Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
Is academic freedom becoming a casualty of the modern university, as the latter is transformed by the public-private partnerships that increasingly dominate our political life?
Just before Easter, a Montreal man, father of four and full professor at a university …
The neologism thawteffery is for “thought F-ery.” F-ery connotes a short-run horizon, such as the election cycle. I pronounce it “thaw-tef-fery.”
Thawteffery is the wicked management of thought, election-to-election, by wicked people for wicked purposes. I speak of the wicked …
Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, on the heels of also cancelling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors …
Here is the Premier of Australia, which has become such a hotbed of censorship efforts of late, opining that it is the “responsibility” of social media platforms to suppress “misinformation.”
The PM of Australia is getting memes of him removed…Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has made international headlines over alleged censorship creep in an escalating standoff with social media platform X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
Inman Grant’s current crusade is not an isolated affair. She is a …
Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), proudly announced in 2022 that it had partnered with the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), an international alliance of major news corporations and Big Tech firms, to counter the growing threat of “fake news.”
It …
They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor. The rest of the text is perfunctory. The headline is the takeaway, and the …
In early 2018, I attended a reading at an independent bookstore in the heart of bourgeois Brooklyn. It was to launch the memoir of a Mexican-American former Border Patrol agent who had become disillusioned and quit. To the surprise of …
The concept of the Overton window caught on in professional culture, particularly those seeking to nudge public opinion, because it taps into a certain sense that we all know is there. There are things you can say and things you …
“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”
This was part of …
During last month’s Supreme Court hearing on a landmark case on federal censorship, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, “My biggest concern is…the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.” Her comment was mystifying because that is the whole point …
[This article was coauthored with documentary filmmaker Janus Bang]
After two years of draconian lockdowns, governments around the world suddenly dismantled their unprecedented campaigns against Covid-19 in silence. From one day to another, the whole thing was supposed to be …
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to …
The will to power manifests itself in myriad ways. It can come from the the point of a pen or the point of a sword, from a ballot box to an ammo box, it can come from rules, regulations, and from …
Along with my co-plaintiffs, I was at the Supreme Court last week for oral arguments in our Murthy v. Missouri case, in which we are challenging the federal government’s alleged censorship on social media. The Supreme Court will likely rule in June …