Jacinda Ardern may no longer be Prime Minister of New Zealand, but she was back at the United Nations continuing her call for international censorship. Ardern is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world and continues to draw support from political and academic establishments. In her latest attack on free speech, Ardean declared free speech as a virtual weapon of war. She is demanding that the world join her in battling free speech as part of its own war against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Her views, of course, were not only enthusiastically embraced by authoritarian countries, but the government and academic elite.
In her speech, she notes that we cannot allow free speech to get in the way of fighting things like climate change. She notes that they cannot win the war on climate change if people do not believe them about the underlying problem. The solution is to silence those with opposing views. It is that simple.
While some of us have denounced her views as an attack on free expression, Harvard rushed to give her not one but two fellowships. While the free speech community denounced her for unrelenting attacks on this human right, Harvard praised her for “strong and empathetic political leadership” and specifically enlisted her to help “improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online.”
I actually have no objection to the inclusion of Ardern as a Harvard fellow. She is a former world leader who is leading the movement against free speech. It is a view that students should consider in looking at these controversies. However, Harvard has heralded her views with no acknowledgment of her extreme antagonism toward free speech principles. There is also little countervailing balance at the school with fellows supporting free speech as a human right. Rather, Harvard (which ranks dead last on the recent free speech survey) has become a virtual clearinghouse for anti-free speech academics and advocates.
Free speech is now commonly treated on campuses as harmful. Rather than the right that defines us, it is treated as an existential threat.
What is so chilling is to hear Ardean express her fealty to free speech as she calls on the nations of the world to severely curtail it to prevent people from undermining their policies and priorities. She remains the “empathetic” face of raw censorship and intolerance. She is now the virtual ambassador-at-large for global speech regulation and criminalization.
“[S]he notes that we cannot allow free speech to get in the way of fighting things . . .”
The Left’s premise, barely beneath the surface:
You cannot persuade, debate, reason with the unwashed masses. They are incapable of figuring out for themselves what is good or bad for them. They are congenitally defective. The only option left is to coerce and compel them. For their own good, of course.
If that does not make your blood boil, nothing will.
Correct. To the Left – which is supposedly intent on fighting dangers to “our democracy” – we can’t really allow democracy because the great unwashed masses are bitter clingers, a basket of deplorable, and semi-fascists (per Obama, Hillary, “Joe Biden”).
We shouldn’t let free speech get in the way of fighting for God!
Going public with views like hers! You gotta be kidding me. Kevlar!
It’s a ‘Sign’. It won’t be long until the War (III) starts and Everybody is told to Shut-Up.
That speech is from 23 sep 2022 a full year ago
https://youtu.be/q_4Cjki3SOM?feature=shared
The Right should organize a “Long March” of sorts, where a thousand guys with rifles march from New York to Los Angeles.
It would be very symbolic. The right to bear arms and assemble rolled into one.
Anonymous, the Soviet Democrat’s apparatchik doing their work here, claims conservatives should replay the history of his fellow communists and forefathers, the Communist Chinese and their Long March? Anonymous’s fevered attempts to support the Soviet Democrats and their police state fascism is reminiscent of the vile, hate filled rhetoric of Mao’s young Red Guard, so there is some rational link to a neo-Soviet Democrat Red Guard pushing for another Long March.
It’s a pathetic joke of a suggestion, of course. Two of the things that the Soviet Democrats and their Marxist Useful Idiot apparatchiks hate with the heat of a thousand suns is both the First and Second Amendments. It’s like watching Bribery Joe, The Big Guy, continue lying to Americans’ faces that he knew absolutely nothing about his son’s clients, never met them, never spoke to them, his son never made a dime off Communist China, etc.
If Anonymous ever stops lying in his appearances here, we’re going to have to send EMTs to check and see if he died. If he did, at least he’d be able to continue voting…
Bla bla bla bla bla
Right? All these people bring to the table is “Turley is hypocritical,” “Turley neglected to mention that . . .” Wake me up when they say something interesting.
So basically that’s a tu quoque argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Suppose you win that argument? Then what? It’s not interesting. It’s more interesting (in my view) to debate the points that Turley is making about what’s happening in society, than to debate Turley’s moral character.
It’s about pointing out the fact that Turley’s argument has a major flaw.
