We have previously discussed the effort of students and faculty to bar federal agencies like ICE from job fairs despite the strong interest (and need) of students to seek such jobs. Now the American University College Democrats have demanded the banning of Customs and Border Protection despite widespread unemployment and the dire need of many fellow students to find positions with such agencies. The interesting twist is that this was not even an on campus event but a virtual event. Even without the government stepping on campus, the students objected to other students being able to speak with Customs in a virtual space.
Category: Free Speech
I have a column criticizing Twitterfor its labelling of tweets from President Donald Trump as presumptively false. Twitter has yielded to demands in Congress to censor and regulate political speech. In signature style, however, Trump promptly bulldozed the high ground in the controversy by threatening to close down social media companies through retaliatory regulations. The First Amendment was written to bar that very authority in either the President or Congress or both. The President cannot be the putative victim of private censorship while claiming the authority to engage in government censorship. In fairness however Democratic leaders have threatened such a regulatory crackdown in the past. The coverage on Trump’s threat telling omits the fact that Democratic leaders and presidential candidates have made the same threat in the past.
Continue reading “Trump Threatens To “Shut Down” Social Media Companies”
There is a new controversy swirling around Twitter’s new rules allowing the removal or labeling of tweets that the company deems false or misleading. I have a column out this morning criticizing Twitter’s warning attached to recent tweets by President Donald Trump. However this controversy concerns the person who has said that he is in charge of “developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,” Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth. Critics have highlighted fairly extreme postings from Roth calling Trump and his supporters Nazis. I do not agree that the problem is Roth’s personal views or postings. The problem is his role and the rules at Twitter. The problem is anyone exercising this power of speech regulation. Indeed, as this controversy grew around Roth, Kathy Griffin is the latest poster to face calls for removal for effectively calling for Trump to kill himself. Again, Griffin should be allowed to post such hateful thoughts and the rest of the world should be allowed to denounce her, again, for her unhinged humor.
Twitter has (correctly) declined demands from various people to delete the tweets of President Donald Trump pushing the conspiracy theory that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a young intern, Lori Klausutis. I have repeatedly denounced the use of this tragedy as reprehensible given what the family has gone through. I have received many emails from people who defend Trump’s tweets and advance this claim. I am not convinced for all of the reasons that I have stated previously. I view this conspiracy theory as analogous to the one involving with Rep. Gary Condit and the death of intern Chandra Levy. In that case, Condit actually had an affair with Levy but I was highly critical from the outset of the overwhelming presumption of guilt based on nothing but sensational and scurrilous rumor. It is not enough to say that “some people believe this might be true” to justify such tweets. Seven percent of Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows, but we do not investigate the claim.
We have long discussed the difficult questions raised by private and public employers punishing employees for postings on social media or controversies in their private lives. When employers are identified in the media, controversial statements or conduct can have an obvious backlash against the them, particularly if there is an allegation of racist or discriminatory views. For free speech advocates, this can raise a type of “Little Brother” problem but the First Amendment is focused on state, not private action. This ongoing debate over where to draw the line on private speech has a new controversy with the release of a truly shocking videotape of a woman, identified as Amy Cooper calling police on an African American bird watcher in Central Park. Her employer Franklin Templeton has put her on administrative leave while reviewing the incident. She is reportedly the head of insurance investment solutions at Franklin Templeton. Others have called for animal abuse charges to be filed as Cooper was shown yanking around her hapless dog during her tirade. The dog was surrendered to a local shelter for its protection. Update: Amy Cooper was fired shortly after she was put on administrative leave.
Scarborough’s co-host and wife Mika Brzezinki is calling for President Donald Trump to be banned on Twitter after he resumed his bizarre pushing of a conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered an intern in 2001. I have long denounced the President’s use of the tragic story of Lori Klausutis as callous and wrong. There is not a shred of support for this claim and the constant tweets from the President only adds to this tragedy for the Klausutis family. As I noted yesterday, “politics ain’t beanbag” but it is also not a license for such malicious slandering of your critics. Having said that, I do not support the effort to ban Trump from Twitter. I have written repeatedly about the danger posed by calls from politicians for increased censorship on social media and the Internet. Indeed, I criticized Trump recently for such banning of opposing views from his Twitter account.
Continue reading “Mika Brzezinski Calls For Trump To Be Banned On Twitter”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Once again I needed to “make essential travel to facilitate commerce related to critical infrastructure.” *** So I loaded up some tools and headed down the highway. For me I find the semi-arid coulees to be relaxing and soul-resting. Unless someone or natural events disturbs the area, it otherwise will remain nearly identical to what it was ten or twenty years earlier. Wildland fire seems to be the main cause of change and even in that example only a few years are needed for restoration. Time moves at a lichen’s pace.
Click on each photo to enlarge.
