North Carolina high school student, 16, is suspended for saying 'illegal alien' in class

A North Carolina high school student has been suspended for using the phrase 'illegal alien' in class.

Christian McGhee, 16, was suspended for three days from Central Davidson High School, after using the term during a classroom discussion about word meanings.

Christian questioned the term 'alien' in an assignment, asking if it referred to 'space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards,' as reported by the Carolina Journal.

His comment reportedly offended another student who physically threatened McGhee, leading to the involvement of school authorities.

'I didn't make a statement directed towards anyone — I asked a question,' Christian told the Carolina Journal.

'I wasn't speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards, and the term 'illegal alien' is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary,' he added.

His suspension could impact his chance of securing an athletic scholarship for college as he played on his school's track and cross country teams.

His mother, Leah McGhee, said that despite their efforts, the assistant principal has been unwilling to remove the infraction from Christian's record.

'Because of his question, our son was disciplined and given THREE days OUT of school suspension for 'racism,' wrote Christian's mother in the email, reported by the Carolina Journal.

https://gazette.com/news/wex/north-carolina-high-school-student-suspended-for-using-the-term-illegal-alien/article_28e2a01a-ca3c-5bf8-9410-8e6617006cad.html

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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Germany plans to unveil censorship zones which violate freedom of speech and free assembly

The German government is planning to introduce so-called censorship zones in certain locations – just like the UK. These censorship zones around abortion facilities are established to silence the pro-life view. These zones are not “pro-choice”, they’re no-choice.

And their actions deliberately ignore recent rulings by the Federal Administrative Court. Several weeks ago, the federal government approved a draft law on censorship zones to be established in certain locations in front of and around German abortion-related facilities in which certain opinions can no longer be expressed and certain peaceful activities prohibited.

What are censorship zones?

Censorship zones are areas defined by the local administration or even the legislature where specific opinions, actions or gatherings are prohibited. These zones censor certain expressions of opinion, hence the name ‘censorship zone’.

A look at Great Britain shows where restrictions on peaceful prayers can lead. In recent months, several people have been arrested there due to local censorship zones. The arrests occurred because individuals were quietly praying on a public street. The zones there have led to even silent prayer and, thus, thoughts being criminalized. We must not stand for this. Here’s why:

Censorship zones violate fundamental freedoms

Censorship zones are advanced under the guise of protecting women, but they are levied against peaceful individuals who in no way condone the harassment of women. After all, harassment is already prohibited under German criminal law.

What is most dangerous, however, is the fact that certain opinions are banned because they’re unpopular. Even if we disagree on abortion, we should agree that basic human rights—like free expression and free thought—are too important to throw out the window. 

We all have the basic human right to think, act, and pray in accordance with our convictions.

Only recently, the Federal Administrative Court confirmed the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of opinion of a pro-life prayer group.

They gathered across the street from an abortion facility and quietly prayed. The police did not find harassment while observing the group in Pforzheim.

Similarly in the UK, A pro-life activist is being investigated for a third time for praying silently in a censorship zone.

She had nothing with her, did not prevent women from entering the abortion facility, and did not even speak to anyone. A silent prayer in her mind was enough to bring her to court – a serious violation of freedom of thought.

Censorship zones are clearly having serious consequences for fundamental freedoms in the UK and we cannot let the same thing happen in Germany. 

These zones silence without offering help

Censorship zones do nothing to protect women. Rather, they block women from hearing about the offers of help available to them.

The sad reality is that these zones fail the women who choose abortion out of a sense of helplessness. By banning peaceful offers of help and alternative options, many women will feel even more alone.

Shouldn’t women in crisis pregnancies have access to help and alternative options to abortion?

If the state can ban freedom of expression and assembly in front of certain establishments, why not in other places?

There is no logical endpoint for such censorship

https://adfinternational.org/commentary/germany-plans-for-censorship-zones

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Scotland’s New Transgender ‘Hate Crime’ Law Already Showing How It Leads to Tyranny

Scotland’s new “hate crime” law already is demonstrating how it will be used to squash dissent and free speech.

The so-called Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which went into force in Scotland on April Fools’ Day, adds age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity to a list of protected classes.

The law provides for various potential punishments, including jail time.

The new law has been fiercely criticized by author J.K. Rowling, creator of the “Harry Potter” series, and many others who rightly see it as an attack on the freedom of speech.

Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf said the bill is about “protecting people from a rising tide of hatred.” But who will protect the people’s God-given right to free speech?

When asked about activists who are creating lists of other people to target when the law goes into effect, Yousaf said that the only ones who should worry are those who are stirring up hatred.

But who decides what exactly stirring up “hatred” really means?

Siobhian Brown, Scotland’s minister for victims and community safety, was asked whether intentionally “misgendering” someone would be considered a crime under the law. At first she said, “Not at all,” then continued: “It could be reported and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland.”

Very reassuring.

The response to the law has been predictable.

Scottish police reportedly “received more than 7,000 online reports of offences in the first week since the introduction of a new hate crime law.”

Police have called the law an unsustainable burden on their force. Frankly, I’m more concerned with the burden this law and ones like it are placing on the fraying threads holding up the fleeting notion that those living under such measures really live in a “free” society.

I don’t buy the premise that this law was created just to protect the vulnerable and that the Scottish people have nothing to worry about.

Let’s call this what it is: a secular, authoritarian blasphemy law, as my Scottish friend Madeline Kearns described it in National Review.

My feeling is that this legislation was created by left-wing politicians to be a weapon in the hands of their activist base. The institutional-activist partnership is part of the same perverse circulatory system, and the pols are simply putting another prop in place to secure their power to control thought and discourse.

Despite a flood of evidence that the entire gender transition movement is based on lies and false premises, it nevertheless remains the dominant ethos in the West’s elite cultural and political institutions.

These institutions don’t rely on science or popularity, but are instead bound together by a particular globalist ideology and worldview. Whether one calls this “NextGen Marxism,” as my colleague Mike Gonzalez has in his new book, or DEI, or simply the Left, the ethos is undeniably dominant in the West’s most elite circles.

That’s not changing, yet.

What is changing is that there is now a more aggressive, one might call it “populist,” counter to this worldview that’s growing against our farcical pseudo-elite.

This movement is broad and includes many “intellectuals” as well as ordinary people. It’s caused a serious shakeup in Left/Right politics as some liberals, like Rowling and Bari Weiss, have moved to the Right—especially in their criticism of the transgender narrative that places ideology over reality.

Scotland’s new hate crime law is intended to suppress the counter movement, to create a climate of fear where people take a serious risk by speaking up and telling the truth.

The West’s cultural elites can’t have people willing to say that the emperor has no clothes or that a man can’t become a woman with impunity. That threatens the regime, the interlocking lies that the elites tell themselves and use to secure their positions within its institutional tendrils.

So, what the cultural elites are doing is what plenty of other authoritarian and totalitarian societies have done in the past. They are making the cost of telling the truth high enough that a general mass of people will be afraid to declare it publicly or even privately.

They are dressing up these dictatorial designs in the language of preventing “hate” and by making the penalties seem low enough that they don’t immediately illicit images of other notorious, oppressive states of the past.

“Hey, don’t worry, we won’t prosecute you for misgendering someone, yet. Unless the police and the courts say so, of course, but that’s not my department.”

That’s effectively what Scottish politicians and other proponents of transgender hate crime laws are saying.

Don’t buy it.

Anti-speech laws to intimidate dissenters aren’t the final solution to the problem; they instead are intended to establish a government-mandated norm of what is considered acceptable speech. These laws are a firm but insistent swat directed at anyone who might be thinking of telling the truth rather than spouting the party-approved narrative.

More repressive laws come later if the people don’t comply.

Sure, most cases of alleged hate speech under this law won’t lead to arrests or significant fines. At least for now. But how many people are going to be willing to speak the truth when there’s a chance they could get arrested, face a lawsuit, or even end up in jail?

Most people aren’t Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The creators of these laws know that and are counting on the probability that most aren’t even a Rowling, or a Riley Gaines, or a Ray Shelton either.

