Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Disney’s Memory Hole

Simpsons, China, censorship

China’s leaders fear Winnie the Pooh.

And The Simpsons.

The totalitarian regime’s opponents liken Xi Jinping, the latest Dear Leader, to Winnie the Pooh — due to an obvious resemblance. So Xi’s government works hard to expunge Winnie images.

The Chinazis also want everyone in China and Hong Kong (not to mention across the universe) to forget the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when hundreds or thousands of people demanding democratic reform were killed. 

The Walt Disney Company is eager to cooperate with this besieging of memory.

The Simpsons is part of its new streaming service in Hong Kong, where citizens have been losing the last remnants of political freedom permitted under the two-​systems agreement of 1997. Whether preemptively or in compliance with instruction from the Chinese government, Disney has deleted a certain episode from the series’ archive available to Hong Kongers.

In the memory-​holed episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pain,” Homer, presiding over the corpse of Mao, opines that Mao is “like a little angel that killed fifty million people.”

Another character has a stare-​down with a tank, recalling the briefly effective “tank man” confrontation with a row of tanks in that fateful June of 1989.

The episode also satirizes the Chinazi determination to erase all discussion of Tiananmen. For instance, the Simpsons see a sign at Tiananmen Square announcing “on this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

Instead of appeasing Xi’s government, what should Disney do? 

What anybody who is paid to help repress a people and blank out the past: Stop doing that. 

Forfeit the money. 

Stand up for human rights. 

Or lose them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Senatorial Suppressor

Elizabeth Warren, censorship, 1st Amendment, free speech

The brazenness of governmental assaults on freedom of speech continues apace.

In addition to “aggressive IRS scrutiny” of conservative groups, using campaign finance regulations to suppress speech, and FBI raids on homes of perpetrators of journalism, we are seeing government officials openly demand that private firms suppress speech.

In September, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Amazon chastising it for promoting books that contradict the government line about matters pandemical.

One target of Warren’s finger-​wagging is The Truth About COVID-​19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.

I don’t know how cogent it is. I’m willing to let the authors make their case.

Not Senator Warren.

In her public letter, she rebukes Amazon for being “unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the sale of falsehoods . . . .” That’s a lot of book-​warehouse-​burning implicitly rationalized. How many classics of Western civilization contain falsehoods? Not to mention the I Ching.

Now the authors and publisher of The Truth About COVID-​19 have sued Warren for acting to violate the First Amendment by proxy. Their filing cites a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that politicians violate the First Amendment when telling booksellers that selling certain books may be “unlawful.” Exactly what Warren does in her letter.

As that Court put it, “people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.” 

Let’s hope that today’s Supreme Court recognizes the same reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Freedom to Say “Jesus”

Brian Hickman, religion, freedom, dance

Some people have it tough to begin with. Then others make their lives even tougher for no good reason.

Fifth-​grader Brian Hickman has cerebral palsy. Inspired by his mother, Adriana, he doesn’t let it keep him down.

His resilience has recently been tested. One of the things Brian loves to do is dance, and he spent weeks preparing for a talent show at his elementary school. 

Then the school said no.

He wanted to dance to “We Shine,” a contemporary Christian song that mentions Jesus. In accordance with the school district, administrators told him he couldn’t use it. 

Too offensive.

The principal opined that permitting the song would violate “separation of church and state.”

Well, “separation of church and state” is a term of art for what is in the Constitution: the right to free exercise of religion, and a prohibition on establishing a state church.

Letting Brian dance to his preferred music could not have resulted in the imposition of a prayer schedule on the citizenry, in forcing Episcopalians to become Lutherans or vice versa, or in otherwise coercively establishing religion.

No, officials were merely consulting their own sensibilities and deciding that they or the students could not abide exposure to Christian sentiments. Since Brian likes only Christian songs, any alternate he might have come up with would probably also have been refused.

But why make him start from scratch anyway?

His mother knew what to do: enlist the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, which promptly filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Which promptly reversed course and let Brian dance to the music he wanted.

Case closed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights ideological culture

Bright Sheng Dimmed

Lawrence Olivier, Othello, race, censorship

Resolved: pedagogic enthusiasm plus naivety about the likely reactions of the “safe space” brigade shouldn’t be a burning-​at-​the-​stake kind of offense. 

Or any kind of firing offense.

