We may not realize the degree to which free speech is under attack

Free speech is under attack across the country. The censoring of conservatives on Google, Twitter and Facebook is one form, and another form of censorship occurs in the news media when many of the nation’s largest and most read newspapers, and most watched and listened to broadcast media, report only some of the relevant news.

This bias of selecting some news over other news is dishonest and dangerous. It creates a situation where millions of Americans are quietly forced, through their reading, listening and watching habits, to make a wide variety of often significant decisions with only some of the important information they may need.

Free speech is also under attack at many of America’s institutions of higher learning. Colleges and universities once were the places where the expression of a variety of ideas was highly regarded and encouraged.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently released the results of what it called “the largest free speech survey of college students ever performed,” consulting roughly 20,000 students at a variety of institutions. 

The 55 colleges involved were chosen “to represent a variety of colleges in the United States, including large public universities, small private colleges, religiously-affiliated colleges such as Brigham Young University, and Ivy League colleges.”

The results are not encouraging.

Sixty percent of students said they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond. This position was held by 73 percent of “strong Republicans” and 52 percent of “strong Democrats.”

Black students are most likely to report an instance where they censored themselves, with 63 percent taking this position. Here are three examples from survey participants on self-censoring:

* “I was in a class where the professor pretty much made you feel as if your participation grade was at risk if you disagreed with them.” — Black female at Georgetown University

 

* “Whenever it is obvious that some of my professors are on the left, I felt like I couldn’t express my political opinions due to my grades.” — Asian male at Clemson University

 

* The professors within my college tend to be conservative. I worry with certain professors that my opinion would cause them to unfairly grade my projects. — Hispanic female at the University of Arizona

The survey also found that just 15 percent of students — 11 percent of females and 19 percent of males — felt comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic.

The FIRE report notes that “a number of questions focused on a tension between feelings, or emotional reasoning, with logical inference and deduction.” And some faculty members explained that “a number of their students place a ‘supreme importance’ on their own feelings even when what they ‘feel’ is right is contradicted by empirical evidence.” Here are two students’ responses on this:

“Just in general. You have to be very careful of your words in order to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. Sometimes it is very hard to debate on topics because of this.” — Multiracial male at Northwestern University

“Nearly every day I feel like I cannot express my opinion without hurting someone’s feelings.” — White female at Georgetown University

Over the last couple of years there have been several instances of speakers invited to campuses to speak, but were shouted down and sometimes threatened. Many of those speakers were unable to complete their speaking engagement.

FIRE found that Ivy League school students were slightly more in favor of using violence to stop a campus speech. Twenty-one percent — one of every five — expressed some level of acceptance for violence in such situations.

And, on whether it is “always” or “sometimes” acceptable to shout down a speaker in extreme conversations, only 15 percent of extreme conservatives agreed, while more than 60 percent of extreme liberals agreed.

FIRE rated the universities on a numerical scale, and color-coded them for Speech Code, meaning “whether college policies restrict student speech that is protected by the First Amendment.” The codes are: Green = Best; Yellow = Intermediate; Red = Worst; Pink = Warning.

The five institutions with the highest level of free speech are: University of Chicago, Kansas State University, Texas A&M University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Arizona State University, all with Green codes.

The five institutions with the lowest level of free speech are: Syracuse University, Dartmouth College, Yellow codes; and Louisiana State University, University of Texas, and DePauw University, Red codes.

No West Virginia institutions were among the 55 that were ranked, but two Virginia institutions were included. The University of Virginia was ranked 6th on the list with a high level of free speech, and a Green code. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI) was ranked a respectable 8th with a mid-level Yellow code.

Censorship is a serious issue, one that is at odds with America’s First Amendment. Free speech is a cornerstone of this nation. 

There really is only one reason why someone or some group would exercise censorship: They are afraid their ideas will not be able to win when competing with different ideas, and therefore they will be unable to inflict their will on others. It’s about control.

