EU Directly Attacks the First Amendment

The EU is trying to destroy the First Amendment. It is an attack on the United States. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE quotes this article by the Editors of The Free Press:

“The stated reasons for the fine are a lack of transparency, a violation of advertising rules, and misleading users with “deceptive” design. The real reasons have little to do with those allegations, and everything to do with the kind of speech the EU wants to suppress: perspectives that have not been filtered through bureaucrats, academics, or media professionals; views that go against the received wisdom of policymakers; and views that have not been vetted and found to be acceptable by governments. Any company that utters the wrong kind of speech should now know that the meter is running.”

Mike Benz has been explaining that the actions of the EU must be considered a direct assault on the lives of all Americans:

This is the day I’ve warned the Trump Admin every day for 7 years would come, since 2018’s EU Disinfo Code, to 2019 when the DSA was floated in concept, to 2020 when it became a formal draft EU law while I was at State, to its 2022 adoption, to its 2025 mandatory Disinfo Code.

I keep telling you exactly what to do and exactly what bad things will happen next if you think you can ignore this and not do anything, and each thing I keep saying will happen next literally keeps happening next and happening exactly as I told you it would if you didn’t act.

How could anyone in the admin be surprised the EU censorship law would fine/extort X ??? That’s WHY they made the law, whose enforcement teeth JUST kicked in this summer! This is like letting a flesh-eating cannibal sleep on your chest then being surprised it bit your heart

My lovely DC policymakers who are doing so much good, this €120M fine is N-O-T-H-I-N-G compared to what happens in 2026, 2027, 2028 if this — the first fine — isn’t smacked the fuck out of the air hard, mercilessly and with a message. Is @USAmbEU briefed enough to be armed?

BTW, what has Hillary Clinton been up to? Jonathan Turley explains:

Heritage Foundation exposes Hillary Clinton was directly behind getting the European Union to use their Digital Services Act to pressure Elon Musk and America back into censorship ‌

Hillary Clinton flew overseas for a meeting to facilitate this against America ‌

“They (The European Union) gathered in Berlin, and it was the most anti-free speech gathering I've ever been part of — Hillary Clinton was there, and she really fueled the anger. ‌

When Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, she called on the EU to use the infamous Digital Services Act, which is one of the most anti-free speech pieces of legislation in decades. And she called upon the EU to use the DSA (Digital Services Act) to force the censorship of American citizens, force people like Musk to censor.

It's an extraordinary act by someone who was once a presidential candidate” ‌

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Words Are Not Violence

When I was growing up, we often said "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Last year, I spoke these words at a free speech presentation at a local library and the participants glared at me. I get the same stares when, after I am told that something I said was offensive, I respond by saying "You do you." or "Live and let live" or "To each his own." There are other expressions that don't fare well around the many self-appointed nannies inhabiting American universities, where wokeness still runs amok:

Be yourself

Do your thing

Do your own thing

Be true to yourself

To each their own

Live and let live

I was reminded that it still takes thick skin to say these common sense sorts of things in many places when I spotted this meme:

Words are not violence, yet this obvious and useful distinction is being willfully ignored and at great peril to societal flourishing. In his article at Free Press, "Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché," Greg Lukianoff comments on this important distinction:

Words are not bullets. Words can’t strike a man from 142 yards away, causing a torrent of blood to erupt from his wound, sending him first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Only bullets can do that.

Upholding that distinction is the North Star of everything I do as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). For years, I’ve warned that equating words with violence erases the bright line liberal societies drew after centuries of bloodshed. The law draws this line with precision. Advocacy, even vile advocacy, remains protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That’s the Brandenburg standard, and it exists because the alternative is to let the powerful decide which ideas are allowed.

Or, as the Supreme Court put it in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” These aren’t lawyerly niceties; they are the safety valves of pluralism. Blur them, and real violence becomes more, not less, likely.

Campus culture has been eroding that line for years. Students are told that offensive ideas are “harm,” that “silence is violence,” and—in a flourish that should now embarrass its users—that speech can be “literally” violence. Jonathan Haidt and I pushed back on that argument almost a decade ago. It’s conceptually wrong and practically dangerous—and has only grown in influence. Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense. [emphasis added]. This is the bloody fallacy we just witnessed: Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force. We need to bury this trope. Retire it—from classrooms, HR trainings, and editorials—for good.

The numbers show how far the rot has spread. FIRE’s new College Free Speech Rankings, which surveyed nearly 70,000 students across 257 campuses, find a record share now rationalizing coercion. Roughly 34 percent of students say that using violence to stop a campus speech can be acceptable in some circumstances; roughly 70–72 percent say the same about shouting down speakers. In 2021, the violence number was in the low 20s; by last year it was 32 percent. It should be zero. A university that can’t persuade students to reject violence categorically is failing at the first task of liberal education.

