Tag Archives: free speech

Yet Another Example…

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…of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disregard for our Constitution. This one comes from the supposedly independent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of Biden’s Executive Branch (we know what the statute says; we also know who appoints EEOC commissioners). The EEOC’s latest rule

elevates gender identity as a protected class under discrimination laws like race, sex, and religion.
Prohibited harassment includes “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new regulatory document declared.

This is the Federal government attempting to dictate to Americans operating private enterprises what they must say. This is a direct contradiction of our Constitution’s 1st Amendment requirement that Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…. Of course, this limit applies to the Executive Branch, also.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY) emphasized the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in her own response to this…overreach:

They can’t tell you [that] you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the flag. And so forcing someone to actually use pronouns that they don’t choose to use, and then holding your employer liable, to me, is going to have First Amendment problems.

It’s also a contradiction of our Constitution’s 10th Amendment which is even clearer:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In our Constitution there are no powers conferred on the Federal government authorizing it to compel particular speech. Indeed, compelling speech is the same as abridging speech, since forced words take the place of barred words.

And none of this even begins to approach the idiocy of setting gender ideology above the facts of biology.

Free Speech NPR-Style

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And by extension, given the leftist (not the nearby center-left part of the political spectrum) bias of National Public Radio, here is the concept of the Left’s free speech. This is illustrated by NPR‘s retaliation against one of its own who spoke apart from the Narrative™.

Recall that Uri Berliner, a 25-year denizen of NPR and lately Senior Business Editor, wrote an op-ed for The Free Press that called out NPR for its far left and growing farther bias in its news reporting, extending even into the stories it chooses to publish or ignore.

NPR has suspended veteran editor Uri Berliner after he detailed his employer’s “absence of viewpoint diversity” last week in a stunning rebuke of the news organization.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported the five-day suspension without pay began on Friday.

This is what the “news” and ideology opinion outlet and the Left generally think of free speech.

National Public Radio needs to have its Federal subsidies—that’s your and my tax money—cut off entirely. That won’t be much given that 69% of NPR‘s financing comes from “Corporate sponsorships” and “Core and other programming fees,” and 30+% comes from other private sources, but at least we won’t be paying for this abuse out of our own pockets.

Update: Following NPR‘s atrocious behavior regarding free speech, Berliner has resigned altogether from that outlet.

The Disingenuousness of Government Censorship

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case centered on, among other speech-related matters, whether the Federal government illegally—unconstitutionally—pressured social media companies to suppress or delete altogether posts of which the government disapproves regarding Wuhan Virus vaccines.

The government’s arguments in the case are telling.

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar…likened the government’s interactions with social-media companies to Ronald Reagan’s urging the media to help combat drug abuse, George W Bush’s inveighing against pornography, and Theodore Roosevelt’s denunciation of muckraking journalists.

This is one of the government’s disingenuousnesses. All of Reagan’s, Bush the Younger’s, and Roosevelt’s inveighing were publicly done. Us ordinary Americans knew what those Presidents were telling “the media” what they wanted them to do, and we knew it as soon as they spoke. The Biden administration, on the other hand, pressured today’s social media outlets behind the scenes, in secret. For instance,

When Hank Aaron died in 2021, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, suggested in a tweet that the baseball legend’s death was caused by a Covid vaccine.
The next day, a White House employee asked Twitter, now known as X, to take down Kennedy’s post. “Wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the White House’s Covid-19 digital director wrote to two Twitter employees.
The social-media platform did so.

Here’s another of the Biden administration’s disingenuousnesses, if not an example of its outright cynicism, this one regarding the 5th Circuit’s ruling forbidding officials including the president’s counsel, press secretary, director of digital strategy, and other White House staffers from coercing, “significantly encouraging,” or supervising content moderation.

The Biden administration appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It warned that the restrictions would prevent the government from talking to tech companies about matters of national security and public safety, as well as urging them to protect teens from the harmful effects of social media.

Nonsense. The appellate court’s bar in no way prevented or prevents anyone in the Biden administration from talking to tech companies or anyone else about anything at all. Those officials just have to do it publicly—like those prior Presidents had done, and in the same vein those prior Presidents had—and they aren’t allowed to attempt to apply pressure to comply.

Prelogar does have an argument, of sorts.

The government is entitled to speak for itself by sharing information, urging action, and participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public[.]

Absolutely, the government is so allowed. However, government—in the present case, the Biden administration—is not speaking for itself when it moves to suppress the speech of others who disagree with the administration position.

Nor is the Biden administration “urging action” regarding the subject of a debate when it is urging suppression of views that run counter to the administration’s position.

Nor is the Biden administration participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public when it acts to suppress the speech of others, which also is of concern to the public, thereby barring the public from participating in what the Biden administration wants to be a one-sided debate.

The Biden administration should exercise its “entitlement” to speak for itself by answering disagreeing comments in the commentary with its own—public—comments saying why those disagreeing comments seem erroneous; asserting what the administration believes to be accurate information; and explaining in concrete, measurable terms why it believes its own claims to be the more accurate.

There are no alternatives in a nation that believes free speech to be a fundamental right intrinsic in each of us citizens.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Religious Persecution

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Finland Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola stood (still stand?) accused by Finnish prosecutor Anu Mantila of the heinous hate speech crime of quoting from the Bible.

Finnish district courts said, no, and acquitted the two. The prosecutor objected and took the cases to a Finnish appellate court—where the two were once again acquitted. Räsänen:

It isn’t a crime to tweet a Bible verse, or to engage in public discourse with a Christian perspective. The attempts made to prosecute me for expressing my beliefs have resulted in an immensely trying four years, but my hope is that the result will stand as a key precedent to protect the human right to free speech.

Mantila’s weasel-worded rationalization of her decisions:

You can cite the Bible, but it is Räsänen’s interpretation and opinion about the Bible verses that are criminal[.]

Well, no, they’re not, not within any universally recognized concept of free speech and opinion-uttering.

Mantila may well appeal again, to the Supreme Court of Finland. If she does, the case will cease to be a matter of prosecution (if it ever was); it will be naked religious persecution and a parallel direct attack on the principles underlying free speech.