Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

Rand Paul quits YouTube, citing censorship | Fox Business

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., argues that the Democrats have done nothing to introduce the spending bill to Republicans.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., penned an op-ed Monday announcing hes embarking on anexodus from Big Tech, starting with YouTube, over what he describes as rampant censorship and an "almost religious adherence to the edicts of government bureaucrats."

"Many in Congress, on the Left and the Right, want to break up or regulate Big Tech, but few of these loud voices have actually stepped up and quit using Big Tech," Paul wrote in a piece for the Washington Examiner. "So today, I announce that I will begin an exodus from Big Tech. I will no longer post videos on YouTube unless it is to criticize them or announce that viewers can see my content on rumble.com."

RUMBLE GOING PUBLIC IN CHALLENGE TO 'BIG TECH'

"Why begin with YouTube? Because theyre the worst censors," he added.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Dec. 13, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Paul complained that whenever he posts content that challenges the current White House narrative concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, no matter how well sourced and researched, YouTube deletes the videos. He saw his account suspended for a week in August for violating the sites COVID-19 misinformation policy over a video claiming surgical masks and cloth masks dont protect against the coronavirus.

"The gall to delete constitutionally protected speech!" Paul wrote Monday. "It is indeed ironic that the censors likely think of themselves as progressive but their actions are more suggestive of the diktats of the Medieval church. Think about it. In the U.S. in 2021, you are being told there are ideas or opinions that are too dangerous for you to see. It is disinformation they admonish, so if you want to stay on their platforms you must conform to their approved opinions."

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Nov. 4, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Paul said he may still post a video or two in the future only to decry YouTubes censorship and promote its competing platforms, but that his plan is to eventually quit Big Tech altogether and take his business elsewhere, and he encouraged others to do the same. He also said he created a libertarian news aggregator site called libertytree.com.

"About half of the public leans right," he wrote. "If we all took our messaging to outlets of free exchange, we could cripple Big Tech in a heartbeat. So, today I take my first step toward denying my content to Big Tech. Hopefully, other liberty lovers will follow."

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Rand Paul quits YouTube, citing censorship | Fox Business

Banning books, Pennsylvania, and a strange case of censorship | Opinion – pennlive.com

By Can Bahadr Yce

Since a school board in Tennessee unanimously voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus from classrooms, censorship once again has become a topic of conversation. The most recent wave of banning books in states like Texas, which is at an all-time high according to the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom, reminds me of what happened in Turkey over the past few years.

It is one of the most absurd cases of censorship, and it involves Pennsylvania. Between 2016 and 2019, the Turkish government destroyed more than 300,000 books. The number was announced rather proudly by the former education minister. In addition, around 2 million textbooks had been destroyed and reprinted. That includes a 6th-grade textbook, which was barred from schools for referencing the state of Pennsylvania. (

The word Pennsylvania appears in an essay by James Michener.) What is the connection between the Turkish governments censorship policy and an American state? For beginners, Pennsylvania has been a highly polarizing word in Turkish politics for quite a while because Fethullah Glen, who is considered as a nemesis by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lives in the state.

Glen, a Muslim cleric, is accused by the Erdogan regime of instigating the failed military coup in 2016. Mr. Glen has denied the allegation and Turkey failed to provide evidence of his involvement. While President Erdogan never mentions Mr. Glens name in his public speeches and simply refers to him as Pennsylvania, the word became a part of the political rhetoric and justification for censorship in Turkey. Probably, the majority of Pennsylvania residents have no clue that the name of their state has been an objectionable word in another country.

Even more absurdly, a math textbook was banned for featuring Fethullah Glens initials in a question containing the words from point F to point G. Such anecdotes may sound unreal and ridiculous, but they are real and dangerous. Banning novels, comic books, or textbooks is never a good sign for a society. It indicates authoritarian tendencies, oppressiveness, cruelty, and lack of empathy. Censorship belongs on the wrong side of history.

