purges and the show trials, or Gao Yuan who participated in the struggle sessions of the Red Guards, or Dith Pran who experienced the collective indoctrination of the Khmer Rouge, you notice a pattern of pathological interpersonal relations that repeats itself over and over: a fear of speaking out, peer pressure, status-seeking through denunciation, a rush to denounce before one can be denounced oneself, self-criticism, public humiliation, a hunt for heretics, ostentatious displays of piety, and assertions that certain identities (petty bourgeois, kulaks, those who wear glasses, etc.) are inherently epistemically untrustworthy. These terrors of the past of course required material, economic conditions for them to emerge, but they were also built upon a foundation of morbid intragroup psychological dynamics.

The executions, torture, and imprisonment of these events were not simply the product of an external, alien force imposed upon its victims as in the case of an invasion by a foreign army or a coup, but perhaps even more terrifyingly, they were also a horizontal process that involved a breakdown of trust between friends, old comrades, coworkers, students and teachers, husbands and wives, even between parents and children.

Of course, intragroup illiberalism is something common to all humans rather than unique to the Left. We also see similar group dynamics when we explore historical events not directed by our political camp. The witch hunts of sixteenth-century Salem was another notorious instance of intragroup terror, the dynamics of which were famously dramatized by Arthur Miller as an allegory for McCarthyism and the associated blacklist. Here again we might note, contra the arguments that non-state actors cannot engage in censorship or illiberalism, that neither Hollywood studios that fired or no longer hired left-wing actors, screenwriters, and directors, nor the trade union bureaucracy that purged alleged Communists as part of that process, were agents of the state.

Yet because the Left is the cradle of civil liberties, we have a special responsibility to guard against illiberalism. After the experiences of the twentieth century, we will forever have a solemn task to constantly be on our guard against any recurrence of the morbid group dynamics that helped give rise to them, and within our own movements before anywhere else.

There is a need to let progressives who support free speech know that they are not alone and to give them confidence to speak out against censorship and illiberalism on their campuses, in their organizations, in their communities, or wherever someone imposes it, whether this comes from the right, center, or left, from the state or civil society.

But beyond the need for the Left to recognize that freedom of speech and civil liberties are the prerequisite for our own ability to organize, we cannot leave the discussion at the level of liberal principle.

As necessary as liberal freedoms are, socialists have always known that they cannot be fully realized within a class society. Liberalism contradicted itself by insisting on free markets and the right to own property, which undermine the equal exercise of all other liberal freedoms. Neither a poor man nor a rich man in liberal society have any legal restriction on the ownership of a printing press, but only one of these men materially has the ability, the freedom, to make use of that press. There is no true equality before the law so long as there remains class inequality outside the law.

In Karl Marxs first printed article, published in 1842, a report on the debates on freedom of the press in the Rhenish Diet, he attacks censorship of the press and then also the defenders of the bourgeois conception of freedom of the press as suffering from pseudo-liberalism and half-liberalism:

The French press is not too free; it is not free enough. It is not under an intellectual censorship, to be sure, but it is under a material censorship Therefore the French press is concentrated in a few places; and if material power concentrated in few places has a diabolical effect, how can it be otherwise with intellectual power?

That is, as mid-twentieth century democratic socialist and Berkeley Free Speech Movement militant Hal Draper explains in his 1977 exposition of what pushed Marx to go beyond the radical liberal conceptions of his youth: Tying the exercise of a freedom, then, to possession of enough money to operate it is a form of censorship too, and not to be borne.

Put another way, civil liberties may be the necessary condition for the Left to be able to argue for and to organize the building of an egalitarian society, but the building of an egalitarian society is the necessary condition for the realization of civil liberties.

Thus the limitations of the Harpers letter are certainly not that it decries censorship, or that it is anodyne liberal centrism, but that it does not take its professed values seriously enough. In the fight for civil liberties, Marx was right: neither censorship nor half-liberalism will do.