That’s why these “small” threats to liberty must be met and defeated now. Now is the time to refuse to live by lies while the stakes still aren’t quite gulags.

We must, like Thomas Jefferson, swear hostility to every tyranny over the mind of man.

In the United States we are fortunate to have the First Amendment, and that may at least slow down this rush to control speech and thought. But that won’t keep back the tide of suffocating, increasingly government-mandated groupthink forever. Little islands of liberty aren’t good enough.

Although the gender transition ideology seems strongest in the United States, my feeling is that if it can be beaten, it will be beaten here.

Refuse to live by lies while the law is still on our side, and create laws to protect the truth rather than suppress the truth to create victims. That’s the way we will preserve liberty and thwart the coming of a new Dark Age.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/12/scotlands-new-transgender-hate-crime-law-already-showing-how-it-leads-to-tyranny/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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I too have been censored

It's a bit ironical that the author of a blog promoting free speech should be censored but it has happened again on my  "Dissecting Leftism" blog

Google own blogspot, who host my writings so it is Google who are the censors.  They can delete anything that I write without consultation.

I have noted one such deletion on my  "Dissecting Leftism" blog a few hours ago

The deletion does not bother me too much as it is of a post that appeared nearly a month ago. And the article remains online in the place I got it from

The thing that promotes Google censorship is mention of some bad effect of vaccines so that is interesting in itself.  What are they trying to hide?  The cat is well and truly out of the bag when it comes to dangerous side effects of the Covid vaccines so their censorship efforts seem futile to me.  Is it just a formality?  Maybe.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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University of Melbourne caves to Fascist thuggery as Israeli academic silenced

One of Australia’s most prestigious universities has cancelled a speech by an Israeli engineering academic after it had been advised the event would be ­“severely disrupted”.

Professor Tal Shima, an aerospace engineer, had been scheduled to speak to a small gathering of staff and students at Melbourne University’s engineering faculty on Thursday, but the lecture was abruptly cancelled.

The Australian understands the faculty made the decision to cancel following a number of threats to disrupt it.

The pro-Palestinian group UniMelbforPalestine demanded the event be cancelled, citing Professor Shima’s position at the Israeli Institute of Technology. The professor has, among other roles, been dean of aerospace ­engineering, which the group claimed involved “researching weapons” used by Israel and which meant he had been ­“directly involved in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza”.

It also claimed research ­organisations he worked for had been funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defence and the US Air Force.

On Thursday the Instagram page of the group – “a grassroots collective of University of Melbourne students, staff and alumni organising on campus for a free Palestine” – boasted that the event had been cancelled.

“Breaking news: Melbourne University’s engineering faculty has succumbed to our pressure and canceled (sic) its event hosting an Israeli professor complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” it said.

“Yet another win for justice and accountability by Melbourne University’s community against this corrupt Zionist management.”

A Melbourne University spokeswoman confirmed the lecture had been called off because of safety concerns.

“Following clear indications that the seminar was going to be severely disrupted, the faculty of engineering and information technology cancelled the seminar,” the spokeswoman said.

“Freedom of speech is respected and supported at the University of Melbourne, and is central to our values and identity. We welcome debate and protest on campus, providing it does not extend to violence, threat or intimidation.”

Professor Shima was unable to be contacted on Thursday. He is understood to be on sabbatical at the Australian National University.

It is unclear what he was planning to speak about at the lecture. The Australian understands the audience was expected to number fewer than 50 and he was also planning to meet with several Melbourne University academics.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion told The Australian “if universities capitulate to campaigns of intimidation, it means that small bands of extremists will determine which nationalities and which ideas are allowed on campuses”.

“This places the free exchange of ideas, for which universities exist, at risk,” he said. “We call for the invitation to be immediately reinstated and for the university to make clear that violent extremism and exclusion, on the basis of national origin, will not be tolerated.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/university-of-melbourne-caves-as-israeli-academic-silenced/news-story/98e35ca8addaa76437c3d39988ab1e55

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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What to Know About Elon Musk’s Battle With a Brazilian Judge Over Speech on Social Media

More Latin American tyranny

When billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter—now X—in 2022, some feared that the self-avowed free-speech “absolutist” would turn the platform into a free-for-all for disinformation. Now, as a Brazilian judge seeks to crack down on fake news on social media, he and Musk have found each other at odds in a growing spat that could have significant consequences for Musk, Brazil, and X.

On Saturday, X’s Global Government Affairs team posted that it had been forced to block “certain popular accounts in Brazil” without, in its view, sufficient explanation. It was prohibited, it said, from publicizing what accounts were impacted as well as what court or judge issued the orders.

“We believe that such orders are not in accordance with the Marco Civil da Internet or the Brazilian Federal Constitution, and we challenge the orders legally where possible,” the post said. “The people of Brazil, regardless of their political beliefs, are entitled to freedom of speech, due process, and transparency from their own authorities.”

Tensions escalated when Musk, in a series of posts, called out the judge, Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, by name and said X would not abide by his orders no matter the consequences. Musk later said de Moraes ordered the suspension of accounts belonging to “sitting members of the parliament and major journalists.”

“These are the most draconian demands of any country on Earth!” Musk said in one post.

“We will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there,” he said in another. “But principles matter more than profit.”

“This judge has brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil,” he said in another. “He should resign or be impeached.”

In turn, de Moraes issued a decision Sunday saying he would include Musk in his larger investigation as well as initiate a new inquiry specifically into the X owner, whom he accused of obstruction of justice and incitement to crime—actions, in the judge’s description, that “disrespect Brazil’s sovereignty.” ...

Right-wing politicians, including Bolsonaro, have accused de Moraes of overstepping his authority and abusing his power, though many of de Moraes’ defenders argue that the judge’s approach is sound, given the fragility of democracy in the country....

And Brazil’s Secretary of Social Communication Paulo Pimenta posted on X in response to de Moraes’ opening of an investigation into Musk: “We will not be intimidated. Our Country is sovereign and no one is going to impose their authoritarian will and enforce the logic that money makes their ‘business model’ above the Federal Constitution.” [A nice case of projection here. Who exactly is being authoritarian?]

https://time.com/6964518/elon-musk-brazil-judge-moraes-free-speech-disinformation/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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‘Misinformation’ Is the Censors’ Excuse

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month in the momentous case of Murthy v. Missouri. At issue is the constitutionality of what government authorities did to censor speech that departed from preferred narratives.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson posed a hypothetical to Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga: “Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. . . . Kids all over the country start doing this. There is an epidemic. Children are seriously injuring or even killing themselves in situations. Is it your view that government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?”

Mr. Aguiñaga might have countered with a question of his own: What “information”? Whether government authorities would be justified in seeking to suppress such videos is an important question. But it isn’t a question about information, misinformation or disinformation.

What would be the correct information? If we rendered the video as a statement, it would be something like: It is valiant or cool to jump out of third-floor windows. That statement is foolish, wrongheaded, false. But “misinformation”? That is a category error.

What’s “cool” is no more a factual question than whether “Citizen Kane” or “Rear Window” is the better movie. What’s cool to confused kids is a matter of interpretation and judgment, which are far beyond mere information.

In Murthy, however, the government defends its actions in terms of combatting misinformation and disinformation. The administration and other practitioners and proponents of censorship thereby pretend that they are merely protecting the public from cut-and-dried falsehoods. In doing so, they misrepresent their actions and attempt to evade responsibility for arrogating to themselves the decision of what is safe and sound for people to see and hear.

In turn, they portray free-speech advocates as supporting falsehoods, even lies. The “misinformation” stratagem kneecaps them by trapping their objections in the limited dimension of information, forcing them to epistemologize to fight off censorship. Here we are, on the opinion page, talking about how information differs from interpretation and judgment.

The approach is attractive to censors because it flatters their vanity, frees them from accountability, and rigs the game against their opponents. Hubris built the Tower of Babel, and the result was semantic chaos. Today we see hubris and semantic chaos in censorship operations that claim to be combatting “misinformation.”

