THOUGHT POLICE NEWS - PAGE 2
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” – George Orwell
We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries. It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines … 1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and: 2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves.
This cult-like craze, where the bigots are engaged in a strange competition to find new things to rage about, is no longer a campus activity. With the introduction of ‘critical race theory’, another damaged product of the academic brain that teaches that all white people are inherently racist, the corporate world has gone full-blown woke to the point where Coca-Cola, when it is not pushing alternative sexual lifestyles on children, is instructing its workforce to “be less white.” Meanwhile, United Airlines recently announced it will be culling white male pilots in the cockpit in favor of minority groups, because I guess enough planes are not crashing. That is not to suggest that the flying skills of minorities are somehow inferior to those of white males, but rather that nothing good ever comes when it is forced from above Attacks of a racist nature against any group are simply disgusting, and it is shocking that such a thing is allowed to happen in America, one of the most racially diverse countries in the world. It should be remembered that the US did not become diversified by accident; it became that way because it was encouraged to happen by the American people, the majority of whom are (still) white. …
In a lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in damages, MyPillow claims Dominion Voting Systems is trying to stifle unproven allegations of voter manipulation by “using today’s cancel culture” to sue people pushing conspiracy theories about its technology. “Dominion’s purpose is to silence debate; to eliminate any challenge to the 2020 presidential election; and to cancel and destroy anyone who speaks out against Dominion’s work on behalf of the government in administering the election,” the lawsuit against the election technology company says. The lawsuit, announced by MyPillow’s pro-Trump CEO Mike Lindell, acts as a countersuit to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion filed against the pillow company in February.
If you harbor any hopes that the ivory tower still stands strong, you can put those hopes to rest. It has crumbled. Consider Exhibit A in the case of the Sane vs. the Snowflakes at the University of Virginia. On April 8, Kieran Bhattacharya had to seek the intervention of a federal judge to protect his legal right to ask questions – yes that’s right, simply ask questions – within the hallowed halls of Thomas Jefferson’s pride and joy. The trouble for Bhattacharya began in 2018, when he, as a second-year medical student, decided to attend a panel discussion on the subject of microaggressions. During the lecture, he asked the presenter, assistant dean Beverly Cowell Adams, if only “marginalized groups” could be victims of such thought crimes. When Adams answered “No,” Bhattacharya challenged her by pointing out that the slides she had used thus far in her lecture indicated the exact opposite and that she was being “inconsistent.” For committing the heinous malfeasance of challenging inconsistencies and engaging in something that used to be known as healthy debate, a “professionalism concern card” was filed against Bhattacharya. He was subsequently brought before the Academic Standards and Achievement Committee and accused of “aggressive and inappropriate interactions in multiple situations.” The committee then told Bhattacharya he was required to undergo psychological evaluation before he could return to class. When he asked under what authority the school could require this, Bhattacharya was summarily suspended from school. And there you have it. This pretty much sums up the state of today’s educational enterprise. Our academic institutions have, for all intents and purposes, become perpetual nurseries where faculty and students alike are stuck in chronic infancy, shouting “You offended me!” every time someone dares to challenge their thinking or present a contrary idea.
A Colorado judge who was censured by the state’s Supreme Court after being accused of using racist language with a coworker has resigned. The Colorado Supreme Court said Arapahoe County District Court Judge Natalie T. Chase used the N-word multiple times with a coworker and was racially insensitive on many occasions, according to court documents recommending discipline for Chase and public censure from the Court. The documents detail a 2020 incident in which Chase, a former law clerk and a Family Court Facilitator were driving back to work after attending an event in Pueblo, Colorado. “Judge Chase is white and the Family Court Facilitator is Black,” the documents read. “On the way back from Pueblo, Judge Chase asked the Family Court Facilitator questions about why Black people can use the N-word but not white people, and whether it was different if the N-word is said with an ‘er’ or an ‘a’ at the end of the word.” “During the conversation, Judge Chase used the full N-word a number of times,” the documents state. The facilitator was uncomfortable and “felt angry and hurt by the conversation,” according to the documents. “She has explained that Judge Chase’s use of the full N-word was ‘like a stab through my heart each time,'” but didn’t feel comfortable sharing her discomfort or emotions with Chase due to fear of retaliation. Following this incident, Chase made other derogatory statements, including tell coworkers, some of whom were Black, that “she would be boycotting the Super Bowl because she objected to the NFL players who were kneeling during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality against Black people,” the documents read. Following the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020 after former police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, Chase also voiced her opinion on subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that took place across the U.S. When two Black court employees were discussing the protests while in Judge Chase’s courtroom, she told them “some of her opinions regarding racial justice issues” and “asked one employee some questions about the Black Lives Matter movement.” “The employee tried to explain the Black Lives Matter movement, and Judge Chase stated that she believes all lives matter,” according to the documents.
Yesterday might have been the best birthday Simu Liu ever had, with the actor celebrating turning 32 by seeing the first trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings explode online and draw hugely enthusiastic reactions from all corners of the internet, with both the movie and the man himself trending worldwide. However, because this is social media we’re talking about, it wasn’t long before the star found himself being targeted by cancel culture. A tweet posted by a then 23 year-old Liu in 2012 where he described Nicki Minaj’s vocal stylings as comparable to watching a homeless man yell at a pigeon resurfaced and went viral, and somehow that made him a racist in the eyes of certain people.
An account appearing to belong to the former president’s new platform, @DJTDesk, emerged on the social media site shortly after — but a source close to Team Trump told The Post that the account was not created by anyone on former President Trump’s team. By Wednesday evening, Twitter had suspended the account. Reached for comment by The Post, including questions on the validity of the account, Twitter stood by the decision despite the identity of the user remaining unknown and seemingly not connected to the former president. “As stated in our ban evasion policy, we’ll take enforcement action on accounts whose apparent intent is to replace or promote content affiliated with a suspended account,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
Disneyland’s new Snow White ride, which reopened this month after a year of Covid shutdown, faces criticism for its “non-consensual kiss” between Snow White and Prince Charming … Splash Mountain, has been overhauled because of its problematic Southern stereotypes. And The Jungle Cruise is still closed after Disney promised to remove the “Trader Sam” character, a jolly dealer in shrunken heads, and its ape-like depictions of indigenous people … Remakes of Disney’s early princess films have tacked perilously close to cancellation, too … The Snow White story, then, endures because it is memorable – but also infinitely flexible. It bends to accommodate the concerns of each storyteller and their times. But, of course, this means that, a few decades down the line, it is likely to get caught out when those priorities change. That said, given Disney’s eagerness to tippex their past, I wouldn’t bet on a happily ever after for Prince Charming and his charmless kiss.
Two New Jersey officers are facing steep punishments for a social media post that likened Black Lives Matter protesters to terrorists. Speaking on “Fox & Friends First,” former Officer Sara Erwin said she was terminated following an investigation by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office — which determined no criminal behavior took place — leaving the department to issue its own punishment. Her sergeant, Mandy Grey, was demoted and suspended for liking the post shared in June 2020 that stated: “Last night as I left for work I had my two kids crying for me not to go to work. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the way I did last night. And then I watched people I know and others I care about going into harms way. I love my police family like my own. So when you share posts and things on Facebook I’d really appreciate if you’d THINK before doing so. I’ve seen so many black lives matter [sic] hashtags in these posts. Just to let you know — they are terrorists. They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don’t care if I die” … Both women have served the department for over two decades. Grey made history when she became the Hopewell Valley community’s first female officer, and again when she was promoted to sergeant in 2019.
Alec Baldwin slammed “cancel culture,” saying it is no longer focused on accountability but likened it to a “forest fire” that can only “destroy.” “Cancel culture is like a forest fire in constant need of fuel. Functioning objectively. No prejudice. No code. Just destroy. The deserving and the undeserving alike,” the actor said on Twitter.
A St. John’s University professor lost her job, allegedly after students were upset after she quoted the N-word aloud while reading from a Mark Twain novel to her class. The school denied that the quote was the reason she was fired from her job, though. Hannah Berliner Fischthal, an adjunct professor at the school for two decades, was fired from her position on April 29. She allegedly lost her job after an incident two months earlier during a remote class with her students on February 10. In Fischthal’s ‘Literature of Satire’ class, she was reading an excerpt from Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain’s anti-slavery novel from 1894. Twain uses the N-word in the novel, which Fischthal contextualized to her class before saying it, according to the New York Post.
Francisco José Contreras, deputy to Spain’s far-right Vox Party, was locked out of his Twitter account for 12 hours last week after saying “a man cannot get pregnant” because they have “no uterus or eggs.” Contreras’ comments were in response to an article he shared on the social media platform about a transgender male who announced they were a father after giving birth to a baby girl. Contreras said in a Facebook post on May 11 that he had received a message from Twitter which informed him that he had violated its policies on “hate speech” for the remarks.” “The hateful tweet (which I was forced to delete) was one that said: ′′A man cannot get pregnant. A man has no womb or eggs”,” Contreras wrote in response to the move. “You can see this is already fascist biology. Next time I’ll try 2 + 2 = 4.” According to Twitter, Contreras violated its policy against material that threatens, harasses, or fosters violence against other people on the basis of their race, ethnic origin, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religion, age, disability or disease. “Keep in mind that repeated defaults may lead to permanent suspension of your account,” Twitter warned. “Go to Twitter now to fix the problem with your account.” A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment.
A handful of heavyweights in the conservative movement on Monday launched an advocacy group designed to push back against what the organization describes as a rising tide of “cancel culture” and “corporate wokeism.” Mike Davis, founder and president of the group, Unsilenced Majority, said he wants to model the group on other organizations he leads that focus on judicial nominations and Big Tech. “As we’ve shown with the Article III Project and the Internet Accountability Project and now Unsilenced Majority, when you take off the gloves, put on the brass knuckles and punch back, you’ll break the left’s glass jaw,” Mr. Davis said in an interview. He envisions the group leveraging earned media and social media and said the overarching goal is to mobilize a grassroots army to push back on companies that appear to be bowing to the politically correct. The campaigns could involve counterboycotts and litigation. Mr. Davis said the group wants to make sure there is a “price to be paid” for what it calls “corporate wokeism.”