Continue ReadingWords Are Not Violence

Barack Obama Openly Advocates for Censorship by the Elites to Help the Unwashed Masses

Obama is clearly advocating the need for censorship in this video:

Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts and separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government regulatory constraints…

I'll paraphrase: "We," (the pre-ordained elites) will be in charge of what you can say and hear. We're helping you and you need our help because you're too dumb to think for yourself. You'll love it!

This is no one-off for Obama. Despite being a former professor of law, who taught constitutional law, Obama considers himself one of the elite leaders of the censorship industrial complex.  Consider this brand new article by Michael Shellenberger: "Obama-Linked Stanford Center Held Secret Meeting With Foreign Governments To Plot Global Internet Censorship: Top EU, UK, Brazil, and Australian officials met in September with US censorship advocates to combine and coordinate efforts." Excerpt:

In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy address at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

The 2024 election of President Donald Trump significantly reduced the threat of Obama, DHS, and NSF censoring the American people. Trump defunded much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Platform Accountability Act is going nowhere in Congress.

To be fair, Trump is no saint on free speech. As FIRE's Will Creely testified recently, Trump has been bludgeoning numerous entities to curtail free speech:

To be sure, the government may speak for itself, and the public has an interest in hearing from it. But it may not wield that power to censor. As Judge Richard Posner put it: The government is “entitled to what it wants to say — but only within limits.” Under no circumstances may our public servants “employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens.”

So the law is clear: Government actors cannot silence a speaker by threatening “we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,” as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission did last month. Nevertheless, recent examples of jawboning abound: against private broadcasters, private universities, private social media platforms, and more. The First Amendment does not abide mob tactics.

Democrats, however, are more on board with Obama's approach to censorship than republicans:

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Stark Sex Differences Re Intolerance of Opposing Viewpoints

Fascinating research from "The Eternally Radical Idea." Worth reading Chapin Lenthall-Cleary's entire article here.

Amazingly, it turns out that men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.

The data comes from FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings, which is designed to gauge the state of free speech on American college campuses as well as student attitudes toward free speech. This includes gauging students’ feelings towards allowing various hypothetical speakers on campus, which we can break down by various characteristics. When evaluating the data based on gender, some shocking trends arise.

Men are, on average, significantly more tolerant and less censorious than women. By contrast, while political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers on their side, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little. However, regardless of party or ideology, men are significantly more tolerant than women, so much so that the gender difference dominates the ideology difference. This effect is even more acute in the extremes: men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be “perfectly tolerant” of opposing views — meaning they would definitely allow any campus speakers, including those they disagree with.

Further,

And while left-wing women are stereotypically seen as being uniquely censorial, the reality is that this tendency applies to all groups of women, regardless of ideology.

And this:

Democrat-leaning independents are more tolerant of both sides than Democrats, and Republican-leaning independents are more tolerant of both sides than Republicans. Again, however, we see the stark effects of gender on these measurements: male Democrats are more tolerant of right-wing speakers than female Republicans.

And this:

Many women display extreme censorial attitudes, and only towards right-wing speakers.

What is causing this? 

My suspicion, corroborated by other research, is that women have much stronger general opposition to speech that may cause emotional discomfort and a preference for harmoniousness.

One of the above sources was a 2021 Psychology Today Article. Here an excerpt:

  • In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

  • Two recent studies of online adults revealed that women were more censorious than men.

Continue ReadingStark Sex Differences Re Intolerance of Opposing Viewpoints

Mike Benz Describes the Challenges of Dismantling Joe Biden’s Censorship-Industrial Complex

Because they cling to corporate media as their main source of “the news,” many of the most vocal people online don’t realize that the Biden Administration poured billions of tax dollars into censoring and propagandizing Americans. Nor do they know the details. This secret operation was so vast and so ghastly that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded:

[T]he Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—“unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.” We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.

Who were the recipients of this tax money? Answer: Numerous government agencies, including DHS and USAID (and many others), who funneled the money out to dozens and dozens of NGO and non-profits with disarmingly patriotic names (e.g., Global Engagement Center and the National Science Foundation) who did the dirty work, often in close coordination with prestigious American universities. They worked in tandem with each other and with the CIA, which continued to make good use of all of its favorite Project Mockingbird techniques to convince you to be someone else. Many of the doubters don’t know CIA history. They don’t know that the CIA has topple dozens of governments Or they assume that the CIA used to be bad but they somehow got to be the good guys when after they displayed animus against Trump.

This censorship-industrial complex (also sometimes referred to as “the Blob”) has convinced you that you were well-informed and that you were thinking your own thoughts. They made sure you only heard one version of every story so that you voted only for the “correct” candidate. They were so good at their jobs that you believed that virus particles couldn’t pour through cloth masks. They made sure that you slurped up every government-approved position and that you deep-down hated those who disagreed with you, including your friends and family members.

[More below, including the transcript of Mike Benz' entire talk at NatCon

Continue ReadingMike Benz Describes the Challenges of Dismantling Joe Biden’s Censorship-Industrial Complex