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Censorship by the campus Left does not take a break during the school year, not even on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The latest incident of censorship happened at Washington University in St. Louis, where a student stole the American flags set out as part of the 9/11: Never Forget Project put on by Young America's Foundation. The student serves in student government. He claimed the display was in violation of school rules (it wasnt) and that he was violating no policy or law by trashing the flags (which is debatable, given that police officers had threatened to arrest him for trying to destroy the display earlier).

This wasnt even the only campus 9/11 display that was vandalized. Michigan State also saw a memorial display tampered with. And, as Jonathan Turley notes , this has become a popular trend on college campuses across the country. Left-wing students and staff now feel entitled to censor ideas they dont like, ironically, under the guise of free speech.

Washington University said that the school condemns the vandalism and that we value freedom of expression in all forms and will work to ensure that all students are able to express their points of view through appropriate channels without disrupting the rights of others to show support for causes they care about. Its a bit mealy-mouthed, but the message seems to be that the university cares about free expression and opposes censorship.

If it means that, it should start by disciplining the student who vandalized the display. According to YAF, the university has not said whether that student will face disciplinary measures. Too often, all universities do is offer a concerned statement without punishing the censorious offenders. Washington University must ensure that this kind of behavior is punished because anything less is tacit approval.

Original post:
Universities must do more to address censorship by students and staff on campus - Washington Examiner

I think Tennessee Williams accidentally wrote a love letter to the year 2020, says director Brenna Geffers of Williamss The Demolition Downtown, the short play shes staging outdoors at the Bas Relief in the towns center. Geffers, founder of the Philadelphia-based Die-Cast ensemble, has directed four festival productions over the years, including Pericles in 2017.

The Demolition Downtown is about a fascist takeover and the way many might sort of comfortably slide into that, Geffers says. David [Kaplan] chose the play before the pandemic. But its about a couple afraid to leave their house and talking about what food they have left in the freezer, so it became spooky and, after Jan. 6, it seemed even more relevant.

The rarely staged play was published in Esquire magazine in June 1971 as the escalating war in Vietnam divided the nation. As a companion piece, Kaplan directs an outdoor staging of Williamss dark satire The Municipal Abattoir, a short play that Williams worked on through the 1960s. It centers on a government clerk and a state-run slaughterhouse where good citizens, when summoned, go willingly to be killed.

In both plays, the audience has a voyeuristic experience, says Geffers. They are both funny pieces [about] a world that is absurd yet so familiar that we can do nothing else but laugh at it. Its too terrifying to do anything else.

Williamss plays and their popular screen adaptations were often censored, including his first produced play, Battle of Angels. In its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston in 1940, the Boston City Council took umbrage at the story of a charismatic drifter, Val Xavier, whose arrival upends a Mississippi Delta small town and exposes its racism and religious intolerance. According to the festival program, when Margaret Webster, the plays original director, returned to Boston to watch a performance of the censored version, she wrote that she found a castrated and largely incomprehensible edition of the play dying an inevitable death at the Wilbur Theatre.

Not just that, but a conflagration at the end of the play went so awry on opening night they almost burned down the entire theater. The first two rows of the audience had to flee, says Jessica Burr, founder and artistic director of the New York City ensemble Blessed Unrest, which will stage the Battle of Angels, sans pyrotechnics, at Provincetowns Town Hall.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Battle of Angels never made it to Broadway, although 17 years later a different version with a new title, Orpheus Descending, did open in New York. A third retelling was the 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, starring Williams mainstays Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.

Burr sees contemporary parallels in the 1939-set Battle of Angels.

We generally think of community as a good thing but in this case theres a dangerous groupthink that can destroy the individual. Its also an impossible love story between people who refuse to compromise. They are surrounded by these terrified, frightened people who have to destroy it to keep the status quo.

Unlike the original production, Burrs Battle of Angels has a multiracial cast led by Michael Gene Jacobs, a Black actor. Burr says her research indicates that Williams likely wanted Val to be played by a Black man. But in 1940 Williams was 23 years old and a nobody. He could not tell the producers what to do.

Williams was obsessed with the Othello story, says Burr. He studied Shakespeare really closely and he studied his Greeks. [Battle of Angels] is a collision between these very Christian ideals of right and wrong and the Greeks sensibility. Before completing the play, Williams wrote a short story called Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor? Its a strange piece but it led directly into Battle of Angels, she says.

