In the global anti-free speech movement, Maria Ressa stands apart. The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Columbia professor has used her celebrated position to call for censorship in the name of tolerance and diversity. She is showered with accolades as she calls for curtailing speech with a highly sophisticated, though at times Orwellian, pitch. In the cause of tolerance, she calls for viewpoint intolerance, particularly in the regulation of speech on the Internet.
That was evident this week as she spoke at Dartmouth’s Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards. The most insidious aspect of this campaign is how academic and other groups regularly portray Ressa as a free speech advocate.
A couple of years ago, I spoke at the World Forum in Berlin on free speech. It would be my first in-person exposure to Maria Ressa, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who also spoke about free speech. However, as I wrote at the time, rather than an ally on free speech, I found a diehard advocate for censorship. Ressa has been embraced by Europeans as a champion of speech regulations, using her status to call for limiting speech around the world.
A supporter of Hillary Clinton (who has also called for Europeans to use the infamous Digital Services Act to censor Americans), Ressa has attacked figures like Elon Musk for dismantling censorship systems. For the anti-free speech community, she is the perfect Trojan horse speaker. She is billed as a champion of human rights, yet she spreads the same anti-free-speech narratives.
In her speech at Dartmouth College, Ressa pushed back on attacks on her comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. While such criticism is the exercise of free speech, she told the Dartmouth College student paper that the state of free expression in the U.S. is “horrific.”
The statements to The Dartmouth are vintage Ressa. She declared
“I think we are living through the Filipinization of America. America has long been the beacon of freedom and democracy that you aspire to. It’s horrific to see that change and to see the country that anchored the post-World War II world begin to destroy it. I’m shocked to see Americans afraid to speak out.”
The problem is that Ressa is selective about who can speak and about what she declares “false information.” She views conservative governments as virtually synonymous with “authoritarianism” and demands “accountability” for social media companies that do not censor disinformation. That includes cracking down on anyone she considers to be “online trolls” or people who engage in “misogynistic and racist attacks.”
She has continued to espouse the same narrative that Russian disinformation was behind the 2016 win of Donald Trump. In her prior remarks, she declared:
“If the tactic worked on us, then it was deployed for you. That’s what happened in 2016, when 126 million Americans were targeted by Russian disinformation, and on January 6, in the violence on Capitol Hill when Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.”
She often demands censorship to combat conservative governments and causes that she opposes because she is right and they are… well… fascists, of course. At Harvard, she proclaimed:
“In Cambridge Commons just on the other side of that gate, there’s a marker to American patriot William Dawes, who, like his more famous friend Paul Revere, rode through here sounding the alarm: ‘The British are coming.’
…I will say it now: ‘The fascists are coming.'”
She wants regulators in control of speech to guarantee that the “truth,” as she defines it, is given greater attention:
“Now, Big Tech is now choking traffic to news sites, which means you will get less news in your feeds. How do you know what’s real, how do you know what’s fact when your emotions are what’s manipulated, when our biology is hacked? Instead of facts, And instead, the “enshittification” of the internet is in full bloom: more trash, more propaganda, more information operations that push our emotional buttons. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo deleted X last year, calling it a human sewer.”
Dartmouth shows how many in academia will continue to use Ressa to spread this anti-free speech narrative under the guise of a champion for human rights. Some of us believe that free speech is a natural right, a human right. That makes Ressa less than an inspiring figure on the world stage when she campaigns for speech controls and censorship.
Ressa is a reminder that censorship in the United States is more likely to come from the left under the guise of fighting fascism than an actual fascist government. It will be rationalized as an act of tolerance by enforcing viewpoint intolerance.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
I never knew the standards for getting a Nobel Peace Prize were so low.
I gotta get me one of them Nobel Peace Prizes right away!
Strange that Ms Ressa is condemning the United States for not censoring free speech when she was arrested in the Philippines for demonstrating and speaking for free speech. As such she ran afoul of President Duarte and was arrested and detained then convicted. How can she then turn around and advocate censorship. Her inability to see the contradiction in her stance on free speech and censorship is remarkable.
But we know that this has nothing to do with free speech but more to do with the “right speech” where your opposites in thought and speech are the only ones that should have their rights curtailed or totally revoked.
Granted that free speech can be a sewer but a person capable of thought and judgement is usually capable of getting down in the sewer and pulling out the useful thoughts and points of view and saving them for posterity and humanity.
There is a lot that rolls by each of us every day. Our job is to determine what to snatch from the sewer, pull it ashore, examine it, measure it against what else is found and determine what truth it can show to us. We don’t need a filter upstream guiding our thoughts and denying us the right to make our own decisions. Certainly not Ms Ressa or Hilary Clinton.
So, what “Now, Big Tech is now choking traffic to news sites, which means you will get less news in your feeds.” news traffic is being chocked off?
Seems to me, do a Google search and the first page will be mostly leftist MSM.
Ressa is a Fascist. There is no other way to describer her and those of her intolerant ilk.
Let the censorship start with her and her ilk. How many battalions does Columbia University have?
Maria Ressa expresses a form of self-delusional bias that only others can begin to understand. The same trend she expresses is present in most European nations that have experienced an influx of immigrants with personal belief systems based on Islamic traditions. The first thing they must oppose is free speech, because it allows blasphemy, which transcends all civil laws and notions of freedom. The Philippines, Ressa’s country of origin, has a population in which more than 10 percent of the people are Muslim. Compare that with the U.S., where our Muslim population is about 1.4 percent. In the UK and Germany, the Muslim population is quite large and growing at more than 6 percent of the population. The answer, the only answer, is tolerance, but, alas, this is frowned upon as being blasphemous by some, like Ressa, as being an evil tool of the infidel.
Disney Asks FCC To Declare ‘The View’ A News Show, Exempt From Equal Time Rule
Disney is asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to declare the daytime talk show “The View” a “bona fide news” program to bypass the federal equal opportunities law, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced May 22.
By Jill McLaughlin – The Epoch Times ~ May 23, 2026
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/disney-asks-fcc-declare-view-news-show-exempt-equal-time-rule
She has the right to spew nonsense.
She absolutely does.
She has no right to use force to accomplish her goal of limiting the freedom of others.
Does Reesa have the Rahm Emanuel Honorary Professorship at the Clinton Foundation as well? You know old Rahmy said – never let a good opportunity (aka crisis) go to waste. Looks like Comrade Reesa is turning free speech into a crisis that can only be solve by crushing out unapproved thoughts. Well done Comrade Reesa – train those empty headed DODO BIRD students.
This is a odd way to start a Sunday.
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Once again, in a retrial against Weinstein, prosecutors were unable to score a win. Yet another charge against the former Hollywood bigwig has ended in a mistrial, this time over Jessica Mann’s rape allegation. And according to one female juror, the split was rather interesting… all the women voted not guilty, and three men voted guilty.
How things in The Bigger Picture fall into line, like that of Free Speech Censorship.
(Watch the full video to the ending ~ 2hrs.)
Economist Exposes How Banks Manufacture Wars, False Flags & Famines to Usher in the New World Order
Virtually every major war begins under false pretenses. German economist Richard Werner explains what the current global conflict is actually about.
The Tucker Carlson Show • May 22nd 2026 • 126 mins
https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-richard-werner-052226
It’s a small college, but there are of us that used to love it