Consumers’ Research, an educational nonprofit dedicated to consumer information, on Tuesday launched an ad campaign targeting corporations over “woke” political narratives. The campaign calls out American Airlines, Nike and Coca-Cola, specifically, saying they have put politicians before their customers, according to Consumers’ Research. “America Airlines shrunk legroom for passengers and laid off thousands of employees during the COVID pandemic while receiving billions in taxpayer bailouts,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild said in a Tuesday statement. “Coca-Cola and Nike have both been exploiting foreign, potentially forced, labor in China while American workers suffer.” He continued: “It is time these corporate giants were called to task. We are giving consumers a voice. These companies should be putting their energy and focus on serving their customers, not woke politicians.”
Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan railed against the rapid escalation of aggressive wokeism Thursday for spoiling good comedy and silencing those who don’t fit the characteristics of favored groups under the progressive mold of victimhood. On his program with fellow stand-up comic Joe List, Rogan complained comedy today suffers from risk-aversion to cancel culture, where jokes made even ten years ago would be career-ending in today’s environment … As cable news ratings slide, Rogan’s podcast was the most listened to in 2020 with more than 190 million downloads every month.
The Space Force has relieved an officer of his command after recent comments he made on a podcast criticizing the diversity and inclusion initiatives the military has recently been encouraging. Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier, who was promoting his new book “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military” on the podcast “Information Operation” with host L. Todd Wood, claimed inclusion and diversity training are based in Marxism and critical race theory, which examines systemic racism and how institutions have benefited white people. During the podcast and in his new book, Lohmeier singled out The New York Times 1619 Project, which looks at the impact slavery had on the foundation of American institutions. He called the teachings about systemic racism that are proliferating in schools “un-American.” “Our diversity, inclusion and equity industry and the trainings we’re receiving in the military via that industry are rooted in critical race theory which is rooted in Marxism,” Lohmeier said.
Five rural counties in Oregon voted on Tuesday in favor of leaving Oregon and becoming part of Idaho, joining two other counties that already voted in favor of the idea last year. The ballot measures called on officials in each county to start considering the move and are the first step of the “Greater Idaho” movement, which aims to expand the state of Idaho to include rural Oregon and part of California. The activists behind the group say Oregon’s government does not represent the conservative values of much of the state and that none of the Democrats in the state Legislature represent a rural area. “This is why Oregon passes laws that kill industries in eastern, central, and southern Oregon. They don’t protect us from rioters, forest arsonists, or school curricula that teach kids to hate Americans and Americanism. And they pass laws that violate our conscience. We can’t let our money support their system anymore. We are outnumbered, we don’t have leverage, and things will continue to get worse,” the website reads.
“Cancelling” can be defined as a way of behaving, especially on social media, in which it is common to completely reject and stop supporting someone because they have said or done something that offends you, with the goal that they are silenced, shunned, fired, relegated, etc. The principal error of this phenomena is that it lacks mercy. No apology is good enough for those who are “offended.” It also lacks respect for life, failing to see the other as a person, a subject, and instead making them into a mere object of scorn that needs to be eliminated. Once people can be relegated socially, causing them actual harm or physically eliminating them becomes a possibility.
The House Oversight Committee is asking for an investigation into the Postal Service’s surveillance of Americans’ social media posts about protests, following a series of reports by Yahoo News about the program. The bipartisan request for an investigation into the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s covert internet surveillance program, known as iCOP, was sent Monday by committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and ranking member James Comer, according to the letter requesting the review. A copy of the letter was obtained by Yahoo News.
In addition, more people now say they oppose the group than did in June 2020. In the survey, 244,378 registered voters answered the question: “Do you support or oppose the Black Lives Matter movement?” Support for BLM is up over the past two years, but the momentum has dipped since its peak in June 2020, a few weeks after Floyd’s death. Additionally, more people now say they “oppose” the movement. [47% support Black Lives Matter; 40% oppose Black Lives Matter; 13% neither support nor oppose: unsure]
Nate Silvester, a Bellevue ID Marshal’s Office deputy who famously posted a viral video making fun of athlete LeBron James, has been fired from his position. “We wish Mr. Silvester the best, and we ask for calm and understanding,” commented Burns, further iterating that Burns was let go for “multiple policy violations” since May 20. Regarding the viral Tik Tok video mocking LeBron, Burns had this to say: “The statements made do NOT represent the Bellevue Marshal’s Office. The Bellevue Marshal’s Office always demands that our deputies engage with our citizens in a friendly and professional manner.” Silvester has recently signed a book deal with Di Angelo Publications, according to local outlet KTBV 7. A GoFundMe raised an epic amount of $521,000 in Silvester’s name. He said that his intention is to use part of the money raised to create a scholarship fund for other police officers who find themselves in his same situation. The rest will go to the First Responders’ Children’s Foundation.
Former high school track athlete Chelsea Mitchell was the “fastest girl in Connecticut” at one point in time until the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) began allowing transgender girls to compete in women’s sports. Last week, USA Today published an op-ed from Mitchell about competing against transgender athletes and her decision to push forward with an appeal of the case. On May 25, editors at USA Today, without notice to Chelsea, changed the word “male” to “transgender” throughout her piece and condemned her use of “hurtful language.” In an editor’s note, the outlet explained that the op-ed was updated to “reflect USA Today’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.” In a series of tweets, Mitchell’s attorney, Christiana Holcomb, accused the media organization of “unilaterally” changing Mitchell’s words after acquiescing to “backlash from the woke mob.”
A white reporter for a rightwing media outlet founded by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson has sued Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, over her temporary decision to grant interviews only to journalists of color. Thomas Catenacci and the Daily Caller News Foundation argue in the lawsuit that Lightfoot discriminated against the reporter because of his race. They argue that Lightfoot violated their first amendment rights and Catenacci’s right to equal protection by not responding to an interview request on the day of her second anniversary in office or in the days that followed. The suit was filed on Thursday in federal court in Chicago by a conservative organization, Judicial Watch. Lightfoot, Chicago’s first Black female and first openly gay mayor, said on 19 May she would grant interviews marking the second anniversary of her inauguration on 20 May exclusively to journalists of color.
An elementary school physical education teacher in Virginia was placed on leave after an explosive speech in which he told his school board he wouldn’t “affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa,” Fox News has learned. During a Loudoun County school board meeting Tuesday, teacher Byron “Tanner” Cross voiced his opposition to policies surrounding gender. “My name is Tanner Cross and I am speaking out of love for those who are suffering from gender dysphoria,” Cross told the board. He went on to discuss a “60 Minutes” special about the issue. “’60 Minutes’ this past Sunday interviewed over 30 young people who transitioned but they felt led astray because of lack of pushback or how easy it was to make physical changes to their bodies… They are now detransitioning,” he said.
This week, a clip of America’s most prominent racial grifter, Ibram X. Kendi, began making the rounds on Twitter. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” has undoubtedly made a fortune by indicting those who disagree with him as complicit in American racism — and by providing partial absolution to those who repeat his cultish ideas. In one particular clip from a recent interview, however, Kendi was asked to do one very simple thing: to define racism itself. Kendi failed signally in that task. “I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas,” Kendi stated. The audience laughed out loud .. Yet the left not only nods along to this; it champions it. For deep thoughts like Kendi’s, CEOs pay millions: Jack Dorsey of Twitter gave Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University $10 million last year; The Vertex Foundation of Vertex Pharmaceuticals is giving Kendi’s center $1.5 million over three years; Bank of America has brought in Kendi to deliver his insipid message; The Boston Globe has teamed with Kendi’s center to create a new media platform. To date, the Center for Antiracist Research has generated precisely zero research; its website reads, “We are now accepting proposals for our research and policy teams.” The center is also accepting applications for its “Antibigotry Convening.” And, of course, the center has merchandise, including Antiracist Book Festival face masks (for just $25!).
When Jesse Schwartz got fired from his teaching job at the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, administrators at the Main Line private school said it was because he had violated the school’s social media policy by criticizing the institution. In that meeting, they showed him three of his own tweets, according to his lawyer, Mark D. Schwartz: “young jews are worth saving from the morally and intellectually corroding clutches of zionism! idk how to do this but i’m gonna try to do it lol,” said one … The firing of Schwartz, who is 27 and unrelated to his attorney, cuts to the heart of several issues that have divided the country, including Zionism, Israel’s national ideology. In the last month, people have more frequently criticized media outlets such as the New York Times for their coverage, saying that the media’s obsession with the appearance of impartiality reflected a pro-Israel bias. Last month, the Associated Press fired news associate Emily Wilder for violating its social media policy after conservative media outlets targeted the recent Stanford graduate, writing news articles about her pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Zionism in college and saying her college activism raised questions about her objectivity. “There’s no question I was just canceled,” Wilder told SFGate last month. In 2017, two teachers at Friends Central School, another private school on the Main Line, were fired after they invited a Palestinian professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College to speak to a student group. Professor Sa’ed Atshan’s talk was called off when some parents and students complained that Atshan was an anti-Israel activist. Though Friends Central is Quaker, many Jewish students attend the school.
Organizers of a Memorial Day ceremony turned off a speaker’s microphone when the former U.S. Army officer began talking about how freed Black slaves had honored fallen soldiers soon after the Civil War. Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter said he included the story in his speech because he wanted to share the history of how Memorial Day originated. But organizers of the ceremony in Hudson, Ohio, said that part of the speech was not relevant to the program’s theme of honoring the city’s veterans …In the days before the ceremony, Suchan said she reviewed the speech and asked Kemter to remove certain portions. Kemter said he didn’t see the suggested changes in time to rewrite the speech and talked with a Hudson public official who told him not to change it. Kemter said he was disappointed that the organizers silenced two minutes of his 11-minute speech, during which he talked about how former slaves and freed Black men exhumed the remains of more than 200 Union soldiers from a mass grave in Charleston, South Carolina, and gave them a proper burial. “This is not the same country I fought for,” said Kemter, who spent 30 years in the Army and served in the Persian Gulf War.