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The Threat to Civil Liberties Goes Way Beyond Cancel Culture - Jacobin magazine

The 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past was recently added onto Disney+ and was left completely uncensored. Now, Hugh Jackman is commenting on one particular scene that shows his behind in full view.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the first PG-13 film to be left completely uncensored on the family-friendly streaming service.

Since its launch, Disney+ has remained relatively conservative with its censorship. This is in efforts to keep the streaming platform family-friendly for all its viewers.

The platform made headlines after the Lizzie McGuire reboot was put on hold over beliefs that the series wouldnt be appropriate for Disney+s target audience. As well, the Love, Simon reboot Love, Victor moved to Hulu after Disney felt the shows content wasnt age-appropriate. The censorship controversies have caused many other programs to look elsewhere for a streaming platform.

Most recently, Disney+ used CGI to cover up Daryl Hannahs behind in the 1984 film Splash which stars Tom Hanks. The latest cover-up for the PG-rated film further shows the lengths Disney+ will go to make sure it maintains its family-friendly content.

Now, X-Men: Days of Future Past has arrived on the streaming service and is completely uncensored. It is officially the first PG-13 movie to arrive uncensored on Disney+.

Along with the films rating, it includes adult content such as the f-word and a scene which shows Jackmans naked behind in full view.

Jackman took to social media this week to share the news about the film being added to Disney+. He also includes the infamous nudity scene with an emoji covering his behind.

Days Of Future Past becomes the first movie to air on Disney+ uncensored. That was my future but lets be honest its more like my past, Jackman says.

Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds also jokingly commented on Jackmans post saying that he hopes Disney+ will leave Deadpool uncensored, too.

Excited for them to do the same for Deadpool, Reynolds says. Its time children knew.

What are your thoughts on X-Men: Days of Future Past being left uncensored on Disney+? Let us know in the comments below.

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Hugh Jackman made it past Disney+'s censorship with this 'X-Men' scene - Alternative Press

Welcome to The Queue your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web.

Its ultimately a programmers job to manage and interpret art. And some pieces of art require more management and interpretation than others. Which brings us to Gone With the Wind. Its one of the most enduringly popular films of all time. But its derogatory slave stereotypes and romantic view of the Antebellum South are uncomfortable. For some, even painful. But to edit or deny access on the basis of that discomfort whitewashes what the film represents as a historical and cultural document.

HBO Maxs removal of Gone With the Wind in June was not an attempt to re-write history. Quite the opposite. Time Warner removed the film with the intention of returning it to its library with added historical context. That context took the shape of a supplementary video recording of a panel discussion moderated by author and historian Donald Bogle and an introductory video, which now plays before the movie starts. The film itself is unaltered because in Time Warners words: To do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

In the intro, linked below, Turner Classic Movies host and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart sets the stage for Gone With the Wind.Stewart describes the films cultural significance and controversies, advocating for the importance of preserving Old Hollywood films for viewing and discussion.

You can watch What to Know When Watching Gone With the Wind here:

This clip comes courtesy of the fine folks at Turner Classic Movies. TCM is a two-time Peabody award-winning network and trusted source for all things Golden Age. You can follow them on their YouTube account here.

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Gone With the Wind and the Difference Between Censorship and Context - Film School Rejects

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TOMS RIVER, NJ After declaring that Toms River Township is not racially diverse enough for her liking, Toms River Councilwoman Laurie Huryk, a Democrat on Tuesday said she had received a threat in the mail. She waved a piece of paper in front of her, but did not read the letter. She did not say whether or not she reported the alleged threatening letter to the Toms River Police Department.

Huryk claimed the threat was in response to social media postings online after she told the township at the last council meeting that Toms River needs to do a better job at making the community more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals. Huryk has yet to explain how her plan to make the community more diverse would work and didnt explain how the current demographics of the community negatively impact the township.

According to census.gov, Toms River is 82% white, 3% black. As compared to the United States on whole which is 60% white and 13% black. New Jersey is 55% white and 15% black, Huryk said. We need to take a look at ourselves to examine what we can do as a community to make Toms River more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals and that of our state and the United States.

Huryk noted that the townships 82% white population is much higher than the state and national average.

Now, she claims she is being threatened and that her statement was twisted and misrepresented.