Audiences can see the connection for themselves as the festival will also present a staged reading of Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor? at Fishermen Hall. Adapted by Thomas Owen Mitchell, it is about a Black screenwriter who has a secret affair with a white movie goddess. Williams abandoned the project after writing 75 manuscript pages, likely because he realized that, in 1940, the subject matter would prevent it from being produced as either a play or a film.

PROVINCETOWN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FESTIVAL

At various locations in Provincetown, Sept. 23-26. Schedule and ticket information at http://www.twptown.org

Originally posted here:
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival returns to celebrate works that made the censors sweat - The Boston Globe

You probably saw all the photos of the weekends Met Gala, in which the elites attending the event showed their beautiful faces while the workers serving them were forced to wear masks.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported another similar two-tiered structure for the privileged and those who are beneath them. This one had to do with Facebook and its now-renowned censorship policies.

Simply explained: The underclass are muzzled while the elites speak (or type) freely.

From the WSJ report:

Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The program, known as cross check or XCheck, was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the companys normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are whitelistedrendered immune from enforcement actionswhile others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

The XCheck policy literally says, Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors when enforcing content policy.

Reclaim the Net adds:

This is in marked contrast to how billions of deplorables are being treated on the platform, often falling victim to Facebooks inadequate to say the least automatic moderation, as well as deliberate censorship.

In seeking to illustrate how VIP users are abusing this privilege, the [Wall Street Journal] for some reason chose only examples harmful to one side of the political divide in the US, citing posts containing anti-Clinton, anti-Covid vaccination, etc., content, and even one from former President Trump that are viewed as harmful and would, in any case, be censored had they been posted by regular people.

Facebooks response to the article was that the policy is outdated.

Go here to see the original:
Facebook Censorship Limited to the Internet Underclass National Legal And Policy Center - National Legal and Policy Center

Two 2021 graphic novels, Red Lines by Cherian George and Sonny Liew (MIT Press) and Orwell by Pierre ... [+] Christin and Sebastien Verdier (Self Made Hero) both address issues of censorship and free speech.

Fake news, gag rules, NDAs. cancel culture, government crackdowns, algorithmic deceptions: Its as though we live in a world that took George Orwells 1948 classic 1984 as an instruction manual for controlling thought and expression. But because people on all sides feel that they, and only they, are the victims of this chill, its difficult to find a contemporary analysis of censorship and free speech that does not resort to partisanship and finger-pointing. Now two works of graphic nonfiction released in the last month take on this challenge from two different directions, each with great success.

Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship by Cherian George and Sonny Liew, ... [+] published August, 2021 by MIT Press.

Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship by two Singaporeans, Cherian George and Sonny Liew (MIT Press, August, 2021), takes the direct approach. This is a scholarly and systematic look at efforts to suppress political speech in the form of cartoons, drawings and comic strips historically and globally.

As the book lays out in great detail, cartoons have a unique power to get under the skins of authorities, hypocrites and stuffed shirts in all times and all cultures. Because cartoons are so informal and approachable, efforts to censor them appear especially humorless and heavy-handed, which can redound to the benefit of satirists and provoke a public outcry against the oppressors.

Consequently, the efforts to stifle this kind of speech have grown both sophisticated (through invisible means of influence applied to publishers, distributors and consumers of the content) and coarse (violence, repression, and mass murder in the case of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo). Red Lines offers vivid examples from around the world indicating the many ways governments, religious authorities, economic interests and others conspire to stifle dissent and silence cartoonists.

The authors, accustomed to the chilly attitude of their home country of Singapore toward speech that violates the consensus promulgated by the government, view censorship as anything that impedes the free expression of the artists ideas, not just official action. They present examples of subtle intimidation by authorities, commercial censorship (cartoons whisked out of sight by media companies), censorship by technology (either through bloodless algorithms or opaque and unappealable platform policies), the well-meaning censorship of online mobs out to suppress problematic expression, and outright violence and intimidation, among others.

Red Lines s not exactly a graphic novel, although there are sections that are done in comics style. It is more of an extensively illustrated textbook, full of word balloons and narrative blocks, charts, clip art, Fumetti-style photo-collages and other graphic elements along with sequential art. Both authors seem comfortable working in this visual format; the two previously collaborated on the award-winning, best selling graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and Liew has worked at the highest levels of the American comics business.

