FIRE: “Free speech comes at a price. But it’s nothing compared to the price we will pay if we abandon it.”

FIRE weighs in on the horrific struggle involving Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the same excellent suggestion that it offers regarding ever other conflict: The more feee speech, the better.

The article is titled: "As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalates, so must our commitment to free speech: Intense political disagreements demonstrate the necessity of the First Amendment." Excerpt:

Let every participant in the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict show their cards, even those with the most extreme views. And let others marshal arguments and evidence to refute or discredit those views. Let it all happen out in the open.

At the end of the day, we’re not better off knowing less about what our fellow Americans actually think. As FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate has said, “I want to know who the Nazi in the room is so I know not to turn my back to them.”

In Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket soldiers’ funerals with signs bearing messages like “Fags Doom Nations” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” It’s hard to find a case involving speech that draws less public sympathy. But as the Court said in an 8-1 decision uniting justices across the ideological spectrum:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.

Free speech comes at a price. But it’s nothing compared to the price we will pay if we abandon it.

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New Alumni Group Advocates for Free Inquiry at Colleges

On Oct. 18, five alumni groups announced the creation of an organization to stand up for open inquiry: The Alumni Free Speech Alliance. This group consists of alumni. Why?

Because with rare exceptions, everyone else may feel too exposed to attacks to take a stand against campus culture. Our experience is that the few student free-speech groups don’t have many members (Princeton’s has about 20). Champions of free speech among faculty are badly outnumbered, even as many left-of-center professors are starting to realize that they too can be brutally canceled by the mob. Those few students and faculty who speak up often feel isolated and exposed.

University trustees, presidents and other administrators are also usually mired in the toxic campus environment, which responds to heresy with attacks. Most have either been cowed by or genuinely believe in a woke orthodoxy that sees free speech as an inconvenient disruption.

That leaves alumni as the only university stakeholders with the numbers and clout to lead the defense of free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in campus environments. Free speech and academic freedom are fundamental to the advancement of knowledge and to the success of our colleges and universities. Will all teaching and research at these schools soon be subject to a mandated orthodoxy? Will parents keep paying to send their children places where the fundamental elements of learning are suppressed? These institutions constantly seek alumni involvement and contributions. Alumni have the ability and duty to demand that their schools maintain the reasons for which they were created. But to be effective, alumni need to organize.

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The Newly Published Westminster Declaration Seeks to Dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex

From Public, an introduction to the Westminster Declaration, an effort focused on "formal censorship by governments of online speech, not censorship at the level of the workplace or media." Several excerpts from this article:

A group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration ...

The signatory list includes scholars like Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and John McWhorter, actors like Tim Robbins and John Cleese, journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang, and scientists like Jay Bhattacharya. It includes prominent free speech advocates like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Nadine Strossen, Greg Lukianoff, and many more.

You may notice that the signatory list features thinkers from the Left, like Slavoj Žižek, as well as thinkers from the Right, like Jordan Peterson. People with very different political views have signed the declaration, and you may also notice that individuals with significant disagreements have signed it. That is precisely the point. It is only through free speech that robust political, ethical, and scientific debates can take place.

“Across the globe,” the Declaration reads, “government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. …the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance.”

Those who claim they are simply “fighting misinformation” are, in truth, attempting to control the minds of the public. This is exceedingly dangerous since, ”time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labeling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defense against disinformation.”

While we do not intend to add any additional signatories to the Declaration, given the significant amount of time already invested, we welcome endorsements in the form of articles and social media posts by those who agree with it. We are happy to note that The New York Post, The Telegraph of London, The Times of London, Die Welt, France-Soir, La Veritá, and other newspapers have written about or will soon publish articles about the Declaration.

The opening passages to the Westminster Declaration:

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

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Inconsistently Applied Principles of Woke Ideology Exposed by Student Reactions to Recent Gaza Events

At National Review, Charles Cooke's sharp-edged article invites us to exhale. We didn't believe most of the allegedly high-minded principles proclaimed by Woke Ideologists.  They didn't either. Here's an excerpt from "The Woke Code of Morality Was All Nonsense":

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

After noticing the hypocrisy, Jonathan Haidt also weighed in, making reference to the release (this week) of a new book by Greg Lukianof and Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind (2023). First of all here's how Haidt and The Canceling define cancel culture: "efforts to silence people by threatening them with social death, unemployment, or physical harm for questioning orthodox beliefs or proposing heterodox theories. " Haidt's comment:

The Canceling was a darn good book when I read a draft last spring, in order to write the Foreword for it. It’s an even better book now that the world has been treated to the shocking spectacle of so many university presidents remaining silent, or issuing only vague and cautious comments, in days after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Their collective reticence stood in stark contrast to the speed with which so many had offered expressions of solidarity or shared grief whenever an election or court case went the “wrong” way in the years since 2014. (In general I think universities should embrace the “Chicago Principles” and commit to institutional neutrality. See Jeff Flier’s recent application of these principles to the current situation. But if university leaders made so many pronouncements on “controversial” issues before October 7, then they should have made a strong one on October 8.)

Why did so many leaders take so long to say anything strong or (seemingly) heartfelt about the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the holocaust? Why did so many wait a few days to see which way the wind was blowing before augmenting their initially tepid statements? I see nothing to suggest antisemitism; I see everything to suggest fear.

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