Knowledge can’t be flattened down to information. Once we appreciate the richness of knowledge, we see that anti-“misinformation” projects are miscarriages of civility, decency and the rule of law. We must rediscover the norms of openness, tolerance and free speech. Science, democracy, justice and everything else the censors purport to value depend on public confidence, and confidence depends on those liberal norms.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/misinformation-is-the-censors-excuse-murthy-supreme-court-covid-social-media-27ccb7c8

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Black ban this!

In a bid to help you get through the week without offending anyone’s sensitivities, no easy task I know, allow me to bring you up to speed on your use of pronouns as promoted by posters that have appeared around the University of Queensland campus heralding the arrival of the neopronoun.

Forget he/him, she/her and they/them and, enter the neopronouns. These, students are told, are a new category of pronoun such as “ze, hir, hirs, xe, xem and xyr”.

“Neopronouns,” they are told, “can be used by anyone.

“They don’t hold a specific meaning and are a way for someone to best represent themselves like they would through clothing or their name.”

Obviously, if someone introduces themselves to you as an “xe” or a “hirs”, there is always the chance that simple-minded souls such as us might presume that they are suffering from a speech impediment or have hosed down a couple of coldies before leaving home.

This confusion is understandable, but rather than muttering something about having left the iron on and hurrying away, the correct response is to listen carefully.

Did they say they were a “ze” or an “xe” or an “xem’” or an “xyr”?

If you make a mistake, the correct response is to “give a brief but genuine apology, then correct yourself and move on. If someone makes a mistake with other people’s pronouns, politely and without shaming, correct them”.

I’m tempted to say that in simpler times before victimhood and self-obsession took hold, things were more black and white, but that could cause offence and I wouldn’t want that.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/mike-oconnor/mike-oconnor-why-im-seeing-red-at-colourcoded-correctness-and-neopronouns-at-university-of-qld/news-story/6a6883f5451f4e8feeb89ce889e2a42b

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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New York’s ban on pot ads struck down as violation of free speech

New York’s struggling legal pot industry has been thrown into turmoil yet again after a judge issued a ruling striking down state rules banning cannabis advertising and marketing as a violation of commerce and free speech.

The same Albany judge, Kevin Bryant, last summer struck down other Cannabis Control Board rules as illegal for providing convicted potheads preference in obtaining licenses over disabled vets and other applicants.

The legal woes last year froze the licensing and opening of new cannabis shops for months while the number of unlicensed marijuana shops sprouted across the city and state like weeds.  

In a withering 13-page ruling issued Wednesday, Bryant said the Office of Cannabis Management issued regulations outlawing promotions and marketing on third-party platforms without evidence backing them up, all but saying the edicts came out of thin air.

“There is nothing in the record to establish precisely how OCM developed the regulations,” Bryant said.

“This court must find that the conclusion was arbitrary and capricious and that there is no substantial basis in the record to support respondents [OCM’s] action. The regulations are unconstitutional violations of petitioners’ free speech rights.”

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/us-news/new-yorks-ban-on-pot-ads-struck-down-as-violation-of-free-speech/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Connecticut Dem successfully has new legislation amended to include phrase 'expectant mothers' after branding woke alternative 'pregnant persons' an 'affront'

A Connecticut Democrat successfully changed the wording of new legislation to add the phrase 'expectant mothers', after branding the original suggested language - 'pregnant persons' - an affront to women.

State Rep. Robyn Porter, a Democrat representing New Haven, proposed an amendment to House Bill 5454 to incorporate the term 'expectant mothers' during discussions on a bill regarding state funding on Thursday.

'My children call me mother, ma, mommy. It depends on the day,' Porter said Thursday. 'I don't answer to pregnant person or birthing person. That's not what I answer to.

'A huge part of my identity is wrapped around being a mother and a grandmother. So I find it an affront that someone would try to tell me that what they're putting on paper for the purpose of policy covers me when I'm telling you that it doesn't,' she continued.

The bill was originally launched by the Human Services Committee before reaching appropriations to incorporate the phrase 'expectant mothers' to lines five and six.

The original lines of the bill read '… shall create a strategic plan to maximize federal and state resources for mental health services for children six years old and younger, their caregivers and pregnant persons.'

Lawmakers voted 32-16 to adopt the term 'mothers' following a 35-minute debate.

The unexpected decision was achieved through a coalition of Republicans and members of the legislature's black and Puerto Rican Caucus - with all 16 opposing votes coming from Democrats.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13277473/Connecticut-Dem-Robyn-Porter-new-legislation-amended-phrase-mothers.html

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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Journal of Free Speech Law: "Weaponized from the Beginning," by Prof. John Fabian Witt

The Introduction:

Accounts of modern free speech law typically begin in a moment of pragmatic optimism about the value of free speech in a flourishing democracy. In the usual story, which Laura Weinrib helpfully calls "the myth of the modern First Amendment," young progressives like Zechariah Chafee, Felix Frankfurter, Learned Hand, and Harold Laski draw on pragmatist philosophers like William James and Charles Pierce to persuade Justices Holmes and Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court that censorship was antithetical to democratic self-government. Holmes announced that the production of more speech served as the best test of truth. Brandeis, championed speech as a guarantor of democracy. Still others believed they had found in freedoms to speak a better way of managing dangerous radicalisms. Leading commentators ever since rest their accounts of the advent of free speech law on one or another variation of a new and hopeful conception of the function of speech in democracy.

Strangely, something like the opposite is more accurate. The distinctive feature of the moment in which modern free speech law arose was but grave new worries about the relationship between free communication and self-government. When Holmes and Brandeis first gave voice to free speech ideas in their famous dissents in the fall of 1919 and 1920, keen observers were coming to terms with a world of distortion and misinformation. Four long years of war propaganda had shown that speech by the powerful could dangerously destabilize public opinion in ostensibly democratic societies. The return to peace, too, had been accompanied by stunning displays of communications power. Storms of racist and nativist public opinion produced a wave of postwar racial pogroms. Employer propaganda smashed postwar strikes in the steel industry and elsewhere. A generation of public relations men left war propaganda efforts, entering new industries like marketing and advertising firmly convinced by their wartime work that information was supremely susceptible to manipulation and control.

At the beginning of modern free speech doctrine, close observers were coming to see speech as more than an indispensable foundation for democratic self-government, though it was that, too. Speech had also become—to adapt Justice Kagan's iconic phrase from a century later—a weapon for democracy's subversion.

Early observers of the World War I-era crisis of propaganda and misinformation did not treat it as a problem of free speech law, or not exactly. Freedom of speech in 1919 had barely been invented as a judicial doctrine; courts would not begin to protect speech against repressive laws until at least the late 1920s and 1930s. Absent a First Amendment to rely on, critics and advocates turned not to free speech doctrine in the courts—or not only to free speech doctrine in the courts—but to mediating institutions that offered bulwarks against distortions in the domain of public opinion.

In what follows, I sketch the views of two key participants in the formation of the free speech tradition in America. Walter Lippmann and Roger Baldwin both began their professional lives in the first and second decades of the 20th century on the left of American politics. Each participated in the formation of the modern First Amendment tradition: Lippmann as an interlocutor in the group of progressive pragmatists around Justice Holmes and Baldwin as founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Over the course of their long careers, the two men veered toward different positions. Lippmann would become a center-right technocrat and a skeptic of democracy's capacity to rationally manage modern social problems. Baldwin would become the nation's best-known defender of civil liberties, offering a different kind of skepticism about majority rule, one rooted in individual rights against majoritarian control. But in the immediate wake of the war, they offered overlapping and trenchant accounts of the relationship between speech and what Jurgen Habermas would later call the public sphere. Neither man believed that unrestricted communication flows alone would sustain a flourishing domain of public opinion. To the contrary, each man came to see that powerful interests and propaganda campaigns badly distorted the kinds of public information on which democracy depended. Despairing of a solution to the crisis of information in the modern age, Lippmann turned to neutral expertise in the administrative state. Baldwin, by contrast, believed that the labor movement offered a more promising path, one that could rescue democratic values by offering a better ecosystem for the formation of opinion on collective questions. Like many of his generation, Baldwin called this vision industrial democracy.

Both strategies held value a century ago—and still do today. Much of our difficulty with lies and propaganda in early 21st century public opinion resides precisely in the legitimacy crisis of the administrative state and the collapse of the labor movement.