Psychiatrist Dr. Aruna Khilanani took to TikTok last week in an effort to get Yale to publicly share a virtual talk she gave at the invitation of the Ivy League university entitled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” … Khilanani delivered the talk to medical students in April after being invited by the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. Her comments focused on the idea of “whiteness” … “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f**king favor,” Khilanani said during the talk.She went on to discuss white people and talking about race. “They [white people] feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath,” she said.”We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility.
According to The Washington Post, it’s hunting season for cancel culture and its latest targets are “racist” birds. The Post ran an expansive report on Thursday, titled “The racist legacy many birds carry,” focused on the “birding community,” which apparently is having a difficult debate “about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers.” “Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies,” Post environmental justice reporter Darryl Fears began his piece, noting she was hired to “break down barriers” at the Georgia Audubon nature preserve. “But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.”
A professor at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller, is suing 19 colleagues for libel after they signed a letter to the school dean demanding a “review” of his conduct because he urged students to look into the scientific rationale for the mask mandates and to assess the truthfulness of the media drive to promote them.
In a new global survey, respondents overwhelmingly supported freedom of expression—for anyone they agree with. Who cares about free speech? Almost everyone, according to a new global survey commissioned by Justitia (of which I am the director). In fact, across populations in 33 countries, a whopping 94 percent think it’s important for people to be able to say what they want without censorship … Once people are forced to measure their support in the abstract for free speech against trade-offs and (supposedly) competing values, the near-universal support quickly plummets. It seems many people cherish the right to speak freely for themselves but attach less value to the opinions of others that might clash with their own values and priorities. Across all countries, only 43 percent support the legal protection of statements offensive to minorities, while 39 percent are in favor of prohibiting statements offensive to their own religion and beliefs. Tolerance for statements supportive of same sex-relationships varies from near universal support in Denmark and Sweden (91 percent), to less than a third in Pakistan (27 percent). Seventy-two percent of Danes and Americans are willing to tolerate insults to their national flags, compared to only 16 percent and 18 percent in Turkey and Kenya, respectively.
Take notice, Wyoming. Last month, the Biden administration proposed a rule that, among other things, attempts to transform a long-standing grant program aimed at improving U.S. History and Civics education in K-12 into a push to divide our students and country. The program is voluntary and prioritizes states that teach concepts rooted in critical race theory, or CRT, for grant funding. Among others, it names the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and CRT theorist and author, Ibram X. Kendi. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) the federal government should not be pushing specific curriculum onto states and 2) it attempts to normalize controversial political theory as the foundation of K-12 history and civics instruction. My experience is that most everyone wants a balanced and comprehensive view of American history taught to our children, one that highlights the enormous sacrifices our forefathers made to bring freedom to America, but is also honest about the history of slavery and discrimination. According to a national survey by Parents Defending Education, 74% of Americans said they oppose teaching students that white people are inherently privileged and black and other people of color are inherently oppressed. Unfortunately though, the voice of radicals who believe otherwise, is very loud right now and gaining traction with critical race theory.
Former President Obama in an interview that aired Monday warned against what he characterized as “the dangers of cancel culture” going too far in American society. “A lot of the dangers of cancel culture and ‘we’re just going to be condemning people all the time,’ at least among my daughters, they’ll acknowledge that among their peer group or in college campuses, you’ll see people going overboard,” Obama said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Obama said his daughters, Malia and Sasha, have a “pretty good sense of: look we don’t expect everybody to be perfect we don’t expect everybody to politically correct all the time.” Obama has in the past criticized what he in 2019 called “woke” culture that leaves little room for forgiveness for misdeeds of people in public life. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said at an event for his foundation Summit in Chicago that year. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.” He said people calling others out on social media is “not activism”
A St. Cloud law firm is in turmoil after a round of firings that began with its leader going after employees he believed were supporters of former President Donald Trump, according to a lawsuit filed in Stearns County District Court. In the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when Trump supporters violently stormed the building to prevent congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election as president, the suit alleges that Wesley Scott sought to fire employees he believed had made pro-Trump posts on social media. Scott, president of the Kain & Scott law firm, terminated two employees — and then fired three of his law partners after they told him his actions were violating Minnesota law, according to the legal complaint. The partners whom Scott fired — William Kain, Margaret Henehan and Kelsey Quarberg — are suing for wrongful termination from the St. Cloud-based law firm that specializes in bankruptcy cases.
A Virginia mom who endured Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution before immigrating to the U.S. ripped a Virginia school board at a public meeting Tuesday over its stubborn support of the controversial critical race theory. “I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Xi Van Fleet told the Loudoun County School Board members. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.” She likened CRT, which critics deride as a form of “neo-racism,” to China’s Cultural Revolution, a Mao-led purge that left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead from 1966 to 1976. The estimates vary greatly and many details have been shrouded in secrecy for decades.
Sen. Tom Cotton told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin his office has received “hundreds” of whistleblower complaints about the military’s new diversity and inclusion training, which he says amounts to “anti-American indoctrination.” Cotton, R-Ark., has aggressively fought back against such training. In March, he introduced legislation to ban critical race theory training from the military. He and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, set up a website for whistleblower complaints to be directed to them earlier this month. Cotton said he’d seen reports of “plummeting morale, growing mistrust between races and sexes where none existed just six months ago and unexpected retirements and separations based on these trainings alone.”
A Black mother slammed critical race theory (CRT) on Thursday, telling the Florida Board of Education that it was teaching hate and ruining the “greatest country in the world.” “Just coming off of May 31, marking the 100 years [since] the Tulsa riots, it is sad that we are even contemplating something like critical race theory, where children will be separated by their skin color and deemed permanently oppressors or oppressed in 2021,” said mom Keisha King. King’s comments came after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the school board to pass a rule banning CRT and associated ideas in schools. “That is not teaching the truth,” King added, “unless you believe that Whites are better than Blacks.” She went on to dispute the idea that CRT was “racial sensitivity or simply teaching unfavorable American history or teaching Jim Crow history.” “CRT,” she said, “is deeper and more dangerous than that. CRT and its outworking today is a teaching that there’s a hierarchy in society where White male, heterosexual, able-bodied people are deemed the oppressor and anyone else outside of that status is oppressed.” “That’s why we see corporations like Coca-Cola asking their employees to be less White, which is ridiculous. I don’t know about you, but telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are Black is racist – and saying that White people are automatically above me, my children, or any child is racist as well. This is not something that we can stand for in our country.”
Two decades ago, free speech battles erupted on college campuses. The ACLU, an organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.
This week saw another example of cancel culture in action. Unfortunately, the victim became a willing participant. At some point, those of us who rightly decry the hyperventilating wokescolds should stop feeling sorry for those being canceled when they either play the game or seek to turn themselves into heroes. All they’re doing is ensuring this disturbing trend continues unabated … Too often, leftists decry supposed white privilege. Yet, those same leftists never give up their own privilege. They’ll just lecture other people about it, from their positions of power, in order to gain social currency. I’m not in the business of handing our social currency and I find virtue-signaling annoying. So if Kemper or anyone else will give into cancel culture in a way so over-the-top as a means to not merely protect themselves, but to ensure the continuation of the tactic, then they should actually be canceled themselves.
An NPR TV critic appeared to be the latest media figure to engage in cancel culture by demanding that actor Tom Hanks become an “anti-racist” in a piece that was panned by social media users. “Tom Hanks is a non-racist. It’s time for him to be an anti-racist,” the title of Eric Deggans’ opinion piece read on Sunday. Deggans begins with the disclaimer that he admires Hanks as an actor and considers him to be a “stand-up guy.” But he gets to his point a few breaths later, arguing that Hanks did not do a thorough enough analysis in his guest essay for The New York Times calling for more teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre, when a White mob destroyed a wealthy Black community in Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing between 100 and 300 people, from May 31 and June 1, 1921. “The truth about Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black Americans, was systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears,” Hanks wrote, urging schools to teach the lessons of Tulsa as early as elementary school. Deggans believes Hanks didn’t go far enough.
As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim. One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found/ As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim. One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found. “I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.” Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.
Roger Waters told the press at a recent pro-Julian Assange event that Facebook approached him about using the 1979 Pink Floyd classic “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” in an upcoming advertisement for Instagram. “It arrived this morning, with an offer for a huge, huge amount of money,” Waters said. “And the answer is, ‘Fuck You. No fuckin’ way.’” “I only mention that because this is an insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything,” he continued. “I will not be a party to this bullshit, [Mark] Zuckerberg” … Waters ended his diatribe by bringing up FaceMash, the pre-Facebook website that Zuckerberg created at Harvard in 2003 to compare the looks of women on campus. The incident was dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network. “How did this little prick who started out as ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a four out of five, she’s ugly, we’ll give her a four out of five,’ how did we give him any power?” Waters asked. “And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”
A Texas library apologized this week for accidentally displaying a conservative book on transgender issues in its Pride Month showcase. June is Pride Month, and the library had posted images of bookshelves at its three locations celebrating LGBTQ-themed books to mark the occasion. Somehow, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” was chosen as part of a display meant to “celebrate the lives and history of our LGBTQ+ community.” “Hey @RyanTAnd you made it into the pride display,” Twitter user @lastforkickball tweeted Monday, tagging the author, conservative scholar Ryan T. Anderson, and adding a clapping hands emoji. “Guess @irvinglibrary staff doesn’t actually read books.” The library responded: “We noticed this error as well and removed it from our display days ago. Unfortunately this is an older picture and missed it when we posted it. We do apologize!” “Thank you! Differing perspectives do NOT belong in OUR library,” @lastforkickball replied.
