We have previously discussed the cancel campaigns targeting JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling was not only the greatest selling author of all time but a wildly popular writer until she publicly opposed certain transgender policies as inimical to the advances in feminism. Now, she is the target of a lawsuit by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the gold-medal winning athlete who had previously failed a gender test to confirm that she is a female fighter. We previously discussed that global debate, but Khelif is now accusing Rowling out of many thousands of critics of being a cyberbully. X owner Elon Musk has also been named in the lawsuit.
Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign. Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns.
She held her ground after Scotland passed a draconian law, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. The new crime under the law covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.”
Rowling previously posted various responses to the controversy on her X account on August 7, including: “For the record, bombarding me with pictures of athletic women to ‘teach’ me that women don’t all look like Barbie is like spamming me with pics of differently-shaped potatoes to prove rocks are edible. I can still see the difference and you look frankly bonkers.”
She later also posted: “Commentators pretending critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw-manning. I don’t claim Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.”
She further wrote on X how she was concerned over both boxers challenged over their gender at the Olympics: “What will it take to end this insanity? A female boxer left with life-altering injuries? A female boxer killed?”
France has eviscerated free speech protections over the last few decades with speech criminalization laws. There is some question whether the French laws would apply to tweets made outside of the country.
These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
The question of the extraterritorial application of such laws is the question. Conversely, the United Kingdom and the European Union are asserting the right to regulate speech in any country, including political speech in American presidential elections.
Rowling has every right to be heard on the Olympic boxing controversy. This debate raises core issues that touch on a wide array of political speech. Khelif has the ability to refute these claims through the exercise of her own free speech. As in the past battles fought by Rowley, her effort to advocate for women’s rights is also a major test over free speech in Europe.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).
Kamala and Tim need to show solidarity with Imane Khelif. The best way for them to support Khelif’s nobel cause would be for Kamala to undergo a sex change to a transmale and for Tim to become a transfemale. It’s the patriotic thing to do to support trans-America.
Read the BBC article, this is interrelated with some French persecutor’s office to fight online hate or some other Orwellian nomenclature.
These anti-hate speech codes (“incitement” is usually a key word) have been around in Europe since at least 2000
They started out being used against skinheads and holocaust deniers, ie, “Racists and antisemites”
Now any Englishman or French who opposes unlimited third world migration and endless billions of welfare to encourage it, is deemed a a racist, homophone, Islamophobe, etc.
But remember when it was just skinheads and David Irving, we told you it would be used against regular people eventually.
The bourgeois middle class of Europe didn’t listen, and didn’t care. Now you too will suffer.
Understand who’s at fault, by the way, not all the migrants.
Really it’s the western billionaires who are behind the “Foreign policy blob” and American elections and the Democrat party mostly (but also to a lesser degree the RINOs) They are the profiteers behind most of the financialized western economy (Blackrock) and the military industrial complex and these forever wars. The same characters who gave tons to Hillary and were surprised and enflamed by Trump’s win in 16. They will stop at nothing to get him now.
And here in America the bourgeois academic types sniffle at Trump and MAGA rednecks etc
It’s class warfare, waged by very clever billionaires who run the media.
There may be an occasional dissenter like Trump or Musk but these exceptions more or less prove the rule
The irony here is all these red state people running around still talking about commies– don’t realize the commies were right about this: global capitalism is actually the enemy. It really is. Not free enterprise, not private property as a social and cultural institution, but international oligopolies that manipulate American agencies like their personal fiefdoms. These are the enemy and those who control them.
Trust me, it’s tankie stuff that might actually save us! We need discipline, right ideas, and leadership to win.
And ultimately we will eventually need the most severe measures to kick the teeth out of the mouths of the global vampires.
IF we wait too long and they succeed in developing and deploying AGI, it’s probably game over for humanity.
Saloth Sar
Exactly! Well said.
* It’s a 3rd world Professor Turley.
When the fun is done it’ll be cropdusted.
