Oopsie! Meta, the monster (in many senses of the word) parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, blocked the link to a new, 30-minute infomercial supporting the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the rebel independent Presidential candidate whom Democrats wish they could vaporize with their bad thoughts. Meta says it was a “mistake.”
Maybe it was. The embargo didn’t last long: the ad was only unavailable from late afternoon last Friday to the middle of last Saturday. A spokesman for Meta said the link had been incorrectly flagged as spam. For some reason, RFK Jr.’s campaign and supporters don’t trust Meta. Tony Lyons, a founder the super PAC that paid for the ad, says his group plans to sue Meta in federal court for censorship and First Amendment violations.
“When social media companies censor a presidential candidate, the public can’t learn what that candidate actually believes and what policies they would pursue if elected,” Mr. Lyons said. “We are left with the propaganda and lies from the most powerful and most corrupt groups and individuals.”
“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”
—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled,“Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”
Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.
For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law, Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading →
—-The attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana in their U.S. Supreme Court opposition to staying the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit order declaring that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had violated the First Amendment by secretly pressuring social media platforms to take down posts as “misinformation.”
What a great line! I’m amazed it has never been used before: an instant classic and useful quote.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in a case to determine whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating that endlessly useful word to progressive and Democratic censors, “misinformation,” on social media platforms. There are four case before SCOTUS on this topic, which, among other expressions of alarm, was the target of the so-called “Twitter Files” posts organized by Elon Musk in 2022.
The case being argued today, like the other ones, arose from revealed communications from administration officials urging/ persuading/ threatening social media platforms to take down Left-unfriendly posts on the Wuhan virus vaccines, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop and other matters. Last year, the Fifth Circuit hit the Biden administration with an injunction that severely limited this tactic. The three judge panel wrote,
Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.
And the Biden administration opposed that language. Let me repeat that for emphasis: the Biden administration opposed that language. This is, you will recall, the administration and the party that has based its campaign against Republicans before the election this year on the premise that it is the Republicans and their presumptive Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who pose an existential threat to democracy. Yet these are the same aspiring totalitarians who used the power of the government—“Nice little business you have here…be a shame if anything were to happen to it!”—to secretly coerce, pressure, and infiltrate (read the whole order linked above) social media and Big Tech platforms to do their bidding regarding what opinions and assertions could be communicated by citizens.
But you know and I know an awful lot of people, including elected officials, educators and journalists, who wish this could happen here, will do what they can to see that it does happen here, and regard themselves as enlightened and virtuous for believing this.
[Aside: I first (and last) heard that Mothers of Invention riff when I was a freshman in college. I made me laugh then, and it just made me laugh now. Yes, I am looking for things that will make me laugh.]
Sam Melia is an activist who was recenly sentenced to two years in prison for making and distributing offensive stickers, including thos saying,
“It’s OK to be White”
“White Lives Matter”
“Love your Nation”
“Stop Anti-White Rape Gangs”
“Stop mass immigration”
“Reject white guilt”
“They seek conquest, not asylum”
Other stickers are unquestionably racist or anti-Semitic. One asked: “Why are Jews censoring free speech?,” for example. He’s a member of neo-fascist Patriotic Alternative, and is clearly an asshole, distributing printable stickers and encouraged his followers to download them and sick them them up in public places. In January, at Leeds Crown Court, Melia was found guilty of distributing material “intended to stir up racial hatred” and “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage,” though there was no such damage. Last week he received his sentence of two years in jail, and British progressives are just thrilled about it.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says that when Melia was arrested in April 2021, police “found in his wallet” stickers that expressed “views of a nationalist nature.” When police searched Melia’s home, they “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley” and other evidence “of Melia’s ideology.” Yes, in Great Britain, home of the Magna Carta, Locke and W.S. Gilbert, you can now be imprisoned for what you believe and what opinions you express.
Thanks to the First Amendment, the U.S. has been spared that step into totalitarianism so far, but the double standards applied to the January 6 morons and the George Floyd marauders show that the potential for erosion is strong.
“We need to trust ourselves more to confront hateful thinking and to ensure our communities are safe for everyone, rather than inviting officialdom to restrict and punish ideas we don’t like. Censorship both expands the state’s jurisdiction over theindividual’s mind and weakens social solidarity by discouraging the public from directly confronting bigotry in preference for asking the government to cover our eyes and ears. The impact this has on the free society is devastating.