Every sheriff in the state of Utah signed a letter saying they would try to safeguard the Second Amendment in the midst of proposed legislation and recent executive orders authorized by President Joe Biden. “Importantly, the Second Amendment of our divinely inspired Constitution clearly states … ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed,’” said the statement (pdf), signed by all 29 sheriffs in the state, and was released via Cache County Sheriff Chad Jensen’s office. “We hereby recognize a significant principle underlying the Second Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms is indispensable to the existence of a free people.”
And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow. I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.
Barkley: ‘A lot of our bosses are cowards’. NBA Hall of Famer and TNT sports analyst Charles Barkley blasted his “bosses” at TNT, which includes CNN president Jeff Zucker, over cancel culture, telling 106.7 The Fan’s “Grant and Danny” show that “you can’t even have fun nowadays” when covering sports. Barkley railed against “politically correct people” during the Monday radio appearance, blaming them for taking the fun out of his show, “Inside the NBA,” and vowed to leave TNT in a few years when he turns 60. “You can’t even have fun nowadays without these jackasses trying to get you canceled and things like that,” Barkley said. “Just having fun, talking about sports. I’m trying to hang on for another couple years until I’m 60, and then they can kiss my ass. I’m only working until 60. I’ve already told them that.” “We can’t even have fun anymore. We’ve had fun all these years, and now all of a sudden in the last year and a half, everybody’s trying to get everybody fired, and it really sucks,” he added.
Kevin Hart admits he’s made plenty of mistakes and knows he’s not the only one — which is why he says cancel culture is flawed. Speaking with The Sunday Times, the 41-year-old actor, who admitted to being “canceled, what, three or four times,” made a case about why he was “never bothered” by it. “When did we get to a point where life was supposed to be perfect? Where people were supposed to operate perfectly all the time? I don’t understand,” said Hart. “I don’t expect perfection from my kids. I don’t expect it from my wife, friends, employees. Because, last I checked, the only way you grow up is from [screwing] up. I don’t know a kid who hasn’t [messed] up or done some dumb [stuff].” The actor and standup comedian adds that cancel culture should only be invoked if someone does something “truly damaging. …When you just talk about… nonsense? When you’re talking, ‘Someone said! They need to be taken [down]!’ Shut the [heck] up! What are you talking about?” Hart says comedy has suffered because comedians are too afraid of being cancelled: “You’re thinking that things you say will come back and bite you on the [rear.]”
A majority of students perceive a climate that is generally open to sharing of controversial or unpopular ideas in the classroom. However, there are wide disparities in this perception among students with different political ideologies. In general, students with a more conservative political ideology are less likely to perceive a classroom climate that is open to diverse points of view in comparison to students with a more liberal political ideology. Moreover, although a majority of students perceive a climate of open inquiry,there exists large numbers of students who do not. A majority of students perceive a climate that is open to sharing of controversial or unpopular ideas in the classroom. However, many of those same students are in favor of reporting professors or fellow students who make comments they deem to be offensive.
I was a liberal once upon a time and supported the American Civil Liberties Union when it defended Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. A lot of liberals understood that even vile members of our society have First Amendment rights. And that if you deprive them of their rights, then no one is safe … Now I learn from a recent story in the New York Times that old values at the ACLU are in the progressives’ crosshairs, that there are forces at the organization which believe that left-wing values should trump free-speech rights … Not that long ago, this kind of thinking would be considered alien to the essential mission of the ACLU. But now, to progressives at the 101-year-old organization, free speech apparently is worth fighting for only when the cause is sufficiently woke.
Nebraska’s attorney general has filed an amicus brief on behalf of 14 states in support of religious freedom in the workplace in a case out of New York state. New York’s public accommodations laws are so restrictive, the lawsuit asserts, that they prohibit a Christian photographer from even explaining on her own website that her religious beliefs inform the ethos of her photography. The brief, in the case of Emilee Carpenter Photography v. James, filed June 4 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, supports Emilee Carpenter, a New York-based photographer who is a Christian and refuses to photograph same-sex wedding ceremonies. To understand why it might be necessary for 14 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia, along with Nebraska) to offer their support to Carpenter, it’s helpful to get a clear picture of New York’s punitive public accommodations laws. New York’s public accommodations laws ban sexual orientation discrimination, but the way the state applies the ban goes too far. Her attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom say those laws “require Emilee to create photographs and blogs celebrating same-sex marriage because she creates photographs and blogs celebrating opposite-sex marriage.”
The roots of my own unlikely cancellation go as far back as 1987, when Jesse Jackson marched Stanford students up Palm Drive to a rhythmic chant of “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go!” The next year, I joined the advisory council of its Graduate School of Business where I was soon invited to fill a one-year faculty vacancy … Then, last year, before a student-politician boldly posted that “White people need to be eradicated,” I was summoned to respond to an equally disturbing complaint over having “triggered” woke students. Because I didn’t think I’d done anything worthy of the summons and because I had received the distinguished teaching award from students, a “Silver Apple Award” from alumni and been appointed to a faculty chair, I wasn’t worried. Alas, I’d misjudged my peril … In a class I teach, students objected when guest CEOs claimed to have been “color blind.” When I volunteered that I, too, had resisted hiring based on skin color, gender or quotas, and had relied, instead, on character, competence and commitment, some students were offended … Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.
Why Hungary fans marched against the taking of the knee. The game is in Budapest. It is Hungary vs France. But it is more than just another Euro 2020 match. As I arrive at the fans’ zone, I see a bunch of guys holding a banner challenging the gesture of taking the knee. The banner has an image of someone taking the knee with a cross through it — a clear statement of rejection of this practice of abasement. I talk to Gergely and Sanyi, two of the guys milling around the banner. They tell me why they think it’s right to take a stand against the Anglo-American gesture of taking the knee. Sanyi tells me, ‘We are not like them, we are a proud people who refuse to bend ourselves to anyone’. Standing near us is Orsolya, who says the ritual of taking the knee has nothing to do with being against racism. ‘It is a new form of piety. It makes us sick.’ Almost everyone I talk to tells me that we Hungarians have decided to take a stand against all this crap. They are still angry that when they booed the Irish for taking the knee in a recent game, the Western press denounced them as racist. They feel that they are continually lectured by the Western media as if they are colonial subjects. And they are not having it anymore.
As the commander of a missile warning unit, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier felt responsible to report threats foreign and domestic before they harm the people of the country he loves and defends. He wrote a bestselling book and spoke out against anti-American, Marxist radicalization of military personnel he has witnessed in his role as commander of the 11th Space Warning Squadron of Space Force, at Colorado’s Buckley Space Force Base. In return for trying to expose what he considers a clear and present threat to national security running through all branches of the military, Lohmeier was relieved of duty on May 14 by Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting. “I didn’t know the intent of that meeting, but I had my suspicion,” Lohmeier explained during a recent visit with The Gazette’s editorial board. “He said ‘I have seen your podcast and you have been politically partisan while acting in an official capacity,’ which I to this day deny. The second reason he cited is that I was publicly critical of the policies of my chain of command.”
The question is only: How long will decent people stand by quietly and watch it happen? … There’s a pattern to such censorship campaigns. A fresh example presented itself this past week at Science-Based Medicine, which bills itself as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine.” On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so. Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer.
The presence of these posters, she said, contradicted what the school board said at a prior meeting: ‘no politics in school.’ A 9-year-old student took a school board to task over its apparent 180 on a policy barring teachers from displaying Black Lives Matter posters. The viral video, making the rounds online this week, shows the girl speaking before a Lakeville Area School Board meeting on June 8. The student, who only identified herself as “Novalee,” said she saw posters of Black Lives Matter and Amanda Gorman on her teacher’s wall at Lakeville Elementary School. The presence of these posters, she said, contradicted what the school board said at a prior meeting: “no politics in school.” The student said she informed her principal about the Black Lives Matter poster. She said she requested it be taken down but the principal refused. When she cited a school board policy prohibiting Black Lives Matter posters in the district’s schools, the principal allegedly told her that the school board members were the ones who made the posters. “When I was heard two weeks ago, you told us to report any BLM in our schools. Apparently, you know they’re in our schools because you made the signs,” the student said.
100% totally female weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was forced to bid farewell to her Olympic dreams yesterday after a tragic accident left her with a severely lacerated testicle. Hubbard would have been the first transgender woman to compete in the Olympics. The injury is not life-threatening, but doctors have advised Hubbard that she needs to refrain from heavy lifting for at least six to eight weeks as her injury heals. Obviously, that means Olympic weightlifting is off the table. Hubbard was something of a controversial figure at this year’s games given that she was born a biological male and competed as a male weightlifter until 2013. Many critics argued that this gave her an unfair advantage compared to female weightlifters, but Hubbard says that’s ridiculous.
The nation’s largest police union on Tuesday slammed politicians and the media for fueling anti-police sentiment across the country. As violent crime is surging, “some politicians and some in the media are gaslighting the public into thinking the public into thinking the police are the problem,” the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) tweeted. The post included homicide and shooting statistics for major U.S. cities. The most notable was Portland, which saw an unprecedented 533% increase in homicides and a 126% increase in shootings between 2020 and 2021.
“State legislatures across the country are passing a wave of anti-voter laws based on the same repeatedly disproven lies that led to an assault on our nation’s capital,” Psaki said. White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued full-throated support for federal voting legislation that would change voting laws in every state, using the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6 as justification for the Biden administration’s stance.
In a small, book-strewn apartment in Beijing’s outskirts lives one of the last Chinese academics who refuses to be silenced by the ruling Communist Party’s relentless crackdown on intellectuals. Wu Qiang, 50, once had an enviable career as political science lecturer at the elite Tsinghua University.But he was dismissed in 2015 after conducting fieldwork at the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong a year earlier … He remains an anomaly. Since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China’s vibrant intellectual circles gradually fell silent as Party critics were arrested, fired from their institutions or forced to flee abroad. “Ten years ago, perhaps every weekend in every corner there would be a large number of salons and meetings (in Beijing),” he said. “But now, this wonderful scene does not exist anymore… everyone always talks about one issue when we meet: who’s disappeared or been detained recently. Everyone is waiting to see who will be next.”