Continue reading “Weekend Photos: Today’s Column, The Basalt Of The Earth”
President Donald Trump and the White House appear to have violated a 2019 federal court order that it cannot block twitter accounts from the official White House account, @realDonaldTrump, based in the content of its tweets. The account, @realDonaldTrFan, has over 313,000 followers and savages the President regularly with parodies. If the site was blocked as reported, the action would be a flagrant disregarding of the authority of the federal courts.
Continue reading “White House Blocks Twitter Account In Apparent Violation Of Court Order”
We have previously discussed the uncertain standard applying to teachers and professors who are subject to discipline for social media postings. It often seems that any termination or discipline is based upon subjective or majoritarian views of the content of postings. The latest such case is out of Catholic University of America where adjunct professor John Tieso has been suspended after tweets ridiculing Barack Obama and Kamala Harris after working for the school since 2013. Tieso told the site The College Fix that he is considering legal action.
For years, many of us who have long supporteded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have grown alarmed by its abandonment of core principles in the support of civil liberties in favor of support what seems a more political agenda. Under the leadership of a President Susan N. Herman and Executive Director Anthony Romero, the ACLU has dropped support for unpopular causes while aligning itself more closely with the Democratic Party’s position on issues ranging from immigration to sexual harassment. I have spent my life supporting the ACLU and speaking at its conferences. It has been very painful for many of us in the “Old guard” as these political advocates have taken over the board and organization. That has been evidenced as the ACLU moved to develop a more nuanced approach to “hate speech” after criticism following the Charlottesville protests. Free speech protection was once the touchstone of the ACLU which was fearless in its unpopular advocacy. It is now an area of open retreat for the organization as the leadership seeks to appease irate donors. Despite the right to carry being a constitutional right, the ACLU has indicated that it will not vigorously support the right to lawfully carry weapons at protests. That is no more evident than in the truly shocking filing of the ACLU to oppose due process rights for students at our colleges and universities, particularly in the imposition of a higher and more consistent evidentiary standard. While I found aspects of the brief to raise compelling points, the thrust of the brief is an attack on basic evidentiary protections that would have once been viewed as a position fundamentally at odds with the organization’s mission.
We have been discussing the rising intolerance for free speech and academic freedom at colleges and universities from course material to social media postings to political speech to jokes. As speech codes and microaggression rules are enforced, various groups are calling for the silencing or removal of those with opposing views. The latest is at my school where pro-Israeli students are calling on the university to reconsider the appointment of anthropology and history professor Ilana Feldman as the interim dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs. The sole reason is that they disagree with Feldman’s support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Continue reading “GW Students Petition To Remove Interim Dean Due To BDS Support”
I recently criticized the calls of Democratic leaders like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff for greater censorship of the Internet and social media. Such calls have been growing for years but leaders like Schiff are citing the pandemic as a basis for speech monitoring and censorship. That opportunity has not been missed by countries like China which has used “fake news” on the pandemic to arrest dissident scientists trying to share suppressed information. Most recently, Hungary has started jailing people for up to five years, which political dissidents say is targeting political critics.
Continue reading “Hungary Shows How Fake News Is The Rallying Cry Of A New Generation Of Censors”
Below is my column in The Hill on a largely overlooked part of the recent material to be released in the Flynn case as well as the testimony released by the House Intelligence Committee: the focus on the Logan Act as the way to charge former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Indeed, I recently disagreed with former President Barack Obama on clearly false legal statements made about the Flynn case. However, within those false statements was a crushing irony. Obama is mentioned in the documents as discussing the use of the Logan Act against Flynn. While Obama decried (falsely) the lack of precedent for the dismissal of the Flynn case, he previously discussed the use of a clearly unconstitutional statute against Flynn that has never been used successfully to convict a single person since the start of the Republic.
Continue reading “Logan Act Is The Last Refuge For The American Prosecutorial Scoundrel”
Below is my column in The Hill on calls for increased censorship on the Internet and social media due to the pandemic. While academics are writing that “China was . . . right”, China was celebrating World Press Day by sentencing journalist Chen Jieren to 15 years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble, extortion, illegal business operations and bribery.” It is an ironic moment to herald China’s censorship of the media when the evidence mounts that China concealed and censored information on the virus outbreak in January.
Here is the column:
As the United States has continued to give the regime billions and President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has been showered with praise from President Donald Trump, the Egyptian regime continues to wipe out free of speech, the free press, and other civil liberties. The latest outrage is the death of Egyptian filmmaker Shady Habash, 24, who was incarcerated for two years without trial for a music video entitled “Balaha” mocking Sisi. The American people has supported this lethally insecure authoritarian leader and a regime at war with the very founding principles of this country. In a letter published by his supporters, Habash wrote “Prison doesn’t kill, loneliness does.”