All of visual design helps, at least partially, to decompress what is a very dense and academic work (it clocks in at 448 pages). It also carries the point across in ways that plain text could not. Red Lines might not be beach reading, but it surely belongs on the syllabus of any media studies class as it sets the standard for discussion of this topic.

Orwell, a graphic novel biography of the famed novelist, by Chrstin and Verdier, published by Self ... [+] Made Hero, July 2021

Orwell, a graphic biography of the famed British author by writer Pierre Christin and artist Sbastian Verdier (English edition from Self Made Hero, July, 2021, following a 2019 French release from Dargaud) arrives at largely the same place but takes a completely different path. Orwell famously predicted a world where censorship was so ingrained in the fabric of government and society that any form of critical thinking was viewed as a crime by the totalitarian regime. It is thanks to him that we have the colorful vocabulary for describing modern censorship and the manipulation of perception: Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, two-minutes hate, and many others.

If history has flattened Orwell into this collection of his greatest hits, Orwell seeks to reclaim the legacy of the man through a gripping narrative of his life story. Christin and Verdier explore how Orwell, born Eric Blair, synthesized a range of influences and experiences from his upbringing in the twilight years of the British empire, into the clear-eyed perspective on the dangers of totalitarianism that he exhibited in his masterworks Animal Farm and 1984.

Orwells unusual variety of life experiences, from being the clever poor boy in his elite British prep school to a low-level colonial authority in Burma to a destitute vagabond throughout the 20s, helped shape a worldview that was able to step outside the frames of class and ideology typical of the era. The final step in his education was his traumatic tenure as a foreign fighter in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, where he took up arms to defend the left wing Spanish state from a fascist rebellion led by Francisco Franco. Orwell himself survived the experience but his idealism perished on the battlefield; from then on, he recognized that ideologies that elevated abstract theory over ordinary human experience could only lead to oppression, no matter how lofty their stated goals.

For someone as disdainful of comics as Orwell apparently was (he wrote critically about Superman and the superhero genre in the 1930s), he is extremely well-served by the medium in this book. Verdiers black and white artwork is gorgeously detailed where it needs to be, while telling the story without much fuss and frill. It is especially good at evoking the atmosphere of pre-war Britain and the various physical environments.

Orwell avoids emphasizing its subjects most famous work; 1984 literally does not appear until the next-to-last page, with an extended quote to give the flavor of the book. However the final section, After Orwell, provides broader context and some incidental overlap with Red Lines in its description of how factions have appropriated some of his passion and critique in service of illiberal agendas stemming from various points on the political compass.

For Orwell, dystopia was a world in which words and meaning have parted company, whether through the explicit work of censors or through the insidious processes of self-censorship, euphemism and intimidation. As Orwell and Red Lines make clear, the courage to stand up to those forces is as necessary today as it was in 1948.

Read more from the original source:
Two New Works Tackle Censorship And The Power Of Speech - Forbes

"Woke Inc." author Vivek Ramaswamy called out Big Tech censorship on behalf of the federal government during an interview on "America's Newsroom" Tuesday, saying "George Orwell is rolling in his grave" over the coordination between the two. Ramaswamy continued by explaining the hybrid relationship is a real threat to individual liberty, just days after a Gold Star mom was temporarily kicked off of Instagram after blaming the Biden administration for her son's death in Afghanistan.

RIGHT TO PRIVACY IS INTACT, BUT AMERICANS MUST FIGHT FOR IT: LARA LOGAN

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: George Orwell is rolling in his grave. We live in a country where you're supposed to be able to criticize the people in power. That is what freedom means, and yet here is a woman whose son died on a humanitarian mission in Kabul and blames the President of the United States and is silenced by Instagram for doing it. Here is what George Orwell didn't imagine- he thought it would be government directly doing the censorship, and what neither our Founding Fathers nor George Orwell ever imagined was that they would be delegating their dirty work to private companies to do through the back door what the government cannot directly do.

It's mutual back-scratching. That's crony capitalism 2.0 where this is a new hybrid of big government and big business that I think is the real threat to individual liberty today. Back in 1980 it might have been big government alone. Today it's not just big government- it's this new hybrid of big government and big business that's far more powerful because each can do what the other cannot.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE:

More here:
'Woke Inc.' author: George Orwell never imagined this kind of censorship - Fox News