https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpn1qx9S218
Social media giants are routinely “disappearing” content and squelching free speech.
(Be sure to access the Project Veritas videos specifically related to Twitter’s admission of encoding parameters to provide automatic shadowbanning). – Janet Levy
The growing threats to free speech throughout the United States come from a number of sources, including government officials, academia, and the rising influence and power of social media giants.
The threats by government leaders, such as former attorney general Loretta Lynch who, while in office, considered “criminally prosecuting” anyone who disagreed with President Obama on climate change, and the move by Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) to limit the application of the First Amendment concerning paid political speech, may have diminished due to the results of the 2016 election. But in other circles, the pressure to mothball free speech rights continues.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has released a vital document, which charts academic freedom over the past 103 years. According to author David Randall, “We publish this chart today because America faces a growing crisis about who can say what on our college campuses.”
According to the study, “At root this is a crisis of authority. In recent decades university administrators, professors, and student activists have quietly excluded more and more voices from the exchange of views on campus. This has taken shape in several ways, not all of which are reducible to violations of ‘academic freedom.’ The narrowing of campus debate by de-selection of conservatives from faculty positions, for example, is not directly a question of academic freedom though it has proven to have dire consequences in various fields where professors have severely limited the range of ideas they present in courses …Potent threats to academic freedom can arise from the collective will of faculty members themselves. This is the situation that confronts us today. Decades of progressive orthodoxy in hiring, textbooks, syllabi, student affairs, and public events have created campus cultures where legitimate intellectual debates are stifled and where dissenters, when they do venture forth, are often met with censorious and sometimes violent responses. Student mobs, egged on by professors and administrators, now sometimes riot to prevent such dissent. The idea of “safe spaces” and a new view of academic freedom as a threat to the psychological wellbeing of disadvantaged minorities have gained astonishing popularity among students.”
Popular protests against the policies of the Iranian regime and in some cases against the regime itself affected 70 Iranian cities between Dec. 28, 2017 and Jan. 4, 2018. Nearly 4,000 protesters were arrested and 23 killed before the demonstrations stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Although the Iranian government tried to cast blame on foreign actors, the protests surprised Western observers, as well as the various Iranian exile movements, who struggled to understand what had happened after the fact. The leadership of the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests against vote fraud in the re-election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have played no role. The events of the last days of December and the first days of January appear to have been a spontaneous outburst of popular frustration with deteriorating conditions of life. Lacking structure, organization and a political program, the eruption stopped as quickly as it began.
Because the protests had no organization or centralized leadership, they represent no threat to the Iranian regime in the near term. There is another side to this coin: spontaneous expressions of popular anger on a national scale reflects a deep malaise in Iran’s economy that cannot easily be fixed, if indeed it can be fixed at all. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the revolutionary regime has borrowed massively from Iran’s future, in economics, finance, the environment and demographics. It has allowed corruption to determine the allocation of financial resources on the scale of an African kleptocracy. And it has channeled resources into expensive foreign adventures at the expense of desperately-needed spending at home. It cannot employ its present generation of young people, who suffer an official unemployment rate of 20% and an effective unemployment rate of perhaps 35%. The next generation of young people will be much smaller due to an unprecedented decline in Iran’s birth rate.
Renowned Professor Outraged After Being Accused of Saying Nice Things About Israel By James Kirchick
Harvard’s Catharine MacKinnon correctly noted the Israel Defense Forces’ ethics. But when a colleague accused her of praising the Jewish state, the celebrated scholar went on the attack.
Before Kendall Myers was sentenced to life imprisonment for betraying secrets to Cuba, he was an avid proselytizer for the London Review of Books. As recounted in Toby Harnden’s 2009 Washingtonian profile, the former State Department analyst (who had spent 30 years spying for the Castro regime) would pass copies of the Review to his neighbor in the tony D.C. Westchester building along with the endorsement that the magazine was “much better on Palestine” than its American inspiration, the New York Review of Books. That publication, known for printing Tony Judt’s call for a binational Palestinian state and Peter Beinart’s jeremiads against the “American Jewish establishment,” was, Myers sniffed, “too Israeli.”
