Tag: censorship

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Cold Climate in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, China, censorship, freedom, mind control

“There is no ‘red line,’” says an anonymous thirty-​something Hong Kong humanities professor. “If they want to come after you, everything can be used as an excuse.”

Grace Tsoi, writing for the BBC, shows what happens when political correctness returns to its roots in totalitarianism. As it has in Hong Kong, in the “People’s [sic] Republic [sic] of China [sick].” The young academic Ms. Tsoi is quoting elaborated the situation: “He says his nightmare is being named and attacked by Beijing-​backed media, which could cost him his job, or worse, his freedom.”

Political correctness can cause academics in America their jobs, of course. But as relentless as our woke media and online mobs may be to “de-​platform” people they disagree with, it’s harder to go all the way.

Under a totalitarian state, it’s easier to be more thorough.

That’s why totalitarianism is the modish form of tyranny that tyrants aspire towards.

More power.

“In the academic year 2021/​22, more than 360 scholars left Hong Kong’s eight public universities,” Ms. Tsoi explains. “The turnover rate — 7.4% — is the highest since 1997, when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule, according to official data. Foreign student enrolments have dropped by 13% since 2019.”

The chilling effect is arctic. Self-​censorship has become the rule, in advance of expected censure, censorship, or worse. Hong Kong academics blame all this on 2020’s National Security Law, which “targets any behaviour deemed secessionist or subversive, allowing authorities to target activists and ordinary citizens alike.”

It’s worth remembering that while “secession” is a dirty word for the powerful, and subversion the enemy of all, it does depend on context: secession from a tyrannical state is liberation; subversion of an unjust system is justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights judiciary

Court Halts Imprisonment for Speech

free speech, satire, mind control

Left-​wing enemies of right-​wing freedom of speech, specifically the freedom of speech of Douglass Mackey, recently got their way when U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly sentenced him to seven months in prison.

But now, a month after sentencing, another court has said wait a minute.

As I reported in October, Mackey was convicted for actions in 2016 that nobody could have known would later be treated as crimes. The FBI had arrested him shortly after Joe Biden became president in January 2021 — as if waiting for a favorable political climate for an obviously partisan action.

According to selectively prosecuting U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, Mackey threatened democracy and sought to “deprive people of their constitutional right to vote.”

What attempted deprivation of voting rights? Did Mackey lock people in their homes so that they could not go out to vote? Steal ballots? Glare and scream at people walking toward a voting site?

No, all that this obvious opponent of Hillary Clinton did was publish satirical posts telling Hillary voters to vote by text, much easier that way. Obnoxious, maybe; or silly. But the posts had no power to hypnotize or derange anyone or, for that matter, prevent anyone from double-​checking with an election office or Google. And prosecutors brought in no voters who claimed to have been fooled by the obvious jest — which arguably was satire, a jape upon Mackey’s political opponents.

There’s no there there. Nevertheless, Mackey’s liberty has been at risk at least since 2018, when his legal name behind his pseudonymous social media presence was revealed.

It’s still at risk. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Mackey’s seven-​month imprisonment until his appeal can be decided and the free-​speech issues properly adjudicated.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Die, Disney, Die!

Musk, Zombie Slayer

Disney is taking big financial losses, after a series of bombs on the silver screen and on its own channel, including a billion on last year’s four film fiascos.

Why?

The company went super-​woke. And could, therefore, go broke.

Or, says Patrick Ben David, become a “zombie company,” unable to make profits, kept alive only by low interest rates and the hope that Apple will buy it.

Nevertheless, Disney joined a group of major players pulling their advertising off Twitter, er, X.

Why?

Because X’s new owner, Elon Musk, favorably forwarded a tweet about anti-​white racism that was said, by many, to be antisemitic.

It’s the rage, now, not only to support Hamas’s terrorism but to excoriate Israel, Zionism, and even Jews in general, yet it was Musk’s forwarded tweet about how Jewish intellectuals and organizations too often support anti-​white rhetoric that panicked the big companies, including Bob Iger-​headed Disney.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in an on-​stage New York Times interview, asked Mr. Musk to respond to all this. “I hope they stop,” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.”

Musk went on: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me, with advertising — blackmail me with money? — ‘go f**k yourself.’”

Then Musk repeated that command, using hand signals. 

“Is that clear? I hope it is.” Smiling, he added, “Hey Bob … if you’re in the audience.”

Mr. Sorkin pressed X’s owner on the consequences.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” said Musk, amidst his usual stutters. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company — and we will document it in great detail.”

“But those advertisers are going to say, ‘we didn’t kill the company.’”

“Oh, yeah? Tell it to Earth.”

Musk explained that both he and the boycotters will make their cases, “and we’ll see what the outcome is.”