At our last meeting, I quoted U.S. Census data followed by self reflection inclusion, diversity and unity, Huryks said. My words were twisted and my meaning misrepresented on social media, resulting in escalating hateful and divisive commentary messages, voice mails, culminating in this disgustingly racist, threatening letter sent to my home. Im not going to read it, its extremely offensive and threatening.

Its where I live, with my family. As leaders in the community, it is our responsibility to be part of the solution, to work towards unity and condemn deceitful, divisive and hateful behavior. For the most part, this council and the previous have been shining examples of bi-partisanship, save one, she said, referring to Councilman Daniel Rodrick who has been working overtime to expose political corruption in Toms River government. Weve demonstrated that we can disagree but come to compromise and present civil for the most part.

Rodrick has been a key detractor in the townships plans to turn downtown Toms River into a fledgling city and has been speaking out against political corruption by other members of the council in Toms River.

Huryk said she also fully supports the organization Stop Hate for Profit which has organized a financial advertising boycott against Facebook to financially harm the social media companys business until it increases censorship on Facebook contributing to the dissent against the Black Lives Matter movement.

Whatever weve done is not enough, we must be ever determined in our efforts to stop the seeding and division and continuously work towards equality, inclusion and diversity and unity, Huryk said. Hate for profit has real consequences for real people. It is our job to return our world to civility and to quell the divisiveness and deception all day and every day.

Stop Hate for Profit seeks to remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, antisemitism, violent conspiracies and Holocaust denialism, which is a very noble object.

The group also wants anyone on Facebook who talks about vaccine misinformation or climate denialism to also be banned from the social media platform.

According to the National Review, Huryks plan for forcing an unnatural demographic change in Toms River is part of her Democrat partys national platform to abolish the suburbs.

A story published by the National Review, entitled Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs investigated Democrat Presidential Candidate Joe Bidens housing plan for America that seeks to eliminate single family zoning, as evidenced by the townships plan to build 7 story buildings through the Toms River downtown area.

Biden has embraced Cory Bookers strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call little downtowns in the suburbs, said Stanley Kurtz of the National Review. Combine the Obama-Biden administrations radical AFFH regulation with Bookers new strategy, and I dont see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves.

Kurtz said that the Democrats latest platform attacking the predominantly white suburbs is geared towards winning elections for the party, not a plan for the greater good of the people who already live there.

They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing, Kurtz said. [That], of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

Is Huryk concerned about diversity in Toms River or is she now just towing the Democrat political party line for Joe Biden heading in the 2020 Presidential election?

This week, in Oregon, a politician was caught writing himself a hate letter he claimed was sent to him online.

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Democrat Councilwoman Who Said Toms River Too White, Claims She Received Threats, Calls for Facebook Censorship - Shore News Magazine

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On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and host of the The Daily Wires podcast The Michael Knowles Show Michael Knowles joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss everything from censorship by big tech to TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party. Sen. Cruz and Knowles co-host the political podcast Verdict With Ted Cruz in which Cruz gives his take on the most important national news. You can watch the trailer in the tweet below.

The senator argued that although media bias has been around forever, its immensely dangerous that a handful of monopolies now control every means of discourse. Similarly to China, the left, who controls all the major institutions in America, doesnt want people to thoughtfully communicate their ideas because they dont work. They must suppress free speech and silence the truth, Sen. Cruz said, because truth prevails if the discourse allows for it.

I think the threat of of big tech censorship is the single greatest threat that democracy faces, that political discourses faces, that free speech faces. Weve got a handful of giant monopolies with massive power, and their arrogance is growing exponentially. And they have demonstrated a repeated willingness to silence, to stifle, to muzzle speech they disagree with, he said.

Listen Here:https://mp3.ricochet.com/2020/07/Fed_200713CruzKnowles_FINAL.mp3

See the article here:
Federalist Radio: Ted Cruz And Michael Knowles On Censorship, TikTok, And The Chinese Communist Party - The Federalist

In an open letter published in Harpers Magazine, 152 writers, including JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood, claim that a climate of censoriousness is pervading liberal culture, the latest contribution to an ongoing debate about freedom of speech online.