If you lose, improve your game; don’t change the game to suit you

What do people do when they can’t win by being better, but cannot stand to lose? The answer often is to fudge a little, or a lot, rather than to gracefully accept defeat, and try to improve.

Pitchers threw illegal spitballs to win. Some quarterbacks prefer underinflated footballs. Election officials stuff ballot boxes, encourage unregistered people to vote, or vote often, or simply report false totals.

Sometimes, those who can’t win under existing rules want to change the rules to make it easier to win, but they often choose the easier route of relying on preferable, though improper, interpretation of the rules.

Democrats once merely thought about things differently from Republicans, but worked within the existing, long-standing and sensible election system created by our Founders. Not so much these days.

What we are witnessing today is a broad coalition of people trying to silence ideas and points of view they disagree with, rather than try to win a debate against those opinions in the light of day.

We see this in the malpractice of some media outlets, both old (print media and radio/TV news providers), and new (social media etc.).

A veteran newsman, Ted Koppel, 25-year host of ABC’s “Nightline,” from 1980 to 2005, agrees that President Donald Trump is “not mistaken” when he says the major media are “out to get him.” “We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were,” he told Marvin Kalb at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace earlier this month.

“We have things appearing on the front page of The New York Times right now that never would have appeared 50 years ago. Analysis, commentary on the front page,” Koppel added.

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, frequently receive criticism from conservatives, who say they are singled out and censored. Hardly ever do liberals/progressives have this complaint. And today, if you say certain newly unpopular things, you might be charged with a crime.

College campuses, once the arena for lively and beneficial debate of ideas, both friendly ideas and otherwise, now often ban conservative speakers from campus when heated protests against them arise. Claiming safety as the reason, administrators ban these speakers. But whose safety is at risk, and safety from whom?

The conservative speakers and those who support them are at risk of violence because campus leftists cannot abide those who do not think like they do. And rather than disciplining the violent protesters and restoring order and healthy debate to the learning environment, college administrations take sides and cave in to the leftists.

Stories of political indoctrination replacing or supplementing the presentation of subject matter in schools, all the way from colleges down to elementary grades, are not uncommon, particularly at the higher education levels.

Thanks to the abandonment of professional ethics by the leftist media and leftist educators, free speech is being stamped out, replaced by an “our way is THE way” message.

Along with free speech, important historical monuments and other fundamental elements of our democratic republic are under attack. Changing inconvenient rules is gathering a significant following. Some of the Democrat presidential hopefuls have targeted the Electoral College, and some have taken aim at the Supreme Court.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), both of whom see themselves someday wearing the president’s title, are ready to chuck the Electoral College in order to earn that title.

And much of the electorate has been uneducated or mis-educated in the whys and wherefores of their country’s system of government, and have no idea why this is a bad thing. 

As a safety device – an “insurance policy,” in common parlance – they now want to stack the United States Supreme Court with more activist justices, who will focus on desired outcomes, not on constitutional and legal original meaning and intent.

This group includes Robert Francis O’Rourke (D-Texas), who calls himself by the Hispanic nickname “Beto,” to attract votes. And the previously mentioned Sens. Harris and Warren, along with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) are on board with this “solution” to their electoral problems.

And if changing those rules isn’t sufficient to win elections, some also want to lower the voting age to 16, and even allow illegal aliens to vote. Claiming “voter suppression,” they complain that asking people at polling places to prove they are eligible to vote, one of the most valued rights of a United States citizen, is somehow voter suppression.

Missing the essential point, liberals/progressives say, “If the Founders were alive today, they would think differently about things than they did back then.” The point they miss or ignore, of course, is that the Founders were not speaking about specifics, but about principles in creating a unique system of government.

Never before in recent history has an American political party been so determined to trash so much of the design of a government that has proven to be so superior to any other in history as today’s most prominent Democrats.

Are they really so desperate to impose their will on the rest of us that they will act to take down the entire country in order to gain power?