Watching Trump crash and burn in slow motion is highly satisfying. His act of acting like a total d-bag got him a core base which eeked him over the line in 2016. Every loss since then, political and legal, has been wonderful. What makes this one especially awesome is how, like Wile E. Coyote, he thought he was home free… except, the humiliation he thought he was dumping on Biden is now being dumped on him.
I’ve got my popcorn and am daily being entertained by Trump, who’s only way to get out of the trap he ensnared himself in by name calling and sociopathic lying, is to act like an adult and respect people he disagrees with. But he can’t, LOL. He’s white trash and is only ramping up his d-bag charm. In November he’ll be swinging from the noose he made, LOL.
* you’re sadistic anonymous. See a doctor. Seriously
Less sadistic than Trump, but, yes, sadistic.
As VP Heiress said, speaking to the nameless rabble;
Now looky here y’all, don’t be so sad, you just need to look at the yellow school buses. Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus, right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus, right? (Applause flashes on the backdrop) – The ASL Signer signals: Achtung, applaus dummköpfe,or wir wille schießen.
Just — there’s something about the — and — and most of us, many of us went to school on the yellow school bus, right? And it’s part of — it’s part of our — our experience growing up. It’s part of, you know, a nostalgia and a memory of — of the excitement and joy of going to school to be with your favorite teacher, to be with your best friends, and to learn. The school bus takes us there. And in America today, 25 million children a day go to school on the yellow school bus — 25 million children a day.
And as the Nation’s Border Commissar, I’ve personally ensured that there are over 50,000 unaccounted for children somewhere, if still alive, who sneaked in just to enjoy the freedom of riding on one of our big yellow school buses. What a great Nation we have that so many of the worlds downtrodden would seek a new beginning riding on one of our big American yellow school buses.
And today, 95 percent of our school buses are fueled with diesel fuel, which contributes to very serious conditions that are about health and about the ability to learn. What else would explain how someone of my obviously diesel fueled brain exposure could stand before an audience of the world’s greatest and most educated society espousing such meaningless dribble and be applauded for it? Right, it’s joy, RIGHT!!!
(Audience hears bolt clicks behind them…).
“He’s white trash”
Likely that odious racist remark comes from the mouth of an effete white liberal fool, maybe a retired professor* who got his taxpayer funded sinecure for fabricating purported knowledge in what formerly was known as the humanities. They are a certain breed of loathsome catamite who are in special need of vocational retraining, such as in ditch digging in the desert, so they too can one day become useful citizens.
They are a comprador elite of sorts, disloyal to the nation and the people, and increasingly are known as that.
Eventually, will be rectified.
Saloth Sar
* maybe not a worthless humanities professor, maybe some other parasite, maybe a government bureacrat, who knows. But we all know the kind of people who use that word white trash: usually people from poor backrounds, lace curtain Irish, the first in their families to go to college, and constantly afraid they’ll be exposed for what they should have been proud of, but arent, which is, that they came from the working class, though they now suck up daily to the Soros types and hustle for “grants” and other crumbs from the billionaires. Sickening losers, we all know the type! The “NFPs” and “NGOs” are infested with them! That’s who’s also supplying many of the patients for the trans clinics too, because very ambiguous! The wispy beard, blue hair, tatted and riveted types!
The good professor’s efforts to speak out against totalitarian thought police in the UK dates at least to 2011 when he called out authorities in the Isle of Wight for arresting someone who played Kung Fu Fighting. Looney Toon behavior against opposing viewpoints is well-engrained in the UK. Orwell was prescient. We all know that now.
* as to defining women and men, ask the DOT about blood alcohol levels. Men are allowed higher levels than women for DUI. same should hold true for sports.
Women’s sports are for women to encourage physical fitness . Just so absurd.
* as to defining women and men, ask the DOT about blood alcohol levels. Men are allowed higher levels than women for DUI.
No, they’re not! Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea?
It’s not just the government that would like to punish you for expressing views and opinions that they don’t like.
Rowling and Musk have the money/muscle and the desire (most important) to reverse/overturn the extreme anti-free speech policies that have crept into European jurisprudence —-
Who becomes the next POTUS and moves into the White House in January, 2025 will be an existential event with long-term consequences.