Myers has thankfully not been heard from, on politics or the relative merits of book reviews, since his sentencing nearly a decade ago. (“I see no sense of remorse,” the federal judge told Myers and his wife, who assisted his espionage, at the couple’s sentencing. “You were proud of what you did.”) But I was reminded of Myers’s recommendation when reading the letters section of the current London Review. There, the feminist American legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon can be found angrily responding to a review of her most recent book, Butterfly Politics. The reviewer, Lorna Finlayson of the University of Essex, had taken exception to MacKinnon’s 2008 acceptance of an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in defiance of the academic Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement against Israel. (Moreover, “one of the people honored alongside her was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and critic of ‘Islamic extremism.’”) Adding insult to injury, MacKinnon returned to the Zionist entity in 2014, where she “delivered a speech at the Kiryat Ono Academic College in which she praised the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as ‘the only army in the world that does not rape the women of its occupied people.’” Citing the Israeli historian Benny Morris’ work on the 1948 War of Independence and a 27-year-old Amnesty International report, Finlayson disputes that this is in fact the case.
Finlayson also takes issue with what she calls MacKinnon’s “broadly pro-American narrative when it comes to global politics.” MacKinnon, a critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hardly a liberal interventionist, is guilty of this charge because she draws a parallel between terrorism and misogynist violence, seeing both rooted in a “masculine ideology.” This is revealing of a “pro-American narrative,” Finlayson argues, because, while women have done nothing to deserve the violence of a patriarchal society, the same can hardly be said of the terrorism directed at America and other Western imperialist states, responsible for the “destruction of entire Middle Eastern societies and their ways of life.”
In most academic circles, especially the ones inhabited by Catharine MacKinnon and Laura Finlayson, the accusation that one is acting as a useful idiot for George W. Bush is a scarlet letter, as depraved as liking child pornography or torturing animals. But the allegation that she is a handmaiden of American imperialism is not what prompted MacKinnon to write a letter to the editor. No, it was the fear that readers of the London Review of Books might mistake her for having even the slightest sympathy for the Jewish State which stirred the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School to action.
Although genuine feminists have made strides for women’s rights in Western countries, they have helped set back the rights of young Muslim women to break free from the oppressive codes of an Islam defined and controlled by Muslim men.
It is one of the ironies of modern politics that the same word can be susceptible to more than one meaning, creating confusion for everyone.
One of the reasons for the confusion is that liberal values are generally shared by moderates on both the left and right of politics. Not by the far left — Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, and Stalinists or Britain’s Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – or by the far right – Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland, Hungary’s Jobbik, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, or Greece’s Golden Dawn.
Leftist values underpinned both the American and French revolutions, helping to create the liberal democracies that remain our chief defence against Communism at one end of the political spectrum and Fascism on the other. Most of those values are taken for granted by mainstream populations in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and much of Europe. Writing in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, Ralph Raico describes classical liberalism as
“the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism.”
One might also include civil rights; democratic institutions; equal justice under the law; separation of religion, state, judiciary and education, and international co-operation. Although there is, of course, more to liberal values than these, they are all enshrined in articles of the US Constitution and implied or stated in the constitutions and laws of other democracies.
The role of liberalism in the reformation of Europe following World War II is made clear by Oxford historian Professor Martin Conway:
Liberalism, liberal values and liberal institutions formed an integral part of that process of European consolidation. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the liberal and democratic identity of Western Europe had been reinforced on almost all sides by the definition of the West as a place of freedom. Set against the oppression in the Communist East, by the slow development of a greater understanding of the moral horror of Nazism, and by the engagement of intellectuals and others with the new states (and social and political systems) emerging in the non-European world to the south.