However, while fighting against it, the consolation of being on the right side of history will not fix our problems. We need to understand where the real danger lies. It is all about normalizingonce people get used to being censored, this will lead them to self-censorship and more oppression. It starts with a single book: whether it is racism, antisemitism, or the assumption of protecting children from sexually explicit material, banning a book creates a climate of fear.

While the government was busy destroying printed materials in Turkey, people dumped books themselves out of fear. This is how censorship works. Even if banning printed books is practically useless in the digital age and makes people curious (Maus is now a bestseller), the act of banning is still a fundamental problem. It can set the norm.Challenging books, of course, is not new in America. It has long been a part of school board meetings. But this time it looks differentbanning attempts are now better organized, more politicized, and polarizing. If it becomes the new normal, politics will eventually deprecate culture.

Preventing young people from reading books that deal with difficult topics is not protecting them. As a professor, I know that books about challenging subjects can make the conversation more stimulating and productive. Young people can learn to think critically from what they read. Learning about different perspectives opens their minds. Banning books is an indication of intellectual decline and lack of self-confidence. Its a threshold; if it is approved by the majority of society and normalized, anti-intellectualism will be emboldened.

This means dark times ahead. And it always starts with a single book.

Can Bahadr Yce teaches history at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA. He was the book review editor of Zaman newspaper. Zaman was seized and shut down by the Turkish government in 2016.

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Banning books, Pennsylvania, and a strange case of censorship | Opinion - pennlive.com

Our Nation Cannot Censor Its Way Back to Cultural Health – The Dispatch

I want to start with a story about cancel culturethe cancel culture that existed on a cold December night in 1860 in Boston, Massachusetts. In our popular imagination, Boston in 1860 was a good place, the heart of abolitionism and unionism. But not that night. That night a mob silenced a great man.

Frederick Douglass was supposed to address a meeting called, How Can American Slavery Be Abolished? It was a tense time in the United States, at the beginning of the most extreme and violent national test in our history. Abraham Lincoln had just been elected. In less than three weeks South Carolina would secede. The rest of the South would fall like dominoes, and then would come our most brutal war.

Douglass could not speak. A mob stormed the stage, with police looking on. Abolitionists tried to restore order, but violence reigned. Eventually, the police movednot to clear the mob to protect speech, but rather to clear the meeting hall and end the event.

In one condensed moment, we saw the kind of mob action and police passivity that we sometimes still see today. Private citizens mobilized to block speech, and rather than protect liberty, the police saw fit to restore order instead. But American order requires the protection of liberty.

Douglass refused to be silenced. Days later, he mounted the stage at Bostons Music Hall, delivered his prepared remarks, and then added an additional statement that goes down in history as one of the most compelling defenses of free speech ever made.

Called simply A Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston, it begins with a tribute to the city, but even in Boston, Douglass says, the moral atmosphere is dark and heavy. The principles of human liberty, he warns, find but limited support in this hour a trial.

Every single student in America should read this speechnot just because Douglass rightly decries his lost liberty, but because he explains why the right to free speech is so precious.

No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter ones thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.

Slavery cannot tolerate free speech, he declared. And in words that should be burned into our civic hearts, he noted that there exists not just a right to speak but a right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. Free speech applies to us all, and that right is rooted in our humanity, the inherent dignity of man:

The principle must rest upon its own proper basis. And until the right is accorded to the humblest as freely as to the most exalted citizen, the government of Boston is but an empty name, and its freedom a mockery. A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the rightand there let it rest forever.

I begin with Frederick Douglass for a reason last week a middle school teacher I know reported that a group of parents were upset about an assignment that asked students to read, you guessed it, Frederick Douglass. Apparently, there are more than a few parents who believe it is a grievous injury to hear from Americas critics, even when one of its critics was one of its greatest men.

I have never in my adult life seen anything like the censorship fever that is breaking out across America. In both law and culture, we are witnessing an astonishing display of contempt for the First Amendment, for basic principles of pluralism, and for simple tolerance of opposing points of view.

