Free Speech Hypocrisy

Nico Perrino (of FIRE) sternly points out the rampant hypocrisy.

Do we actually believe in free speech?

Do we actually believe controversial speakers have a right to speak in America — free from government censorship?

For the past decade, I stood alongside conservatives who loudly — and justifiably — protested when speakers like Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray were prevented from speaking on college campuses, often under the guise of vague appeals to "safety."

Will those same voices rise up now that the boot is on the other foot?

Do we actually believe in free speech as a principle, or merely as an expedient argument when our side is censored?

Do we actually oppose cancel culture?

Do we actually oppose the heckler's veto?

Do we actually oppose vague security rationales for censorship?

I will work with anyone to defend free speech in any scenario, even if doing so means those same people — whether they are the canceled conservatives of the past or the canceled left-wingers of the present — will sometimes abandon free speech when it's their side doing the censoring.

Believing in free speech is as simple as the golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Nat Henthoff's book title comes to mind: "Free Speech for me, but not for thee."

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Trump’s Free Speech Report Card

I was happy to hear Trump's strong rhetoric on free speech. Unfortunately, he is making major missteps in the real world. Matt Taibbi is also concerned. This is an excerpt from Matt's article at Racquet News, "If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is ScrewedWith civil liberties flatlined around the globe, Donald Trump is blowing off the First Amendment at the worst conceivable time":

China guarantees free speech, unless it undermines “the interests of the state.” You can be fined 14.7 million yuan for comparing the army to a squirrel. In Russia jails are filling with regime critics, while papers like Novaya Gazeta are forced to suspend publication until after the Ukraine war. British police routinely conduct speech raids against offenders across the spectrum, Germany boasts about its thought cops on 60 Minutes, and the EU’s vast censorship law, the Digital Services Act, just played a role in helping overturn an election result in Romania. Around the world, from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to India, free expression is in full retreat.

That leaves America, where the First Amendment is the last obstacle to a global movement toward bureaucratization of speech. In last year’s campaign Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rightly ran against the speech excesses of the Democratic Party, with Vance saying views on censorship constituted the “biggest difference” between Trump and Kamala Harris, and Trump upon inauguration naming censored figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to high office. The administration initially acted like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Vance confronting Europe over its civil liberties crackdowns. They seemed to know what they wanted to achieve on this issue.

That operation is now hanging by a thread. Trump is suddenly blowing it on speech in a big way, with two big categories of screw-ups: pandering to Israel, and reaching into the same emergency-power cookie jar that foreign counterpart-jackasses like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Thierry Breton have recently raided, in efforts to suppress populist movements like Trump’s own. Once he jumps on this bandwagon, we’re all screwed, because there’s nowhere left to run.

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The Self-Appointed Smart People Should be in Charge of Everything, They Say

This is one of the major divides in modern world: Some people think the People should really run their own governments. Then there is an elite handful of people who believe that because they are so super-smart, the public-facing government should be a facade for unwashed masses, a Potemkin village, and the self-appointed rich fucks should call all the shots.

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FFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.

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