RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/18/censorship-has-a-perfect-failure-record/

Free speech is under assault from all angles. States across the West are arresting purveyors of so-called hate speech, and cracking down on alleged mis- and disinformation. Even the US government, despite the First Amendment, has been caught leaning on social-media firms in order to outsource censorship to the private sector. Universities, once places of vigorous, robust debate and unfettered inquiry, have been transformed into ‘safe spaces’ where contrarian views are Not Platformed. We’re not only losing the right to free speech – many seem to have forgotten why it matters at all.

As legal expert Jonathan Turley explains in his new book, The Indispensable Right, free speech is fundamental to our humanity. Without the ability to articulate our beliefs, we become not only less free, but also less human. Jonathan was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are crusades against speech, particularly those driven by the state, undermining free speech?

Jonathan Turley: The Biden administration has created three categories for censorship: disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Of the three, malinformation is my favourite. It’s defined as the use of true facts in a misleading way. It isn’t hard to imagine how the government might abuse that definition.

Current proponents of censorship make arguments that I find very disingenuous. For example, they will raise an issue like child pornography, which is an act that is against the law. They have a habit of taking the most extreme forms of conduct and using it to justify sweeping and ambiguous forms of censorship. If you take a look at the UK, France, Germany and Canada, you begin to see what happens when you allow censorship to take hold. It develops an insatiable appetite.

My book poses the challenge to name a single censorship system that has succeeded in stopping an idea or movement. Censorship has a perfect failure record and my book tries to explain why. In my view, it is because freedom of speech is a human right. It’s something we’re hard-wired for. I even refer to medical studies that show how parts of our brain can shrink if we don’t express ourselves. We are so designed for free speech that we can have a physical response when we fail to use it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-mass-commutation-criminal-justice-retribution

Last week, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 federal inmates. The administration bragged that it was the largest single-day granting of clemency in American history. But a backlash swiftly followed as the public learned whom the president had released: pill-mill doctors, Ponzi schemers, and a judge who got $2.1 million in kickbacks for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit facilities.

Biden’s mass commutation came at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union and others of what Ezra Klein and Michael Lind referred to in a recent postelection conversation as “the Groups”—the vast but inchoate network of left-wing advocacy organizations that moderate Democrats are blaming for the party’s 2024 defeat. Biden’s lame-duck concession to these advocates raises questions about how much influence such radicals continue to hold in the Democratic Party.

But even more importantly, the popular outrage at Biden’s mass commutation highlights a fundamental problem with the argument advanced by criminal-justice-reform groups like the ACLU. Specifically, they deny the importance of retribution, the notion that the criminal-justice system should impose punishments not just instrumentally—for instance, because it makes the nation safer or discourages crime—but also because criminals deserve it.

Many of those who benefited were, on paper, reasonable recipients of a presidential commutation. They had been released under the provisions of the CARES Act Home Confinement Program, a Covid-mitigation strategy created during the Trump administration that sentenced low-risk, nonviolent federal offenders to serve their time at home rather than in federal prisons.

The program seems to have been a public-safety success. Of the 13,204 releasees, just 22 were rearrested between March 2020 and June 2023, and 96 percent had no violations of their parole, technical or criminal, over the same time period.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/18/biden-seals-his-legacy-as-worst-president-in-history/

Since the election, not-soon-enough-to-be-former President Joe Biden has provided a steady stream of reminders as to why the nation will be glad to be rid of him. His unique mixture of incompetence, cluelessness, disdain, arrogance, and sleaziness has been on full display.

Consider what Biden managed in a few short weeks.

The unprecedented, sweeping pardon of his son Hunter made a mockery of not only his solemn pledge that he’d trust the justice system but managed to infuriate every Democratic leader and media fanboy who’d sung his praises for that pledge.

The mysterious appearance of drone swarms around the country has showcased the ineptitude of Biden’s administration, which has attempted to: 1) tell Americans that they must be mistaken, 2) reassure everyone that the drones pose no threat and 3) admit that it has absolutely no idea what’s going on with these drone flights.

The administration’s muddied responses sparked bipartisan outrage. New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul complained that “this has gone too far” after drones temporarily shut down runways at New York Stewart International Airport.

Biden’s decision to commute nearly 1,500 sentences for people – who, he said, “have shown that they deserve a second chance” – and pardon 39 others has raised hackles, even among the mainstream media.