Conservatives have enemies to their right.
‘Democracy is in crisis,” begins the 2018 annual report from Freedom House. “For the 12th consecutive year, . . . countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains.” Indeed, the downward trend may be accelerating. This year for the first time, the number of countries registering losses of freedom — a whopping 71 in all — is more than double the number in which freedom grew.
Alarm at this trajectory, together with some other global events and trends, inspired the issuance of the Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal, officially launched at the October 2017 conference, in Prague, of the Forum 2000 Foundation, an organization founded by former Czech president Václav Havel and maintained by members of his family and close political associates. The Prague Appeal is intended as a “moral and intellectual catalyst for the revitalization of the democratic idea” and as the charter for the Coalition for Democratic Renewal, consisting of intellectuals and activists, from scores of countries, who aim to “go on the offensive against the authoritarian opponents of democracy.”
That such an initiative might draw return fire from its targets is to be expected. More surprising, however, was the broadside against it in these pages by National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan, speaking mostly through the voice of Ryszard Legutko. O’Sullivan merely glossed a polemic that Legutko had contributed to the Australian magazine Quadrant. Lengthy quotes from it made up most of O’Sullivan’s piece.
O’Sullivan introduces Legutko as a “distinguished Polish philosopher,” but one could not tell from the method of his diatribe. In the compass of a thousand words, Legutko accuses the Prague Appeal of being “bizarre,” “outrageous,” “intellectual[ly] dishonest,” “an insult to decency,” “vile,” “shameful,” and “a lie.” He attributes to the signers, many of whom have published a great deal, views in manifest contradiction to what they have written. Oddly, he elsewhere recently put his name to an appeal for “linguistic decency,” noting that “language is a delicate instrument, . . . debased when used as a bludgeon,” and that “recourse to denunciation is a sign of . . . decadence.”
What is going on here? The fuse igniting Legutko’s (and, by proxy, O’Sullivan’s) explosion is the inclusion, in the Prague Appeal, of a reference to Hungary alongside references to Venezuela, Turkey, and the Philippines. All are cited as examples of “backsliding democracies” where “illiberalism is on the rise.” Legutko, who angrily decried this as “attributing guilt by scurrilous association,” and O’Sullivan, who directs a think tank in Budapest, are evidently partial to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. More broadly, they appear to sympathize with “populist” movements that have arisen recently in Europe and the U.S.
My column that posted last night is an in-depth analysis of the Schiff memo, the response of House Intelligence Committee Democrats to the Nunes memo published by committee Republicans. I offer a variety of reasons why the response principally proffered by the committee’s ranking member, Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), fails to defend the issuance of FISA court surveillance warrants against an American citizen tied to the Trump campaign, Carter Page, in a counterintelligence investigation seeking to probe suspected ties between Donald Trump and Russia. The warrant was issued based on uncorroborated hearsay allegations from unknown sources, compiled in the so-called Steele dossier. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose that these allegations were generated by an opposition-research project commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
As I argue in the column, the Schiff memo leaves no doubt that the key allegation supporting issuance of the warrant is the Steele dossier’s claim that, while on a well-publicized trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met with two top Putin regime operatives, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin. Page credibly denies the meetings; former British spy Christoper Steele’s claim that they happened is based on unidentified hearsay sources that he concedes he never confirmed; and all indications are that the FBI never corroborated them. In congressional testimony, Former FBI director James Comey described the dossier’s allegations about Donald Trump as “salacious and unverified.” Furthermore, according to a memo published by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members — Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) — then-director Comey conceded that the Bureau did not corroborate Steele’s sources and relied on the fact that Steele had given the FBI reliable information in the past. (See Grassley-Graham memo, p.2.)
At the Washington Examiner, Byron York picks up on something I wish I had highlighted: The Schiff memo’s focus on past Russian intelligence efforts (in 2013) to recruit Page to become an agent for Russia. As Byron notes, the Schiff memo claims that “Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”
The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.