Bright Sheng, University of Michigan professor of composition and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, showed his class the 1965 movie “Othello,” which stars Laurence Olivier. Olivier was in blackface. 

Sheng failed to give a trigger warning so that safe-​space aficionados could either gird their loins or skip the class.

Uh oh.

As Reason magazine’s Robby Soave notes, Olivier’s use of blackface “was controversial even at the time.”

Given the sub-​venial nature of the sin, what might any sane-​but-​offended student have done? Go up after class and say, “Gee, Professor Sheng, love your class, but shouldn’t you have made some preparatory comment about the blackface? Well, have a nice day.”

But no. It’s got to be a wailing reenactment of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, with rabid students (and others) demanding Sheng be booted. No attention to context, no proportionality, no common sense.

Sheng has offered an abject apology, saying, in part, that “time has changed, and I made a mistake in showing the film, and I am very sorry.”

Was the mob demanding his ouster appeased? No. The mob never is.

The professor has for now stopped teaching his class, and the university is “investigating.”

The investigation actually needed, alas, will not be done. What administrators must discover is a backbone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights social media

Our Authoritarian Moment

Youtube, censorship

Was it something I said?

Yesterday, YouTube removed the video of my latest episode of This Week in Common Sense. Why? The platform claims I violated its “terms of service” and “community standards” by providing “medical misinformation.”

Funny, YouTube did not specify which statement in the video was incorrect, much less provide any citation to back up its “misinformation” claim.

This sort of authoritarianism is quite common these days. We’re just supposed to take the Authority’s word that It Possesses the Whole Truth.

No debate. No dissent.

There is not even a reference or consult.

Which is what Dr. Byram W. Bridle, PhD, Associate Professor of Viral Immunology Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph discovered.

He refused to provide evidence of vaccination. So his Canadian university “banned” him “from campus for at least a year.” And sat by while colleagues and students abused him for being “anti-​science.”

Thing is, as he points out in his Open Letter to the academic institution, not one of the tenured immunologists of the University of Guelph thinks there should be mandatory vaccination. All are very concerned about the goal of universal vaccination. Since not one of the available vaccines appears effective enough to produce sufficient immunity in recipients “herd immunity,” the goal must be mere “herd vaccination.” 

Dr. Bridle is especially annoyed that the university does not allow him to demonstrate his natural immunity to the disease, which simply does not interest the pro-​vaccination bureaucrats.

Worse yet, at no point in the university’s deliberations over the vaccine mandate did administrators consult their own immunology department!

That’s not “following the science.”

Like at YouTube, it’s a political campaign: science not required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: I first heard about both stories from my podcasting sparring partner, who produced two stories on his website regarding Dr. Bridle and tipped the hat to historian Tom Woods.

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First Amendment rights social media

The Death of “Mind Your Business”

Covid, obituary, Twitter, social media, censorship

“Twitter is now censoring obituaries.”

That was the tweet of Sean Davis (@seanmdav) summing up (perhaps just a tad hyperbolically) the latest social media attempt at what might best be called “official spin.” 

Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) asked “Who @Twitter thought it was okay to say an OBITUARY is misleading?” But Mr. Domenech tweeted without any exaggeration.

The obituary in question appeared in The Oregonian. The basic information that so vexed Twitter? It appeared in the first paragraph of a grieving family’s sad marking of the death of Jessica Berg Wilson, who “passed away unexpectedly Sept. 7, 2021 from COVID-​19 Vaccine-​Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT) surrounded by her loving family. Jessica was an exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-​year-​old young mother with no underlying health conditions.”

FoxNews summarizes the social media giant’s warning on Kelly Bee’s (@ke11ybender) original tweet as follows: “Twitter labeled the tweet ‘misleading,’ and provided information on ‘why health officials consider COVID-​19 vaccines safe for most people.’”

How gratuitous. Jessica Berg Wilson is not “most people.” 

She was one person. 

The malady in question, Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, has to do with clotting in the body’s smaller blood vessels. The “Vaccine-​induced” in the obituary is very pointed, and probably only a theory, as they say, but it doesn’t look like a bad theory: at least one doctor has identified micro-​clotting as a problem that the mRNA vaccines can cause.

News of these cases has been suppressed, apparently in the cause of universal vaccination. Twitter dutifully adds its weight.

Adjudicating medical claims is none of Twitter’s business. Social media companies are ruining their own industry. Ask why. 

Demand answers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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