Local CBS weather reporter April Moss announced live on air on Sunday that she will be revealing “discrimination” at her station, making her the second TV journalist to criticize their network during a segment in the space of a week. Moss, 38, of CBS 62 in Detroit, interrupted her weather report live on air on Sunday to announce that she will be sitting down for an interview with the activist group Project Veritas. The weather reporter said that during the interview she will be discussing “the discrimination that CBS is enforcing on its employees.” After the announcement, Moss went back to her weather report.
The embattled school board of Virginia’s Loudoun County cut off public comment during a fiery meeting Tuesday as residents traded barbs over new transgender policy proposals Tuesday following weeks of protests from district parents opposed to some of the measures, which they have criticized as potential left-wing indoctrination and a violation of parental rights. The policies affect transgender student rights, privacy and restroom accommodations and would require Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. An official school board vote on the proposal is not expected until at least Aug. 10. But it has become a hot-button issue in the district, where 259 residents signed up to speak during the public comment session Tuesday and people lined up at the doors early to get seats in the packed auditorium …. Multiple parents asked the district to drop its appeal of a court order to reinstate teacher Tanner Cross, who was suspended after speaking out publicly against the proposal. They argued that fighting the judge is a waste of taxpayers’ money and doomed to fail.
The Biden administration just released a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. Sadly, instead of a smart, measured approach to the real dangers we face, it is a stunning admission that the administration will use the full powers of the state to attack its political enemies. Even worse, they openly admit grafting this onto the social engineering programs they are running to fundamentally transform this country into a woke paradise. wokeness is just re-branded socialism, and we on the Right know that it produces nothing but human misery, not paradise. Ever hopeful, the bright-eyed social justice warriors are fortunately blessed with an education that skipped all that. So, they march forward hacking and slashing at the founding principles of this country, and over the past several generations they have made significant progress … We must stop this attempt to turn the natural concern Americans have about terrorism into a political weapon. It is a ploy right out of totalitarian textbooks — brand the opposition as enemies of the state and then use all elements of the security apparatus to sideline and punish them. It is already in effect with the obscene overcharging and solitary confinement without bail of many of the Capitol rioters. Anyone who committed violent acts during this political rally gone bad should be punished, but the attempt to brand the entire event as an insurrection reveals the intent to outlaw political speech the Left dislikes. The vast majority of people were simply there to peaceably petition their government for redress of grievances by asking for an investigation into election irregularities.
House Republicans are demanding an apology after a Democrat yelled, “Racist,” at a colleague who was quizzing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona about critical race theory during a committee hearing Thursday. The accusation was hurled at Virginia Rep. Bob Good, a freshman Republican on the Education and Labor Committee, who was asking Cardona about a proposed department rule that referred to the 1619 Project and How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi. Then Good mentioned a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting that erupted over objections to critical race theory on Tuesday. As Good was speaking, a man could be heard shouting, “Racist.” The source of the comment appeared to come from New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Norcross, as his screen on the virtual committee meeting popped up during the remark. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A top University of Saskatchewan doctor has been fired after urging caution for teens getting COVID-19 vaccinations. Dr. Francis Christian, clinical professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan and a practising surgeon in Saskatoon, has been suspended from all teaching responsibilities effective immediately and fired from his position with the U of S as of September. On June 17, Christian released a statement to more than 200 doctors which contained his concerns regarding giving COVID-19 shots to children. He stated he had not come across “a single vaccinated child or parent who has been adequately informed” … Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed director of the Surgical Humanities Program and director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Christian is also the editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities … Christian is not alone in his concerns regarding underage COVID-19 vaccinations – the US Centre for Disease Control had an “emergency” meeting due to new data that the Pfizer vaccine multiplies the risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation) ten times over for 12-17 year olds. The German government advises against vaccinating those under the age of 18. The World Health Organization posted an update to its website on June 21, which advised “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment” for COVID-19. Within 24 hours, this guidance was withdrawn and replaced with new guidance stating, “COVID vaccines are safe for those over 18 years of age.” Christian said a large, growing “network of ethical, moral physicians and scientists” are urging caution regarding recommending vaccines for all children without informed consent. He said physicians must “always put their patients and humanity first.”
In the world of Olympic weightlifting, Laurel Hubbard has been a subject of controversy over the last couple of years. This is only growing, after reports from a fellow New Zealand weightlifter by the name of Tracey Lambrechs, claims that she was given an ultimatum after the transgender athletes addition to the team. Lambrechs was a weightlifter for the New Zealand Olympic team, scoring as high as 13th in the 2016 Games. She also apparently was the best 75kg lifter on her team at the time too. That was, at least until Laurel Hubbard entered her weight class, shattering all the records that she set. As Tracey explained in a recent interview, this led to her being forced to make a decision: either change weight classes, or retire from the sport altogether.
Army Gen. Mark Milley is getting kudos from the media for telling Congress that the military hasn’t become “woke,” even as its leadership urges soldiers and sailors to absorb woke ideas. The brass is trying to have it both ways on this issue, and that may ultimately undermine its core mission. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that he “personally” found it “offensive” that Republicans have accused general officers of being “woke.” A pair of Florida Congressmen had been criticizing Gen. Milley over seminars at West Point about “white rage.” The Chief of Naval Operations has recommended “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book that proposes “future discrimination,” ostensibly against white people, on his professional reading list for sailors. Gen. Milley has to be sensitive to the political realities in the White House, but he was clearly exercised about the criticism, saying it’s “important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.” He later added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” So, he asked, “what is wrong” with “having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” Of course sailors and Marines should read widely. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said similarly last week that he was merely exposing sailors to new ideas. But one can still wonder why “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book promoting sectarian racism, is on the reading list as “foundational” material on par with Jim Hornfischer’s classic naval histories. The Navy’s reading list for sailors also includes “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” and “Sexual Minorities and Politics.” Contrary to Gen. Milley and the Navy brass, it is not an assault on open-mindedness to ask whether an institution that requires esprit de corps and a common purpose can function if sailors are primed to view white shipmates as potential “oppressors.”
Whatever your view on sex and gender, freedom of speech is key. Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of democracy, which cannot flourish unless citizens can articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship or sanction. So it should concern anyone who claims to be a democrat that there is a growing evidence that women who have expressed a set of feminist beliefs that have come to be known as “gender-critical” have, in some cases, faced significant professional penalties as a result … [T]here have been clear and significant attempts to interfere with women’s freedom to express gender-critical beliefs. Maya Forstater lost paid work as a result of colleagues complaining about the gender-critical beliefs that she had expressed on social media. The academics Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix were disinvited from speaking at Essex University events because of their gender-critical beliefs and were subjected to violent threats from students, with serious wider professional consequences. Two weeks ago, the Royal Academy announced in a social media post to half-a-million followers that it would no longer be stocking the artist Jess de Wahls’s work because of her “transphobic” views, based on a gender-critical blogpost she wrote in 2019, These are just a few examples but there have been many more of women being harassed, punished, censured – and even physically assaulted – for their gender-critical views. Meanwhile, the chief executive of Stonewall has likened gender-critical beliefs to antisemitism. The chilling result is the frightening of women into silence because they fear the consequence of expressing their feminist beliefs.
There have been many accounts, my own included, of the philosophical roots of what is now widely known as “critical race theory,” itself part of the larger ascendancy of identity politics, in America and throughout the West. Some of those accounts have seen the “Cultural Marxists”—the line of thinkers including the Hungarian Marxist György Lukacs, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the mid-century Frankfurt School, and especially the member of that contingent known as the “father of the New Left,” Herbert Marcuse—as most directly instrumental in the rise of our metastasizing identitarian cancer … I have offered one partial response in a recent essay in which I advance the argument that our influential, wealthy white elites, the very people most likely to have inherited their wealth from ancestors who lived in a time when true white supremacy existed in America, rushed opportunistically to the forefront of today’s “progressive” wave in order to work off their guilt; they have taken the indictment that had been aimed squarely at them and diffused it to all people with white skin, most obviously their poor, backward “white trash” cousins, the ones that, ironically, were least likely to have received any actual benefit from America’s sordid racial history.
Even events such as “father-daughter dances” may be discontinued under new guidance developed for local school boards by state Department of Education. Virginia’s Department of Education is urging school districts throughout the state to work to end as many sex-segregated activities and programs as possible as part of a recently promulgated set of rules aimed at accommodating transgender students statewide … The new state rules also appear to require local schools to permit students on overnight school trips to choose lodging accommodations that align with their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
You see them every day: custom vanity license plates and the messages behind them. But now the state is telling a mid-state woman she’s got to change her custom plate because they’ve deemed it offensive, and she’s suing the state to keep it. The Tennessee Department of Revenue is the agency that checks vanity license plates for offensiveness when they are issued. The license plate in question reads: 69PWNDU .. The state is telling a mid-state woman she’s got to change her custom plate because they’ve deemed it offensive, and she’s suing the state to keep it. Gilliam’s attorney, Daniel Horwitz, says despite the connotation you may have thought of, Gilliam is “an astronomy buff and a gamer,” and the license plate is merely a reference to the year of the moon landing and a common gaming term.
Right-wing authoritarianism is a well-studied personality construct characterized by adherence to conventional values, submission to authority, and aggression towards those who deviate from social norms. New research provides evidence that a similar construct could help to explain authoritarian attitudes and behaviors among those on the left side of the political spectrum. The study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that left-wing authoritarianism not only exists, it is also a strong predictor of participation in political violence. “Authoritarianism has really only been studied in one group of people: conservatives,” said study author Thomas H. Costello, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Emory University … “The reasons for this are a little circular — namely, lots of scholars have theorized and argued that only conservatives can be authoritarian. But if this isn’t the case, and authoritarian individuals also exist on the left — as I think we show in the study — then the lack of research concerning left-wing authoritarianism becomes a big deal” … The findings are in line with a previous study that attempted to measure left-wing authoritarianism. That study found that authoritarians on both sides of the political divide tended to score higher on measures of dogmatism and prejudice against political rivals. But the new research points to several important differences between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians. For instance, left-wing authoritarians consistently scored higher than their right-wing counterparts on measures of neuroticism, belief in science, and willingness to ban opposing views.
