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Andy Rain/EPA/NewscomYou'd think Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself was the driver of the van that plowed into pedestrians on London Bridge Saturday, the way U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is talking about the attack. He isn't, but everybody across the world, not just in the United Kingdom, needs to pay close attention to how May wants to respond to the assault.

May believes the problem is you and your silly insistence that you be permitted to speak your mind and to look at whatever you want on the internet. And she means to stop you. And her attitude toward government control of internet speech is shared by President Donald Trump (and Hillary Clinton), so what she's trying to sell isn't isolated to her own citizenry.

In a speech in the wake of this weekend's attack, May called flat-out for government authority to censor and control what people can see and access on the internet:

We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breedyet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.

Note that May appears to be trying to narrowly pitch a regulatory regime that focuses entirely on censoring speech by terrorists. One might argue that even America's First Amendment would not protect such speech, since such communications involve planning violence against others.

But May and the Tories really want to propose much broader censorship of the internet, and they know it. May is using fear of terrorism to sell government control over private online speech. The Tories' manifesto for the upcoming election makes it pretty clear they're looking to control communication on the internet in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with fighting terrorism. BuzzFeed took note:

The proposalsdotted around the manifesto documentare varied. There are many measures designed to make it easier to do business online but it's a different, more social conservative approach when it comes to social networks.

Legislation would be introduced to protect the public from abuse and offensive material online, while everyone would have the right to wipe material that was posted when they were under 18. Internet companies would also be asked to help promote counter-extremism narrativespotentially echoing the government's Prevent programme. There would be new rules requiring companies to make it ever harder for people to access pornography and violent images, with all content creators forced to justify their policies to the government.

The manifesto doesn't seem to acknowledge a difference between speech and activity, Buzzfeed adds:

"It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically."

New laws will be introduced to implement these rules, forcing internet companies such as Facebook to abide by the rulings of a regulator or face sanctions: "We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law."

The United Kingdom already has some very heavy content-based censorship of pornography that presumes to police what sorts of sexual fantasies are acceptable among its populace. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written repeatedly about the British government's nannying tendencies in trying suppress pornography.

In a manner similar to this censorship push, May and the British government sold the Investigatory Powers Actalso known as the Snooper's Charterto the public as a mechanism to fight terrorism. But the massive legislation, now in place as law, actually demands that internet companies store users' online data to investigate all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with terrorism at all.

The European Union is also hammering out regulations that would require social media companies to censor their services. But the E.U. plan is currently much more limited than what the ruling party in the U.K. is demanding. The European Union wants to force companies only to delete videos that contain hate speech or incitements to violence.

So be warned: This isn't even a slippery-slope risk that a government that claims the authority to censor terrorist communications might broaden that scope to other areas. May and her government already want those broader powers. They're just using the fear of terrorism to sell the idea.

Link:
Theresa May's Call for Internet Censorship Isn't Limited to Fighting Terrorism - Reason (blog)

At the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, anti-racist protests spilled over once again into threats of violence. Every year at Evergreen, minority students play virtue-signal hooky to highlight racial inequities. They call it the Day of Absence. When this years Day of Absence turned into the Day-That-Evergreen-Students-Demand-That-All-Whites-Leave-Campus, Professor Bret Weinstein disobeyedshades of Thoreau!and calmly explained the difference between Evergreens past clarion calls to anti-racist righteousness and this years diktat to discrimination: The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Heres the rub: Weinstein has deluded himself if he thinks the Day of Absence was ever about crippling oppression. Todays student demands are about power exercised through threatened and actualized violence.

Its everything to do with Evergreen students fascistic beliefs and threatsso severe that the Olympia chief of police told Professor Weinstein it was unsafe for him to go to the colleges campusand nothing to do with equality or equity.

You might be wondering where the Mayor of Olympia is in all this, or why the damn police arent getting in gear. Because left-leaning professional politicians, increasingly isolated on the coasts, choose to abstain from the free speech fracas unless theyre dragged in. The party being banded to a coastal sliver means theyre hardened by the demands of a homogeneous progressivist base.

A little south of the Evergreen fray, in Oregon, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced that he would not issue any permits for alt-right events scheduled to take place in the weeks following the Portland stabbing carried out by Joseph Christian.

To support his position, Wheeler used the same canard about there being a hate speech exception to the First Amendment that Howard Dean peddled in justifying Ann Coulter being barred from Berkeley. Lets call it the Wheeler-Dean Theory of the First Amendment. Heres the proposition: A) Right-wing political positions are hateful and disfavored by progressives; B) that which is hateful is not protected by the Constitution; therefore, C) the spoken political positions of the Right are unconstitutional.