Do we still have freedom of speech? Well, yes; sometimes we do.

 

Thank goodness for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects what our Founders viewed as our God-given rights to free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

However, while efforts to infringe upon those and other rights are not unheard of, the attacks on them currently form a far more serious threat than perhaps at any other time, and certainly the most serious in many decades.

There has been ample news coverage of instances where Christian bakers and florists were forced to bake cakes or produce flower arrangements for gay weddings, contrary to their religious beliefs.

A decorated Army chaplain is facing what his attorneys are calling a “career-ending punishment” after he explained to a soldier that he could not conduct a marriage retreat that included same sex couples, but was willing to find someone else to do it.

Somehow, no matter how many people are available and willing to provide these services, those wanting a particular service view it as a horrible crime if a person refuses to perform it on religious grounds.

These days, certain “preferences” held by relatively small groups are thought to be of even greater importance than those rights set in stone by our Founders.

Some small efforts at balancing these breaches have occurred, but one’s ability to practice his or her religion in the customary fashion is only sometimes protected, these days.

These breaches of the First Amendment’s protections are serious enough, but what is happening on social media, on college campuses and elsewhere regarding free speech and free access to information is much worse, if for no other reason because of its broad swath of free speech encroachments that are being slashed through our culture.

Burgess Owens, a conservative African-American entrepreneur and 10-year veteran of the NFL, appeared at Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently. He told the audience, “I grew up in the Deep South during Jim Crow segregation laws. I can tell you how racism looks, how it feels, and what it means. You guys today can go anyplace you want to — any restaurant, any college.”

Well, that was too much for the audience. A female attendee asked him to repeat his first name, and after he did so, she said, “Oh, I thought it was ‘Tom,’” as in Uncle Tom. Cute.

Student activists at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, made good on their threat to disrupt an address by conservative Christina Hoff Sommers. What makes this one worse is that it was at the Law School. Yes, that’s right: students studying the law denied Sommers her free speech right.

The Leftist operators of Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube social media platforms think the way to persuade people to their ideas is to cheat them out of contrary opinions. 

The Media Research Center has produced a report titled “Censored” on how and to what extent popular social media are trying to “persuade” people to their way of thinking, not through the common sense of their ideas or the power of their argument, but by keeping people from seeing other points of view.

Authors Ashley Rae Goldenberg and Dan Gainor tell us that social media influences our worldview and can even influence elections. “Americans are seeing the results everywhere online. Conservative spokespeople, political candidates, even members of Congress, are falling victim to censors and the top tech firms are to blame.”

The article addresses claims of liberal bias and censorship against Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube individually, listing the claims and evaluating them, showing that the claims are supported by evidence.

These include such things as that Twitter censors conservative tweets pro-life ads, and censors content that governments find objectionable.

Liberal attitudes are at the core of Facebook and it censors pro-life advertising. Facebook’s algorithms filter what things its members can see, and it also blocked the “Diamond and Silk” girls’ posts, calling their content “dangerous.” Have you ever seen Diamond and Silk? Dangerous?

Google’s fact-checking system and algorithm contain an anti-conservative bias, and its News Lab partners with the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to identify “hate.”

Charges against YouTube mirror those previously mentioned for the other three media.

Is it that these folks have so little faith in their way of thinking that they don’t trust it to stand up against contrary ideas? Or do they not want to go to the trouble of actual debate and take a chance on losing in the marketplace of free ideas?

Whatever the motivation, using their ability to control what their customers or users see is truly otherworldly.

Liars, cheaters and cowards, oh my!

Faced with unpopular ideas, so many in our country are convinced that the appropriate reaction is to hold their breath, sob uncontrollably, stomp their feet, run to their safe space and demand that the speaker of these ideas shut up.

Private businesses or organizations can control what their Websites show. No argument there. The question, however, is not whether they can, but whether they should? Politics and business is a bad combination, and in these instances is quite dangerous.