We all can remember enjoying books when we were 11, 12, or 13 years old. In many ways, the books we read shaped our interests and character. They educated and uplifted us. We read about American history, sports, science, art and music, and devoured all sorts of fiction and biographies. Books were a window to the world. But in recent years, so-called “educators” have been purposefully polluting school libraries with “children’s” books to please their own perverse agendas. To call these books psychologically harmful is a huge understatement. In fact, these adults have no interest in how this material harms the minds of children. (It seems clear that many of them are purposely corrupting youth – essentially grooming them to accept these sexual practices.) And parents rarely are aware of this. But at the Baird Middle School in Ludlow, MA, things began to erupt as the 2019 school year began. The librarian and the head of the English department brought books into classrooms with instructions to teachers that the children should be given time to read them there.
As cancel culture sweeps across college campuses, faculty members in otherwise good standing are finding themselves as sudden outcasts, wrecked by long-established teaching practices or for having used a “foul” word in good faith. “I can’t say whether this is the most chilling environment we’ve ever seen as I’ve only been in the higher ed space for 10 years or so, but I can say that our case submission numbers are through the roof in the last year,” said Daniel Burnett of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit that advocates for free speech on college campuses. While Mr. Burnett said FIRE can’t pinpoint a single cause for the jump, it began in May 2020, the same month George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody and ignited waves of protest. “Our caseload jumped significantly since last summer, from 60 cases in May 2020 to 282 to the following month,” he said. “Since then, every month except one has had caseloads in the triple digits — something that happened only nine times since 2007. In 2021, a third of our case submissions have been from faculty.” Jay Bergman is a tenured history professor at Central Connecticut State University who found The New York Times’ “1619 Project” lacking in historical accuracy. He was not alone: The project’s chief essay won a Pulitzer Prize but drew criticism from historians for multiple errors in its attempt to make slavery the centerpiece of American history … In his letter, Mr. Bergman urged the educators not to take his word for it, given his expertise is in Russian history. Instead, he quoted the rebuttals to the project by liberal Ivy League professors such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson, themselves Pulitzer Prize winners, and quoted “1619 Project” founder Nikole Hannah-Jones. He called the Times’ work “false, mostly false, or misleading,” and labeled Ms. Hannah-Jones, currently under consideration for a tenured faculty post at the University of North Carolina’s journalism school, “an anti-white bigot.”
Time magazine has taken more than $700,000 from China Daily for sponsored content. Time magazine failed to disclose Chinese government funding for content published in its most recent print edition. The magazine’s June 21-28 double issue included an insert from China Daily, a media outlet controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Disclosures on the insert label it as an advertisement from China Daily in Beijing and note that additional “information is on file with the DOJ, Washington DC.” Chinese government funding for China Daily is not mentioned. China Daily registers with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law aimed at tracking foreign government influence. Advocacy groups have criticized news outlets for partnering with China Daily out of concerns that the organization is spreading propaganda in the West. Some companies, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have ended content-sharing deals with China Daily because it is controlled by the Chinese government. The outlet has paid millions of dollars to publish content in Western magazines’ and newspapers’ print and online editions.
[Alexis] Conneau has helped spearhead a category of AI known as natural-language processing that has redefined how we communicate on the Web. He has led research into AI that Facebook and others used to refine their automatic blocking systems for bullying, bigotry and hate speech, tackling the coarsening influence of the Web faster and more rigorously than any human moderator ever could … “The stuff we’ve been doing on hate speech and bullying classification: There is no other way than an automatic way to solve these problems,” he said. “There is no other way.” But in his critics’ world, what they would call reality, his work will become just another tool for deep-pocketed companies to misuse: a biased and invasive force empowering more targeted advertising, more automated surveillance and more mass deception on a global scale.
judge ordered Minneapolis to hire more police officers Thursday after residents banned together and sued the city in August 2020. Hennepin County Judge Jamie Anderson mandated local leaders employ 730 sworn officers by June 30, 2022, after it was found that the projected number of police officers for June 1, 2022, 669, was in violation of the city’s charter, which stipulates the area must have 0.0017 licensed peace officers per resident. Mayor Jacob Frey and the city council were ordered to “take any and all necessary action to ensure that they fund a police force.” In August 2020, residents Cathy Spann, Sondra Samuels, Don Samuels, Audua Pugh, Jonathan Lundberg, Aimee Lundberg, Georgianna Yantos, and Juliee Oden sued city authorities over rising crime following the death of George Floyd.
An eyebrow-raising new Facebook feature warns users when they might have been exposed to extremist content or if they know someone who is becoming an extremist — prompting concerns it may target conservative voices and stifle free speech. Screenshots of the anti-extremism alerts circulated Thursday on social media. One of the prompts asks users, “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” “We care about preventing extremism on Facebook,” the prompt goes on. “Others in your situation have received confidential support.” A second alert read, “You may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently.” “Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment. You can take action now to protect yourself and others,” it continues. Both of the alerts also redirect users to a support page.
A bombshell report from the New York Times on Sunday revealed there is allegedly heavy internal strife at ESPN stemming comments about diversity that NBA sideline reporter and “The Jump” host Rachel Nichols made about her colleague Maria Taylor, NBA and NFL reporter and the host of “NBA Countdown.” According to the New York Times, Nichols made these comments in July 2020 after ESPN told her that Taylor, who is Black, would be hosting coverage of the NBA Finals instead of her. Nichols sought advice from LeBron James’ longtime advisor Adam Mendelsohn and James’ agent Rich Paul on a call that was reportedly accidentally recorded because Nichols hadn’t turned her video camera off. During the call, Nichols can be heard saying that she feels like Taylor is only being promoted over her due to ESPN’s long and terrible record on diversity … According to the New York Times, the response from employees who work on NBA content was anger and frustration at Nichols’ attitude: “Within ESPN, particularly among the N.B.A. group that works with both Taylor and Nichols, many employees were outraged upon watching the video. They were especially upset by what they perceived as Nichols’s expression of a common criticism used by white workers in many workplaces to disparage nonwhite colleagues — that Taylor was offered the hosting job only because of her race, not because she was the best person for the job.”
Wai Wah and George pointed out that Porter failed to congratulate the students who had studied for years and passed the exam. They also noted that Porter had neglected to pay respect to the other 19,266 students who similarly sacrificed but did not pass the test. The only thing that mattered to Porter was “our students,” a label that included only Blacks and Hispanics. … Not one of these bureaucrats from de Blasio and Potter to the previous education chancellor, Richard Carranza, asked the obvious question: why had “too many” Asians passed the test? Asking such a question would have forced de Blasio to examine what influences and behaviors made certain students successful. He would have quickly discovered that there was nothing “Asian” about their successes — after all, far more Asians failed the test than those who passed. He would have also discovered that it was their steadfast belief in the American Dream that drove them to take chances on their talents, a path followed by countless successful Americans.
PBS has sparked tense backlash with its decision to have Vanessa Williams perform the “Black national anthem” during its July 4 coverage – with critics blasting the move as divisive and un-American. Williams’ performance on the station’s annual Capitol Fourth program Sunday evening is intended to celebrate the recognition of Juneteenth’s establishment as a federal holiday. “It’s in celebration of the wonderful opportunity that we now have to celebrate Juneteenth. So we are reflective of the times,” the actress and singer, who was the first Black woman to win the Miss America Pageant, told the Associated Press. “We are reflective of the times and I’m happy to be part of a tremendous show that the producers are aware and willing to make the changes that have happened within the past year and a half.” Her rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” will not replace the U.S. national anthem, which will be sung by Grammy-award winner Renée Fleming, but it has still bitterly divided people on social media. Lavern Spicer, a Republican candidate in Florida’s 24th District, who is Black, said the song could divide the country on a day people should be standing together. “Vanessa honey, a BLACK national anthem is something a Black African Country would have, not a country like America that exists for everyone,” Spicer tweeted. Author Tim Young echoed Spicer’s concerns, tweeting: “Nothing will unite us more as a nation than separate but equal national anthems…”
The Statue of Liberty is a ‘meaningless symbol of hypocrisy’ because of America’s history of racism, sexism and anti-immigrant sentiment, according to the Washington Post’s art and architecture critic. Philip Kennicott, a Pulitzer Prize winner, argued in an essay Saturday that the monument – which has stood for a century as one of the most iconic examples of American freedom – represented ‘unfulfilled promises’. He added that the statue was irrelevant to non-white Americans, using as evidence the absence of representations of the statue when he visited a Chicano art exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.
The New York Times sparked fireworks with an Independence Day report on the political implications of displaying the American flag — just weeks after being forced to defend an editorial writer who said she was “really disturbed” to see Old Glory flown by supporters of former President Donald Trump. The Times article — with the online headline “A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite” — suggests that Trump supporters have embraced the flag “so fervently” that liberals have “all but ceded the national emblem to the right.” “Today, flying the American flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue, albeit an imperfect one, to a person’s political affiliation in a deeply divided nation,” the Times tweeted on Saturday, with a link to their piece, “A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite.”