It’s not a flaw in Turley’s argument. At most it’s a flaw in his character. You need to learn some logic. You could start by reading the Wikipedia page I linked to.
To give you a start: tu quoque is one species of ad hominem, which is itself one species of ad fontes. All are fallacies because they attack the source of the argument rather than its content.
“. . . ad hominem, which is itself one species of ad fontes.”
Huh?
“Ad fontes” is a Latin expression meaning “to the sources” — as in Renaissance thinkers returning to the original Greek and Roman texts. It is not a fallacy, and therefore has no “species.”
Anon – I’m with the ACLU on this one: answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.
Oldman, you better check out the new ACLU, they no longer believe in that theory.
Ugh, really? If you’re right then I’m very disappointed.
How would you respond to the spread of atheism online? Why should that kind of disinformation be tolerated?
It’s about the contradiction of his principle.
See to me that’s boring. If one blog, that favors free speech, doesn’t practice free speech . . . and that’s your whole point? That’s a yawner.
But if universities are silencing dissent, and the media is silencing dissent, and the government is in bed with the media telling it to silence dissent, those types of issues have society-wide implications. As such, they’re more interesting than pointing to one law professor and calling him a hypocrite.
Turley is acting as an editor which is his right to do. He is not taking orders from a govt. agency or asking for special protections.
Who are these other editors Turley is accusing?
The good professor is a decent, moral man, unlike you.
And it is his blog. He can do as he chooses. He and others see you for the evil you are.
If you dont like it, STFU and go away.
Because he’s not the govt.
Anonymous, a virulent racist whose purpose here is to defend the lifelong Racist In Chief currently wandering the White House in his Depends, returns to the predictable.
Soviet Democrats and their Marxist Useful Idiots defending and promoting the racism of Bribery Biden, The Racist In Chief, claims that Turley is the racist – AND promoting censorship.
It isn’t Anonymous and the Soviet Democrats with their long history of police state fascist racism and censorship – it’s Turley and anyone who criticizes them doing that who are supposedly the ones guilty of doing what they themselves are doing.
The left is not very good at practicing the golden rule.
They need a great deal more practice, in fact.
Good one Kevin. Reminds me of an old cheer:
Florida oranges, Texas cactus
We think your team needs more practice!
We all feel so comfortable being in the US with our 1st A, but if the Democrats had a few more votes in the senate they would have gotten rid of the filibuster and then packed the Court. Once the Court was packed they would have won every 1st A case that they took up (and they would find a bunch of cases that they liked) and then we would be heading down that slope of losing our very own freedom of speech.
The hold is more tenuous then we can imagine and one of our parties is moving in this direction every single day. They silenced people on FB, Twitter and the other sites, they scream down speakers, they tried to have Scary Poppins running us over and unbelievably they have the media backing them???
Covid was the training ground, the Climate is next. Notice that the border isn’t an emergency, crime isn’t an emergency just climate and maybe racism are an emergency. Although maybe I should amend my remark because they will end up calling the border and crime an emergency so that they can ban all discussion of both.
Enemies of the people are right here as well. Guys like “Anonymous” always argue that shouting down others is a form of free speech. “Anonymous”, like others before him, will comment 200 times a column as he tries to ruin the comments section probably because this is what he is paid to do. The FBI had many agents at Twitter why would we not think they have them everywhere that has decent information?
“if the Democrats had a few more votes in the senate”
On the morning of Nov 4, 2020, i told my very liberal and “well informed” girl friend that “joe manchin just became the most powerful person on the planet”. She look at me like my head was missing.
I don’t like the way people are, so, God, if you’re listening, you can destroy them in a flood or a meteor strike and I would be ok with that. Thank you.
If there was a meteor strike, being the soft squishy person you are, likely you and your children would not survive.
We would be okay with that.
This is Anonymous carrying on in Lyin’ Like Bribery Biden fashion. Lie blatantly and presume that if normal Americans reject the unending litany of lies, at least you’ll have muddled the waters doing your service for the police state fascist Soviet Democrats and the Dear Leader.
“And truth be told, there isn’t a person on the planet who would survive a direct meteor strike.”
Sure they would. It happens all the time. Meteors are constantly hitting (about 17,000/year) the Earth and yet here we are.
“Most meteorites reach the Earth’s surface in the form of dust or very small particles after passing through the atmosphere, which is why we do not normally see them. However, believe it or not, some 17,000 meteorites fall to Earth every year.”