Even some liberal campaigners might feel uncomfortable defending the free-speech rights of a bigot like Melia. They need to get over themselves. As the American essayist HL Mencken said: ‘The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped atthe beginning if it is to be stopped at all.’
And that is exactly why our aspiring censors—in the Congress, in the White House, in the news media, in universities, in DA offices—need to be stopped now. Immediately. This year.
On the heels of the previous post about intolerant progressives came my awareness of the news that both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly, dominated by Democrats, passed bills that would eliminate long-standing tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that was founded in 1894 for female descendants of Confederate soldiers. The group’s mission was and is to honor Confederate ancestors through memorial preservation—an increasingly difficult job—and charity work. It is currently exempt from paying property taxes and recordation taxes, which are charged when property sales are registered.
This week the State House of Delegates passed a bill revoking the group’s exemptions as well as the property tax exemptions for two other Confederate heritage groups, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Inc. and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society.
To state the obvious, the three non-profit groups have been targeted because many legislators don’t like their beliefs and activities. Don Scott, the Democratic speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, said it was important to revoke the exemptions from “organizations that continue to promote the myth of the romantic version of the Confederacy.”
It’s a serious question. Several episodes lately have reminded me of the ubiquitous saying about how we all risk becoming the thing we most hated in our youth, or that we inevitably turn into the person we hate most, etc. There are too many versions of the quotation to list.
I started my mind wandering down these dark corridors while researching a post I may never write about Harvard’s gobsmacking alumni magazine this month, as various writers and revered minds tried (and failed) to make sense out of the university’s recent travails without, somehow, saying anything critical about the woman at the center of them, deposed Harvard president Claudine Gay. After all, she is still on the faculty (and black, and a woman, and a DEI warrior), so being overtly negative about her conduct—as in making her accept responsibility—apparently would be too transparent to countenance.
In an essay reprinted from the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” Derek Bok (who became president of Harvard while I was a student there) wrote about the school’s cultural challenges, and, I noticed, never mentioned the term “progressive” once in his article, only the term “liberal.” And I thought, “Wow. Talk about being out of touch.” Does Bok really think today’s militant, intolerant, censoring, bullying, doctrinaire progressives would qualify as liberals in his era? Sure, they embrace many of the same agenda items, being anti-war, pro-drug use, wanting abortion on demand and other Sixties obsessions. But they are anything but liberal in the classic sense.
As you see by the EA links, I batted just .500 in covering this topic, and some of the incidents described in FIRE’s report are clearly major ethics breaches that should have been discussed here. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for being a catalyst for so much unethical conduct by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (AUC)—the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—as well as his own usual forays into the Ethics Twilight Zone that I missed other important matters. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have croaked, “So many things I might have done, but Trump got in my way….”
OK, I’m kidding. Sort of.
The most horrible story that I missed is a tie between the Mayo Clinic outrage and the Marion County Police Dept.’s gestapo act. In that one, FIRE explains,
[ JM here:I want to let Curmie’s Conjectures stand on their own, so I apologize at the outset by intruding with a brief introduction. Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the whole post because the author’s scholarly tone and apparent focus at the start suggests that this will be a narrow discourse on topics rather more relished by Curmie and me than by the majority of EA readers—theater and the performing arts—fear not. The tags on the article will be “Canada, censorship, the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck, and political theater.” The post also involves some of the same considerations as one of mine two days ago. ]
There is a theory, one to which I subscribe, which suggests that the Dionysian Festival of classical Athens began not really as a religious observance in honor of a demi-god but rather as a means of consolidating the political power of the tyrant Peisistratus. Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that by 458 BCE Aeschylus’ Oresteia, widely acclaimed as “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” offers commentary on the reforms of the Areopagus enacted by the strategos Ephialtes some three years earlier.
There is no question that since that time the theatre has often—not always, but often—been political. The 20th century offered more than a few examples of playwrights and production companies who, often at personal risk, critiqued the power structures around them: Jean-Paul Sartre took on the Nazis; Lorraine Hansberry, racism in the US; Athol Fugard, apartheid; Václav Havel, communism in Eastern Europe.