Daniela Galarza, a staff writer for the Post’s food section, began her piece by knocking a 1993 restaurant review printed by the Post itself that referred to Afghan food served at Bethesda’s Sunrise Kebab as “exotic,” insisting that the use of the word “says more about how they saw the world than about the cuisine itself.” Galarza then complained about readers who reacted to her ramen recipe she shared in her newsletter, with one calling it from an “exotic foreign cuisine” while another expressed that the “exotic ingredients” required in her recipe are hard to come by in typical grocery stores, asking if she could “please try to pick some recipes featuring ingredients that are readily available
Concerned parents and media critics swatted the New York Times on Thursday after the newspaper heralded Justine Ang Fonte, a New York teacher who recently became infamous for her sexual education curriculum for children and young adults, as a “sex-positive educator,” and called her lessons “pornography literacy.” For seven years, Fonte was the director of health and wellness at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In May, she was invited to teach two Zoom lessons on “pornography literacy and consent” to juniors and seniors at the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side. Those lessons reportedly included some “masturbation” images, outraging parents and eventually leading to her resignation. But the Times had a different viewpoint on the controversy and appeared to provide Fonte some backup. “Pornography literacy classes are supposed to teach students how to critically assess what they see on the screen,” the Times tweeted, with a link to its report from Style reporter Valeriya Safronova. “But when a sex-positive educator taught her curriculum at two elite New York City schools recently, some parents were outraged” … Critics condemned the New York Times for pushing what they believed to be a premature – and dangerous – message to children. “Porn is not ‘sex-positive,’” said pro-life activist Lila Rose. “That’s like saying rat poison is a vitamin. Porn is dehumanizing to everyone involved & damaging to healthy sexuality. Also—instructing 5 year olds about masturbation is sexual abuse & any adult involved should be criminally charged.” Rose was one of many to argue that Fonte or the Times should face consequences for this type of messaging.
[T]here’s a man in Omaha who has taken issue with the slogan. The banner has been flying for several years. The signs are everywhere, all making the same statement: Black Lives Matter. Charles Logan’s sign doesn’t make a statement; it asks a question. “If all Black lives matter, then why do Blacks keep killing Blacks?” Logan [who is Black] said … “The only time they talk about ‘Black lives matter’ is when it involves a white person and a Black person with an incident,” he said. “Then, these Blacks killing these Blacks every day, and nobody wants to come out and say nothing about that.” As he stands on the corner of 24th and Lake streets, Logan gets some honks of support from passing vehicles. He might be saying out loud what many are thinking … “I had a Black lady talk to me, and she called me all kinds of n- words,” he said. “Then she said, ‘You shouldn’t have that sign.’”
Donald Trump’s lawsuit against major social media companies pits freedom of speech squarely against the First Amendment. There can be no doubt that these social media giants are denying the former president his freedom of speech, while also denying his viewers and listeners the opportunity to hear and read what he has to say. But these media companies are claiming that the First Amendment protects their right to deny free speech to those with whom they disagree. Specifically, they assert a First Amendment right to censor Trump and others. The danger of this “new censorship” — not by government but by private companies that effectively control the marketplace of ideas — is precisely that it may well be protected by the very amendment designed to keep the marketplace of ideas open to diverse views. Hence the paradox — and the uphill battle that Trump may face in persuading the courts that his non-constitutional free speech right to communicate with his millions of followers should trump the constitutional right of social media companies to censor.
The American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are both organizations with stated commitments to academic freedom and free speech. But the AAUP chapter at the University of Oklahoma says FIRE erred in its description of a program at Oklahoma where faculty members trained other faculty members on how to make minority students feel comfortable and excel in class. FIRE says the program’s speakers showed insensitivity to academic freedom and free speech … “Think Black Lives Matter shouldn’t engage in property destruction? We’ll have to ‘re-adjust’ your thinking,” says a description of the program on FIRE’s website. “If you’re a student at the University of Oklahoma — congratulations! Your instructor may already have done all of the thinking for you. But beware: Deviating too far from an instructor’s personal opinions can cost you. A recording of an ‘Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies’ workshop acquired by FIRE raises alarm bells about the state of free expression and freedom of conscience at Oklahoma’s flagship university.”
Five California police officers filed a lawsuit against a city in Silicon Valley over a Black Lives Matter mural containing “discriminatory” anti-police imagery that was put on display across from City Hall. “Law enforcement officers, including Plaintiffs, were forced to physically pass and confront the Mural and its offensive, discriminatory, and harassing iconography every time they entered the Palo Alto Police Department,” the lawsuit filed against Palo Alto said. The lawsuit cites images such as the logo for the American black nationalist organization the New Black Panthers and an image of convicted police killer Assata Shakur … The officers in the suit had lodged complaints to officials that the 245-foot mural violated the state Fair Employment and Housing Act, but the city “ratified the conduct and insisted that it remain and persist,” the lawsuit said. The mural also sparked a petition from the National Police Association for its removal last July, which said it was “reprehensible” to celebrate a convicted police killer.
The president of the Utah NAACP chapter became the latest to denounce the controversial stance taken by Black Lives Matter Utah that the American flag is a “symbol of hatred” and anyone who flies it is a racist. “The NAACP does not agree with that statement and rejects the idea that flying the American flag is a racist message,” Jeanetta Williams, president of the NAACP Utah State Conference, said in a prepared statement released late Saturday. “The flag stands for all the people who have lived and served to bring about the best of the American experience, that all people are created equal. Real American patriots have stood for equality and justice for all” … Black Lives Matter Utah sparked national controversy on the Fourth of July when Scott posted the comments about the American flag. “When we Black Americans see this flag we know the person flying it is not safe to be around, ” the Facebook post says, “When we see this flag we know that the person flying it lives in a different America than we do.”
It’s no secret that the movies—like the rest of pop culture—have been operating in an ever-narrower field when it comes to what can be portrayed on-screen, and by whom. Even to identify the growing list of prohibitions would invite attack … Suffice it to say that Sean Penn had a point when he suggested on a recent Conan O’Brien podcast that today, as a straight person, he probably couldn’t be cast as the gay activist Harvey Milk, a role for which he won an Oscar in 2009. “You wonder at some point if only Danish princes can play Hamlet,” he said. On another front, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized for his lack of racial sensitivity in In The Heights. Rita Moreno then apologized for defending Miranda. Meanwhile, John Cena scrambled to salvage F9 by apologizing for an offense to China. In truth, Hollywood might as well be operating under the Hays Code, which, in a version adopted on June 29, 1927, outlawed the portrayal, “irrespective of the manner in which they are treated,” of, among other things, any “willful offense to any nation, race or creed.” Obviously, this can’t go on—not if a supposedly creative business that has long taken pride in its rule-breakers (Warren Beatty, Quentin Tarantino), anti-heroes (Super Fly, Thelma & Louise), and incorrigible irreverence (from Charlie Chaplin, through Monty Python, to The Hangover and beyond), is ever going to breathe again … The uncodified but very real strictures on film—as with those curbing speech on campus, in social media, at comedy shows—are piling up faster than offenders can Tweet apologies. Yet the industry’s key players and institutions have been slow to campaign for free expression …
Thousands of Cubans took to the streets across the country on Sunday in an unusual protest in which civilians shouted slogans against the Communist government, such as “We want freedom” and “We are no longer afraid.” The demonstrations came at a time when Cuba faces the worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, an increase in repression against political opponents and a strained health system during a critical stage of the pandemic … Cubans in several provinces contacted by Noticias Telemundo confirmed that the government, which controls the only internet provider company on the island, has caused service outages to prevent live broadcasts. “They do not want the world to see what is happening in Cuba,” said a resident from Havana who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from the regime. President Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on national television to call on the Army to confront the protesters: “The order to fight has been given,” he said. In Cuba, videos broadcast on social networks, which could be verified by Noticias Telemundo, show special agents known in Cuba as Black Berets, being deployed in some localities and violently detaining civilians who protested and sang peacefully. Díaz-Canel also called “all the revolutionaries in the country, all the communists, to take to the streets and go to the places where these provocations are going to take place.”
A New Jersey trial was stopped and a juror was fined thousands of dollars after he disobeyed a judge and Google-searched a patch on the uniform of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, believing it to be a symbol for white supremacy. The case of U.S. v. Kevin Ruiz-Quezada is a perfect example of how deep the leftist rot of identity politics has affected every aspect of modern life. Even ICE uniforms are being mistaken for or interpreted as symbols of a non-existent system of colonial supremacy and prejudice, according to reports … The Courier-Post reported a man named Stephen Meile was deliberating last month with other jurors when he and others became confused about a patch on an ICE uniform. Per the court, Meile had been told not to use books, the internet or other means to do his own research. He allegedly ignored that order and went to Google for answers, only to be led to believe that the uniform patch was a logo for white supremacy, the U.K. Daily Mail reported. Meile then shared his findings with other jurors. The Department of Justice said in a media release that Meile had been fined $11,227, as his actions caused U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler to find him in contempt of court and to declare a mistrial.
The American Booksellers Association is facing withering criticism from booksellers after walking back its promotion of an anti-trans title to member bookstores. Among the promotional items included in the ABA July “white box” mailing sent to 750 bookstores, the organization included a copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as a sell sheet … Within hours, the ABA issued an apology statement. “An anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members,” the ABA wrote. “This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s ends policies, values, and everything we believe and support. It is inexcusable.” The organization apologized to trans booksellers and noted that further action will be taken within the next three weeks. But booksellers said the statement fell short, calling out the organization’s use of the passive voice in the opening sentence. They also demanded greater transparency about how the decision to include the book was initially made, and called for demonstrable steps to restore trust with trans book workers and authors. Some called on the ABA to offer promotions for trans authors’ books at no cost … Among booksellers, however, there was little disagreement about the content of the book. “As longtime @ABAbook members with beloved staff across the gender spectrum, we’re extremely disappointed and angered to see the ABA promoting dangerous, widely discredited anti-trans propaganda, and we’re calling for accountability,” the Harvard Book Store wrote on Twitter … In an email late Wednesday, ABA CEO Allison Hill issued an additional statement to booksellers. She apologized, not only for the promotion of Shrier’s book, but also for a racist incident last week in which the organization featured Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon on its Indie Next bestseller list, but included an incorrect cover image. Instead of using the actual cover, the ABA used a book cover by an author who Hill described as “a different Black author, a right-wing extremist.”
