Censorship

Wednesday

Cockburn

Poet laureate can’t define a ‘ban’

Amanda Gorman, the young female poet who read at Joe Biden's inauguration lamented on Tuesday night that her poem had been banned by a Florida school library. “Just found out my inaugural poem 'The Hill We Climb' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County because it causes "confusion and indoctrination,” America's first National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted.  The poem, however, was never banned. Instead, according to the Miami-Dade school district, “The Hill We Climb” was moved from the elementary section of the library to the middle-school section.  “It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle-school students and, it was shelved in the middle-school section of the media center.

amanda gorman

Sunday

Ben Domenech

They wanted to break the internet. It broke them

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

media

Friday

Alexander Larman

Do James Bond’s would-be censors have a point?

James Bond may have battled the nefarious forces of SMERSH, SPECTRE and other international terror organizations, but surely he has never faced quite so implacable a foe as the sensitivity reader. Following in the footsteps of Roald Dahl, the wholesale revision of whose books led to international outrage, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which have been re-released to mark the seventieth anniversary of the first publication of Casino Royale, have undergone their own exercise in alteration. But is it an egregious travesty à la Dahl, or — whisper it — might someone have had an idea arising from nobler motives?

bond

Friday

Ben Domenech

How taxpayer money was used to silence speech

Here's a simple question: how much American taxpayer money is being spent to silence, censor, and blacklist opinions? Legacy media reporting on the House Oversight Committee's initial look into the actions of Twitter during the 2020 elections focused mostly on questions surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop. The committee's investigative reports, however, ought to hone in on the most disturbing aspect of this story: social media giants were routinely directed and coerced into censoring and silencing American citizens by entities funded by those same taxpayers.

tax dollars free speech censorship disinformation

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Congress’s Twitter hearings show Democrats are done with free speech

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, free speech was primarily defended by civil libertarians and the Democratic Party. This was in the 2000s, when a handful of civil libertarians on the right and many more on the left worried about how the Patriot Act would enhance the government's ability to monitor its own citizens. They also opposed the growing power of the intelligence community, which they thought could pressure companies into providing private information that the government could not legally grasp for itself. The past is a different country. Yesterday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee with three former Twitter executives illustrated as much. Democrats repeatedly made the case that the hearing was a distraction, unimportant, even conspiratorial.

Wednesday

Madeline Fry Schultz

Art history is now ‘Islamophobic’

At a private liberal arts college in Minnesota, art history is now Islamophobic. In October, an art history professor at Hamline University was teaching Islamic art, a segment that included two depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in fourteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings with significant historical value. The professor alerted her students beforehand, careful to ensure that observant Muslims who object to the depiction of their prophet would not have to see him on screen. It seems that the professor had done everything right: providing images of famous paintings for her students’ edification but allowing students to opt out of viewing them if doing so ran contrary to their religious beliefs. But who are we kidding? This is a liberal arts college in the twenty-first century.

Quaran

Saturday

Cockburn

Putin mentions the war

So much for "don’t mention the war!" Russian president Vladimir Putin has called the conflict in Ukraine a war for the first time on Thursday. Cockburn is quite flummoxed — this is the same Putin who has made an industry out of locking people up who refused to call the war a “special military operation”. On December 22, while addressing the situation in Ukraine, Putin said, “Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war.” The irony alone of this statement is too much to handle. The man who invaded his neighbor and disregarded the laws of war is now saying he does not want to “spin the flywheel of military conflict”?

nuclear tactical putin war

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is Elon Musk about to ax millions in severance for Twitter execs?

As if getting fired from your job isn’t distressing enough, it’s got to hurt a whole lot more when you miss out on $122 million in payouts. Reuters reported that Elon Musk recently fired Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. According to research firm Equilar, these folks were set to receive “golden parachute” payout packages worth up to $122 million in severance and unvested stock options. But according to the New York Times, “Mr. Musk… appears unlikely to pay the golden parachutes that the fired top executives of Twitter were set to receive. Under the merger agreement, those executives… had been set to receive compensation of $20 million to $60 million if they were fired. But Mr.

Monday

Rich Cromwell

Elon Musk should make Twitter weird again

Before the internet, the town square was a weirder place. True believers — from those concerned about fluoride to those dedicated to stopping gay frogs — had to put in the work. There were cardboard boxes and Sharpies to procure in order to make signage. A milk crate wasn't necessary, but it did elevate the speaker above his audience. It was not a desk gig. People had to get up and hit the corner from morning until some point in the evening, blasting out their gospel to whoever passed by and, perhaps, stopped to listen. Those early content creators had angles. Some sang or played guitar. Others simply testified. Regardless, they were the righteous, willing to sacrifice time and effort for their art. Then Twitter happened.

Sunday

Bridget Phetasy

It’s the parallel economy, stupid!