Baldwin's strategy for dealing with distortion in the public sphere is less well known than Lippmann's. In some respects, however, it is more promising as a model for our current moment. Unlike Lippmann, Baldwin never made the mistake of imagining that experts could stand outside the information cycles of the societies they purport to govern. Baldwin's industrial democracy is distinctive because it is to be built on institutions that are unabashed partisans in the struggle for life and in the management of information. Labor unions are not above the fray, they are in it. They are on their members' side. They pass along information that working-class citizens in a mass society can trust because it is in their interest to do so. At the same time, labor organizations' role constrains them from certain kinds of distortions. Unions' institutional interest in preserving the firms with which they bargain tethers them to reality. Labor, in other worlds, is dependent on and invested in rival institutions in a given community. For Baldwin, the genius of industrial democracy is thus that it offers what we might call an endogenous institutional foundation for public opinion formation. Industrial democracy does not rest on the impossible Lippmannian goal of transcending clashing interests through external authority. Instead, industrial democracy makes the interests of workers central to the way information is produced and received in public life.

The stories of Lippmann and Baldwin suggest that our crisis today is not only that new speech technologies like the internet have occasioned evermore dangerous opportunities for distortion of the public sphere. Distortion predated our particular technological juncture. Nor are lies and propaganda chiefly a problem in First Amendment doctrine; they have haunted the democratic public sphere under wildly varying doctrinal regimes. Our crisis today is in large part that key mediating institutions like the administrative state and the labor movement are in decay or even catastrophic decline.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/04/03/journal-of-free-speech-law-weaponized-from-the-beginning-by-prof-john-fabian-witt/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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People point to huge upsurge in vocal Jew-hate in Australia. The majority want tougher laws

Australians are backing a federal plan to toughen the law against hate speech in a bid to shield minority groups from attack, as 57 per cent of voters perceive there has been a rise in racism because of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The exclusive findings of the Resolve Political Monitor poll highlight the rising anxiety about racial and religious vilification after months of protests against both sides of the war, lending support to a Labor pledge to impose criminal sanctions on those who target people in malicious online attacks.

But voters are split on whether the fierce debate is threatening community safety, with 40 per cent saying the country was less safe – up from 36 per cent in November – but 34 per cent saying there was no change, while the remainder were unsure.

The conclusions, in the latest Resolve Political Monitor conducted for this masthead, show that only 15 per cent of voters believe there has been no increase in racism and religious intolerance as a result of the conflict, while 57 per cent thought there had been a rise.

Hundreds of Jewish Australians were targeted last month in a “doxxing” attack that released their personal information online, while some rallies in support of Palestine have led to warnings about racist chants, and the Islamophobia Register Australia has reported a surge in attacks on Muslims.

Resolve director Jim Reed said the findings showed the strong community rejection of hate speech, racism and violent protest at a time of fierce argument about the war.

“It almost goes without saying that most Australians would object to hate speech, but they balance that against the need for expression free from government intervention,” he said.

“However, they are particularly attuned to the need to tackle it now given the dangers posed to domestic social cohesion by the Middle East conflict.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said last month he wanted to fast-track laws to combat hate speech and make it a criminal offence to engage in doxxing, which is the malicious publication of someone’s personal information online.

The prime minister asked Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to put the laws to parliament, with the changes going ahead regardless of a separate political dispute over religious freedom and sex discrimination laws.

“The idea that in Australia, someone should be targeted because of their religion, because of their faith, whether they be Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Catholic or Buddhist, is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese told radio station 2GB last month.

“And that’s why I’ve asked, as well, the Attorney-General to develop proposals to strengthen laws against hate speech, which we will be doing. This is not the Australia that we want to see.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has warned against vilification in repeated comments since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, saying people could be prosecuted under criminal law for intimidation.

“Hate speech and incitement of violence has zero place in our society. Let’s be very clear about it,” he said in December.

The Resolve Political Monitor asked if people believed stronger laws were needed to ban hate speech against people based on their faith, finding that 56 per cent were in favour and 19 per cent were against.

When voters were asked if the government should make it a criminal offence to engage in the malicious publication of private information online, 74 per cent backed the idea and only 4 per cent did not, with 22 per cent unsure.

A clear majority also supported action to make social media platforms remove the doxxing material, with 73 per cent in favour of this and 6 per cent against, with 21 per cent unsure.

There was strong majority support for action on doxxing across the political divide, although the support for action on hate speech was lower among Greens voters. While 61 per cent of Labor voters and 62 per cent of Coalition voters wanted to ban hate speech, the support was 52 per cent among Greens voters.

Respondents showed strong support for diversity in the annual report on social cohesion by the Scanlon Foundation, although many say the migrant intake is too high. The latest report, issued last November, found the proportion of people with a negative attitude towards Muslims fell from 41 per cent in 2019 to 27 per cent in 2023. The November report said 9 per cent had a negative attitude toward Jews. The survey work for the Scanlon report was conducted before the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7.

The Resolve Political Monitor surveyed 1610 eligible voters from Thursday to Sunday, generating results with a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

The question on racism in the Resolve Political Monitor was: “Some people have suggested that there has been a rise in racism and religious intolerance in Australia as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Do you think this is the case or not?”

The Resolve survey found that 57 per cent said there had been an increase in racism since October, a view shared by 56 per cent of Labor voters, 62 per cent of Coalition voters and 58 per cent of Greens voters.

The survey found 33 per cent believed there was more antisemitism and 11 per cent thought there was more Islamophobia, while 55 per cent said there was both, or they were unsure. This was based on responses from 926 voters, the subset that said there was an increase in racism.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/people-point-to-a-rise-in-racism-in-australia-the-majority-want-tougher-laws-20240328-p5fg0k.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Elite Doctors Support Government Censorship in the Name of Public Safety

On March 25, Medpage Today gave us the pro-medical censorship argument, delivered by two doctors with impressive credentials who appear to be cheering on a 1984-style information-control future. Titled “Medical Misinfo Runs Rampant Online. The Gov't Must Retain the Right to Intervene,” this argument totally fails to understand the balance that must exist between the government’s right to inform and the free speech rights of citizens, especially in a rapidly changing field such as science. Benjamin D. Hoffman, MD, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, General pediatrician and Professor of Pediatrics at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital and Oregon Health and Science University and Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPP, board certified and president of the American Medical Association, are the two authors.

Target: misinformation and disinformation

The two physicians seeking to muzzle tens of thousands of doctors aren't based on malicious intent, in fact quite the opposite. From their point of view, “Online misinformation about vaccines harms patients, undermines trust in science, and places additional burdens on our healthcare system through reduced vaccine uptake.” They go on to note that “the widespread proliferation of misinformation and disinformation has triggered higher levels of vaccine hesitancy and refusal, allowing a resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases that we had nearly eradicated.”

And there has been an increase in measles cases and reports of vaccine hesitancy have led to a few percentage point reduction in children vaccination rates. But also, about 70% of the population lined up to get the COVID-19 vaccine under the premise that it would work like other vaccines. No one expected a third, fourth or even a fifth booster shot within just a couple years. To not be able to criticize the government and a powerful industry such as Pharma in a democratic society means, well, that you are no longer living in a democratic society. That a particular definition of science is exploited by a confluence of interests, a ministry of truth right out of George Orwell’s 1984 isn’t necessarily a stretch at that point.

To blame physicians that research and prescribe FDA approved repurposed drugs or that call out identified vaccine safety issues for vaccine hesitancy, and hostile to science-- classifying them as anti-vaxx, then advocating for the government to silence them, is frankly, a calling card of a precursor to an oppressive, overreaching state, and ultimately some form of fascism.

“Discredited medical falsehoods”

Admitting a tension between their goals and the US Constitution, our Medpage Today authors note that “Preventing the spread of vaccine misinformation without infringing on free speech protections in the First Amendment is a thorny legal issue that is at the heart of a landmark case now before the U.S. Supreme Court….”