Correlations of yearly frequency counts for specific prejudice themes across the 47 news media outlets in the 2000-2019 time range suggest that left-leaning and centrist news media outlets tend to be synchronized in the yearly usage of words that denote racism. In contrast, moderate left-leaning, centrist, and right-leaning outlets tend to be highly correlated in the usage of terms that denote anti-Semitism. Centrist and right-leaning outlets also seem to be correlated in their usage of terms that denote homophobia, see Figure 9 … Our results document a marked increase in the prevalence of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse within the 2010-2019 time frame. The trend precedes the emergence of Donald Trump in the political landscape for most of the terms analyzed but appears to accelerate after 2015. The abrupt and dramatic changes in word frequencies suggest the existence of powerful underlying social dynamics at play.
The Pentagon is reportedly working with an extremism analysis company that considers the web search “the truth about Black Lives Matter” and others to be signs of interest in or engagement with White supremacism. According to Defense One, the contractor Moonshot CVE, which has ties to the Obama Foundation, is working on data that would identify which military bases and branches have the most troops searching for domestic extremist content. While that particular project’s contours are unclear, the company previously released a June report, in conjunction with the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, on purported “White supremacy trends in the United States.” In it, the U.K.-based company said it “monitored a list of almost 1,600 indicators of interest in or engagement with White supremacism, focused specifically on anti-Black and anti-Semitic narratives being used by extremist groups.” As examples, it listed the search phrases “George Floyd deserved to die,” “Jews will not replace us” and “the truth about black lives matter.” For “the truth about black lives matter,” the group said: “This search suggests that the BLM movement has nefarious motives, and is a disinformation narrative perpetuated by White supremacist groups to weaponize anti-BLM sentiment.” It adds: “While the search phrase appears innocuous, several books include it in their title and allege that the BLM movement is ‘joined with Antifa burning and looting.’ These sources echo White supremacist disinformation narratives alleging that BLM protesters are trying to ‘overthrow the republic’ and ‘harm American citizens in a Marxist coup,’ as a means of delegitimizing it. Multiple videos on YouTube also promote these narratives – in particular the criminalization of BLM – using the identical phrase.”
Dear Boss, Compelling any employee to take any current Covid-19 vaccine violates federal and state law, and subjects the employer to substantial liability risk, including liability for any injury the employee may suffer from the vaccine. Many employers have reconsidered issuing such a mandate after more fruitful review with legal counsel, insurance providers, and public opinion advisors of the desires of employees and the consuming public. Even the Kaiser Foundation warned of the legal risk in this respect. (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/key-questions-about-covid-19-vaccine-mandates/) Three key concerns: first, while the vaccine remains unapproved by the FDA and authorized only for emergency use, federal law forbids mandating it, in accordance with the Nuremberg Code of 1947; second, the Americans with Disabilities Act proscribes, punishes and penalizes employers who invasively inquire into their employees’ medical status and then treat those employees differently based on their medical status, as the many AIDS related cases of decades ago fully attest; and third, international law, Constitutional law, specific statutes and the common law of torts all forbid conditioning access to employment upon coerced, invasive medical examinations and treatment, unless the employer can fully provide objective, scientifically validated evidence of the threat from the employee and how no practicable alternative could possible suffice to mitigate such supposed public health threat and still perform the necessary essentials of employment.
Sen. Ron Johnson and several of his GOP colleagues are demanding answers from President Joe Biden regarding the White House’s admission that the administration is collaborating with social media companies to “flag” Americans’ posts for disinformation. “Big Tech has now become Big Brother,” Johnson, R-Wis., told FOX Business exclusively. “It’s the Big Brother arm of big government and it should concern and frighten every American.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing earlier this month that Biden administration officials are coordinating with Big Tech firms and that the surgeon general’s office had upped its research and tracking of disinformation. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” Psaki said at the time. The admission drew criticism from First Amendment advocates.
This is called a purge,” Maher said of the climate in the U.S. and increasingly elsewhere. “It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before people who say cancel culture is overblown have to admit that it is, in fact, an insanity that is swallowing up the world.” As to charges that his stance means he has moved farther to the political right (a place on the spectrum given to reflexively denouncing cancel culture), Maher said, “My politics have not changed, but I am reacting to politics that have.” The news coming out of the Olympics, he continued, “yet another example of how the woke invert the very thing that used to make liberals liberals. ‘Snitches and bitches’: That’s not being liberal.”
Police across the Land of Lincoln are speaking out against Facebook after they say the social media giant blocked them from creating an advertisement that honored one officer’s actions. A Facebook post honoring the actions of a central Illinois police officer was recently denied as an advertisement on the popular social media site. Now the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) is speaking out about what they say is Facebook blocking one of its messages from being heard … Wojcicki also questions why Facebook considered the post inherently political or about sensitive social issues in the first place … In the meantime, Wojcicki says he’s started an online petition to try and get Facebook to reverse its decision. They’ve received more than 2,000 signatures as of Monday, Aug. 2. Facebook is a private company and therefore does have the right to deny any advertisement for any reason. But for [Illinois police union head Ed] Wojcicki, he says it’s all about honoring an officer for his act of bravery. “All we’re trying to do is to honor a brave officer, a heroic officer, and they say that this violates their advertising policy because it’s somehow political. It’s not even remotely political,” Wojcicki said.
[Library Branch Supervisior Alix] Freck’s posts [Facebookk posts about Black Lives Matter] were reported to her supervisors. The manager said she was told she would not be punished, but was later demoted two positions to librarian and transferred to a different location. She soon resigned and then filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Gainesville on Aug. 27, accusing the district and four administrators of violating her First Amendment rights. The lawsuit alleges that a public employer cannot punish a worker for free speech made as a private citizen. “It’s very upsetting to me that especially librarians that I know at my workplace are promoting censorship, which is the exact opposite of what librarians should be doing,” she told WUFT News.
North Korean defector Yeonmi Park says she failed to call for help while being robbed in Chicago last year as bystanders barred her because it would be “racist.” Park was out with her baby and a nanny when three Black women allegedly robbed her near Saks Fifth Avenue on Michigan Avenue. The suspects tried to flee but she managed to grab the woman who took her wallet. Park held onto the woman and attempted to call the police. At this point, the woman allegedly started accusing her of racism and punching her in the chest. “You’re a racist! The color of my skin doesn’t make me a thief,” she recalled the woman as saying. The situation became more difficult for Park as bystanders — whom she identified as white people — gathered around the scene and allegedly prevented her from phoning law enforcement. She said they also let the suspects go. “These people on the streets, these bystanders, who were white people, were calling me racist,” Park alleged. “They were telling me that the color of their [the robbers’] skin doesn’t make them thieves.” Park said she also saw one white mother point at her to illustrate racism in the U.S. to her teenage children. “Look at that racist, that’s the problem we have,” she recalled the mother as saying.
On the flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, there was an older, well-dressed man in the aisle seat and he leaned toward me to ask what my business in Chicago was. I told him that I do documentaries and wanted to know what Pastor Corey Brooks on the South Side thought of the critical race theory controversies sweeping the nation. The man hesitated before revealing that even his tech company had not been spared. Then he said, “As a White man…” and let his voice trail off as if no further explanation was needed. I pushed back. Why say White? I expected him to somewhat acknowledge the absurdity of his words, but he eyed me as if I was the absurd one. “If I speak up, I could lose my job.” We did not say another word to each other.
The state of Oregon will no longer require its students to demonstrate proficiency in math, reading and writing in order to earn a high school diploma in a bid to bolster minority students. Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill late last month suspending the state’s ‘essential skills’ requirement for graduation for the next three years while its Department of Education seeks alternative graduation requirements … It came as the US education system has come to a crossroads over how it approaches issues of race and equity, with fierce conflict over the teaching of critical race theory – a divisive academic movement that has driven a wedge in the nation’s education system in recent months … [The Oregonian] urged Brown to veto it in an editorial. ‘Oregon schools were among the last in the country to reopen to in-person instruction during the pandemic,’ the paper wrote. ‘Our legislators should be focused on how to help students regain the ground they’ve lost after a year and a half of distance learning and hybrid instruction – not on lowering our standards.’
American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal … The words “diversity, equity and inclusion” sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, “equity” does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups.
For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life … millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities. Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are. Most Americans still integrate, assimilate, and intermarry. But the current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear a self-critical and always improving nation, as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole. George Orwell would say of these cultural Marxists that they grab power in the present to reinvent the past in order to control our futures …. Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent. What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.
The Canadian Federation of Library Associations – Fédération canadienne des associations de bibliothèques (CFLA-FCAB) supports the decision of Canadian libraries to uphold Intellectual Freedom, in acknowledgement of libraries’ core responsibility to support, defend, and promote the universal principles of intellectual freedom, while safeguarding and fostering free expression. The decision to retain Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters in the face of requests to remove it demonstrates the commitment to a diversity of thought in the development of library collections. CFLA-FCAB supports and promotes the universal principles of intellectual freedom as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which include the interlocking freedoms to hold opinions and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers CFLA-FCAB “affirms that all persons in Canada have a fundamental right, subject only to the Constitution and the law, to have access to the full range of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, and to express their thoughts publicly. Only the courts may abridge free expression rights in Canada.” Further, library “employees, volunteers and employers as well as library governing entities have a core responsibility to uphold the principles of intellectual freedom in the performance of their respective library roles.”
The Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) positions itself as the “united voice of Canada’s Libraries.” However, we are not united[1] behind the three position statements put out by CFLA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee since 2017[2],[3],[4], all of which defend works or events that are critical of trans peoples’ gender expression. Using Intellectual Freedom only to defend transmisia does not reflect the views of many in the CFLA’s affiliated membership, does not represent the myriad of challenges to intellectual freedom posed to library workers in all sectors of libraries, and does a disservice to the need for open dialogue about the concept and practice of intellectual freedom in libraries. The IF Committee statements, instead, cause active harm to the trans library workers in our field, as well as our communities and patrons. To be clear, we believe that intellectual freedom is a complex issue worthy of discussion; the humanity and fundamental right to gender expression for trans people is not. CFLA needs to reckon with what happens when abstract principles are prioritized over real people’s lives.