Not all such efforts were for causes most of us would endorse, of course. Socialist Realism was a Stalinist policy under which all art had to support The Revolution: not just avoid criticism of the regime, but actively and explicitly endorse it. More recently, the Freedom Theatre of Jenin (on the occupied West Bank) has been in the news. A few weeks ago, one of the student organizations at my university posted an encomium to the company, which they described as “an example of creating liberating theatre and serving communities through theatrical pedagogy and profound performance.” I remembered having written about that theatre a dozen or so years ago. If I might quote myself for a moment: “Turns out that the Freedom Theatre was pretty damned proud of having turned out alumni who engaged in armed insurrection, and at least one of whom, a suicide bomber, richly merited description as a terrorist.”
So no, propagandistic theatre isn’t always a good thing… but engaging with the world is. Even subtle messages matter. Under normal circumstances, Aunt Eller’s wish that “the farmer and the cowman can be friends” doesn’t amount to much. But Oklahoma! hit Broadway after the declaration of war against the Axis powers and before D-Day. “Territory folks” need to put aside their petty grievances when there’s a guy with a funny mustache who’s far worse than any of your neighbors will ever be.
One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.” That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”.
This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here. The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University. His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.
You may recall the incident. Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here. Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad. Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.
Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood. So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing. Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration. The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence. (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)
Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history. Everett was just getting warmed up. He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t. Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).
And, as a bonus, a satisfying validation of Ethics Alarms’ decision to always refer to the “Wuhan virus” rather than “Covid.”
James Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics has written a thorough, fair and objective account of the entire pandemic fiasco, which the Axis of Unethical Conduct still is trying to deny. Here’s his final paragraph:
When scientists craft their scientific conclusions to political ends, they are no longer practicing science. They have entered the political fray. They shouldn’t be surprised when the public begins suspecting political motives behind their other claims, as well. Public health officials let political concerns and institutional biases influence their statements and policies throughout the pandemic.And the media eagerly served as handmaiden to these efforts. Americans started the Covid-19 pandemic ready to make enormous sacrifices to protect their own health and that of others. But our political leaders, health officials, and media squandered that trust through years of capricious policies and calculated dishonesty. It could take a generation or more to win it back.
The essay is long, but essential reading for any informed American. I recommend sending it to all of your smug progressive friends, especially any of the mug-using persuasion, and even more-so to the idiots still wearing masks while alone in their cars.
Literally none of the information included in the article is new to me, nor should it be news to anyone who has read Ethics Alarms over the past three years. (The tag “Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck” will take you to almost all of the posts on the subject.) However, relatively few members of the public read City Journal, (which is routinely superb), much less Ethics Alarms. As I read this piece I was infuriated all over again, not just at being reminded of how the nation came to cripple itself economically, financially, educationally and socially ( never mind how it came to wreck my personal business and financial security), but because this wasn’t written by the “investigative journalists” of the New York Times or Washington Post and featured as a front page story.
Here is another memorable selection from the article, also a depressing one:
The Covid-era collapse in ethical standards in science, government, and journalism might have brought a period of re-examination and reflection. For example, Watergate, 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis all led to majorinvestigations and reforms. So far, however, the pandemic’s polarized battle lines remain intact. Rather than re-examine their mistakes, in fact, some elite institutions seem eager to institutionalize the excesses of the period. In August, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a studytitled “Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US.” The JAMA study examined various Covid claims made by several dozen doctors with large social media followings and bemoaned “the absence of federal laws regulating medical misinformation on social media platforms.” It suggested that doctors who propagate misinformation should be subject to “legal and professional recourse.”
What were the types of misinformation that might require such a heavy-handed response? The study quoted some extreme anti-vaccination theories and other far-out claims. But many of the topics it flagged as “misinformation” fell well within the range of normal scientific or political discourse. The authors wrote, for example: “Many physicians focused on negative consequences related to children and mask mandates in schools, claiming that masks interfered with social development.” The JAMA authors also objected to the assertion that health officials “censored information that challenged government messaging.” Of course, as the Facebook and Twitter documents showed—and the U.S. 5th Circuit recently concluded—that’s exactly what the government did. Finally, the JAMA study flagged as misinformation the claim that Covid-19 originatedfrom a Chinese laboratory, which, it limply objects, “contradicted scientific evidence at the time.” Imagine if the JAMA authors had their way and medical experts were professionally and legally enjoined from contradicting the scientific consensus on major health questions.Without the ability to challenge popular viewpoints, scientists can’t advance our state of knowledge. In such a world, the germ theory of disease might still be dismissed as misinformation; doctors might still be relying on leeches and neglecting to wash their hands.
Ethics Alarms 