There’s a lot of rumbling about American polarization these days. Sometimes it takes the form of people advocating for a national divorce or dire warnings of a forthcoming civil war. A national divorce seems impractical and America is too fat for a civil war. Better evidence that the country is already fracturing is the talk of the “parallel economy.” We’ve come a long way from the 2016 moment of self-awareness about needing to get out of our echo chambers. By 2020 it seemed everyone wanted their own. Now we’re redecorating the walls of the echo chambers. Adding some throw pillows.

parallel

Saturday

Peter Van Buren

Elon Musk should kill Twitter for good

Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it offline. Delete it. Make it go away. What's the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It exists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the cancellation of people, for which Twitter has become uniquely known, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you'd think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or, more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Twitter gives Jordan Peterson the boot, Dave Rubin follows

Jordan Peterson went from being a psychologist advising troubled kids to an unlikely political figure as he fought against the Canadian government’s compelled speech law for pronouns. Cockburn watched with fascination as Peterson clashed repeatedly with the left-wing narrative, even going as far as to resign from his tenured position at the University of Toronto due to their rampant leftist ideology. On June 28, Twitter suspended him for this tweet (as recalled by his daughter): https://twitter.com/MikhailaFuller/status/1541946666567323649 Clearly referring to someone by their birth name is a sin for Twitter. Little did Cockburn know that Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report, was to be next on the chopping block. Rubin sent this tweet before being suspended: https://twitter.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

Matt Drudge was ahead of his time

There are two new movies in the works about internet provocateur Matt Drudge, and with the mic dropping on Roe v. Wade, today, they couldn’t come at a more appropriate time. Drudge has been dictating the national news conversation for decades, but he wasn’t always doing it out of the limelight. The tale of how a CBS Studios gift shop clerk came to inform the most powerful leader of the free world (Trump used to be a big fan) and the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh has been documented in articles, books, and a television series. Drudge went dumpster diving, found a discarded contract, and was the first to report that Jerry Seinfeld was negotiating for $1 million an episode for his show. Drudgereport.

Saturday

Peter Van Buren

Will the Supreme Court end social media censorship?

Conservative media seems to have missed this story, and the limited liberal press it got took it as a simple win. But the real showdown is coming this fall. Later this year, it is possible — not likely, but possible — that the Supreme Court will take away the right of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. This would have the effect of granting some level of First Amendment protection, now unavailable, to conservative users of those platforms. The potential for change hinges on a law struck down by the lower courts, Netchoice v. Paxton, which challenges Texas law HB 20. That law addresses social media companies with more than 50 million active users in the US, like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Pussy Riot’s daring escape from Russia

It is a story of ingenuity, cunning and farce that would have done credit to Mr. Toad, escaping his prison bondage by dressing as a washerwoman. Lucy Shtein, one of the members of the Russian protest art collective Pussy Riot, recently revealed how she managed to flee the country while dressed in the bright green attire of a food delivery company. Along with her constant familiar Mr. Rat — a pet rodent who, as is often the way of these things, has become a social media breakout star — Shtein managed to leave her flat in central Moscow, where she had been under house arrest for more than a year.

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Hollywood won’t say gay in China

Exactly when and where are our stunning and brave Hollywood stars prepared to take a stand for gay rights? Liberal actors and celebrities have a made a show of standing against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, signed earlier this month by Governor Ron DeSantis, a man progressives seems intent on making the next president. When activists and journalists realized they couldn’t stop the bill from becoming law, they deployed their new favorite tactic: demanding that corporations speak out against the bill (see also: how in response to Georgia’s new voting legislation, they insisted that Major League Baseball relocate the All-Star game).

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

Eric Adams and the new Democratic censors

Eric Adams had no idea what drill rap was until just last week when his son introduced him to it. Now he’s convinced it’s the reason for rising rates of lethal firearm crimes in New York City. As crime spirals to new highs in urban areas nationwide, Democratic mayors, who have controlled these cities for decades, are looking for any excuse that doesn’t implicate their policies or those of their predecessors. That’s why Mayor Adams has turned his attention to the presence of an aggressive form of hip-hop on YouTube. Adams threatened to pull social media companies into the principal’s office and “sit down with them and state that, ‘you have a civic and corporate responsibility.

eric adams censors

Monday

Chadwick Moore

Big Tech covers up Biden’s crack pipe giveaway

A throwaway line item in an otherwise innocuous spending package unveiled one way the Biden administration and the Democratic party sees "racial equity." The Washington Free Beacon revealed a week ago that the Department of Health and Human Services would be distributing free crack pipes to drug users to promote hygiene and advance racial equity. The cost was around $30 million and the program is similar to what left-wing fiefdoms like Seattle and San Francisco already do. The story had all the elements of tabloid gold — even better in clickability than the last Biden crack pipe story: Hunter’s laptop.

crack pipe

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

The hippies have become the cops

You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders. I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You'd imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan. It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform.

neil young

Monday

Patrick Hastings

One hundred years of Ulysses

A few years ago, the private school where I teach asked me to offer an evening class on James Joyce’s Ulysses to adults. The idea was to remind alumni, parents and other community members what it feels like to be in one of our enriching classrooms. For over a decade, my Ulysses senior elective had been a major feature of our course catalogue; now, a few adults were about to pop the hood on this infamous tank of a book. As course registrations began to trickle in, I recognized the surnames of current and former students. Then an administrator joined the course, and I had a flutter of nerves at the realization that one of my bosses was actually going to read Ulysses and encounter the disreputable content that lurks within. My cover was blown.

Ulysses