I stand by my ability to survive a direct hit of a dust particle, you keep being a Nancy.
So, you don’t believe in facts. You sound perfect for the global warming doomsayers.
I am not a Trump supporter.
I did not vote for him in 2016 or 2020. S. Meyer and I had a series of comments on the subject.
However, as I have stated in the recent past, if Trump is the Republican candidate I will vote for him. Even if he is in jail. But I would prefer someone else.
As to my comment at the meteor strike poster, he/she seems to have some kind of weird, morbid attachment to war, death, destruction of the entire world. See his/her previous comments about nuclear war and escalating the Ukraine/Russian war. I was merely pointing out with a degree of irony that he would likely not survive despite calling on God to smite those he/she does not like and used ‘we’ as those of us who are against such actions of the escalation of the Ukraine/Russian war, WWIII and nuclear Armageddon.
As for the rest of your comment, pure projection on your part. I know full well shooting at a meteor will do absolutely nothing nor would I try. Waste of ammunition.
What is “right-wing?”
Actually depending on the size of the meteor, its composition and where it would make impact would have a varying degree of the chance of survival. Scientists know of several large meteor strikes on the earth. Life continued on.
Communism’s newest “empathetic” little cheerleader coming to you LIVE, courtesy of one of our oldest universities. Welcome to wokism in today’s Amerika. Thank you, Jonathan, for an excellent article.
Just waiting for the first s@@tlib to support her comments and call anyone a “nazi” who disagrees.
We have to destroy the village to save it, right?
antonio
I recently emailed a Harvard professor who wrote about climate change and asked about the recent discovery of an ancient temple and city located underwater off Naples, Italy. It was dated from before the Roman Empire and I asked what might have caused the sea to rise since this was long before fossil fuels and industrialization. I noted that these changes must have been “natural” as opposed to man-made. To his credit, he asnwered me and said that yes, natural occurrences do account for things like this and are happening constantly – BUT, we do not have to contribute to these changes or accelerate them by burning fossil fuels.
JJC,
Good point and good on the professor to respond.
However, the one issue I have with the whole climate change debate is they never discuss carbon footprint. For example, prior to COVID, the IT industry, namely streaming services, consumed as much energy as the entire global airline industry did. Likely with work from home technology the IT industry power consumption has increased.
They want their cake and eat it too.
Write the professor a follow up question: In order to combat climate change, would he be willing to revert to a low carbon footprint of say pre-industrial revolution like lifestyle? Say late 1800s? Horse and carriage. No internet. No smartphones. Limited healthcare. All food sourced within a days walk.
That is what life looks like without fossil fuels.
The burning of fossil fuels has lead to a dramatic decrease in climate related deaths in the past 100 years.
Earth never had a constant climate. We can try to fight climate change but there exists no neutral climate position to return to. Climate change is a natural phenomenon. The last ice age ended around 1850, so we are now in a period of global warming until the next ice age arrives (which will be far more disastrous than global warming). If you ask a serious scientist how much as a percentage of current warming is caused by human action and how much by nature, he cannot answer it. Of course, we contribute to it but how much is unknown. Does human action accelerate the warming or lead to higher tend temperature than without human action, or both? No clear answer can be provided. Nevertheless, politicians globally implement policies to fight global warming without any clue what the end result can be (as we are unbale to stop the natural trend) and without any cost-benefit analysis. That is called mismanagement. After Covid, climate change is now an instrument to control the world’s populace. That is the true objective. That’s why the UN is called upon to take action, so recalcitrant countries can be forced to comply.
Ardean may even herself believe that climate change is an existential threat as she likely has been subjected to decades of propaganda as well (this started in the 1970ies when I was a teenager). That makes her even more useful. She is not a global leader but a global puppet – slightly more important than the Swedish snotnose.
Some scientists have recently come out to state that there is NO climate crisis or emergency. Clearly, the globalists need to stop the spread of this kind of scientific misinformation!
The condescendence of her speech is also revealing but not different than Hillary calling those of us living in fly-over country, deplorables. Critical thinking is a skill Ardean either has lost or never had. She refuses to evaluate her own positions, which confirms that the climate change movement is essential a religious movement defending dogma, not truth. People not believing so much or having a nuanced opinion on anthropogenic climate change are often – in a denigrating manner – called ‘flat earthers.’ They forget, however, that in medieval times, the flat earth theory was the consensus theory, much like anthropocene climate change is now. Those disagreeing and claiming earth was round and circling the sun (instead of the other way around) were persecuted much alike critics of the climate emergency are today. So, who are really the flat earthers?