As we grapple with this issue in a society where social media allows us all to share extreme views, the Victorian writers offer a precedent for thinking differently about language and how we use it to get our point across. How limits of acceptability and literary censorship, for the Victorians, inspired creative ways of writing that foregrounded sensitivity and demanded thoughtfulness.

Forbidden Books.Alexander Mark Rossi

There are very few cases of books being banned in the Victorian era. But books were censored or refused because of moral prudishness, and publishers often objected to attacks on the upper classes - their book-buying audience. Writer and poet Thomas Hardys first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was never published because the publisher Alexander Macmillan felt that his portrayal of the upper classes was wholly dark not a ray of light visible to relieve the darkness.

However, more common than publishers turning down books was the refusal of circulating libraries to distribute them. These institutions were an integral part of literary consumerism during the Victorian period as the main means of distributing books.

Most influential of these was Charles Mudies Select Library, established in 1842. Mudies library was select because he would only circulate books that were suitable for middle-class parents to read aloud to their daughters without causing embarrassment.

This shaped how publishers commissioned and what writers could get away with. Victorian literary censorship, while limiting, managed to inspire writers to develop more creative and progressive ways to get their points across.

George Eliots publisher, John Blackwood, criticised her work for showing people as they really were rather than giving an idealistic picture. He was particularly uncomfortable when Eliot focused on the difficulties of working-class life.

In Mr Gilfils Love Story(1857), Eliots description of the orphan girl, Caterina, being subjected to soap-and-water raised Blackwoods censorious hackles:

I do not recollect of any passage that moved my critical censorship unless it might be the allusion to dirt in common with your heroine.

As well as dirt, alcohol consumption was also seen as an unwanted reminder of working class problems. Again in Mr Gifils Love Story, Eliot describes how the eponymous clergyman enjoys an occasional sip of gin-and-water.

However, knowing Blackwoods views and anticipating she may cause offence galvanized Eliot to state her case directly to the reader within the text itself. She qualifies her unromantic depiction of Mr Gilfil with an address to her lady readers:

Here I am aware that I have run the risk of alienating all my refined lady readers, and utterly annihilating any curiosity they may have felt to know the details of Mr Gilfils love-story let me assure you that Mr Gilfils potations of gin-and-water were quite moderate. His nose was not rubicund; on the contrary, his white hair hung around a pale and venerable face. He drank it chiefly, I believe, because it was cheap; and here I find myself alighting on another of the Vicars weaknesses, which, if I cared to paint a flattering portrait rather than a faithful one, I might have chosen to suppress.

Here, literary censorship enriches Eliots writing. Eliots refusal to suppress her work becomes part of the story and reinforces her agenda to portray Mr Gilfil as he really is, a vicar who mixes gin with water because he is poor.

As well as inspiring narrative additions, censorship was also powerful because of what was left out of a text.

One of Hardys most loved books, Tess of the DUrbervilles, highlights the crimes of sexual harassment in the workplace and of rape. Because Hardy had to be careful about the way that he presented the sexual abuse of Tess, his descriptions were very subtle. This is how he portrays the scene where Tess is sexually assaulted by her employer, Alec DUrberville:

The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. DUrberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt, and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

The influence of censorship meant that Hardy could not describe this scene in graphic detail. Instead, his depiction is more sensitive and thoughtful. Hardy does not dehumanize Tess by depicting her as a sexual object to entertain the reader.

By focusing on Tesss gentle regular breathing and the poignant image of her tear-stained eyelashes, Hardy avoids gratuitous depictions of violence while at the same time making us painfully aware of the injustice she has suffered. This makes his portrayal of Tess more powerful and poignant. It can be argued that this was achieved because of the limits placed on his writing, not in spite of them.

In these instances, we can see how literary censorship influenced writers to tread more carefully upon difficult territory. It made them think about whether including violence or socially controversial depictions were necessary or gratuitous to their narratives.