The Left declares war on expressing ideas, except for their ideas

 

 

In many American colleges, students expect to be protected from any material that is at odds with their limited ideas. Easily frustrated when their expectations of ideological isolation are breached, petulance results and protests are organized.

This same fear of and intolerance for different ideas brings out older protesters who also are intolerant of having to work to convince non-believers of the superiority of their ideas, which leads to breaking, burning, and otherwise damaging and destroying things, and bullying their way along, because that is an easy substitute for the arduous work of intellectual persuasion.

The ideological divide is so great that many on the Left will not listen to, read, or otherwise have any contact with ideas that disagree with their millimeter-wide field of views, and worse, they will try to prevent even those who choose to explore those ideas from doing so.

The protests of old, once an activity to show one’s disagreement with disliked ideas in a constitutional, legal and peaceful protest with marchers carrying signs, has devolved into crime-laden events where black-clad, mask-wearing, anti-free speech mobs commit violence, property damage and personal injury.

Increasingly violent protests at the University of California - Berkeley prompted officials to cancel a speech by conservative writer and activist Milo Yiannopoulous in February. More than 1,500 people gathered to protest Yiannopoulous, at the time was an editor for the Breitbart News website. Protesters held signs that read "Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech,” pledging to shut down the event, all the while demonstrating their profound ignorance of the First Amendment.

What began as a peaceful demonstration degenerated as the night wore on, police said. Protesters threw smoke bombs, knocked down barriers, set fires and started fights.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter was slated to speak at UC - Berkeley late last month at the invitation of the Berkeley College Republicans. But the school said the event couldn’t be held on campus because of the potential for violent protests between pro-Coulter groups and anti-Coulter groups. Berkeley was unwilling to discourage violence and protect people on its campus, so the speech was moved off campus.

Ironically, these two events occurred at the site where the free speech movement originated in the 60s when Berkeley students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. Is UC - Berkeley now the home of the anti-free speech movement?

Ultimately, the speech was cancelled when UC – Berkeley caved in its duty to uphold its noble defense of free speech.

Not all of the Left is opposed to different ideas, or the concept of free speech. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., while condemning Coulter’s ideas, to his credit defended her right to express them, and said “people have a right to give their two cents-worth, give a speech, without fear of violence and intimidation.”

“Berkeley used to be the cradle of free speech. Now it’s just the cradle for [expletive deleted] babies,” said Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time. “… I feel like this is the liberals’ version of book burning. It’s got to stop.”

An anonymous email is the reason that Portland, Oregon cancelled last weekend’s annual Rose Festival parade, according to The Washington Post. Angered by the participation of the Multnomah County Republican Party, two self-described antifascist groups pledged to protest and disrupt the event.

“You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely,” the email said, referring to the post-election violence last year. “This is nonnegotiable.” The groups threatened to “rush into the parade” and “drag and push” those Republicans participating.

Many of these protesters are victims of coddling and protective treatment that has convinced them that they are somehow special and entitled to play by their own rules, which more and more reflect a tendency toward exercising strong dictatorial control where people are not allowed to disagree with them – in a word: fascism. More confusion by the Left was demonstrated when the people who call their movement “antifascism” depend upon fascist tactics to accomplish their fascist goals.

Many people, including those on the right who are the target of these criminal acts, are fed up with this behavior to the point of taking action. Some of them are willing to meet violence with violence, as was cited by UC-Berkeley in the Coulter speech calamity. This fascist behavior is a large pimple on the face of the Left, making Democrats and others on that side of the political spectrum look particularly foolish, and un-American.

The Democrat Party is generally regarded as the head of the American Left, but the Democrats are in disarray, desperately searching for a leader – will it be Schumer, Obama, Biden, Hillary, Perez (Heaven help us) – and a sensible course to follow, other than merely stomping their feet and holding their breath protesting the election of five months ago, and obstructing everything.

And the fascist wing needs to very quickly be educated the about the freedoms this great country provides that they apparently didn’t learn in school.