They go on to state that our country’s top healthcare organizations and thousands of doctors think that “vaccine misinformation” is a grave threat to the public. The doctors say that they seek to partner with the federal government to advance “factual information.” They go on to note that the decision in Murthy v. Missouri, relating to when government advice becomes government coercion, is based on claims that the Biden administration “engaged in censorship during the pandemic by urging private social media companies to stop the spread of discredited medical falsehoods from their platforms to save lives.” But “discredited” scientific theories often turn out to be current, such as the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID-19 and delegating to the government the authority to pre-determine scientific reality is a slippery slope, to say the least.

Ivermectin an open question

Our well-credentialed, well positioned doctors opine that “at stake in this case is what tools the government and public health agencies have at their disposal to combat medical misinformation. Without getting into the legal arguments on both sides, one thing is clear: to strip away government power to raise the alarm about patently false information on life-saving vaccines -- when illness and lives hang in the balance -- would be a devastating outcome.”

Using ivermectin as an example, they note that the government issued a warning of “serious adverse events” from the drug and unequivocally conclude, despite the mixed evidence, that “numerous studies showed it was entirely ineffective against the virus.” The ivermectin question is especially contentious, with the FDA recently settling a case by agreeing to take down its internet warnings against using the drug for COVID-19.

In concluding, the doctors offer that:

“Stopping the spread of medical misinformation is an enormous task, and we cannot expect any single entity to accomplish this challenge. Those of us who have taken an oath to protect the health and well-being of patients share the responsibility to separate fact from fiction.

Anything less than a comprehensive effort to prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation -- using the powers of the federal government, public health agencies, healthcare
organizations, social media companies and media outlets.”

Government truths to challenged facts

This unabashed call for the US government to continue its role as truth arbiter in the COVID-19 context is misguided and dangerous to civil rights and just plain stupid given the unfolding facts—both known generally to the public and those that will emerge.

The government told us the vaccines would present infection and spread; both of these claims turned out to be wrong. The World Health Organization first informed the world the 70% vaccination target was to achieve herd immunity because the vaccine would stop viral transmission. Of course, they were incorrect and they had to adjust the messaging. Frankly, the WHO was against coercive measures by state actors such as vaccine mandates.

On the other hand, WHO acted coercively if they found out a  developing nation authorized ivermectin on an emergency basis. We had more than one national government representative or their proxy contact TrialSite asking us to take a story down out of fear of WHO reprisal.

How about the WHO’s move celebrating  the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh’s success in its spring 2021 battle against Delta, an unprecedented public health effort that turned an absolute crisis around in months. Part of the multi-faceted regimen was a home medicine kit including ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc. WHO omitted that from their celebratory press release and U.S. media when asked about it lied and said ivermectin was not involved. Merely mentioning this truthful piece of news brought immediate censorship on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (pre-Musk) and others.

Bill Gates has gone on the record that it’s time to find vaccines that are actually sterilizing in effect. But listen to Drs Hoffman and Ehrenfeld, if he [Gates] were a doctor, they would be muzzled. By January 2023, as reported in TrialSite Bill Gates all but announced the current COVID-19 mRNA vaccines as dead on arrival. Gates had managed to earn a fortune on his pre-pandemic bet on the BioNTech mRNA vaccine, however, —as that was the experimental asset selected by Pfizer to commercialize. But Mr. Gates was surprisingly candid about the lack of vaccine durability, although he kept away from the vaccine injury topic. But regardless, Hoffman and Ehrenfeld would have him muzzled if he were a doctor for raising his frustration about the durability and breadth challenges with the current vaccines.

If we allowed authorities or their proxies to dictate truth and fiction, no one would be free to contest what in some cases appear to be exaggerated benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines, for example.

And let’s not forget that while the pharmaceutical industry is very important—our news media platform is dedicated to tracking breakthroughs that ultimately pharmaceutical companies must invest in to turn to medicines—they have been in the past entangled in horrible scandals or illicit schemes that hurt society.

We only need to point to recent incidents such as Merck and Viox or Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin. How many people became addicted to opiates because government agencies fell hook line and sinker for corporate science? When will these doctors espousing such dangerous talk realize what the implications are if you muzzle criticism? Pfizer’s revenues derived from the pandemic approach $100 billion, an unprecedented amount of money. TrialSite analyzed Public Citizen’s Pfizer’ Power, finding that the company in many cases pursued profit over people and health during the pandemic. We remind Drs. Hoffman and Ehrenfeld who ever had the gold tend to impose their will.

At the confluence of power and big money comes a tendency for corruption, and without a free and open press, which includes independent physicians making their opinions known, we could easily slip into a dark non-democratic reality.

Who is Hoffman and Ehrenfeld?

Benjamin Hoffman is the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics for 2024. He is a professor and pediatrician at both Doernbecher Children’s Hospital and Oregon Health and Science University. After studying Anthropology at UC Berkeley, he attended Medical School at Harvard University. Notably, Harvard is an epitome of an elite institution, and since 9-11, our CIA has re-upped its interest is hiring Anthropology graduates.

Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, became president of the American Medical Association in June 2023, and he was voted onto the American Medical Association Board of Trustees in 2014. Dr. Ehrenfeld is a consultant to the WHO and was co-chair of a Navy Surgeon General’s Taskforce. His work has been funded by the DoD, NIH, and others. As to academic credential, the doctor “is a graduate of Phillips Academy, Haverford College, the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health.” Last, Ehrenfeld is a combat veteran of several campaigns in Afghanistan, and for that we are grateful.

What about MedPage Today?

What about MedPage Today? The medical focused media site is owned by Everyday Health Group, which is in turn indirectly owned by J2 Global Inc., an American technology holding company based in Los Angeles, California. The company changed its name to ZiffDavis in 2021. According to Ziff Davis’s annual investor disclosure, MedPage Today is considered their flagship professional property. Ironically, the top two institutional shareholders of Ziff Davis, Blackrock and Vanguard Group, are often among the top five institutional owners in most of the largest publicly traded pharmaceutical companies.  

https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/elite-doctors-support-government-censorship-in-the-name-of-public-safety-c86d6f16

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Cancelled Again: Who Controls Campus Free Speech?

Bettina Arndt

Last time I spoke at Sydney University, the riot squad had to be called in to protect my audience from the baying mob of feminist activists trying to close the speech down.

They didn’t like the fact I was speaking out about their efforts to force universities to set up kangaroo courts to adjudicate sexual assault.

Funnily enough, this kerfuffle led to the federal government calling an inquiry into free speech on campus, which ultimately led to laws that require universities to promote open discussion, rather than allow activists to determine the public discourse.

Obviously, those regulations haven’t had the intended impact because unruly students just go on their sweet way.

Earlier this month I was cancelled again—and this time by the Young Liberals, for Heaven’s sake.

What does that say about the future of the centre-right Liberal Party when they are the ones shutting down proper debate?

The University of Sydney Conservatives Club was hosting a discussion evening focussed on the Higgins rape case. I was approached three months earlier to appear on a panel, along with Chris Merritt, vice president of the Rule of Law Institute, and author Andrew Urban.

The young women organising the event did a terrific job putting together thoughtful discussion points including the use of the case for political ends, undermining of the presumption of innocence, concerns about unmeritorious cases being brought before the courts, damage to the credibility of the media, and the impact of #MeToo.

It was just perfect for setting the scene for civilised debate for a select audience—the event was promoted solely to the Conservative Club students.

Ironically, the previous event hosted by the club just two weeks earlier featured Tony Abbott and the famous UK commentator, Konstantin Kisin, who argued freedom of speech is the cornerstone of Western civilisation.

Clearly, Mr. Kisin’s important message failed to impact on the blinkered views of the president of the Young Liberals who took it upon himself to cancel me.

The week before the event, the president suddenly announced to the female students running the event they weren’t permitted to include me—apparently, Young Liberals NSW has final control over the Club’s activities.

It is interesting to note the new NSW Liberal Senator Maria Kovacic applauded the decision to ban me—to think that this woman won the seat of the late, great Jim Molan.

The Young Liberals president actually suggested that hosting an event with me could ruin the career of the art/law student who was the major organiser.