For Hardy and Eliot, censorship and its limits inspired creativity, sensitivity and thoughtfulness. These examples can provide food for thought in the debate today about free speech and censorship. As Hardy and Eliot wrestled with as they wrote, can things be said differently and, in some cases, do they need to be said at all?

By Stephanie Meek, PhD Candidate in English Literature, University of Reading. Meek receives funding from South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How Victorian Writers Navigated Censorship And Suppression Of Free Speech - Science 2.0

Thank you to Billy Bragg (Cancel culture doesnt stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order, 10 July) for a thought-provoking article and for drawing attention to the statue of George Orwell outside the BBC in London. Mr Bragg says that the quotation on the wall next to the statue If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear is a demand for licence, not a defence of liberty, and argues that liberty must be tempered by equality and accountability.

There is no doubt that very many tweet-friendly quotations are taken from Orwells works and used out of context by people from all parts of the political spectrum. However, the statue quotation remains a powerful statement against censorship. The essay it is taken from was titled The Freedom of the Press. As Mr Bragg says, it was written as a preface to Animal Farm. In fact, it was not used at the time and was only published long after Orwells death, in 1972.

Orwell argued for equality and democracy (accountability was not a term much used at the time) to go hand in hand with the liberty he defended. We are delighted that Orwell is the English writer that Mr Bragg admires the most and that he continues to engage in the reasoned debate for which Orwell is renowned.Quentin KoppChair, The Orwell Society

Re Nesrine Maliks piece (The cancel culture war is really about old elites losing power in the social media age, 13 July), what is at issue here is not the right of people to attack the opinions of others on social media, but the tendency to overreaction when someone expresses an opinion that is at variance with that of self-defining justice warriors.

Opinions that are lawfully expressed may well deserve robust criticism; what they do not deserve is for the person expressing them to be no-platformed, hounded out of a position of influence or traduced as some sort of fascist. Years ago, that sort of behaviour was confined to the wilder fringes of the Socialist Workers party. Now it seems to be all too common among people who should know better. Roger Fisken Ashampstead, Berkshire

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Cancel culture, George Orwell and reasoned debate - The Guardian

Laura Helena Castillo is one of the founders of "Bus TV". She told our team how they came up with the idea to keep on broadcasting local news from their windows and balconies after La Cruz went into lockdown. Theyve started referring to the project as "La Ventana TV", which means Window TV. When lockdown began, at first, we were worried because weve always carried out our projects in the street, in close contact with people, and we had to stop it all. So, we decided to try and develop other activities that would allow us to respect social distancing measures.

We did our very first news bulletins from our windows in mid-May. We got this idea because we had seen how balconies had become a space for expression in Europe during lockdown, allowing contact with the rest of the world. People were singing, playing music and applauding

The very first window news bulletin was delivered in mid-May. In this video, you can hear someone saying, This afternoon, starting at 4pm, La Cruz TV will be broadcast from the balcony of our neighbor, Mrs. Rosa Elena Marrobo."

Then, Daro dresses up in an elegant outfit and reads the news bulletin into a microphone from one of the balconies in the neighborhood while Mariln films him [Editors note: even though these videos are never posted online]. Different people in the neighbourhood offer up their balconies. Weve also rented a speaker from one of the neighbours so that people in the neighbourhood can hear.

"Testing, hello, hello, testing La Cruz TV has a project during quarantaine thats called La Ventana TV", says Daro Chacn in this video.

"Today is May 16, 2020. Weve been in quarantaine for 61 days in Venezuela. Whats happening in La Cruz? The sale of proteins, vegetables in La Cruz were a major help for the community during quarantaine", says Daro Chacn in this video.

For the time being, weve only done three news bulletins from the windows. We had to stop everything for more than two weeks because a woman in the neighbourhood was suspected of having Covid-19. So we didnt want Daro or Mariln to take any risks. But wed like to do two televised news bulletins a week, which was our rhythm with La Cruz TV.

"Three balconies, three episodes of La Ventana TV"

The start of a televised news bulletin presented on a balcony.

These flyers provide information for La Cruz residents.

Article by Chlo Lauvergnier.