Howard Dean, completely ignorant of the history he thinks supports his position, is fond of citing the WWII-era case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the source of the fighting words doctrine (which doesnt apply to hate speech).

Deans discursus conveniently omitted how vile the Chaplinsky case really was. Chaplinsky was a Jehovahs Witness being accosted by a town mob. He was arrested for opposing the war and calling a police officerbrace yourselfa damn fascist.

Citing Chaplinsky proves nothing other than that Mayor Wheeler and Howard Dean both unthinkingly draw from the well of authoritarianism. Its a bad case.

Inconvenient truths like the true story of Chaplinsky are obscured by a supine media who obsess over the apparition of white-race-hatred. Notice that white supremacy is the catch-all term used to justify the most outrageous behaviors, including Evergreen College students using physical intimidation to confine administrators. The willingness of Evergreen College president George Bridges to give in to their every babyish demand doesnt help much either.

The concern for white supremacist activity overwhelming society is, of course, absurd. Joseph Christian, for instance, is more crazed hobo than calculating hater; he was swigging from a bladder of purple-drank sangria before he attacked, he hadnt had a permanent address in years, he once robbed a convenience store because the guy there d[id]nt sell any winning lottery tickets.

Calling Christian a white supremacist is a misdirect, a red herring, a tactic used to raise the stakes so that restrictions applying to only one side of the political spectrum can be justified.

Will more violence come in our cultural Cold Civil War? If it does, it wont be frivolous. It also wont be the doing of the criminally insane like Joseph Christian. If violence comes, it will be a return to the insecurity of the 1970s, when 1,470 terror attacks resulted in the deaths of 184 people. It will be terror and political violence.

The sum-total of terrors tollmortality, fearwill rattle us. And if there is a John Brown moment, a Wall Street Bombing moment, or anything of the kind, the Cold Civil War is going to heat right up. The bloodshed will come on the heels of censorship. The Battle of Berkeley is so much evidence.

Free speech is, as Dr. Jordan Peterson puts it, the mechanism by which we keep our society functioning. The apparatus to which Peterson refers is a safety release valve, a kill switch on combat.

People need to feel like they have an outlet; they need to know they can jettison the frustration (and even the poison) that accumulates in their mind. But today, the institutions of civil societywhats left of it, anywayhave formed an anti-speech coalition: students against speech, politicians against speech, intellectuals against speech, journalists against speech, and on and on.

Youll remember that The Washington Post assumed a new taglineDemocracy Dies in Darknesswhich like most contemporary clichs is not true at all and means nothing. As a matter of fact, democracy dies in the blazing solar heat of the public forum, where the wrong ideas swelter in the hot box, awaiting a heatstroke-induced death, while the emboldened authoritarians of the left wait in the cool shade.

This will cause incalculable damage. And lots more violence.

Here is the original post:
Evergreen, Portland, And The Censorship-Violence Nexus - The Daily Caller

Evanston Now

Viewpoint: Censorship at the library Evanston Now On Friday June 2, the Evanston Public Library held a hearing that may lead to the firing of librarian Lesley Williams this week. Her alleged crime? Posting a message on her personal Facebook page criticizing the library's efforts at racial equity. This ... and more »

See the rest here:
Viewpoint: Censorship at the library - Evanston Now

Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been accused of "shutting down" a rival raising questions about the Governments arms deals with Saudi Arabia during an election hustings.

Independent candidate Nicholas Wilson cried "censorship!" after Ms Rudd was seen passing a note to the chair of the debate in Rye, East Sussex.

Moments later, the chairman rang a bell and ordered Mr Wilson to end his speech.

Asked by the Mirror if he believed Ms Rudd's note was directly responsible for the cutoff he said: "Without a doubt."

Before he was interrupted, Mr Wilson was criticising Theresa May selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

He said: Saudi Arabia are the country responsible for IS and they support IS. We supply arms to Saudi Arabia

But the chairman said he had strayed from the topic of the question, which was the Manchester terror attack.

Am I being censored? he said, before claiming Ms Rudd was planning to abolish the independent Serious Fraud Office so that she could be in charge of prosecutions of financial institutions through the National Crime Agency.

The chairman approached him, gesturing for him to hand over his microphone and saying this was the kind of personal attack I wanted to avoid.

But Wilson, who led a successful campaign against HSBC to get compensation for customers hit with excessive credit card charges, said: This is censorship. I have suffered censorship for 10 years. People dont know about these things because of censorship.

He eventually gave up his microphone.

