About Sasha Stone’s Podcast

This week, a friend introduced me to one of his favorite podcasts: "Sasha Stone's Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning."

I jumped right into Sasha' most current podcast, "The Mugshot Heard Round the World: Did the Democrats finally make a Trump voter?"" Sasha is intensely and creatively thoughtful and her non-partisan ideas will emotionally move for those of us who are not completely enraptured with one political tribe. Hence, the "Free Thinking" part of the title to her podcast.

Despite the paltry and insulting offerings to American voters year after year, the challenge is still to vote for the lesser of two evils, right? What is the lesser of two evils in 2024, at the point where the Democrats have repeatedly shat upon the rule of law, desperately embraced censorship and become louder cheerleaders for endless war than even the Republicans?

And will this be the year when black voters thoroughly reject the political party that has repeatedly taken them for granted, often in insulting ways? I'm speaking of the Democrats. I'm basing this question on several conversations I've recently had over the past month, but Sasha also sees a wider trend based on her own research.  And I don't think that most loyal democrats have the faintest inkling that these tectonic plates are dramatically shifting.

In this single episode, Sasha repeatedly challenged me, forcing me to reframe some of my long-held ideas. I immediately became a subscriber. I invite you to listen if you are looking to be challenged.

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What Passes for Hate Speech

At Public, Alex Gutentag tears apart White House "evidence" that anti-semitic hate speech is on the rise. The evidence is a joke. The claim is yet another government ruse for asserting authoritarian power. Here's an excerpt from this article:

Hate and antisemitism are sharply increasing, say the Biden administration, journalists, NGOs, and the FBI. Groups like the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British nonprofit, claim that censorship is the only way to combat this crisis.

In July, Biden announced a new agenda to fight rising antisemitism, which includes enforcing more censorship of hate speech. The White House is now “[calling] on Congress to hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hate-fueled violence.”

CCDH has successfully pressured advertisers into boycotting Twitter (now called X) in an effort to force the company into restoring the “content moderation” policies it had in place before Elon Musk purchased it. In a reportpublished on June 1, CCDH found that “Twitter fails to act on 99% of hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers.” Since CCDH started its pro-censorship campaign, Twitter/X has lost 60-70% of its total advertising revenue.

 “The Twitter blue tick used to be a sign of authority and authenticity, but it is now inextricably linked to the promotion of hate and conspiracism,” said CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed, who says he started his group after online radicalization led a man named Thomas Mair to kill former British MP Jo Cox. “Our society has benefited from decades of progress on tolerance, but Elon Musk is undoing those norms at an ever-accelerating rate by allowing hate to prosper on the spaces he administers.”

But there is not adequate data to support these claims. Though media outlets promoted the CCDH “report” about hate speech on Twitter/X, it was comprised entirely of a blog post less than 900 words long, based on a review of a scant 100 Tweets. By comparison, 500 million Tweets are sent every day.

The CCDH “report” showcases ten examples of racist and antisemitic posts, but it does not make the other 91 Tweets it supposedly analyzed available. Of these ten examples, seven of them had fewer than 50 “likes,” and two had only about 50 views. Three of the accounts featured in the report have since been suspended, but CCDH has not updated its findings.

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Corporate Media Racecraft

This is a common tactic of the corporate media: Ignore crime statistics to drum up race-based panic. Wilfred Reilly knows his stats and brings sanity to the conversation, sanity that is inconvenient to many progressives:

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm/dataonline/content/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6686

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Florida and California Both Receive a Failing Grade in First Amendment

If you detest Florida's Stop Woke Act, you should also detest the way that California is trying to turn college professors into its ideological puppets. These are both blatant violations of the First Amendment.

Instead of compelling speech at colleges and allowing professors to be disciplined for doing their jobs, what should college administrators be doing? Greg Lukianoff of FIRE offers this advice:

First, stop breaking the law. When a public university restricts freedom of speech, it violates the First Amendment. Although private universities do not share the same legal obligations, many of them make promises to preserve and promote the free speech rights of students and faculty, and they must honor those commitments.

Speaking of commitments, Greg’s second piece of advice is to enshrine free speech protections in official campus policy. One such policy, the “Chicago Statement,” has been adopted by more than 100 colleges and institutions and is viewed by FIRE as the gold standard for free speech commitments.

But you can’t stop there. It’s easy enough to congratulate yourself for putting a commitment in writing, but the real test is when a campus controversy arises over speech protected by the Constitution or by your school’s commitment to free speech. What do you do then? Do you try and wait it out? Hope that everything will blow over?

Well, FIRE hopes not, because your silence will have a chilling effect on free speech. As the university president, you must “defend the free speech rights of your students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early,” says Greg.

One of the most difficult things you will have to do as president will be to defend unpopular speech, even speech that you disagree with, but that is your obligation. Ultimately, the responsibility falls on college leadership, especially presidents, to publicly and unapologetically show their support for free expression. According to FIRE’s 2022 College Free Speech Rankings, students at the top-ranked schools reported that their administration’s stance on free speech is clear and that their administration would likely defend a speaker’s rights during a controversy on campus, a sentiment that is far less common at schools lower in the rankings.

What else can you do? Well, after you have planned for all of that, you should prepare to teach free speech from day one through campus activities and events. In doing so, you’ll clearly convey to students and faculty that the university places a high value on freedom of speech and civil discourse. FIRE even has free speech orientation materials on our website for interested schools.

Finally, as the leaders of scholarly institutions, you must treat commitments to freedom of speech as yet another scholarly endeavor. Universities should survey students, professors, and administrators to “understand their attitudes toward free expression, and to gather opinions of the campus climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.”

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The Mistreatment of Jordan Peterson: How Cancel Culture Works

The case of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson illustrates how cancel culture works. The chilling effect is how and where most of the damage occurs.  Here is an excerpt of an article at The Free Press titled, "Jordan Peterson Goes to ‘War’: The psychologist sells out auditoriums. But he can be stripped of his clinical license because of his tweets. He tells TFP why he won’t back down:

Most of Peterson’s work is technical. (Even the titles of his research are intimidating, like his 2007 paper “Reducing memory distortions in egoistic self-enhancers: Effects of indirect social facilitation.”) Other projects by Peterson are completely anodyne, like his guide and program to improve essay writing.

That’s not what the Ontario Court has taken issue with.

The problem isn’t his clinical practice or his academic research. It’s his worldview. Specifically, his tweets and a few podcast comments, which the College of Psychologists of Ontario, a licensing body for psychologists in the province, considered “unprofessional.”

“The percentage of people who actively oppose what I’m saying is very, very tiny,” Peterson said. “But some of them are extremely committed. And so they can bring disproportionate sway to the decision.” ...

Even if Peterson ultimately loses his license, a man with his following on social media can’t ever be “cancelled.” (And he no longer sees patients anyway.) The more chilling effect of the court’s decision is that it acts as an intimidation toward all other clinical psychologists: self-censor if you share Peterson’s views, or face punishment.

“In all of the areas in which we see pervasive self-censorship, it only takes one example for people to become unwilling to speak their mind. Or even one threat,” Pamela Paresky, a psychologist and author, told The Free Press. “When people say that cancel culture isn’t real because they don’t see people that have legitimately been cancelled, they don’t understand that cancel culture isn't about the cancelling, it’s about the culture. And it’s a culture of fear.”

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