It is quite bizarre and extremely alarming that this young man, who presumably has set his sights on a career in Liberal politics, should join the ranks of the thought police.

In fact, he preferred the event not to take place at all. But the organisers stuck to their guns and decided to go ahead with the event, with my two fellow panellists to handle the discussion.

But when it comes to marketing and promoting the event, the interference came again, with demands that Ms. Higgins not be mentioned.

The promotion simply mentioned, “Lawfare in Australia,” a very bland and rather misleading presentation of the proposed discussion which was originally promoted as “Higgins Unpacked.”

In the end, the event did end up being cancelled, after the other panellists decided on principle to withdraw.

Apparently, the president was not acting off his own bat, but rather had been leant on by other senior members of the organisation. And there are many Young Libs who objected strenuously to my exclusion, so there’s dissension in the ranks, with factional issues at play.

Yet the fact remains that key Young Libs were determined that Higgins remains unpacked.

The head of the organisation failed to answer a series of questions asking him to explain the reasoning for his decision. These included my suggestion that he may subscribe to a preferred narrative regarding the Higgins case.

Heaven forbid that some of the student audience might open their minds to alternative perspectives on the issue. It just shows what a great job the Brittany Higgins cheer squad has done to shut down proper discussion around the facts of this case.

Given the biased media coverage, it will be interesting if Bruce Lehrmann wins his defamation action against the media—the outcome is to be announced on April 4.

The general public has been so misinformed about the holes in the Higgins case that many will be outraged if the judge finds the media was wrong to promote her very story.

It’s a very bad look for Young Liberals to be opposed to uncensored public discussion of the social and political implications of this critical legal case.

The conundrum faced by young conservatives was addressed by Konstantin Kisin, during his recent tour of Australia. At the end of his two-week tour, he warned that this country has been infected by the woke virus, with people afraid to speak out on any number of issues.

“While the centre left appears its extremist fringe, many on the centre-right hesitate to challenge the cultural vandalism they observe for fear of being described as ‘cultural warriors,’” he said.

Was that the fear that prompted this worrying move by the Young Liberals? They know that a thorough dissection of the Brittany Higgins saga would lead to the usual Twitter storm from the lunatic fringe who control so much of university culture.

If that was enough to lead our future Liberal leaders to cower in fear, the future of inspiring political leadership in this country looks very bleak indeed.

It’s a strange thing that this 74-year-old grandmother still has them quaking in their boots.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/cancelled-again-5616837?ea_src=au-frontpage&ea_med=top-news-opinion-australia-0-large-0

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Free speech in dock as US court ponders censorship reach

If the right to free speech diminishes in the US, it won’t last long in other liberal democracies.

This prospect is real after a hearing in the US Supreme Court last week, when the nine justices pondered whether to quash the federal government’s scope to put pressure on tech platforms to take down comments the government didn’t like. On behalf of their citizens and a handful of doctors and academics, Missouri and Louisiana had successfully sued the government in lower courts, arguing bureaucrats unconstitutionally had put pressure on tech platforms to censor criticism of pandemic lockdowns, masks, Covid-19 vaccines, election integrity and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In his ruling, Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty called it “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history”. A federal appeals court largely agreed, but the Biden administration, aware of the extraordinary implications, appealed it to the US Supreme Court.

“(We) cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” White House adviser Rob Flaherty told Twitter, now X, in February 2021, referring to a parody account mocking Joe Biden’s granddaughter.

When officials weren’t telling social media companies what to take down, they were laundering censorship through partnerships with universities, most prominently the Virality Project at Stanford. The justices’ line of questioning wasn’t reassuring for free-speech advocates.

“Before, I was fully confident that American courts were fully devoted to free speech; afterwards, I’m not so sure,” said Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, one of the plaintiffs, whose 2021 roundtable discussion with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on damage caused by lockdowns was removed by YouTube.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, the US Supreme Court’s newest judge, said her “biggest concern is that your view has the first amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways”. As numerous legal scholars have pointed out, that is indeed the purpose of the first amendment of the US constitution – that congress, and by implication government, may not abridge free speech. There’s no exception for pandemics, safety, feelings or anything else.

Even some of the court’s conservative judges suggested the government’s actions were akin to the pressure political staffers routinely put on journalists to influence how they write stories.

Enthusiasm for free speech appears to be waning outside the court, too. The libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief that endorsed government meddling so long as it didn’t rise to “coercion”. That once venerable defender of free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union, which once defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that was home to a large Jewish population, including thousands of Holocaust survivors, didn’t even bother to file a brief.

“If it stays on the persuasion side of the line – and all we’re talking about is government speech – then there’s no state action and there’s also no first amendment problem,” government lawyer Brian Fletcher said. He argued the government’s actions were akin to ministers using the “bully pulpit”, to influence public opinion.

What was occurring was systematic, clandestine, automatic removal of comments on social media, the sort of thing that occurs routinely on social media in China.

Journalists still can write what they want, but not so the thousands of individual citizens, most with far less power than mainstream media journalists, who in this case simply wanted to express their opinion in good faith.

The justices appeared to baulk at “coercion” of social media platforms, but perhaps not “significant encouragement”, a lower bar. But any instruction from the federal government has behind it the veiled threat of antitrust action or reform of section 230, part of US law that shields social media platforms from being sued over content their users post. These are hardly casual recommendations among friends.

Not that it should matter, given free speech entails the right to lie or be ignorant, but much of what was censored turned out to be true, whether it was the veracity of claims about Hunter Biden’s laptop or the potential for injury from “safe and effective” Covid-19 vac­cines. Indeed, last week The New York Times ran an article on the damage lockdowns and school closures caused to children’s development.And after a long legal battle, documents released in Germany last week, reported by London’s Daily Telegraph, showed public health experts there were privately aware lockdowns could cause more harm than good and that evidence masks would slow the Covid’s spread was non-existent.

Had individuals been able to criticise what in hindsight were misguided policies, without fear of censorship and opprobrium, damage could have been limited. Free speech is not only intrinsically desirable but also a critical tool to help scientists, bureaucrats and politicians reach the right answers.

If the Supreme Court decides in favour of the government when it hands down its decision in coming months, expect the growing censorship-industrial complex to flex its muscles further. In Australia, Britain, Canada and other liberal nations, new and pending legislation has strengthened governments’ hands for the next “crisis” that emerges. It’s as if authorities, humiliated for being so wrong throughout the pandemic, have doubled down on censorship rather than acknowledging fallibility.

For now, Elon Musk’s X, the largest social media platform for the exchange of ideas, remains a bulwark of free speech, regardless of what the court decides. But we can’t rely on one man, and one platform, to hold back the tide

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/free-speech-in-dock-as-us-court-ponders-censorship-reach/news-story/1753b075bdcbd4b259d130c8b2eb8ac7

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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The ‘disinformation’ warriors are all about suppressing any speech they dislike, even if it’s true

The “disinformation” warriors are out in full force to get the Supreme Court to reverse the landmark rulings that the Biden administration infringed on Americans’ constitutional rights by leaning on Big Tech to suppress content it disliked.

Mind you, while the “disinfo” zealots claim to fight falsehood, they mostly target speech they simply dislike, much of it perfectly true.

On Sunday, The New York Times jumped in, with a “news” article that fundamentally misled by painting concerns about this censorship as ginned up mainly by “Trump allies.”

Which is utterly nuts: The central journalistic work was done by lefties Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang and iconoclasts Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger; the Taibbi-Shellenberger testimony to Congress was based entirely on their investigations, not some Trumpie whispering in their ears.

Another confusion (one many justices seemed to share in Monday’s high-court oral argument) was a reckoning with just who the supposed “disinformation experts” are, and what their crusade is actually about.

In all but the tiniest sliver of cases, our would-be Ministers of Truth want to suppress not actual disinfo but opinions they don’t agree with and facts that are politically inconvenient for them.

On COVID, gender, Trump’s fake Russian collusion, and pretty much every other big news story of the past decade, the various nonprofits, executive-branch subagencies, and preening academics of our self-appointed “disinfo expert” class have been fighting against truth, not for it.

Take Nina Jankowicz, one of the key “experts” cited in the Times piece.