At this point the cancel culture stories are so common its hard to know where to start. In the last several days weve seen concerted efforts to fire The View host Whoopi Goldberg for ignorant comments about the Holocaust and Georgetown law school lecturer Ilya Shapiro for a poorly worded tweet arguing for a race-blind Supreme Court nomination. Both Goldberg and Shapiro apologized, but theyve both been suspended.

Yet the worst examples of cancel culture dont apply to famous or prominent people at all. The most haunting piece Ive read about rising American intolerance was penned by my friend Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic. Called Stop Firing the Innocent, it details the ordeals of ordinary people who become involuntarily notorious. At this point cancel culture is so plainly, obviously real, that Ill just re-quote progressive writer Kevin Drum:

And for Gods sake, please dont insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.

At the same time that the evidence of far-left intolerance is overwhelming, a few of us have been on a very lonely corner of conservatism, jumping up and down and yelling about the new right, Censorship is coming! Censorship is coming!

And we were correct.

First, its long been clear that the new right was replicating many of the tactics of the far-left, often proudly and intentionally. How many times have I heard Fight fire with fire. Make the other side play by its own rules? Since 2015, right-wing cancel culture has been mainly aimed at conservative Trump critics, but now its metastasizing.

The anti-woke movement is building to a fever pitch. Attempts to ban books abound, and dozens of pieces of legislation have been introduced (and many passed) that dont just seek to narrowly regulate and define public K-12 curriculum, but also to sharply restrict the sharing and teaching of ideas.

These bills are broadening in scope and in number. The invaluable Acadia University professor Jeffrey Sachs has been doing yeomans work cataloging these bills, and he published an impressive roundup last month. At least 122 bills have been filed in 33 different states, and 12 have become law in 10 states (so far).

Ominously, 38 of these bills now target higher education. I say ominously because teaching and scholarship in public higher education enjoys a level of constitutional protection that public K-12 schools do not. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Educations Joe Cohn explains, while legislators have broader (but not unlimited) authority to set K-12 curriculum, the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom prevent the government from banning ideas from collegiate classrooms.

The Supreme Court could not be more clear about the special importance of the First Amendment in the university setting. Cohn quotes these famous words from Sweezy v. New Hampshire:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die. (Emphasis added.)

I quoted this exact passage for years as I filed (successful) lawsuit after lawsuit to strike down university speech codes. When colleges passed speech codes to suppress discourse on campus, they betrayed their very purpose. The call was coming from inside the house.

Speech codes are on the wane, thankfully. Litigation does work. According to FIREs research, the prevalence of clearly unconstitutional speech codes on leading campuses dropped from more than 70 percent of campuses in 2009 to 21.3 percent in 2021.

But now the speech code movement is coming from the outside. Again, heres FIREs Cohn:

In legislatures across the country, including in states like Alabama (HB 8, HB 9, HB 11, and SB 7), Florida (HB 57 and SB 242), Indiana (HB 1134 and SB 167), Iowa (HF 222), Kentucky (HB 18), Missouri (HB 1484, HB 1634, and HB 1654), New Hampshire (HB 1313), New York (A 8253), Oklahoma (HB 2988), and South Carolina (H 4799), the bills contain unconstitutional bans on what can be taught in college classrooms. They must not be enacted in their current form.

Yet even when a state agency can regulate the expression of ideas, should it? After all, most cancel culture incidents dont implicate the First Amendment either. Employers can fire you for your speech. Social media can block any of us from access to their platforms. But in law as in culture, the question of can is separate from the question of should.

For example, a school board can remove the book Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum (because of profanity and mouse nudity), but should it? A school board can remove To Kill a Mockingbird (for alleged racial insensitivity) from a required reading list, but should it?

And if you think state bills are only banning toxic wokeness and protecting kids from left-wing racism and identity politics, think again. Even some of my essays cant be assigned in North Dakota:

Why does Professor Sachs make this assertion? On November 12, the governor signed a bill that makes it unlawful to include instruction relating to critical race theory in any portion of the district's required curriculum . . . or any other curriculum offered by the district or school.

And what is critical race theory? According to the statute, its the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.