The idea is to take the culture war outside educational institutions, the news media, and government bodies, and to shove it into boardrooms everywhere. It’s a great game of chicken, buck buck buck. And, unlike Gale Wynand in The Fountainhead, Musk appears more than willing to lose his investment in X just to prove the point.

An interesting place we’ve come to. The insider elites, and the ideological left, seek to advance woke ideology even if it ruins their own companies, such as Disney, and squelch free speech, even if it means betraying every last principle of American liberty.

So, in this war with other people’s fortunes, take sides: die, Disney, die — before X, let’s hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency

The Censorship Industrial Complex

censorship, social media

“Many people insist that governments aren’t involved in censorship,” tweeted Michael Shellenberger on Tuesday, “but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.”

Because much of recent years’ censorship has occurred on corporate-​owned-​and-​run social media platforms, like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (now X), some have claimed “it’s not censorship” and, because private, is immune to legal prosecution. This quasi-​libertarian argument was most vociferously marshaled by leftists and centrists, who’ve found in the libertarian “private property is sacred” ideal a handy excuse for the censorship they love.

They love it because of what they hate: Fox News, most specifically, and alternative media based on podcasting and vlogging platforms, more generally. These media outlets have bucked the foreign policy establishment as well as the new racism of Critical Race Theory, and official narratives about COVID. 

So they must be squelched — as “disinformation.”

This is all made more clear in what Shellenberger calls “The CTIL Files.” 

The leaked documents “describe the activities of an ‘anti-​disinformation’ group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security.’’

While government operatives and contractors organized, at first, to avoid constitutional and legislative limitations to conducting propaganda and psychological warfare against Americans, the plan was, from the beginning (says the source), “to become part of the federal government.”

In the end, “the military and intelligence agencies” got involved, along with “civil society organizations and commercial media.” Methods used include burner phones, plausible deniability, and “sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.”

You can watch today’s hearing (10:00 AM EST) of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, featuring Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, and Matt Taibbi.

Tell me what you think.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Disagreeing With Päivi Räsänen

Finland, pride, gay, censorship, religion, belief, mind control

In 2019, Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen cited the Bible in her Twitter account in order to express her views about sex and Christianity.

“How does the doctrinal foundation of the Church fit in with shame and sin being raised as a matter of pride?” Räsänen asked (in Finnish). Her tweet included a link to an Instagram post displaying Romans 1:24 – 27, which refers to how males “did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.”

Whether you or I agree with Räsänen’s view that homosexuality is per se immoral is irrelevant. What is not irrelevant is our support for freedom of speech and religious expression: she should surely not be prosecuted for expressing her opinion!

But Finnish police investigated her for the tweet. For good measure, they also included as a possible charge her 2004 publication of a pamphlet questioning same-​sex marriage and discussing related issues. She had published the pamphlet before it became illegal in Finland to express such opinions.

Now Räsänen and a Lutheran bishop being prosecuted for similar reasons have been acquitted.

This is a second acquittal. In 2022, the Helsinki District court ruled that it’s not the job of the court “to interpret biblical concepts.” A state prosecutor replied, “You can cite the Bible, but it is Räsänen’s interpretation and opinion about the Bible verses that are criminal.”

Politicians of Finland, don’t continue on this dark path. Revoke all laws that aim to jail people who disagree with you.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights judiciary

Untruth Speaker, Untruth Speaker

Donald Trump

“You can’t call anyone a liar?” Judge Patricia Millett asked federal prosecutors, “with a tone of incredulity,” according to The Washington Post report.

Millett, along with Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Bradley Garcia, serves on the three-​judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This week they devoted two hours to the appeal of a federal district judge’s gag order placed on former president Donald Trump.

Under Millett’s questioning, federal prosecutor Cecil VanDevender agreed that under the order Mr. Trump could say that someone testifying against him was “an untruth speaker” but not call that person a “liar.”

“He has to speak ‘Miss Manners’ while everyone else is throwing targets at him?” inquired Judge Millett. “It would be really hard in a debate, when everyone else is going at you full bore.”

She noted that the First Amendment importantly protects inflammatory speech, adding with some exasperation: “Your position doesn’t seem to give much balance at all to the First Amendment’s vigorous protection of political speech.”

Trump’s attorney argued that the current leading Republican presidential candidate has taken advantage of the order’s stay, pending this appeal, by “posting about this case almost incessantly since the day it was filed and they haven’t come forward with a single threat that’s even arguably inspired by any evidence in his social media posts.”

The three-​judge panel, at least as The Post reads the hearing’s tea leaves, “indicated it may narrow the order prohibiting the former president from attacking individual prosecutors … or from calling potential witnesses against him ‘liars’ in the heat of next year’s campaign.”

It should. Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed. Orange Man should have the same rights we all rightly possess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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