She’s a writer of Harry Potter fanfic songs whom the Biden White House picked to head up the “Disinformation Governance Board,” an Orwellian project within DHS scuttled thanks to public outrage once its mission — censorship, pure and simple — became known.

What qualifies her as an expert worthy of appointment as a powerful censor?

Hmmm, maybe it was her pushing of actual disinformation on Twitter, i.e. repeated suggestions that Hunter Biden’s 100% real laptop might somehow be a Russian intel campaign.

Or her saying — the horror! — that she shudders to think of “free speech absolutists” “taking over more platforms” (a nod to the Elon Musk/X acquisition)?

Jankowicz’s deranged views sum up the mindstate of disinfo warriors quite nicely: We get to decide what you see and hear, for your own good.

They were at work on this and abusing government power even in the Trump years before Biden took over.

This is not, as Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to think, about government giving feedback to social media companies.  

No: It’s about backdoor efforts to circumvent the First Amendment, using at least the threat of federal action to muscle these companies into suppressing the voices of ordinary citizens as well as academics like Jay Bhattacharya.

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, the fact remains that the crusade against “disinformation” is hyperpartisan politics at its ugliest, and utterly un-American.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/opinion/nyt-pushes-more-fake-news-on-disinformation-as-scotus-mulls/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Work on Hate Speech Law to Stop, NZ Government Announces

The New Zealand coalition government has put an end to work on hate speech laws started under Labour. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on X (formerly Twitter) that he had instructed the Law Commission to abandon the project.

This is despite a 12 percent rise in what NZ Police term “hate incidents” reported to them between 2022 and 2023, to 9,351. The majority were racial abuse (83 percent) followed by incidents targeting people’s sexual orientation (9.7 percent), and people of a certain faith (5.8 percent).

Of the racial incidents, more than a third were directed at people of Asian descent. People of colour were the victims in 8.9 percent of cases, and 7.2 percent were aimed at Māori.

The previous Labour government initially had an ambitious plan to deal with hate speech, but subsequently cut it back in the face of strong criticism from free speech advocates and a pledge from the National Party to repeal laws if it was elected.

The laws were part of the government’s response to recommendations from the Royal Commission into the Christchurch attacks, in which an Australian gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques.

Part of Labour’s problem was that it couldn’t agree on how the law would operate and what it would cover, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Justice Minister Kris Faafoi contradicting each other about what was proposed.

While Ms. Ardern initially promised that political opinion would not be covered by the laws, when questioned in Parliament, she remarked that she would not rule it out, saying it would depend on consultation with the public.

When Kiri Allen took over as justice minister, she announced the law would be restricted to a change around incitement against religious groups, with other aspects referred to the Law Commission.

Then Prime Minister Chris Hipkins stepped in and said that even that provision would be postponed and referred to the Commission, allowing it “the opportunity to consider a difficult and highly contested area of law in totality.”

National’s coalition agreement with New Zealand First included a policy to stop the work on reforming the hate speech legislation.

However, as early as December 2022, Mr. Goldsmith had already committed a National-led government to stop any reforms.

“Hate speech legislation ... is not needed, and it will unnecessarily narrow free speech and expression in our country,” he said in 2023. “Proceeding with new hate speech legislation is a distraction from the more pressing issues that Ministry of Justice officials should be focused on. More speech and debate is the best response to speech that people disagree with—not bans and police investigations.”

Mr. Goldsmith’s decision is unlikely to prove popular among organisations representing minority groups.

When Labour referred its proposals to the Law Commission, Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt said it had “given way to often misinformed and opportunistic political debate.”

Meanwhile, Aliya Danzeisen, national coordinator of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, said “How many more people need to suffer from hate and for how long before our legislators will have the courage to do what is right? There is no more time or consideration needed.”

It received support, however, from coalition partner NZ First, which tweeted: “Freedom of speech is fundamental to any democracy. We’ve stopped work on Labour’s Hate Speech legislation, the vague and overreaching proposal by the previous government was careless legislating and we’ve stopped it in its tracks.”

The Free Speech Union also tweeted its support, saying “It is [already] illegal to incite violence. It was before March 15, and the hate speech laws had nothing to do with incitement to violence”, in response to a tweet from a journalist saying “... it will remain legal to incite violence against Muslims in New Zealand” as a result of Mr. Goldsmith’s decision.

It appears that Mr. Goldsmith’s action did not halt any progress—contrary to claims, the Law Commission had not initiated any work on the proposal.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/work-on-hate-speech-law-to-stop-nz-government-announces-5611670

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Bill Maher rips government for shutting down ‘dissenting opinions’ about COVID pandemic

“Real Time” host Bill Maher ripped into the government, medical agencies and social media platforms for shutting down “dissenting opinions” on COVID-19 opinions Friday.

“As the years roll by now, we see that the dissenting opinions on a lot of these things were quite the right ones,” the HBO host told his guest, author and journalist Kara Swisher.

The conversation started when Maher brought up Murthy V. Missouri, a Supreme Court case that originated from a lawsuit filed by state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana accusing government officials of colluding with social media companies to censor posts online.

These allegedly censored posts included statements about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other topics.

Swisher pushed back on Maher’s points, noting that it was a confusing time for everyone.

Maher said earlier in the interview that he “was always on the page during the pandemic that they should not be shutting down debate about medical matters.”

“I was a dissenter on many of these issues,” he said, before noting that there were valuable opinions that were silenced or discouraged at the height of the pandemic.

Facebook — now Meta — owner Mark Zuckerberg said last year that the “establishment… kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

The host continued, providing examples of where speech on the topic was discouraged.

“OK, but we should have been able to argue about whether it came from a lab, which we weren’t. Things like that,” he said.

“Natural immunity — whether it was better to go to the beach and get sun and fresh air, as I would have said, as opposed to sitting home and day-drinking and putting on weight.”

“They never mentioned that obesity was the biggest factor,” Maher continued.

“They have a lot to answer for.”

Swisher replied: “They do, but you’re in the middle of a plague and a debate that people don’t know, and so you’re going to… “

Maher cut her off: “Yes, so you should be able to debate it — this is medicine.”

“Yes you should,” Swisher responded.

“This is not ­— the moment was not — people make mistakes, and science says it makes mistakes.”

Maher explained more background about the lawsuit.

“There were two doctors, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. They’re from Stanford and Harvard, and they said, ‘We were shut down. Not always fully, but there are ways to do that.’”

“They were saying that we’re going too far with school closures — again, I think, has been proved right. My question was always, ‘Why are your doctors more important than my doctors, the ones I want to listen to?'”

“And the social media companies were in the tank with the government,” Maher said.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/24/media/bill-maher-rips-government-for-censoring-dissenting-opinions-about-covid-pandemic/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Laura's research revealed female academics are bullied into silence over their views on gender. Now, in the ultimate bitter irony, she's been silenced and ousted too

Earlier this month, Dr Laura Favaro popped into her office at Bournemouth University, where she lectures in social sciences, and was told she had some personal post.

Her heart sank: nervous that the handwritten envelopes might contain hate mail.

‘My first thought was “Oh no” but as I began to read, I realised they were lovely cards of support,’ says Laura, 42, who lives near the university with her partner and two young sons. ‘One woman said: “You’re brave and admirable and many women are outraged on your behalf.”

‘The other sent me a donation for my legal case. I was so touched. I tweeted about them, saying I will put them under my pillow and hopefully they will help me sleep better.’ Sleep is something Laura hasn’t had much of recently. Eighteen months ago, she became the latest female academic to be targeted by trans rights activists who demanded she be sacked from her then-job at City, University of London.

Among those responsible for the vicious online abuse were senior colleagues in higher education, including one female professor who had previously tweeted: ‘I have no qualms in silencing people who need to hush the f*** up. In fact, I’ve put the slog in to be able to do just that.’

Laura sought support against the bullying from the university but none was forthcoming and instead she felt ostracised. The university confiscated her post-doctorate work which had taken many months of painstaking research. Last March, she lost her job.  Her ‘crime’? Ironically, it was publishing research into the ‘gender wars’, which found that the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics was endemic in British universities.