Thats not the definition of critical race theory, which is a far more complex and nuanced concept than the sentence above. Its but one version of a definition of systemic racism. Moreover, even North Dakotas false definition of CRT is still broad and vague to the point of uselessness. It easily encompasses my assertions in the essay Professor Sachs highlighted, and it renders multiple editions of the French Press either outright unlawful as assignments in North Dakota or so legally problematic that assigning them presents an unacceptable personal risk.

In Board of Education v. Pico, a 1982 Supreme Court case that cast doubt on the ability of public schools to ban library books on the basis of their ideas alone, the courts plurality described a purpose of public education as preparing individuals for participation as citizens," and as vehicles for "inculcating fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.

Systematically suppressing ideas in public education does not help our students learn liberty, nor does it prepare them for pluralism. It teaches them to seek protection from ideas and that the method for engaging with difference is through domination.

Our nation is a diverse pluralistic constitutional republic, and as James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, we cannot respond to the inevitable rise of competing factions by suppressing liberty, tempting as that always is. Madison was shrewd and realistic enough to recognize that liberty empowers factions. As he put it, Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.

At the same time, however, it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

In a previous newsletter, I mounted a Christian defense of American classical liberalism, and I made the case thatwhile no system of government is perfectAmerican classical liberalism does possess two cardinal virtues. Its protections of liberty recognize both the dignity and the imperfection of man.

And few liberties encompass both that dignity and imperfection more than the right to speak. The violation of that rightthe deprivation of that dignitycan inflict a profound moral injury on a citizen and it can help perpetuate profound injustices in society and government. As Douglass noted, free speech is the dread of tyrants.

Moreover, as John Stuart Mills argument for free speech demonstrates, free speech rests on a foundation of humility. FIREs Greg Lukianoff has written eloquently about Mills trident, the three-part argument for free inquiry. Summarizing Mill, Greg articulates three possibilities in any given argument:

You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.

You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.

You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you dont really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. Its only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.

In short, I value free speech, not so much because Im right and you need to hear from me, but rather because Im very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility.

As American animosity rises, we simply cannot censor our way to social peace or unity. We can, however, violate the social compact, disrupt the founding logic of our republic, and deprive American students and American citizens of the exchange of ideas and of the liberty that has indeed caused, as Douglass prophesied, thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong to tremble in the face of righteous challenge.

One more thing

In this weeks Good Faith podcast Curtis and I dive deep into the balance between grace, mercy, and accountability in public life. When should we forgive and move on? When do we forgive and impose accountability? How does one provide justice and grace?

Those are hard questions, and they of course dont have easy answers. Please let us know your thoughts, either in the comments below or in the comments to the podcast itself. And, as always, thank you for listening!

One last thing

Im going to depart from tradition and post a different kind of video. Its not a song (though it does feature a musician). Dua Lipa asked Stephen Colbert about how his faith influenced his comedy. His answer was brilliant and moving. Watch:

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Our Nation Cannot Censor Its Way Back to Cultural Health - The Dispatch

Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Censorship and Translated Literature in China – Literary Hub

This is Underreported with Nicholas Lemann, from the publishing imprint Columbia Global Reports. We dont just publish books; we use books to start conversations about topics that werent getting the attention they deserved. At least, until we took them on. This podcast is your audio connection to these important topics.

This season, were is focusing on our upcoming book, The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters. This three-part series will explore not only the content of the book, but the issues surrounding it.

In The Subplot, journalist and critic Megan Walsh takes the reader on a lively journey through the last two decades of Chinas literary landscape, illustrating the countrys complex relationship between art and politics. She also dispels assumptions Westerners make about censorship, and opens up a view of Chinese society that you dont see through conventional news coverage.

Before we speak to Megan Walsh herself in upcoming episodes, we want to set the stage, so were joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellors Professor of History at UC Irvine. Hes one of Americas leading China specialists and has written several important books, including Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, also published by Columbia Global Reports. Theres no better guest to help us wade into the intricate and nuanced realities of China, a country that the US has locked in its gaze.

From the episode:

Nicholas Lemann: If there were a sort of typical urban Chinese citizen, can that person walk into a bookstore? What would be for sale?