Later he posted the clip on YouTube under the comment "Amber Rudd shuts down my speech about arms sales to Saudi Arabia".

It has been viewed more than 300,000 times.

We asked the Conservative Party what Amber Rudd wrote on her note.

Nineteen hours later, a spokesman replied: "The chair decided to move it on."

Go here to see the original:
Tory Amber Rudd accused of 'shutting down' rival questioning government arms deals with Saudi Arabia - Mirror.co.uk

Over onthe home page, Tiana Lowe tells the tale of the campus craziness at the Evergreen State College of Washington. Id encourage you to read the entire piece, but the basics are just as absurd as weve come to expect. Radical activists wanted to turn the schools traditional Day of Absence (a day where black students leave campus) into effectively a day of exclusion, demanding that white students and professors leave instead. Bret Weinstein, a progressive biology professor, wrote a polite and thoughtful letter objecting, and the response? Well, the response was insane. Heres Tiana describing what happened next:

Within days, vitriolic student mobs took over Weinsteins classroom, screaming at him, calling him a racist, and demanding his resignation. When videos of the mobs made it to YouTube, the protesters demanded that the videos be taken down. Rather than ignoring the disruption and demands of students including the immediate disarming of police services and mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees Evergreens president, George Bridges, actively enabled them, excusing protesters from homework, instituting said mandatory sensitivity training for all college employees, creating a new equity center, and launching an extensive forensic investigation to seek criminal charges against whoever posted the videos to YouTube. While local police chief Stacy Brown told Weinstein to remain off campus as law enforcement could not guarantee his safety, Bridges lauded the protesters passion and courage.

By the way, if you want to read the full list of the mobs demands, here they are:

We demand for the coordinator of the Trans & Queer Center to be permanently hired full time. Currently, they are temporarily hired and their contract ends in June.

We demand the creation of a permanent position that will support undocumented students. This position will have a budget that will create scholarships, housing, and protections.

We demand that the video created for Day of Absence and Day of Presence that was stolen by white supremacists and edited to expose and ridicule the students and staff be taken down by the administration this Friday.

We demand Bret Weinstein be suspended immediately without pay but all students receive full credit.

We demand an official statement on each of these demands from George Bridges that is divided up into 10 sections on this Friday May 26th, 2017.

We demand that no changes to The Student Code of Conduct be made without democratic student consent.

We demand that Officer Timothy ODell be fired and suspended without pay while an investigation takes place.

We demand the immediate firing of Andrea Seabert Olsen, the Assistant to the VP for Student Conduct, from all Evergreen State College positions.

We demand the immediate disarming of Police Services and no expansion of police facilities or services at any point in the future.

We demand mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees.

We demand the creation of an Equity Center

We demand for the coordinator of the Trans & Queer Center to be permanently hired full time.

We demand the creation of a position that will support undocumented students.

Not to be outdone, a coalition of dozens of faculty and staff have signed their own letter, and its one of the most craven academic documents Ive ever read. It begins:

We acknowledge that all of us who have power within the institution share responsibility for the racist actions of others. Furthermore, those of us who are white bear a particularly large share of that responsibility.

We acknowledge that we have a great deal of work to do in order to honor and live up to the demands made by student leaders during last weeks protests.

And lest you have any doubt about where these folks stand on the First Amendment, they commit themselves to:

Demonstrate accountability by pursuing a disciplinary investigation against Bret Weinstein according to guidelines in the Social Contract and Faculty Handbook. Weinstein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.

This is legally indefensible, of course, and morally repugnant. There is no effort to engage with Weinsteins ideas andno acknowledgment of the threats that have driven him off campus. Weinstein has shown unusual courage in continuing to speak out against threats and intimidation, but how long can he endure? How long can any reasonable person persevere in the face of similar threats and demands? Evergreen has reportedly faced serious threats of violence after the media covered Weinsteins story, but Weinstein is in no way responsible for these threats. Will his radical colleagues apply this standard to their ideological friends? Do they hold them responsible for the threats that drove Weinstein off campus? Of course not.

Instead, this is exactly how even peaceful professors and protesters actively collaborate with the violent fringe. Rather than unequivocally standing up for the fundamental liberties of a colleague while condemning all threats of violence, they blame him for the misdeeds of others, ignore the misconduct of their allies, and then urge their universityto violate the law. Ive said it before, and Ill say it again. Unless and until campus administrators have the courage to use the law to protect liberty, theyll reward violence, increase campus volatility, and set the stage for a truly ugly (and perhaps deadly) incident.

Originally posted here:
Evergreen State College Professors Turn On Their Colleague, Demand Censorship and Discipline - National Review