Now Laura is taking City to an employment tribunal for claims including unfair dismissal, direct discrimination, harassment and victimisation.

The stress of the last year and a half has, at times, been unbearable.

‘I’d vomit with anxiety and wake up in the middle of the night drenched with sweat,’ she says. ‘I’d be sitting with my sons reading them a bedtime story and suddenly I’d feel tears streaming down my face and I’d be shaking. What I am most sad about is that I’ve lost so much precious time with my children.’

Like Professor Kathleen Stock, who was hounded from the University of Sussex, and Professor Jo Phoenix, who won her case against the Open University in January, Laura believes that her gender critical beliefs (that there are only two sexes — male and female) are at the root of why she was targeted.

‘I know that if I did believe in gender identity theory [the belief that men and women can ‘identify’ into the opposite sex], my career in academia would be thriving,’ she says. ‘But I don’t and so this is how they treat women like me.’

It was very different four years ago, when Laura — who was born in Spain — was offered the job of her dreams at City’s Gender and Sexualities Research Centre, which she had helped set up as a PhD student.

‘I haven’t known a life without feminism,’ she explains. ‘My mother was a teacher who had helped bring in anti-sexism approaches to education.’

The family spent time in the UK when Laura was younger and after leaving school she studied dance, then sociology, in Leeds.

But it was in 2015, as a fully-funded PhD student at City University, that she noticed ‘something strange’.

‘I was interviewing editors of women’s magazines who were telling me that these publications were feminist,’ she says. ‘To illustrate this, they would point to how much they were covering the topic of transgender, in particular men who identify as women like Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner).

‘It didn’t make sense to me. First, these men were being prioritised over women. Jenner even won Glamour’s Woman of The Year Award!

‘Also, all I could see were old stereotypes of womanhood — wearing dresses, make-up or heels — rather than the reality of our biology. I couldn’t find any feminism in this.  ‘I went to the academic literature and was surprised by the absence of critical discussion.

‘What was going on?’  With the support of City she put together an application for funding to study the transgender debate but was unsuccessful. Around this time she got pregnant with her first son and she and her partner — a former tennis player — returned to Spain.

But in 2019, by which time her second son had arrived, the university got back in touch to offer her a position to conduct her project.

‘It was a dream come true — I had been offered the chance to go back to an institution that had been so supportive of me during my PhD,’ says Laura. ‘Not only was I coming back to my intellectual home but also to friends.’

Laura returned to City in March 2020. She started her research but early on realised her line managers held views that seemed very pro gender identity ideology.

‘I remember showing them examples of abuse online towards gender critical women involving incitements to kill, decapitate, rape or punch them and my line managers would imply that the violence was on both sides,’ she says.

‘But the evidence didn’t show that. I went into this research with my eyes open and with a definite willingness to have my mind changed.’

Laura approached 50 academics in gender studies — from senior professors to early career researchers — to interview them about how ‘the gender wars’ had affected them. It became obvious to her that something incredibly disturbing was happening in higher education.

‘What struck me early on was the climate of fear,’ she says. ‘One professor described her working life as a feminist academic as a “continuum of hell”. More junior colleagues kept their “mouths shut” fearing their careers would not survive the “horrible backlash”.

‘Even those female academics who were in some agreement with the gender identity side described feeling depressed, alienated, and, most of all, “terrified”. They avoided the subject at all costs because they had seen how this had led to so many women being ostracised, harassed and threatened with violence.

‘Some were comparing the current situation at universities to “authoritarian regimes” and the “Thought Police”, and these well-respected scholars were stopping their gender-related research and teaching.’

She recalls one ‘exceptionally bright scholar’ crying as she told Laura: ‘I don’t want to lose my job. I don’t want to put my kids at risk. And I don’t have extreme views.’

Even some academics who supported gender ideology thanked Laura for the opportunity to have an ‘honest conversation’. These academics admitted to silencing gender critical colleagues and students.

Concerned by what she was finding, Laura decided to survey more than 600 academics — with funding from The British Academy — about the gender wars, working conditions and censorship at universities. Additionally, the Equality and Human Rights Commission asked her to produce a report of her findings.

‘But the more evidence I presented to my line managers at City, the more it seemed they didn’t want to interact with me,’ she recalls.

Was there ever a point she felt she should back off from such a controversial topic to save her own career? She shakes her head.  ‘I felt that I was recording something important, producing a record of a shameful historical moment, so I had to keep going,’ she says.

In September 2022 she published her findings in the Times Higher Education supplement under the headline: ‘Researchers wounded in academia’s gender wars.’

Inevitably there was a savage response on social media.

‘I was expecting a backlash — to be called transphobic,’ she says. ‘But the fact that the critics went for my integrity as a researcher was really painful. They called me “unethical”.

‘They accused me — again, falsely — of naming one of the anonymised participants, and lied about some of my methods.

‘One particularly hurtful tweet was saying that if I could do this to academics, imagine what I’d do to children.’

At this point Laura’s voice cracks and she breaks down in tears.

‘I was at home when this was happening all over Twitter [now called X] and I was horrified.

‘I hoped that my line managers at City would protect me. Instead, all I got was a brief email from them saying: “This has obviously become an institutionally sensitive issue and I’m sure we’ll be in touch over the next few days.”

‘That was it. I felt isolated and frightened. One work colleague who identifies as a transgender woman described my article on Twitter as “an attack on trans people”, and condemned City for allowing the research to take place. Others were demanding the retraction of my article, and of my research findings.

‘There were tweets calling for the end of my career. City investigated a formal complaint and found no evidence of ethical wrongdoing on my part.’

Amid the uproar, some of the academics who had contributed wanted to remove themselves from Laura’s research and the university attempted to persuade her to delete these interviews. ‘I pushed back, calling it Orwellian — you can’t allow people to withdraw from studies just because they don’t like the results — that would be the end of academia,’ she says, as the tears come again. ‘I was also put under pressure to return my British Academy grant.’

Laura was told by senior management that City considered her research data ‘dangerous’, and the university wanted to return her grant because it gave her ‘authority’. She says she was also told things would have been different if she believed that ‘trans women are women’.

It all took its toll: Laura was signed off sick twice with anxiety and depression.

‘It was incredibly stressful,’ she says. In March 2023, the university ordered Laura to return her interviews and survey, and to delete all her copies. A few days later, she was made redundant.

‘The university said there was no more funding for my research,’ she says. ‘But I had a permanent contract which said that, if this happened, then they would look for alternative employment for me. I offered to teach. But I was made redundant. I was very scared. We had no money.’

She adds: ‘Just weeks later, City advertised for six full-time positions within the same department.’

The Free Speech Union, which had been supporting Laura, introduced her to solicitor Peter Daly, who had helped Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater win her case after she lost her job with a think-tank for saying people could not change their biological sex.

With his help, Laura has regained access to part of her research data, and is preparing to take City to an Employment Tribunal on five counts, including the fact they failed to support her and victimised her because of her beliefs.

She has managed to raise £90,000 for her legal costs through crowdfunding but needs another £20,000. ‘The support means everything to me,’ she says.

City denies there is antipathy towards people with gender critical beliefs. Laura believes otherwise.

‘At one point all students and staff were called to “report directly to security” if they saw stickers on campus that were “designed to undermine trans people and their rights,”’ she says. ‘I asked what these so-called “hate stickers” were and they included stickers which simply had the words: “Woman: Adult Human Female” on them. Any student placing one of these stickers would be subjected to disciplinary procedures.

‘So, my case is not just about me stopping the persecution of women who have well-founded concerns about gender identity theory. It is about recovering universities as spaces of open, respectful and evidence-based debate.’

A spokesperson for City, University of London, said: ‘We are unable to comment on employment matters relating to individual members of staff. We can, however, say that we refute the allegations made against us and reject the context in which they are presented.’

They added: ‘At City, we have a legal obligation to protect freedom of expression that we take very seriously. We uphold academic freedom of enquiry in our education and research and are committed to ensuring that free and open-minded discussion can take place.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13220603/Laura-Favaro-research-revealed-female-academics-bullied-silence-views-gender-bitter-irony-ousted-too.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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