Tuesday, February 20. It’s our first time in Prague, and – except for a couple of visits to Berlin – K.’s first time on territory that was once part of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as we’re wont to do on arrival in a new city, we passed on museums and other cultural attractions, preferring instead to walk and walk and walk – to get a sense of the place and the people and start finding our way around.
After several hours of wandering along the winding streets and across cobbled squares dominated by churches, we came back to our hotel and had a drink at the bar. After two gin and tonics, I saw that K. had tears in his eyes. I looked at him quizzically. He could hardly get the words out.
“I’m so angry at my country’s government!” he finally exploded.
The country in question being Norway.
K. explained. We had just seen a good deal of Prague, and had passed heaven knows how many thousands of people. Not once had we seen a hijab. Let alone a niqab or burka.
“In this whole big city, not one!” he cried. “And yet in that little town where we live – in the middle of nowhere! – you can’t look out of the window for a minute without seeing one.”
For us, the Islamization of Western Europe had been a constant topic of conversation for almost twenty years. We’d voiced anger, frustration, despondency, cynicism. But I’d never seen him get teary-eyed about it.
In time for Thanksgiving 2018, Michelle Obama’s memoir is due for release. The book, which should be entitled Enjoying a Bigger Piece of Your Pie, will instead be titled Becoming.
According to the former FLOTUS, the “highly anticipated” tome details what Michelle O calls a “deeply personal experience.” And well it should, because she and her world-renowned author husband reached a hefty $65-million two-book deal with Penguin Random House – a formidable amount of wealth that neither Shelly nor Barry is likely to be spreading around anytime soon.
Due to be published in 24 languages, rumor has it that Michelle’s book will have global appeal, which most certainly puts Becoming in the literature category of contenders for the next Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking of Nobel Peace Prizes, husband Barack, whose half of the book deal is due out in 2019, will take Becoming on an international book tour, where he’ll use his wife’s book as an excuse to promote himself as the ultimate source of all wisdom and truth.
Just for the record, this is not Mrs. Obama’s first crack at authorship. When the former first lady took up organic gardening on 1,500 square feet of White House lawn, that agricultural exploit resulted in a book titled American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen and Gardens Across America.
In a statement from the CEO of Penguin Random House, Markus Dohle, this new book “will stretch the confines of a traditional former first-lady memoir the same way Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian did.” About the anticipated bestseller, Dohle elaborated, “‘Becoming’ is an unusually intimate reckoning from a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations – and whose story inspires us to do the same.”
Recently, it was Mrs. Obama who observed that in the movie Black Panther, “young people … finally [got to] see superheroes that look like them on the big screen.” Therefore, if all goes according to plan, the cover jacket portrait of Becoming will accomplish a similar end.
An axiom is a truth nobody can prove. For example, everyone knows that one equals one, but there is no formal proof. However, when one tries to do arithmetic by ignoring that axiom and, say, letting one equal two, then very quickly the math descends into chaos and absurdity. There is no getting around an axiom, even though one cannot prove it.
A similar principle applies to the social sciences. It was an accepted axiom of society that men are men and women are women. No longer. That axiom has been rejected by some elements of society, and the absurd consequences are becoming more apparent all the time.
The late Betty Friedan, a so-called pioneer of the radical feminist movement, once said the only difference between men and women is biological “packaging” – that is to say superficial appearance. It would follow that by changing one’s external appearance, one can change his sex. Liberals accept this as an axiom.
Science clearly refutes this, but radical leftists, and even some conservatives on the more libertarian side, manage to ignore the science, despite growing evidence that the transgender doctrine is harmful to individuals and to society in general.
The science says maleness and femaleness are the two necessary and complementary halves of the human species. They have different functions that serve each other. Morally speaking, the sexes are equal but not equivalent, and that seems to be a point of major confusion to liberals.