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Yeah, its a great question. And I will bracket off this sort ofwhen we talk about typical, clearly urban is different from rural. But lets just imagine walking into a bookstore in Shanghai or Nanjing or Beijing. There are amazing bookstores in terms of just varieties of things that you can buy. Some of the things that would be probably surprising, and radically different from the United States in a positive sense, is theres much more translated literature. There are plenty of books by Chinese authors, but there are also really quite extraordinary selections of translations of Western fiction, and fiction from many different languages. Fiction in Eastern European languages and novelists from Africa.

I mean, in some ways, though we can go into a kind of feeling superior to people who are living in a censored society, theres another way in which at least the kind of intellectually curious Chinese reader has an amazing number of choices. There are lots of popular genres there, and this is something that The Subplot goes through very well. So its interestingit can be in a way a very cosmopolitan thing. Even at this moment when its harder to physically have people move across the border, there is plenty of translated literature.

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Jeffrey Wasserstromis Chancellors Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointment in law and literary journalism. He is the author of six books, including Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo, and Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. He is an adviser to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Follow him on Twitter at@jwassers

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Censorship and Translated Literature in China - Literary Hub

Flashback: Neil Young participated in ‘Freedom of Speech Tour’ before advocating censorship of Joe Rogan – Fox News

Media top headlines February 4

In media news today, an AP reporter spars with the State Departments Ned Price over allegations on Russia, a report claims that Jeff Zucker and Allison Gollust gave Andrew Cuomo COVID talking points to combat Trump, and an MSNBC broadcast gets interrupted by a Lets Go Brandon flag.

Musician Neil Young appears to have had a change of heart when it comes to the right of Americans to say how they feel about a particular political issue, even if others don't agree with them.

The liberal singer threw himself into the headlines last week following a decision to remove his content from Spotify in protest over Joe Rogan's podcast, complaining the latter was spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic to his millions of listeners, and he no longer wanted to share a platform with him.

However, Young's history of speaking out on political issues runs in contrast to his current position on Rogan, considering he participated in a 2006 "Freedom of Speech tour" that traveled the country protesting the then-involvement of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, often to disagreeable crowds.

Musician Neil Young speaks during a session at the International CES Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

JOE ROGAN HITS THE RIGHT NOTE AFTER NEIL YOUNG ATTACK, SPOTIFY PLAYS DEFENSE

"I was a nervous wreck by the end of that tour. I never want to do another tour like that in my life. I mean, that was so different from every other tour Ive done," Young told Rolling Stone in a 2008 interview. "Just getting up in front of a lot of people makes you nervous. But when you know that some of them are really going to be angry at you, and youre in a crowd, and its a volatile situation, people have been drinking, whatever you know, it makes you nervous."

"It was just that critical time in history where things were turning. Things were changing," he added. "Those who feel the way we do had some hope and those who dont feel the way we do were angry that the change happened. And those people have got a voice, and they have a reason for feeling the way they do. They strongly believe in the convictions. They believe in the military."

"They believe that were doing the right thing for the world, and they have every reason to be respected for their beliefs," he said.

Comedian Joe Rogan (Photo by: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

JOE ROGAN CRITICS NEIL YOUNG AND JONI MITCHELL HAVE THEIR HISTORY OF OFFENSES

Young's then-position on respecting the beliefs of others heavily contrasted his approach to Rogan as he demanded the streaming giant choose between the two.

"They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young," he reportedly posted in a letter to his management team. "Not both."

He also wrote that Spotify has a "responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy."

A "Freedom of Speech Tour" poster from 2006 (Freedom of Speech Tour)

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Other artists followed Young's lead by pulling their music from Spotify; however the company opted to keep Rogan's content and instead implemented a "content advisory" label to combat the spread of misinformation.

Rogan also issued an apology and promised to expand the viewpoints he brought onto his show.

Fox Business' Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report.

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Flashback: Neil Young participated in 'Freedom of Speech Tour' before advocating censorship of Joe Rogan - Fox News