Go here to see the original:
Venezuelans defy censorship to broadcast their own news bulletins - from their balconies - FRANCE 24

Has the dam broken following the build-up of conservative frustration over one-sided censorship against them byFacebook andTwitter?

Evidence of that which had built up for weeks turned into a flood over the last ten days.

What had been a quiet trend of sign-ups by publicly known conservatives including many elected officials turned into an out-and-out campaign to urge followers to join them in social media alternative platformParler (originally Par-lay per the French spelling; apparently the English literal pronunciationis acceptable now too). According toreport by Business Insider, tech data trackers said Parler reached No. 2 for Top News apps on the App Store.

According to data Sensor Tower has provided to Business Insider, Parler has seen a 246% increase in US downloads this week compared with a week prior, the site reported. On Wednesday Parler saw the biggest number of daily installs its ever had: Users downloaded the app an estimated 40,000 times in 24 hours, Apptopia told Business Insider.

Perhaps the most ominous signal came from Trump re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale, whowarned Twitter on June 19th that its days are numbered, after the liberal-leaning platform unnecessarily labeled a humorous-but-innocuous video parody of Fake News CNN posted by the President as manipulated media. The creator of the video, popular conservative meme-maker Carpe Donktum, waspermanently removed from Twitter last week.

It marked a turning point for Parscale, whose only previous statements about Parler were onlycriticisms for its functionality and technical shortcomings, compared to Twitter.

Twitter has recently upped its negative disclaimers and sometimes outright censorship on some tweets posted by President Trump, who is its most famous user. Last month Twittershielded a tweet by Trump that said, during the riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that said, These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I wont let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you! Twitter warned readers that the tweet violated its policies for glorifying violence.

Twitter alsoplaced a warning on a June 23rd Trump tweet in which he wrote, There will never be an Autonomous Zone in Washington, D.C., as long as Im your President. If they try they will be met with serious force! Twitter said it violated our policy against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.

Trumps apparent November opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, has not experienced similar treatment from Twitter, despite the campaign itselfposting obvious manipulated media to make Trump look bad.

Facebook has also gotten into the speech suppression act against Trump, after receiving pressure from its own leftist Silicon Valley employees and other Democrats over its policy to not restrict or delete his posts. Last week CEO Mark Zuckerbergsaid the platform would start labeling political content that violates its policies an apparent about-face fromlate last year, when he said he believed free speech should prevail when it comes to political content.

Also last week,Project Veritas released new videos of whistleblowers who captured former Facebook colleagues saying they suppressed conservative content. If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, said one content moderator, I am going to delete them for terrorism.

And several large corporate sponsorssaid last week they would halt advertising, after they were pressured by liberal groups like the NAACP to punish Facebook over its failure to censor hate speech. This may have been the last straw for many conservatives, who know the label hate speech is applied broadly against them for noncontroversial statements.

Parler is positioned to possibly take away users from both Facebook and Twitter, because it allows up to 1,000 characters per post. Twitters limit is 280, while Facebook is long-form friendly so Parler is a potential happy medium for both.

Hundreds of conservatives have set up on Parler, but most still exist on Twitter. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Lara Trump have Parler accounts, as do many Republican Congress members, andother conservative personalities. But the Big Kahuna, the American president, is still a holdout.

Its about time yall joined me on @parler_app, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentuckytweeted on Wednesday. Whats taking the rest of you so long?!

This platform gets what free speech is all about, and Im excited to be a part of it, said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Lets speak. Lets speak freely. And lets end the Silicon Valley censorship.

Join us on @parler_app at @Jim_Jordan! tweeted the conservative Congressman from Ohio. They dont censor or shadow ban.

On Friday Parler was the top downloaded app in the News category in the iPhone store, outperforming Twitter and Reddit,according to CNBC. Itout-downloaded Twitter again on Monday.

Will there be enough Start Parler activists to motivate a Quit Twitter campaign? It increasingly looks like a possibility.

More here:
Are Facebook and Twitter Finally Paying the Price for Censorship of Conservatives? - National Legal and Policy Center