Anonymous and the rest of the Marxist Useful Idiot “Our Russia Dossier is intelligence agency proof Trump is a Russian agent” Soviet Democrat apparatchiks, repurposed as Weather Warming liars.
Doesn’t bother them in the slightest that every prediction the IPCC has made has proven false. After all, they never questioned that their God, The Magical Marxist Mulatto Clown, bought another multi-million dollar mansion in Martha’s Vineyard the moment he left the White house. A mere hundred yards and a few feet above sea level – where those rising oceans he warned about and spent billions he claimed were to defend against should be pouring through his front door any day now.
Anonymous never questioned why The Magical Marxist Mulatto Clown would spend millions on a mansion about to be flooded by those oceans rising due to the weather – why should he question either the IPCC or the rest of the scientists reliant on a paycheque and funding from the Weather Warming crowd?
You deny that climate changes naturally?
A hundred “likes!” Very well stated.
“If you ask a serious scientist how much as a percentage of current warming is caused by human action and how much by nature, he cannot answer it.” Of course — there is no present tense for a continuous process.
“…he climate change movement is essential a religious movement defending dogma, not truth. People not believing so much or having a nuanced opinion on anthropogenic climate change are often – in a denigrating manner – called ‘flat earthers.’”
‘Heretic’ is the religious term for belligerent Non-Believers™. I’m surprised the Klimate Kultists haven’t forced redefinition of the word itself and inclusion in their Testimonials and Witnessing, (yet).
Maybe we should follow her beliefs on free speech and shut her speech down?
Let them live by their own rules?
she fits right in at harvard. pathetic “school” at this point. When I left (not faculty) in 2018 – it was already bad.
When I graduated in 1979 it was already bad. I was loudly “hissed” (the favorite Ivy League insult) and called, ironically, “Fascist” just for wearing a Ford button in the fall of ’76 while walking the halls between classes.
Predictable:
She’s using Free Speech to kill Free Speech. Flush it’s Guerrillas into the Open.
” In guerilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Such as? if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re mobile and they’re slow.
You’re hidden and they’re exposed.
Only fight battles you know you can win.
You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
That way they’re supplying you. You grow stronger as they grow weaker.”
She is a conspirator of the State – The Enemy.
Harvard just continues to descend into the hell of authoritarianism.
GEB,
You are correct, even though their motto is “Veritas.”
They appear to have strayed from truth.
She remains the “empathetic” face of raw censorship and intolerance.
This started quite a while ago, but on the Left the value of “empathy” is a juggernaut used to mow down all other standards of civil society, such as the rule of law, free speech, equality of opportunity, fiscal responsibility, and others. While empathy between private citizens is one thing, using it as a basis for governing is downright totalitarian, as this modern trend demonstrates.
First, I congratulate the people of New Zealand for relieving her of her duties as the PM. Second, her actions as PM certainly predicted this type career. These anti-free speech idiots are so power mad they cannot even see that this type of actions leads to the authoritarian state they supposedly seek to avoid since “free speech is a threat to democracy”. Either they don’t care or that actually want an authoritarian state. They seem to have no knowledge of the purges of the various authoritarian states of the 20th century where the founding zealous are nearly all in unmarked graves by the time one of the number or a later, less doctrinaire but practical dictator arises. High value targets like her are tailor made for a memorial site to the “heroes of the revolution” as the dictator grip on power tightens.
Like you, I am amazed at how these idiots do not seem to understand where this attack on free speech inevitably takes us. I would love to censor them, but I know that the cost of doing so is freedom itself.
I remember how she cracked down on gang violence by banning assault weapons.
The people who used to say “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” have a new line: censorship is the highest form of free speech.
P.S. Now that “Joe Biden” is in office all those dissent-is-highest-form-of-patriotism bumper stickers have mysteriously disappeared.
We have the 1st Amendment followed by the 2nd Amendment think about that.
I served draft Army I will never shut up!
More PROOF…time to END all Federal Aid and Loans to Colleges!
Let democrats PAY for their FAILURE