Tag Archives: free speech

More Censorship of Conservatives

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Jack Dorsey has continued his Twitter shutdown of Conservatives, this time “temporarily freezing” the account of a Republican Congresswoman. (So much for “believe the woman” and “#MeToo.”)

[Marjorie Taylor (R, GA] Greene’s account “has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations” of Twitter’s “civic integrity policy,” a company representative said in an emailed statement.

For the heinous crime of—what, exactly?

Twitter did not specify what content led to the action—and the congresswoman herself said she was in the dark about the suspension

Rather than answering Greene’s commentary, for instance with actual logic and facts regarding Dorsey’s and his employees’ view of—what, again?—or fostering general conversation among Twitter users on—what was that?—Dorsey has chosen to simply shut up speech with which he’s incapable of discoursing and with which he has decided Twitterers are just too grindingly stupid to form rational argument. Or too emotionally wrecked to face such commentary. Or wholly incapable of simply ignoring the matter on their own initiative.

Or it’s just an excuse, a rationalization. Civic integrity: the truth according to Dorsey and his Twitter. Nothing more, nothing less. And nothing else.

Canceling Objectivity

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Now it’s being made completely manifest in the ivy-coated halls.

The Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, citing Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s (R, NY) “incorrect” claims about voter fraud in the November election, has removed her from its Senior Advisory Committee.

Harvard couldn’t, however, cancel rocks.

Douglas Elmendorf, the school’s dean, said he had first asked her to resign, but she declined.

Stefanik has bigger rocks than the Wonders of Harvard.

Harvard isn’t interested in actual advice, only in echo chamber validation of predetermined choices.

Separately, this is a lady that has places to be in a future Federal Executive Branch should she tire of Congress.

More Censorship

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Mark Zuckerberg is at it again, this time blocking a President’s access to his Facebook, which he created explicitly to be a public forum. But only for those of whom he personally approves.

Never mind that President Donald Trump plainly has never intended to obstruct the peaceful transition of power, but merely to continue his fight to ensure only those votes legally cast and counted are counted. That he plainly expected that to demonstrate his reelection rather than confirm his loss is neither here nor there. And it certainly doesn’t compare in the slightest to the refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election, and the Left’s and Progressive-Democratic Party’s active and four-year-long attempts to overthrow the President duly elected that year. That was an effort Zuckerberg and his minions at Facebook not only whole heartedly approved, but they actively supported and participated in, going to the point of censoring the President’s speech.

Nor has anything Trump has said or tweeted condoned any part of the assault on the Capital Building.

This is just rank censorship. Which censorship—any censorship—is just the cowardice of those who are terrified of opposing opinions.

The clumsy or rude phrasing of those opinions is given artificially heightened importance solely to obscure the cowardice of the censors.

Update: It’s become a full-on assault on individual liberties, epitomized by the overt attack on our freedom of speech, but plainly won’t be limited to that.

We have Jack Dorsey banning all Trump speech from his Twitter, along with the speech of his supporters. We have Followers “disappearing” from other Conservatives who tweet.

We have Tim Cook openly attacking a rival to Twitter–and to Apple–with his ban of the Parler app from his app store.

We have Sundar Pichai joining the attack by barring the Parler app from his Google Android app store.

We have Jeff Bezos shutting down Parler altogether with his Amazon ban of Parler from his servers that were hosting the alternative to Dorsey’s Twitter. That shutdown, too, was done with advance notice deliberately too for Parler to withdraw its–and its users’–information from those servers.

We have Mark Zuckerberg, in addition to the above, banning #WalkAway from his Facebook, a hashtag that committed the speech crime of encouraging members of the Progressive-Democratic Party to leave Party while showing those disappointed and disaffected other places where their voices could be heard and taken seriously.

This a full-on attack by Big Tech, by a tiny few oligarchs grown too powerful and presuming to dictate to ordinary Americans what speech will be permitted in the public square, moving openly to prevent Conservatives from having any voice at all in the public square.

Diversity

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A brief thought. Joseph Epstein wrote about true diversity, as opposed to the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology of race, sex, et al., diversity before merit in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In the main, he’s right. I want to add a little, though, to his concluding sentence.

The best way to celebrate diversity, perhaps, is to begin by celebrating diversity of thought.

Number one.

Number two is overtly recognizing the inequality of individual talent, interest, work ethic, plain luck, and a host of other inequalities intrinsic in every man that culminate in unequal outcomes flowing from the utterly necessary equality of opportunity.

That equality of opportunity is at the center of individual liberty, which includes the freedom to speak diversely—out loud and publicly—from that diversity of thought.

That ability to speak freely is a critical part of every man’s right to show the best that there is in him, a right that is truncated by demanding equality of position or of outcome.

Additionally, that demand for equality of position or of outcome insults every one of us by insisting that our best isn’t worthy of consideration or that we cannot achieve that best without Know Betters in government doing for us.

Campus Speech

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Under some pressure and an appellate court ruling in a Speech First suit, the University of Texas has agreed to stop limiting freedom of speech on campus.

…administrators agree to dismantle the bias-response team and amend policies that chill speech. Gone is a ban on “uncivil behaviors and language that interfere” with the “welfare, individuality or safety of other persons.” Also stricken is a definition of “verbal harassment” that prohibited “ridicule” or “personal attacks.”
Under the settlement, UT reserves the right “to devise an alternative” to its bias-response team, but “Speech First is free to challenge that alternative.”

It’s a step, but only a small one, and it’s unfortunate that Speech First agreed to settle. A court ruling would have been much more binding and over a much broader reach of jurisdiction.

Any settlement is only as good as the integrity of the parties to the settlement, and UT (and ISU and UM, two other institutions that have settled speech matters with Speech First) have already demonstrated their level of integrity by having attempted to ban free speech in the first place. The same personnel who assaulted speech, after all, are the signatories to the settlement and are still in place at those institutions. And this settlement promises more UT-provoked expensive litigation as those personnel dream up other ways to try to limit speech.

Along with this, UT’s band continues to refuse to play The Eyes of Texas over what those associated with the band are pleased to call “politically correct” reasons. Those same UT administrators are pretending to review that position.